Алистер Смит - The Dictator's Handbook - Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics

We might hope for a rosier picture when it comes to secondary education in places that need few essentials. Why wouldn’t all political leaders favor open access to secondary school, where students learn higher levels of math, science, language, literature, history, and social thought? That’s easy to answer. These are dangerous public goods that should be doled out carefully. It just isn’t necessary to have lots of people around with skills that are not absolutely required to produce revenue for the autocrat’s regime. Why, for instance, would any autocrat eager to stay in power want to open the secondary schools to people who are not likely to contribute to the coalition’s wealth and security? Math and science are great subjects for study in China; sociology and political science are the subjects of democracies.

Who Doesn’t Love a Cute Baby?

The incentives to provide good health care are not so different from the incentives to provide basic education. Keeping the labor force humming is the primary concern for leaders of small-coalition countries—everything, and everyone, else is inessential. There is no point in spending lots of money on the health of people who are not in the labor force and who won’t be in the labor force for a long time. One of the more depressing ways in which this can be seen is in the relation between the performance of health care systems for infants and the size of a government’s winning coalition.

It seems that a lot of dictators and their essential backers don’t love babies. This is true whether we think of seeming monsters like Saddam Hussein or the oft-praised Fidel Castro for his efforts to foster high quality health care in Cuba.

Saddam Hussein built lavish palaces while his people suffered under the impact of economic sanctions. The UN provided baby formula intended to offset the impact of this hardship on little children—however, Hussein allowed his cronies to steal it. The formula found its way to markets throughout the Middle East, yielding profits for Hussein, even as shortages in Iraq resulted in a doubling of the infant mortality rate. There is no doubt that Hussein was a miserable human being—it may be that his record is no better or worse than any other heartless brute. Alternately, it could be that dependence on a small group of cronies made him act as if he were a brute. Perhaps in a different place and circumstance he might have gone around kissing babies to garner political support. Perhaps Chemical Ali was right that Saddam was too merciful.5 Indeed, it so happens that even in many autocracies with reportedly good health-care systems, infant mortality is high. This may be because helping little children does not particularly help leaders survive in power. Not that they don’t like a cute baby as much as the next guy, but they recognize that helping babies doesn’t help them.

Cuba has the lowest infant mortality rate in Latin America. It’s a commendable accomplishment. However, the real question is whether we should attribute this to Fidel Castro’s beneficence in building a quality health-care system, or whether he just inherited a good healthcare system from his predecessor, Fulgencio Batista.

Batista originally rose in prominence as a participant in Cuba’s 1933 coup. Although a succession of other figures became president of Cuba, Batista, as army chief of staff, remained a key figure behind the “throne” throughout this transitional period. He defeated former president (under the coup regime) Ramón Grau San Martín in the free, democratic election of 1940. Batista then served as Cuba’s democratically elected president from 1940 until his term ended in 1944. It is noteworthy that during this period Batista enjoyed the support of Cuba’s communist party because of his strongly pro-labor and pro–labor union policies. Indeed, during his period as a democratic leader under the rules of Cuba’s 1940 constitution, Batista proved to be an effective social reformer who also helped promote successful economic policies.6 In short, he governed just the way we would expect a large-coalition leader to govern.

After his term expired, Batista moved to the United States. His preferred successor for the presidency lost to Grau in the 1944 Cuban presidential election. Although still in the United States in 1948, Batista was elected to the Cuban senate. He returned home to serve, and then ran again for the presidency in 1952, but was a distant third in the polls to Robert Agramonte, the front-runner, and Carlos Hevia. Seeing that he had no chance to be elected, and possessed of the backing of the United States government, pro-American Batista launched a coup before the election took place. Backed by the army, Batista now assumed the presidency as a small-coalition dictator rather than as a democratically elected large-coalition leader. Surely this is yet another example of power taking precedence over political principles.

The Cuban economy depended largely on agriculture, especially growing sugarcane, a highly labor intensive activity. As a result, both Batista’s and Castro’s regimes, bereft of natural-resource wealth, had to rely on workers to generate revenue. Each did have the benefit of supplementing that revenue with a significant amount of foreign aid, from the United States in Batista’s case and from the Soviet Union in Castro’s. Nevertheless, to stay afloat, both needed to maintain a healthy and reasonably educated workforce. Therefore, both Batista’s and Castro’s Cuba needed good health care as well as good basic education.

We should not expect vast differences in the public goods provided by Batista after he became a dictator and those provided by Castro. To be sure, their ideological songs were radically different, but they both depended on a small clique to keep them in power. In both cases, the military was essential and so were loyal bureaucrats. So, putting aside the window dressing each used to justify their form of rule, stripping out the ideology, they were running similar regimes. The main difference in our terms was that Batista had a small coalition and a small selectorate once he overthrew the constitution. Castro ran a rigged-election regime, so he, like Batista, had a small coalition, but unlike Batista his nominal selectorate was pretty big. Of course, the real Cuban selectorate under Castro, the influentials, was probably no bigger than Batista’s real selectorate. So we should anticipate that both of them were good at producing good health care and good primary education. And the facts bear out these expectations.

Although a headline fact is that Castro’s Cuba has Latin America’s best infant mortality rate, the details reveal that the relative quality of infant care has declined. Cuba had Latin America’s best infant mortality rate under Batista as well as under Castro. In general, small-coalition regimes gradually run their economy into the ground through inefficiencies designed to benefit the leader and essentials in the short run, at the expense of longer term productivity. How quickly welfare would erode depends in part on what foreign aid comes in to offset the economic woes brought on by small-coalition governance. We should see trends indicating declining quality of health care in Cuba under Castro compared to Batista, not necessarily because one was more civic minded than the other, but because time inexorably diminishes the quality of life for ordinary people in most petty dictatorships.

Cuba’s absolute infant mortality rate has improved markedly since Batista’s overthrow, but Cuba’s relative quality of infant care has not kept pace with the rest of the world. Medical technology has improved health care substantially since the end of World War II, and especially since the 1960s, right after Castro’s revolution succeeded in 1959. Cuba’s improvements in infant mortality, though substantial, have lagged behind improvements in infant mortality in many other countries. In 1957, not long before Batista was overthrown by Castro’s revolution, Cuba’s infant mortality rate was 32 per 1,000 live births. This was the thirteenth best in the world at the time. To put this impressive record in perspective, Cuba was outperforming Austria, Belgium, France, Israel, Japan, Spain, Portugal, and West Germany. Today, all of these countries outrank Castro’s Cuba in infant mortality rates. Yet, until the demise of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s economic growth rate was one of the highest in Latin America and its high abortion rate—which terminates difficult, at-risk pregnancies—is 58.6 per 100, according to the Guttmacher Institute.7