Many Americans believe that Cuba will evolve naturally into a free-market democracy when communist dictator Fidel Castro leaves power. In Cuba the Morning After: Confronting Castro’s Legacy, just published by the AEI Press, AEI scholar Mark Falcoff challenges this assumption.

According to Falcoff, Cuba is saddled with an economic and social system that does not and cannot work. Oppressive rule shattered the island’s once-rich civil society, which cannot be rapidly reconstructed, particularly in the absence of a small-business class. Falcoff writes: “Many assume that once the Castro regime is gone and full diplomatic and trade relations resume, the island will experience rapid economic reconstruction thanks to the existence of a large, affluent, and able exile community based in southern Florida. This would be a logical (and happy) outcome were it not for the fact that Cuba today in no way resembles the country most of these expatriates left twenty, thirty, much less forty years ago.”

Cuba the Morning After compares past and present, underscoring the huge changes Cuba, the United States, and the world economy have undergone since the Communists took control. Falcoff believes that an economically inviable and otherwise dysfunctional Cuba could in coming years pose an even bigger threat to the United States than in its communist heyday. Although Cuba has ceased to be a conventional military or strategic threat since the collapse of the Soviet Union, now, faced with economic ruin, the country may become a platform for the export of drugs and illegal immigrants and pose a threat to our struggle against terrorism.

The author concludes with a caveat to countries following in Cuba’s footsteps: “The wisest among [the new generation of Latin American leaders] would do well to consider the experience of Cuba and thereby spare themselves and their people Cuba’s harsh reckoning, which, along with normalization of relations between the United States, may be remarkably close at hand.”