Cuba
Controversy
By Michael
Albert
Zmag
29 April,2003
A controversy
has arisen on the left in the U.S. about recent events in Cuba. The
Cuban government has enacted draconian legal measures against opponents.
The U.S. government, having provoked the situation by decades of machinations
including recent acts, will very likely use the events to justify further
intervention against the island's people.
Some leftists say that given
this dangerous reality, one should only support the Cuban decisions,
or at most be silent about them.
Other leftists (myself included)
have openly criticized the decisions, though this has taken the form
of two different petitions (one that I signed because I felt it placed
the criticisms of Cuba in the proper context, criticizing also U.S.
imperialism, and the other that I did not sign, feeling that it offered
inadequate context and balance).
Regarding the recent events,
in my view to have better health care, housing, education, and general
social relations than virtually all other comparably developed countries
does not justify dictatorship in Cuba, much less draconian repressive
behavior by that dictatorship. For any state to execute people is bad
enough. For a state to catch, try, sentence, and execute people in a
week is beyond legal, moral, or social comprehension. To fear external
intervention by a massive power that has intervened continually for
decades and now threatens to do much more, is very prudent. But to crack
down on internal dissent and violate proper jurisprudence is not only
contrary to what the warranted fear justifies, it actually fuels interventionist
rationales.
But the above assessment
doesn't address what people are actually currently conflicted about,
which is not the validity of criticisms, but instead whether criticisms
should be put to print at all, given the current context.
To understand the U.S. role
in Cuba is trivially easy. The hypocrisy and cynicism of U.S. policy
are brutally evident in the historical record. Activist opposition to
U.S. Cuba policy should be unrelenting. Thankfully, there is no left
controversy about this.
An issue which gets considerably
less attention, however, and about which controversy does rage, is understanding
more about Cuba itself, and about the efficacy of leftists criticizing
the Cuban government's choices and Cuba's institutional structures.
In a 1962 speech titled "The
Duty of the Revolutionary." Fidel Castro said,
"The summary of the
nightmare which torments America from one end to the other is that on
this continent ... about four persons per minute die of hunger, of curable
illness, or premature old age. Fifty-five hundred per day, two million
per year, ten million each five years. These deaths could easily be
avoided, but nevertheless they take place. Two-thirds of the Latin American
population lives briefly and lives under constant threat of death. A
holocaust of lives, which in 15 years has caused twice the number of
deaths as World War I. Meanwhile, from Latin America a continuous torrent
of money flows to the United States: some $4,000 a minute, $5 million
a day, $2 billion a year, $10 billion every five years. For each thousand
dollars that leaves us there remains one corpse. A thousand dollars
per corpse: That is the price of what is called imperialism. A thousand
dollars per death ... four deaths every minute."
In the four decades since
Castro's assessment, for most of Latin America except Cuba, the above
statistics have improved little, or in some cases even worsened. In
the 1980s, for example, income in Latin America, excluding Cuba, declined
by 8 percent, according to the Inter-American Development Bank. Castro's
injunction in the same speech is therefore as apropos today as it was
then:
"The duty of every revolutionary
is to make the revolution. It is known that the revolution will triumph
in America and throughout the world, but it is not for revolutionaries
to sit in the doorways of their houses waiting for the corpse of imperialism
to pass by. The role of Job doesn't suit a revolutionary. Each year
that the liberation of America is speeded up will mean the lives of
millions of children saved, millions of intelligences saved for culture,
an infinite quantity of pain spared the people."
Little has changed, as well,
regarding who and what is the principle enemy of the people of Latin
America or regarding the magnitude of the crimes that need rectification.
And therefore little has changed regarding the urgency of transcending
U.S. imperial and neo-colonial domination.
But what about "liberation?"
Have the positive goals that a revolution against capitalism, sexism,
and racism should strive for changed? What does Cuba's experience teach
us in these respects?
Despite decades of CIA-supported
terror and U.S.-imposed economic boycott, Cuba greatly exceeds most
of its Latin American neighbors in intellectual, cultural, health, educational,
and political accomplishments. This deserves effusive praise and support.
At the same time, no matter
how you look at it, one-person-rule through a bureaucratic hierarchical
party is dictatorship, even when, as in Cuba, the leader is in many
respects benevolent. Castro is the hub; the Cuban Communist Party radiates
the spokes. Parallel grassroots institutions including what is called
poder popular represent a participatory political trend that has, however,
failed to transcend Party manipulation.
To inaugurate the 1970s,
Castro proclaimed:
"The formulas of revolutionary
process can never be administrative formulas.... Sending a man down
from the top to solve a problem involving 15 or 20 thousand people is
not the same thing as the problems of these 15 or 20 thousand people-problems
having to do with their community-being solved by virtue of the decisions
of the people, of the community, who are close to the source of the
problems.... We must do away with all administrative methods and use
mass methods everywhere."
Cuba had the Leninist, hierarchical
Party and also the popular democratic "poder popular." But,
Castro's words notwithstanding, the former consistently dominated the
latter. Oversimplifying a complex and variegated political history,
it follows that three main impediments have obstructed and continue
to obstruct Castro's stated hope to substitute political participation
for political administration:
1. The Cuban Communist Party
monopolizes all legitimate means of wielding political power and thereby
ensures that there is only one Cuban political line, that of the Party
and its leadership. The first problem is political Leninism.
2. The omnipresence of Fidel
Castro leaves little room for any popular vehicles to attain true decentralized
grassroots power. The second problem is Fidelismo.
3. The willingness of the
U.S. to manipulate political differences and use force to destroy Third
World revolutions provokes and is used to justify regimentation. The
third problem facing Cuba is the not-so-benevolent Uncle Sam.
As Castro and Cuba face the
problem of succession, as U.S. boycott and aggression immorally diminish
the life options of Cubans, and as the corruption of the Cuban political
bureaucracy increasingly alienates the Cuban populace, two possible
political paths beckon the island. Cuba can return to its early aspirations
and move from Leninist party structures and dictatorship to participatory
democracy premised on mass participation, or, instead, Cuba can defend
authoritarianism and preserve elite privileges under the guise of "Defending
the Revolution."
In the political realm, in
practice, it follows that choices that move Cuba toward greater regimentation
are choices for a repressive path and not a liberatory one. When the
Cuban government decides to utilize the death penalty, to speed prosecutions,
and to engage in other repressive acts ostensibly to protect its survival
(but having the opposite implication, at least regarding opinions abroad)
it is bad enough - but when the Cuban government speaks as though doing
these things is some kind of positive and worthy pursuit in and of itself
- rather than indicating that such actions are at the very best a hated
necessity imposed from without - it communicates that regimentation
and centralization are seen as virtues and not as horrible deviations
from preferred aspirations.
What about the economic dimension?
Is the story mixed there too?
For all its worthy accomplishments,
the Cuban economy is far from liberated. Planners, state bureaucrats,
local managers, and technocrats monopolize decisions while workers carry
out orders. In the resulting economy, a ruling coordinator class plans
the efforts of workers and appropriates inflated pay, perks, and status.
Cuba's coordinator economy
has given the Cuban people pride in national accomplishments, and major
material gains in health care, housing, literacy, security, and certainly
at least until the boycott, in overall standards of living. For these
reasons the Cuban revolution is deservedly popular. But however admirable
these achievements are when compared to conditions in Guatemala, El
Salvador, or even Watts or the South Bronx, and however Herculean they
are when considering the U.S.-imposed conditions under which the gains
had to be attained, this does not justify applying the label "liberated."
For that, there would have to be no ruling class, and workers would
have to collectively administer their own efforts, with solidarity and
equity.
However, as with politics,
Cuban economic history has not followed a simple trajectory. The coordinator
model has been dominant, but there has always been an alternative spirit
manifested, sometimes in hope, sometimes in actual experiments, but
regrettably never leading to liberated economic relations.
In 1962 and 1963, impressed
with what they saw when visiting the Soviet Union, and seeing no other
options, Cuba installed economic forms mimicking the traditional Soviet
model. By 1964, disenchantment set in and a great debate ensued. In
a letter written from Africa in 1965, summarizing the spirit of the
recommendations he championed in that debate, Che Guevara wrote:
"The new society in
process of formation has to compete very hard with the past. This makes
itself felt not only in the individual consciousness, weighted down
by the residues of an education and an upbringing systematically oriented
toward the isolation of the individual, but also by the very nature
of this transition period, with the persistence of commodity relations.
The commodity is the economic cell of capitalist society: as long as
it exists its effects will make themselves felt in the organization
of production and therefore in consciousness."
In the debate, Che disdained
the use of "profitability," "material interest,"
and a "commodity mentality," arguing instead for emphasizing
morality, collectivity, solidarity, and the criterion of use value in
meeting human needs. He did not, however, champion nor even raise the
issue of direct control by workers over their own workplaces or over
economic decision-making in general.
Castro adopted a similarly
humane but incomplete stance saying that:
"We will never create
a socialist consciousness ... with a 'dollar sign' in the minds and
hearts of our men and women ... those who wish to solve problems by
appealing to personal selfishness, by appealing to individualistic effort,
forgetful of society, are acting in a reactionary manner, conspiring,
although inspired by the best intentions in the world, against the possibilities
of creating a truly socialist spirit."
Castro acknowledged that
his desires to equalize incomes and forgo competition and individual
incentives would be incomprehensible to some. He knew that to "learned,"
"experienced" economists "this would seem to go against
the laws of economics."
"To these economists
an assertion of this type sounds like heresy, and they say that the
revolution is headed for defeat. But it so happens that in this field
there are two special branches. One is the branch of the 'pure' economist.
But there is another science, a deeper science which is truly revolutionary
science. It is the science of ... confidence in human beings. If we
agreed that people are incorrigible, that people are incapable of learning;
if we agreed that people are incapable of developing their conscience-then
we would have to say that the 'brainy' economists were right, that the
Revolution would be headed for defeat and that it would be fighting
the laws of economics..."
Over the years the economic
debate in Cuba has vacillated between two poles: competition versus
solidarity, profit-maximizing versus meeting human needs, markets versus
central planning, and individual incentives and inequality versus collective
incentives and equality, with many swings back and forth. Consider the
following comments from Castro when the left pole was in ascendancy:
"A financier, a pure
economist, a metaphysician of revolutions would have said, 'Careful,
rents shouldn't be lowered one cent. Think of it from a financial standpoint,
from an economic standpoint, think of the pesos involved!' Such persons
have 'dollar signs' in their heads and they want the people, also, to
have 'dollar signs' in their hearts and heads! Such people would not
have made even one revolutionary law. In the name of those principles
they would have continued to charge the farmers interest on loans; they
would have charged for medical and hospital care; they would have charged
school fees; they would have charged for the boarding schools that are
completely free, all in the name of a metaphysical approach to life.
They would never have had the people's enthusiasm, the masses' enthusiasm
which is the prime factor, the basic factor, for a people to advance,
for a people to build, for a people to be able to develop. And that
enthusiasm on the part of the people, that support for the revolution
is something that can be measured in terms incomparably superior to
the adding and subtracting of the metaphysicians."
The problem has been that
the left pole, which has admirably argued for egalitarianism, solidarity,
meeting needs, and collective incentives, has also wrongly argued for
extreme central planning rather than decentralized, participatory planning
with direct workplace democracy. And the difficulty here is not only
that something valuable wasn't included on the left side of the debate,
but that the positive goals the left championed-solidarity, equity,
collectivity-were subverted by the enactment and experience of coordinator
decision-making and central planning, plus the absence of free speech,
and political liberty. When the left policy pole gained ascendancy the
continuing lack of real institutional participation and power on the
part of workers meant that their enthusiasm and talent were not unleashed
in the hoped for manner. Thus, after a few years of left influence over
economic policy, the economy would eventually falter, and the turn back
to the right-always urged by the Soviet advisers empowered by virtue
of Cuba's dependence on Russian aid-would be legitimated.
In the face of the fall of
the Soviet model, Cuba has not jumped on the free-market bandwagon preferring
any alternative to resurgent commodity economics and a sellout to the
West. But, as the years push on, what can they do instead?
One depressing and regrettably
the most likely possibility is that they will stay the current course,
as they have over the past decade, defending coordinatorism while trying
to rectify its worst abuses, all in the name of "defending the
revolution."
About a decade ago, as the
Soviet system was unraveling but before it was no more, when an earlier
version of this essay appeared, I wrote that the above option "has
three major problems. First, in the long run, it would not permit workers
and consumers to collectively manage their own affairs. It would instead
perpetuate coordinator rule no matter how successful the battle to limit
coordinators' appropriation of material privileges. Second, in the short
and medium term it would do little to elicit increased productivity
and allegiance from the Cuban populace in an effort to ward off the
hardships that further economic isolation will impose. And third, again
in the short and medium term, it would do little to gain grassroots
international support, which is the only possibility to mitigate reductions
in Soviet bloc aid. The virtue, from the perspective of Cuba's elites,
is that the approach would continue to defend elite privileges and would
not risk introducing short-run turmoil."
I suggested that a second
and preferable option was "for Cuba to take the current opportunity
to return to the ideals of Che Guevara and an earlier Fidel Castro,
coupled with new awareness of the importance of economic participation.
This would mean installing a new economic system emphasizing workplace
democracy, consumer councils, an end to the division between mental
and manual labor, and a decentralized planning procedure in which consumer
and worker councils participate directly in formulating, revising, and
deciding their own activities. The problem with this option is that
it risks introducing disruption and would further alienate [elites worldwide],
and, from the perspective of domestic Cuban elites, it would certainly
challenge, and eventually eliminate their privileges. On the other hand,
besides being the only road to real [liberation], the left approach
has the virtue of elevating Cuba back into the role of the leading experiment
in liberation, thereby eliciting greater allegiance, energy, and spirit
at home, and substantial internationalist and leftist grassroots support
throughout the world."
It seems to me that a decade
has been squandered on the wrong path, and yes, I most certainly know
that a considerable part of the culpability lies with U.S. policy isolating
the island, but that the second option still exists. And it seems to
me that leftists around the world, of course committed to obstructing
U.S. imperial designs, ought to make clear what we think is a preferred
way forward, and what we regard as a morally wrong, socially flawed,
and self-defeating approach that can lead only to ultimate disaster.
Every so often movements
and countries face critical choices with historic implications. When
the grassroots movement named Solidarity began to succeed in Poland,
it had the possibility of retaining its working-class composition and
its emphasis on elevating workers to decision-making power via new economic
institutions, or of jettisoning all that in favor of elevating intellectuals
and adopting markets, competition, and profit-seeking despite their
obvious inadequacies. The liberating choice lost because the young movement
put no structural, institutional supports for its enactment into place.
When Jesse Jackson galvanized
new energies across the United States, he and the Rainbow Coalition
had the opportunity to develop lasting grassroots organization and democratic
movement, or to subordinate everything to narrow electoral priorities.
The liberating choice lost because, again, new participatory institutions
were not created.
Later, when Ralph Nader ran
a powerful and popular presidential campaign, again there was the possibility
to solidify the gains, create perhaps a shadow government or in any
event some massive continuing democratic and participatory institutional
opposition, but the liberating choice was again lost.
The recent unprecedented
international upsurge of first anti-globalization and then anti-war
activism around the world has created a potential for establishing new
levels of lasting organizational presence. Many efforts are trying to
preserve the momentum. We will have to see what the results will be,
whether new structures will solidify the gains or not.
Likewise, Cuba can either
continue its siege mentality and defend not only its virtuous accomplishments
but also bureaucracy, dictatorship, central planning, and workplace
hierarchy, or it can develop participatory democracy politically and
truly liberated economics consistent with revolutionary Cuba's past
aspirations. With their Eastern bloc bridges burnt, facing continued
and perhaps even escalated U.S. opposition, I can only hope that Cuba
will once again opt for "a revolution within the revolution,"
and there is no compromise with oppressive power and unbridled greed
in saying so.
Others will see the situation
differently. Fair enough. But those who think that criticizing dictatorship,
the death penalty, and draconian violations of political liberty equals
casting aside radical commitment and tying up with imperialism, ought
to think twice.