ABSTRACT
The beginning of a New Year is special event for everyone: a moment of optimism for a future with unforeseen options, and a time of reflection on what could have been. But given the date of the guerrilla seizure of power in Cuba, January 1, 1959, the start of the year remains a bitter sweet reminder for Cubans at home and abroad of a revolution that failed but that persists. It is as if the normal rhythm of political history, the rise, collapse, and occasional reform of states, has passed by Cuba. After 37 years, Cuban leadership has even lost the capacity to distinguish the popular will from party ideology. The sources of public estrangement are deep in the marrow of Cuban society. They include a series of unresolved contradictions that threaten to become more severe as the New Year progresses.
