Posts by MarceCameron:
The Cuban Socialist Renewal
May 14th, 2013
By Marce Cameron.
Since becoming Cuba’s president (initially acting president) in August 2007, when Fidel Castro became gravely ill and had to step down, Raul Castro has called for a nationwide debate on the future of Cuba’s socialist revolution. The debate is aimed at consensus on what must be done to revitalise Cuba’s socialist project.
Most if not all of the central leadership of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC), led by Fidel and Raul, who are first and second secretaries respectively, recognise that a radical renovation of Cuba’s socialist project is needed if the revolution is to endure in the post-Fidel era. While the debate has unfolded, Cuba has been changing. So far these changes lack the coherence and depth to carry through the necessary and urgent renovation without abandoning the revolution’s ethical and political principles.
Yet the direction of the changes, which flow not only from government decrees but from the massive participation of Cuba’s working people in critical reflection and debate, is clear enough. To the disappointment of the revolution’s enemies abroad, who had hoped that Raul might lead Cuba towards a restoration of capitalism, Cuba is changing in the spirit of Raul Castro’s response to US demands for US-style “democracy” and capitalist restoration in a speech to Cuba’s National Assembly of People’s Power on August 1: “[The National Assembly] didn’t elect me president to restore capitalism in Cuba or to surrender the Revolution. I was elected to defend, maintain and continue perfecting socialism, not to destroy it.”
Respected Cuban journalist Luis Sexto, recipient of the 2009 Jose Marti journalism award, Cuba’s most prestigious, commented on the pro-revolution Progreso Weekly web site on July 15: “Cuban society, rigid for many years, shakes off the starch that immobilized it … to change what is obsolete without compromising the solidity of the Revolution’s power”. What’s obsolete are many of the revolution’s concepts, structures, methods and mentalities.
Economic reforms
Much of what is obsolete flows from, or is reinforced by, a structural dysfunction in Cuba’s post-capitalist, centrally planned economy: while many goods and services are free or heavily subsidized by the socialist state, wages are both insufficient to meet all basic needs and too low to act as much of a stimulus to productivity. In any society, labour productivity growth is the wellspring of economic and social progress.
By reinforcing social inequality that is not linked to the individual’s or work collectives’ labour contribution to society, excessive universal subsidies, combined with low wages, undermine the economic and ethical foundations of Cuba’s socialist project. “Socialism means social justice and equality, but equality of rights, of opportunities, not of income”, Raul said in a speech to the National Assembly on July 11, 2008. “Equality is not the same as egalitarianism. Egalitarianism is in itself a form of exploitation: exploitation of the good workers by those who are less productive and lazy.”
A degree of social inequality is inevitable in any post-capitalist society that is not fully communist. Cuba, a small Third World country suffering half a century of US economic siege, is far from a communist society, which is conceivable only on a world scale. While unavoidable, inequality should be the result of those contributing more to society through their work receiving more from society in the form of goods and services. Yet in Cuba today, people who receive substantial remittances from relatives in wealthy countries such as the US, and those who choose not to work because they’re too busy selling goods stolen from the state on the black market, receive the same highly subsidised food rations, among other subsidies, as conscientious and productive workers. In effect, Cuba’s working people are subsidising what Fidel called “the new rich”.
In a landmark speech at Havana University on November 17, 2005, Fidel warned that the revolution could destroy itself as a result of its own errors and weaknesses, and called for the dismantling of the edifice of universal state subsidies and gratuities — apart from those guaranteed in Cuba’s socialist constitution, such as the right to free health care and education — in order to reassert the socialist principle of “to each according to their work”. He also called for more public criticism and debate within the revolution to expose official corruption and negligence.
While the structural dysfunction in Cuba’s post-capitalist economy has its roots in the malign influence of Soviet bureaucratic “socialism” during the 1970s and ’80s, egalitarian paternalism is largely a consequence of emergency measures adopted at the beginning of the Special Period, the deep economic crisis precipitated by the demise of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s main trading partner, at the beginning of the 1990s. Cuba is yet to fully recover from this crisis period, but oil-rich Venezuela, now undergoing its own socialist revolution, brings Cuba some much-needed moral and material reinforcement. The convergent paths and growing integration of these two revolutions add impetus to the socialist renovation that has begun in Cuba.
Among the economic reforms initiated under Raul’s presidency, the cap on bonus payments tied to productivity has been lifted, and a new payments system that ties incomes to productivity is being generalised across state enterprises; Cubans may now hold multiple jobs and students may work part time to supplement their allowances and gain work experience; and excessive universal subsides are being gradually withdrawn. The aim of these reforms is to put more money in the pockets of productive workers, allowing more workers and their dependants to live with dignity on their legal incomes, rather than having to turn to the black market to make ends meet.
“From now on, if the bureaucracy doesn’t hold us back … [n]obody will have to wait for the generous hand of the state for an increase in salary or pension, which may have to be postponed … If you need it, or if you want to live more comfortably, you can work more”, Luis Sexto commented on July 15.
In other reforms, Cubans may now stay in tourist hotels and buy electrical goods such as mobile phones, computers and electric scooters. Previously, Cubans other than hotel workers were barred from entering tourist hotels in an effort to contain the negative social consequences of Cuba’s opening to foreign tourism, such as prostitution. The sale of consumer electronics was limited to discourage visible displays of social inequality in times of great hardship, which would undermine social solidarity, and to prevent the collapse of Cuba’s antiquated electrical grid prior to the “energy revolution” launched in 2005. Now that workers and farmers can legitimately earn higher incomes, they have to be able to spend this money on something.
Agriculture
The most significant reforms so far have been in agriculture. Raul has declared increasing food production the government’s top priority and a matter of national security. While Cuba spends billions of dollars on food imports, half the farmland has been lying idle, much of it overrun with a woody tropical weed known as the marabu bush. The government is promoting a large-scale “return to the land”. In Cuba, most arable land is socially owned, while some belongs to peasant farmers.
Land belonging to the state will not be privatized. Rather, individuals, cooperatives and state farms are being encouraged to grow crops or raise livestock on idle state land. Raul reported to the National Assembly in December that 54% of this land, or almost a million hectares, had been granted in usufruct, i.e., leased rent-free on a long-term basis. These land grants have benefited around 100,000 people. A social movement among producers has sprung up to pass on knowledge to new farmers. Urban agriculture, the outstanding success story of Cuba’s large-scale transition to more sustainable farming methods during the past two decades, is being complemented by creating or consolidating “green belts” around the cities.
Farmers can now buy some supplies directly from a new chain of state stores instead of everything being centrally allocated by the state, while the state has greatly increased what it pays to producers to stimulate production and thus lower prices in the free markets. Guaranteeing a stable supply of cheap locally produced food to replace expensive imports is a precondition for the elimination of the libreta, or ration book, through which all Cubans are guaranteed a monthly quota of highly subsidised food and other basic goods.
In a bold administrative decentralisation, responsibility for deciding what crops and livestock are to be farmed where has been devolved from the agriculture ministry in Havana and the provincial capitals to Cuba’s 169 municipalities, bypassing a notorious chain of administrative bottlenecks. In November, a report in the newspaper Granma estimated an excess of 89,000 administrative personnel, some 26% of the total, in the state farm sector alone. This “engenders bureaucracy, raises costs, hampers productivity, creates disorder and prevents workers from improving their incomes”. A rationalisation and reorganisation of the sector, long plagued by inefficiency, has begun. In March, the government announced that around 100 unproductive state farms would be closed.
From above and below
To sum up the changes under Raul’s presidency, they are broadly consistent with the diagnosis made by Fidel in his November 17, 2005, speech at Havana University and the line of march he proposed then to achieve “true and irreversible socialism”, while not being limited to the ideas expressed by Fidel then or since.
Secondly, while most of these changes flow from government decrees, some — such as efforts to forge a more mature and permanent culture of public criticism and debate within the revolution, and the gains won against homophobia in recent years — result from encouragement or support “from above” meeting with a groundswell of activism “from below” to overcome administrative opposition, inertia and backward attitudes.
Thirdly, the pace of change is constrained by the need to strive for consensus on the most far-reaching changes and the fact that the Cuban leadership has had to devote much of its energies to crisis management, because of the devastating 2008 hurricanes — which caused economic losses equivalent to a fifth of Cuba’s GDP, and from which the country is still recovering — and the global economic turmoil of the past year and a half, which has hit the Cuban economy hard. This makes further changes all the more urgent, yet it has also delayed their timely implementation. The Sixth PCC Congress, originally scheduled for late 2009, has been postponed at least a year, and a new date has yet to be publicly announced. On the plus side, this leaves more time for a clarifying public debate and the PCC’s internal preparations for the congress.
As Luis Sexto noted in a March 24 commentary for Progreso Weekly, “A careful observer might even believe that the revolutionary government (well described, because of the renovative task it has to perform) is subjected to intense pressure from its bases of support”. Here Sexto is referring to the popular mood for changes in the direction of socialist renovation. Yet administrative opposition and inertia have proven to be formidable obstacles to the implementation of reforms decreed by the government, while among those who urge a socialist renovation there is a vigorous debate. Thus, “We perceive a tug … about what to change and how much to change without excessively endangering the power achieved by the Revolution and sometimes, unfortunately, the bureaucratic power of some entrepreneurial entities”, Sexto observed.
Progreso Weekly’s Havana bureau editor Manuel Alberto Ramy commented on March 31: “We are burdened by a government apparatus that is overweight, excessively centralized and plagued with bureaucrats who turn their little parcels of power into knightly feuds. And many of them, instead of adequately enforcing the decisions [of the revolutionary government], have an infinite capacity for hindering, delaying and/or sidetracking them.” Following the announcement of the closure of 100 inefficient state farms and the redeployment of their 40,000 workers to more productive work, Alberto Ramy hears of “similar stirrings in other ministries and institutions” that have “begun to study the convenience of turning some of [their] companies into cooperative societies”. Such studies indicate that widening the scope of cooperative forms of ownership or management of certain productive entities has “received the blessing of the political leadership of this country”, and suggests that “the top circles of leadership have sketched a more flexible economic model and are willing to explore it gradually and assume the consequences.”
Cuba after Fidel, Can the revolution endure?
February 21st, 2013By Marce Cameron.
Fidel Castro is no longer Cuba’s head of state. Is this a critical moment in the life of the Cuban Revolution as it approaches its 54th anniversary in January 2013, or merely a symbolic changing of the guard?
The revolution’s more deluded enemies and detractors had long predicted that without Fidel at the helm the Cuban people would lose their fear of the “Castro dictatorship” and take to the streets to demand US-style “freedom” and “democracy”.
They were disappointed. When Fidel fell gravely ill in August 2006 and abruptly disappeared from public view, there were no riots, no demonstrations, no civil unrest of any kind — only a sombre mood as Cubans went about their daily lives.
Making a virtue of necessity, Fidel kept the entire world in suspense month after month. When would he make a public reappearance? What would he say next? Was he dead or alive? This bought time for the Cuban leadership to adjust, for Cubans gradually to come to terms with Fidel’s absence, and it kept the enemy guessing. It was vintage Fidel.
No political crisis
There has been no political crisis in Cuba, but an orderly transition to a post-Fidel government. Many outside Cuba were surprised by this turn of events, but those who were expecting a political upheaval failed to grasp two basic realities.
Firstly, the Cuban Revolution was able to endure the harshest years of the post-Soviet “special period” crisis because socialism is the preferred option of the overwhelming majority of Cubans. Most Cubans understand what capitalist restoration would mean: the millionaire and billionaire former owners of Cuba’s farms, factories and mansions returning to evict Cuba’s working people from “their” properties. Cuba’s world-class free health care and education would be privatised, and Haliburton would get the contract to build a McDonalds in every neighbourhood. Cuba would not be another Switzerland, but another Nicaragua or Iraq.
Whatever criticisms Cubans may have of the revolution’s errors and deficiencies, and however much they may complain about the hardships of daily life, few would be willing to hand over the country to Yankee imperialism, with or without Fidel at the helm.
As Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) member and writer Celia Hart told Argentina’s El Militante in July 2007: “Our revolutionary armed forces are better prepared than ever before, and even the children know what to do. Think of an Iraq multiplied by a million and an unbeatable unity of convictions. It’s a price the US can’t possibly afford to pay.”
Secondly, while Cuba is an armed revolution, a people in arms, the socialist option is sustained through the force of persuasion, not the persuasion of force.
Widespread dissatisfaction, especially among the younger generation, has not translated into significant support for the counter-revolutionary option because Cubans are, on the whole, highly educated, politically aware and well informed — and everybody knows that the revolutionary majority would put up a hell of a fight if a real counter-revolutionary movement were ever to emerge.
The counter-revolutionary option has almost zero moral legitimacy. This, and not some hideously efficient repressive apparatus, is the reason that the counter-revolutionary “democratic opposition” in Cuba is not a genuine popular movement but a creature of the US State Department, which hands out US taxpayers’ money to tiny grouplets that masquerade before the international media as persecuted “journalists”, “poets”, etc.
Many commentators have speculated that perhaps Raul will take Cuba down the “Chinese road” toward the wholesale restoration of capitalism under “communist” leadership.
To lend support to such reactionary dreaming, it is said that it was Raul who convinced Fidel to open up the agricultural free markets in 1994; that Raul was a proponent of an enterprise efficiency program that was road-tested in state firms run by the Cuban armed forces; and that Raul has commented favourably on some aspects of the Chinese “model”. QED: Raul wants to restore capitalism in Cuba!
Whatever political differences there may be between Fidel and Raul, they are tactical and stylistic, not strategic or programmatic. There is no indication that Raul intends to turn traitor to the cause to which he, like Fidel, has dedicated his entire adult life. More importantly, Cuba has a collective leadership, and strategic decisions are taken in consultation with the PCC and the country’s working people and their mass organisations.
Special Period
During the early 1990s, when many were predicting the imminent collapse of Cuban socialism, Fidel was an omnipresent candle in the dark. He was always on the move, from one end of the island to the other, inspiring, persuading, explaining, criticising and exhorting his people again and again to do the seemingly impossible. Without Fidel’s immense personal authority and his unique ability to move hearts and minds and to forge unity of purpose, the revolution might not have endured.
The same cannot be said today. While Fidel is irreplaceable, he is no longer indispensable. The most difficult years of the special period have been left behind, and Cuba is gradually emerging from this crisis period. The entire electricity generation and distribution system has been overhauled and decentralised in an “energy revolution” that includes the distribution of energy-efficient light globes and appliances to millions of households. The public transportation crisis is easing, with thousands of new Chinese buses and locomotives replacing the infamous “camels”, articulated trucks modified as people-carriers. Some 110,000 housing units were constructed in 2006, a step towards the half a million new homes needed to eliminate overcrowding.
As it emerges from the Special Period, Cuba is grappling with the period’s legacy — a ramshackle patchwork of collapsing infrastructure, economic distortions, social tensions and a population weary from the daily struggle to make ends meet with state wages, salaries and pensions still insufficient to cover all basic necessities. Less tangible but no less real is the spiritual trauma of having lived through a prolonged siege.
Yet Cuba also builds on the many hard-won achievements of the Special Period, among them the world’s first large-scale transition to low-input sustainable agriculture and a country that has learned to do so much with so little.
The young generation that grew up in the shadows of the Special Period is more inclined to cynicism and disaffection than any previous generation born and educated within the revolution.
In 2000, Fidel launched the Battle of Ideas, a multifaceted social, ideological and cultural counter-offensive aimed at re-engaging the country’s youth. The Battle of Ideas grew to encompass more than 170 educational, cultural and social programs, among them the proliferation of higher education campuses and youth computer clubs in the municipalities and 15 new arts colleges from which thousands of young instructors have graduated to teach music, dance and the fine arts in schools and communities. Cuba’s communists have placed education and culture at the heart of Cuba’s resistance.
Another initiative is the graduation of tens of thousands of young revolutionary social workers, mostly young women from disadvantaged backgrounds, who go into poorer communities and seek out disaffected youth. Their approach is not to preach Marxist doctrine or revolutionary slogans but to befriend young people, win their trust and help them find a rewarding life-project that coincides with the larger collective project of the revolution.
The battle for the hearts and minds of Cuba’s youth is the revolution’s greatest challenge, and the Cuban leadership understand that this battle cannot be won solely on the terrain of ideology. The chasm between the communist dream and the Cuban reality must be narrowed with a sustained economic revitalisation, and consequent rise in living standards, that closes the income inequality divide that opened up during the Special Period; this will be done by reasserting the principle that those who contribute more to society should receive more from society.
Renewal
Cuba today is on the cusp of far-reaching changes, some of which are already under way. At the initiative of the PCC leadership, these changes will be introduced gradually, in step with Cuba’s economic revival and in consultation with the country’s working people and with their active participation.
The basic thrust of the changes was foreshadowed in Fidel’s landmark speech at Havana University on November 17, 2005. In this speech, which was really a call to arms, Fidel posed the question: “Is it that revolutions are doomed to fall apart, or that people cause revolutions to fall apart? … This country can self-destruct, this revolution can destroy itself, but they can never destroy us. We can destroy ourselves, and it would be our fault.”
In step with Cuba’s economic recovery, workers’ incomes would rise at the expense of the “new rich”, while state subsidies — which allow the “new rich” to pay next to nothing for food, housing, utilities and transportation — would be gradually eliminated, leading to the disappearance of the ration card with which Cubans purchase a quota of basic goods at heavily subsidised prices (health care and education would remain free).
Brigades of youth social workers would be deployed to break up entrenched networks of theft and corruption that flourished during the Special Period; Fidel revealed that half the revenue from fuel sales was being lost to corruption.
“Everyone who works for the country and the revolution will receive more”, he said. “The abuses will end. Many of the inequalities will disappear, as will the conditions that allowed them to exist. When there is no one left who needs to be subsidised, we will have advanced considerably in our march towards a society of justice and dignity. That is what true and irreversible socialism demands.”
While many outside Cuba interpreted Fidel’s candid admission of the revolution’s vulnerability and his acknowledgement of its deficiencies as a sign of weakness, the opposite is true. The Cuban leadership is encouraging public debate on how to move forward and raising popular expectations that things will improve precisely because the revolution can now begin to confront these difficulties from a position of relative strength, thanks to the strong recovery of the Cuban economy in recent years.
Since becoming acting president in August 2006, Raul Castro has repeatedly urged more public debate on how to tackle the most urgent problems, and has stressed the need for “structural” changes. During September and October, more than 5 million Cubans participated in 216,000 grassroots meetings to discuss and debate how to move forward. It is a debate of unprecedented depth and scope.
Raul reported to the National Assembly on December 28 that the “principal and decisive aim of this great effort has been to find, with the conscious and active participation of the overwhelming majority of Cubans, the best solutions within the reach of the country’s economic possibilities, given that, as I said recently, nobody here is a magician or can pull resources out of a hat.”
Raul’s call for more public criticism and debate has been taken up by the media, and is also reflected in the intellectual and cultural spheres. The Union of Young Communists daily, Juventud Rebelde, leads the way with the kind of provocative and critical revolutionary journalism that has been all too rare in the past. Controversial topics that were confined to PCC think-tanks and academic journals 10 years ago, such as the cultural censorship of the 1970s and the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union, are finding their way into the mainstream of public debate.
Where will all this discussion and debate lead? What kinds of “structural” changes are likely to be adopted? Under consideration are the lifting of unnecessary prohibitions and regulations; how to stimulate food production; the elimination of the divisive dual currency system; the creation of “social” property (i.e. cooperatives) in the services sector; more foreign investment in strategic sectors; and how workers can be made to feel that socialist property really does belong to them collectively rather than to that seemingly remote entity, the socialist state.
Some of the more far-reaching changes will probably be debated in the lead-up to the PCC congress, likely to be held in late 2008 or 2009. The task before this sixth congress will be nothing less than the rejuvenation and re-legitimation of Cuba’s socialist project in the post-Fidel era, in a much more favourable international context than at the time of the last congress, held in October 1997. Today, Cuba has new allies with the opening of the Venezuelan socialist revolution and the new rise of the left in Latin America.
Cuba and Venezuela
Cuba’s Marxist leadership has always acted on the understanding that socialism cannot be built in one country, much less a small Caribbean island subjected to a ruthless economic blockade by the imperialist monster to the north. From this understanding flows Cuba’s legendary internationalism.
Between 1975 and 1990 Cuba sent 50,000 volunteers and its best weaponry to aid the national liberation movements of southern Africa. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the victory of Cuban and Angolan forces in the battle of Cuito Cuarnavale in southern Angola — this was the culmination of Cuba’s decisive contribution to the defeat of South Africa’s imperialist invasion of Angola and occupation of Namibia — a defeat that led to the freeing of Nelson Mandela, the downfall of apartheid and the independence of Namibia.
Today, the fate of the Cuban Revolution is intimately tied to the further advance of Venezuela’s Bolivarian socialist revolution, which has given besieged Cuba some much-needed moral and material reinforcement. When Venezuela’s socialist President Hugo Chavez visited Cuba in December to open the Cienfuegos oil refinery — mothballed since the collapse of the Soviet Union and completed with the assistance of Venezuela — he told Cubans that deep down Venezuela and Cuba are “really one country”, and proposed a socialist federation.
The benefit to Cuba of the integration of the two countries’ economies can hardly be exaggerated. What is not so widely appreciated is how the flowering of the Venezuelan socialist revolution intersects with the critical debate underway in Cuba about how the Cuban Revolution can draw on its extraordinary resilience and vitality to reinvent itself, once again, at yet another critical juncture in its turbulent half-century. Celia Hart explains: “[T]he basic counterweight to a Chinese version of my revolution is the existence of Venezuela’s revolutionary process, which is increasingly moving to the radical left and thus tugging at the Cuban process… Our links with the young Bolivarian revolution broadens our horizons and forces us to improve ourselves more and more.”
[Abridged from the first issue of Revolucion 21, journal of the Australian Centre for Latin American Studies and Solidarity . Marce Cameron is a member of the national executive of the Revolutionary Socialist Party.]