"I think it was always clear that during some of the market-oriented changes made in the '90s that Castro was holding his nose," Peters said. "One reason was because those changes produced inequalities in the society."
Granma has been exposing case after case of "unscrupulous elements" engaging in black-market commerce. The Communist Party newspaper disclosed last month that theft of medications and healthcare equipment, from factories as well as hospitals and clinics, had become so chronic that some patients couldn't get vital treatment.
The volumes of food disappearing from state warehouses also suggest thievery from top to bottom. As in former communist states in Eastern Europe, there is little sense of wrongdoing among Cubans who take home part of what they produce to sell and stretch salaries that average less than $15 a month.
"The bulk of economic crimes that exist in Cuba are small-scale -- people who don't have hard-currency income who steal a chicken from the restaurant where they work or sell a little gasoline on the side from their company's pump so they can put meat on the table that weekend," Peters said.
A high-profile campaign against corruption has been underway for at least three years, but Castro disclosed the severity of the problem when he warned in November that the very fate of the revolution was at risk amid such moral failures.
"He's trying to relight the fire. But no one goes to the fire," said Damian Fernandez, head of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University. Castro can still turn out half a million people for big anti-American protests, he said, "but they're bused there and they go because it's a big fiesta or their jobs depend on it."
The revolutionary fervor has irrevocably faded, he said, because "the regime that produced equity in the 1960s now produces inequity," with high-ranking Communist Party members benefiting from development of tourist resorts that ordinary Cubans aren't even allowed to enter.
"Fidel frankly dislikes capitalism. He has this very romantic notion that money corrupts, that money is bad," Fernandez said. "He genuinely believes that."
Jaime Suchlicki, director of the University of Miami's Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, likens Castro's actions to the brutalities of the Cultural Revolution. Just as Mao relied on the Red Guards, Castro deploys special enforcement squads from the Interior Ministry and the neighborhood Committees for the Defense of the Revolution to seize property, break up demonstrations and hound those who challenge the one-party order.
