Fidel: Time to reflect on his legacy

This was written for Australia's Green Left Weekly to promote the conference "Fidel in the 21st Century: His Contribution and Ideas for a Better World", to be held over August 18-19 weekend at the New South Wales Teachers Federation building, 23-33 Mary St, Surry Hills, Sydney. Further details are here. An edited version is published in the current issue.

I'll be speaking alongside the Cuban Ambassador to Australia, Mr. Pedro Monzon, in a session titled "Fidel and the renewal of Cuban socialism", on Sunday at 2.30pm.

Fidel: Time to reflect on his legacy

By Marce Cameron

This isn’t an obituary. If Fidel Castro had died I’m sure you would have heard about it. 

Every now and again those who hope and pray for his death spread yet another rumour, only to be disappointed by a photo, a newsclip or a commentary in that unmistakable style, confirming that Fidel is very much alive and making the most of his twilight years.

When the inevitable does happen, the world, admirers and detractors alike, will pause for reflection. The corporate media will saturate our inner recesses with words and images that convey, for the most part, how the 1% appraise his life and legacy. Just imagine the gloating on Fox News.

I suspect it will be harder, and take longer, for those who admire Fidel and feel a sense of loss at his passing to be heard amid this din.

The hundreds of millions of the 99% for whom Fidel has been something of a political compass, and a spiritual compass in the secular sense, will want to reflect and recommit to our shared visions of a better world — a world without Fidel, but nourished by his presence in our struggles.

Thus will begin a new battle of ideas, a concept promoted by Fidel. Between the extremes of hatred for the man and sycophantic adulation lies a broad field for critical, nuanced reflection from Fidel’s side of the struggle for socialism.

But why wait for the inevitable before undertaking this task? Better to begin it now, while Fidel is still among us and before the corporate vultures descend on his tomb.

In this necessary, timely endeavour we are joined, first and foremost, by millions of Cubans committed to the continuity of Cuba’s socialist project, the stage from which Fidel has set out to change the world and, to a degree, succeeded.

Would a pregnant woman in a remote East Timorese village be seen by a doctor today if it were not for Cuban medical personnel and medical training?

How much longer might apartheid have dragged on in South Africa if Cuban blood had not been shed in the sands and jungles of Angola and Namibia? Would Venezuelan’s Bolivarian socialist revolution even exist? According to Hugo Chavez, probably not.

In this sense, “Fidel” is something more than an individual. Fidel is certain ethical values, ideas and ideals; a cause and a devotion to that cause. It is adherence to principles but rejection of sectarianism and dogmatism in the struggle for a better, socialist world.

Fidel's essential message is one of hope, that we can reverse the gradual descent of global capitalism into a 21st-century barbarism, besieged by ecological collapse, if we can only unleash the power of masses of ordinary people acting together with a shared vision and strategic compass.

Fidel is, above all, solidarity in a selfish world.

It is asking what we can contribute and share rather than what we can plunder and hoard. It is worrying about the infant mortality rate in Western Sahara and the waves lapping at the doorsteps of Pacific islanders, and doing something about it.

It is internationalism: the rejection of subservient seclusion behind our white-picket fences and national borders decked out in razor wire.

Australia doesn’t have a revolutionary tradition like that of Cuba. After the European invasion and dispossession of its Indigenous peoples the continent developed as an outgrowth of British imperialism.

Relative prosperity for most, thanks to a combination of circumstance and struggle, has blunted radical urges and channelled them into the English gentleman’s game known as parliamentary reformism.

Waves of progressive radicalisation have ebbed and flowed, but none has yet succeeded in placing the country under new management, as did the Cuban Revolution under Fidel’s leadership.

The next one may just do that, opening the way to a very different kind of Australia. Call it socialism or call it whatever, it will have to bury capitalism.

Fidel is daring to dream of such a revolutionary transformation of our own society. And working patiently towards it in ways that are meaningful to each of us, respecting each other’s contributions and seeking the path of principled unity.

Fidel is contributing our little grain of sand to the revolutionary hourglass, recalling that he began his struggle with a handful of idealistic youth with hardly a cent among them.

The Economist: wishful thinking on "transition"

This was written for Australia's Green Left Weekly. 

Cuba: Corporate press wishful thinking on 'transition'

Green Left Weekly, Sunday, July 1, 2012

By Marce Cameron

“Under Raul Castro, Cuba has begun the journey towards capitalism. But it will take a decade and a big political battle to complete, writes Michael Reid”. So began the lead article of the London Economist magazine’s March 24 special issue on Cuba, under the heading “Revolution in retreat”.

It's a familiar refrain, but how much truth is there to it? Unfortunately for the credibility of The Economist, authoritative mouthpiece of the Anglo-imperialist ruling class, it’s a dog’s breakfast of factual errors, illogical arguments and wishful thinking.

“When on July 31st 2006 Cuban state television broadcast a terse statement from Fidel Castro to say that he had to undergo emergency surgery and was temporarily handing over to his brother, Raul, it felt like the end of an era,” Reid observed.

“In the event Fidel survived, and nothing appeared to change. Even so, that July evening marked the start of a slow but irreversible dismantling of communism (officially, ‘socialism’) in one of the tiny handful of countries in which it survived into the 21st century.”

Had Reid read Marx, he would understand that communism has never existed, let alone in a small number of countries. According to Marx, it could only be achieved on a world scale on the basis of socialist revolutions in the most developed capitalist societies.

So whatever is being dismantled in Cuba, it isn’t communism. Or even socialism, if this is understood to mean the consolidation of a first stage in the transition to a classless society. Even this would require socialist revolutions to take hold in developed capitalist countries.

For Reid’s argument to hold water he would have to demonstrate that Cuba is abandoning its socialist orientation and gradually restoring capitalism, or that the economic reforms that have been implemented and decided on will inevitably lead to capitalist restoration.

Privatisation?

Since Cuba’s socialist state is the owner and manager of the bulk of the Caribbean island nation’s economic resources, the restoration of capitalism, however gradual, would require the transfer of ownership to individuals of large swathes of productive property that belong to Cuba’s working people. In a word, privatisation.

Reid seemed to imply that this is what’s happening in Cuba today: “Raul Castro, who formally took over as Cuba’s president in February 2008 and as first secretary of the Communist Party [PCC] in April 2011, is trying to revive the island’s moribund economy by transferring a substantial chunk of it from state to private hands, with profound social and political implications.”

Here, Reid should have clarified that what is being transferred to “private hands” ― that is, to the self-employed, small private businesses and cooperatives ― is not ownership, but the management of socially owned productive property.

The distinction is crucial, yet Reid glossed over it.

“The leadership shuns the word ‘reform’, let alone ‘transition’,” Reid said. “Those terms are contaminated by the collapse of the Soviet Union, an event that still traumatises Cuba’s leaders.

“Officially, the changes are described as an ‘updating’, in which ‘non-state actors’ and ‘cooperatives’ will be promoted. But whatever the language, this means an emerging private sector.”

Perhaps, but this is not the kind of Cuban “private sector” that those who dream of capitalist restoration would like to see. Take, for example, barber shops and beautician’s salons with one to three chairs.

Until recently, these were centrally managed by Cuba’s 169 Peoples Power municipal governments following the nationalisation of retail trade and services in 1968.

Today, they are being leased to their workers, who purchase their own supplies, set their own prices, maintain the premises and pay income taxes and retirement contributions to the socialist state. Public ownership of the premises is retained and leases specify how they are to be used in the public interest: a barber shop is for hair cuts, not handicrafts.

The Economic and Social Policy Guidelines, adopted by the Sixth PCC Congress in April last year after an extensive public debate, made it clear the privatisation of social property and the emergence of a new Cuban capitalist class is not on the agenda.

Guideline No. 3 is explicit: “In the non-state forms of management [of socially-owned productive property] the concentration of property [ownership] by juridical and natural persons [that is, by enterprises and individuals] shall not be permitted”.

Other than joint ventures between the socialist state and foreign investors, the scope for private capital accumulation in Cuba will be limited to what can be achieved on the basis of the management under lease ― rather than ownership ― of small and medium-sized economic entities by individuals, small businesses and cooperatives.

And such arrangements will occur where they are considered economically viable and socially desirable.

In the main report to the PCC Congress, Raul Castro said: “Some opinions were not included [in the final version of the Guidelines] … because they openly contradicted the essence of socialism, as for example 45 proposals advocating the concentration of [private] property [ownership].

In the same speech, Castro said: “The growth of the non-public sector of the economy, far from an alleged privatisation of social property as some theoreticians would have us believe, is to become an active element facilitating the construction of socialism in Cuba.

“It will allow the state to focus on raising the efficiency of the basic means of production, which are the property of the entire people, while relieving itself of those managerial activities that are not strategic for the country.”

Reid acknowledged: “The new president often says his aim is to ‘make socialism sustainable and irreversible’. The economy will continue to be based on planning, not the market, and ‘the concentration of property’ will be prohibited, Raul Castro insisted in a speech to the National Assembly in December 2010.”

Yet Reid doesn’t acknowledge that what has been implemented to date, and what has been projected in the guidelines, is consistent with what Raul Castro said then ― and that the PCC leadership’s words and deeds refute his own baseless assertion that Cuba “has begun the journey towards capitalism.”

Clutching at straws

Instead, Reid insinuated that Raul Castro’s speeches were aimed not at the Cuban people but at placating Fidel: “He is careful not to contradict his elder brother openly: his every speech contains several reverential quotes from Fidel, who despite his semi-retirement is consulted about big decisions …

“Fidel’s frail and ghostly presence … doubtless checks the speed of reform.”

Doubtless. And if Fidel Castro is consulted on strategic decisions, doesn’t this suggest that he endorses the PCC’s reform agenda, a course that Reid describes as the “irreversible dismantling of communism”? In this surreal light, Fidel appears as Cuba’s reclusive Deng Xiaoping, a reluctant convert to Deng’s best-known contribution to “communist” ideology: “To get rich is glorious”.

Just in case readers were not persuaded that the PCC leadership under Raul Castro (with or without Fidel’s approval) is intentionally setting in motion a process of capitalist restoration, while feigning socialist continuity, The Economist fell back on the hope that capitalism will inevitably return to Cuba no matter what anyone does.

Capitalism, you see, is the natural order of things, and the odds are stacked against Cuba’s socialist project. “Whatever the intentions of Cuba’s Communist leaders, they will find it impossible to prevent their island from moving to some form of capitalism”, said Reid.

“What is harder to predict is whether they will remain in control of the process of change, or whether it will lead to democracy.” In other words, the only question for The Economist is whether Cuba will adopt Chinese-style “market socialism” or evolve into a typical Third World capitalist “democracy”.

Reid notes that capitalist ideologues such as himself have predicted the end of the Cuban Revolution before, and got it wrong. “When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991,” Reid pointed out, “many outsiders believed that communism in Cuba was doomed”.

Today, however, there can be no doubt: “This time, Raul has insisted, there will be no turning back: the reforms will happen sin prisa, pero sin pausa (slowly but steadily)”.

So, when Raul Castro insists the economic reform agenda adopted by the PCC’s sixth Congress will be implemented, The Economist takes his word for it. But when he says that the reforms will strengthen Cuba’s socialist project, rather than lead to capitalist restoration, it dismisses this without offering either facts or arguments to refute it.

Comment: Cuba's alternative to privatisation

Here is the fourth of a series of articles written for Australia's Green Left Weekly on the debates and changes in Cuba. Parts 1, 2 and 3 are here, here and here.

Cuba’s alternative to privatisation

Green Left Weekly #914, March 11, 2012

By Marce Cameron

Cuban President Raul Castro has urged the Caribbean nation's citizens to contribute to a free and frank debate on the future of Cuba’s socialist project.

For the Cuban Communist Party (PCC), the aim of this debate is twofold: to strive for consensus on a new Cuban model of socialist development and to empower Cuba’s working people to implement what has been decided.

In other words, to advance a socialist renewal process in the face of entrenched opposition from within the administrative apparatus.

It is first and foremost a debate about the economy. A draft policy document, the Economic and Social Policy Guidelines, was submitted to a national debate for three months before to its adoption by the Sixth PCC Congress in April last year.

The core principles and objectives of the draft were conserved, but the final version of the Guidelines was substantially modified on the basis of this public debate.

The PCC said total attendance at the 163,000 local debates held in workplaces, study centres and neighbourhoods was about 8.9 million, with many people attending more than one.

More than three million interventions were noted and grouped into 781,000 opinions, about half of which were reflected in the final document. A summary detailing each modification and its motivation, and the number of interventions in favour, was published after the congress.

The Guidelines is not a theoretical document. The government commission responsible for overseeing its implementation has been charged with drafting, as Castro put it, “the integral theoretical conceptualisation of the Cuban socialist economy”.

Rather, the Guidelines is a set of principles and objectives that point to a new Cuban socialist-oriented economic model.

Yet implicit in them is a reconception of the socialist-oriented society in Cuba’s conditions.

Transitional society

The ultimate objective of the socialist revolution is a global classless society in which technology enables minimal human labour to produce goods and services, allowing these to be freely distributed to satisfy people’s rational needs.

Socially owned, this system of production would free everyone from the compulsion to work for others. It would allow a flowering of the human personality that is stunted by capitalist exploitation and alienation, both of which are embodied in the capitalist market.

What blocks this transition is not a lack of technology, but private ownership of most productive wealth and the class rule of the corporate rich over society.

The transition from capitalism to socialism is marked by tension between planning and the market. Democratic planning to meet social needs first becomes increasingly dominant, then ultimately the sole determinant of economic activity.

Without revolutions in advanced industrialised societies, socialist revolutions in industrially underdeveloped countries such as Cuba — inheriting economies stunted by centuries of colonial and neocolonial plunder — are confined to the beginnings of the socialist transition.

This implies a mixed economy with various forms of ownership and management. The only absolute requirement is that the “commanding heights” of the economy are owned by the socialist state — described by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the Communist Manifesto as “the proletariat organised as the ruling class”.

A caveat must be added in light of Soviet bureaucratic “socialism”: socialist state ownership has no automatic bias towards socialism. There must also be socialist democracy.

Nowhere did Marx, Engels or Russian revolutionary V.I. Lenin argue that self-employment and small-scale private and cooperative enterprise are incompatible with progress towards socialism.

For Lenin, in his 1923 article “On Cooperation”, assuming socialist state ownership of large industry, the socialist-oriented society is “the system of civilised cooperativists”.

The notion that building socialism requires state ownership and management of almost the entire economy was born of Stalinist totalitarianism. Far from beginning to wither away as anticipated by Marx, the Soviet state from Stalin to Gorbachev assumed monstrous proportions.

Revolutionary offensive

In March 1968, Cuba’s socialist state expropriated nearly all urban small businesses in an episode known as the “Revolutionary Offensive”.

This was justified at the time by the need to combat hoarding and speculation by petty proprietors. The US economic blockade, the emigration of skilled workers and revolutionary inexperience had led to shortages of consumer goods.

It was also aimed at depriving US-sponsored counter-revolutionaries of points of support among urban small traders and business people.

Yet it was also seen as a step towards a classless society. As it turned out, it was a premature step and therefore counterproductive.

A great deal of planning goes on in big capitalist enterprises. The socialisation of the labour process embodied in large-scale industry is the basis for social ownership and democratic planning in the socialist-oriented society.

Yet even in developed capitalist societies there are economic sectors in which labour is not socialised on a scale that would allow for rational planning.

Rather than seeking to “outgrow” the market in step with the objective socialisation of labour arising from economic development, Cuba’s Revolutionary Offensive abolished the market at a stroke.

In recent years this has been the subject of much public debate in Cuba.

Since early 2008, the PCC daily Granma has opened its pages to criticisms, proposals and debate contributions from readers. There is an ongoing debate on state ownership and management of small productive and service entities, such as cafes and bicycle repair workshops.

Debate

As one reader argued in a December 9, 2009 Granma letter: “Following their nationalisation by the Cuban state in 1968, small businesses and retail firms were converted, little by little, into a source of illicit profit, the robbery of the state, inefficiency and maltreatment ...

“Arguably socialism, by definition, necessitates social ownership of the fundamental means of production, and this is not at odds with personal, family or cooperative property in some means of production or services.

“The state must free itself from the yoke of these entities which, far from being social property, have become a means for the enrichment of a minority that exploits [the majority] to the detriment of the satisfaction of the needs of the client, that is, the people.”

In other words, these entities have undergone de-facto privatisation at the hands of corrupt administrators who pay no taxes on their illicit earnings.

The opposing view is that expanding the scope of cooperatives and other small-scale private enterprise is unnecessary and unwise. The solutions proposed lie on the subjective plane — replacing corrupt administrators with honest ones, for example.

Such solutions don’t address the material roots of the problem: the inability of the socialist state to centrally manage such entities with quality and efficiency, and average state wages that don’t cover all basic living expenses in Cuba’s post-Soviet Special Period.

Widespread petty theft from the socialist state is an inevitable consequence of the latter.

The Guidelines rule out privatisation and the concentration of productive property ownership in the hands of a new Cuban capitalist class.

At the same time, they give the green light to an expanded small-scale private and cooperative sector that is projected to embrace almost half the workforce by 2015.

How can these two objectives be reconciled?

Avoiding privatisation

The idea is to lease small productive and service entities, from bakeries to beauticians, to self-employed individuals, small private businesses and cooperatives. Social ownership of these premises, which belong to the municipal People’s Power governments, would be retained.

These governments and the socialist state will regulate leased entities to ensure that they fulfill certain social objectives.

Responsibility for running these enterprises, however, passes from the state to their workers, who operate them in a competitive environment where prices are set by the market rather than central planning.

In agriculture, the government is promoting a large-scale “return to the land”, leasing farmland rent-free on a long-term basis — an arrangement known as usufruct — to individual farmers, cooperatives and state farms.

This puts farmers, rather than Havana-based administrators, in the driver’s seat while avoiding a concentration of land ownership.

Castro summed up Cuba’s alternative to privatisation in the Main Report to the Sixth PCC Congress: 

“The growth of the non-public sector of the economy, far from an alleged privatisation of social property as some theoreticians would have us believe, is to become an active element facilitating the construction of socialism in Cuba.

“It will allow the state to focus on raising the efficiency of the basic means of production, which are the property of the entire people, while relieving itself of those managerial activities that are not strategic for the country.”

Comment: Cuba debates its socialist future

This is the third instalment of a series of articles written for Australia's Green Left Weekly on the debates and changes in Cuba. Parts 1 and 2 are here and here. 

Here is a link to the official English translation of Raul Castro's closing speech to the PCC National Conference in January. 

Cuba debates its socialist future

Green Left Weekly #912, February 26, 2012

By Marce Cameron

Two decades after the demise of Soviet bureaucratic “socialism” and the onset of its “Special Period” crisis, Cuba is immersed in an ongoing debate on the future of its socialist project.

When Raul Castro became interim president in August 2006, he called for free and frank debate and launched a series of nationwide consultations in the lead-up to the Sixth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) in April last year.

Intersecting with these organised debates is a wider discussion in Cuba’s revolutionary press, academic journals and other institutional spaces.

Numerous mass consultations involving millions of citizens in local workplace and neighbourhood meetings have been held in Cuba since the 1959 revolution.

What is different about this debate is its depth, scope and detail ― and the candour with which different viewpoints are expressed in a climate of growing respect for differences.

In other words, Cuba’s culture of debate is maturing.

Cuban political scientist Rafael Hernandez said in November 2007: “When we talk about debate or criticism we often talk about censorship, restrictions, control, but we never talk about our own lack of a ‘debate culture’. We must foster a culture of debate from the start, because our society doesn’t have it.

“We often call a debate ‘good’ when the participants say the same as we think. That’s not debate; debate is disagreement. And it’s very important that in a debate we express divergent positions in a spirit of dialogue, of mutual respect.

“I think [Cuban] politics is going through this stage right now.”

Debate culture

Cuba has been undergoing a deeply popular socialist transition for five decades. Why is it only now developing a culture of public debate?

One reason is US imperialism’s relentless siege. It has not only been subjected to an economic blockade since 1960, but illegal radio and TV broadcasts, sponsorship of subversion and terrorist acts, an immigration policy aimed at depriving Cuba of skilled workers and a propaganda crusade aimed at demonising Cuba as a “communist dictatorship”.

This state of siege has fostered a siege mentality in Cuba. Many people have viewed public criticism and debate as unwittingly aiding the enemy. Others have used the blockade as an excuse to evade responsibility for their own mistakes and wrongdoings.

Another reason is that during the 1970s and '80s, Cuba assimilated elements of Soviet bureaucratic “socialism”, above all, hyper-centralised decision-making by a vast administrative apparatus that micro-managed almost the entire economy.

Such top-down tendencies were reinforced by idealistic errors, acknowledged as such today by the PCC leadership, which entrenched the negative phenomenon of state paternalism.

Paternalism has two faces: citizens looking to the socialist state to do everything for them, such as fixing a broken window in the home, and provide for all their needs regardless of their labour contribution to society; and officials treating citizens like children who cannot think or decide things for themselves and who do not need to be informed.

This stifles individual and collective initiative that could contribute to Cuba’s socialist project. It also robs people of their sense of social responsibility. It has weakened mechanisms of accountability and sapped the vitality of Cuba’s institutions of socialist democracy.

Revolutionary Cuba has never lacked opportunities to participate in popular mobilisations and in carrying out the tasks of the Revolution. What is has lacked is enough opportunities for involvement in deciding what those tasks will be.

Cuba has developed its own unique institutions of socialist democracy. Cuba's system of popular self-government is based in local communities, where neighbours gather to nominate candidates for election to the municipal assemblies. Delegates must report to their constituents and can be recalled by them at any time. The PCC is banned from backing candidates and all citizens have the right to be nominated.

Despite this, there remains a disconnect between Cuba’s highly educated and politically sophisticated populace, a product of the Revolution itself, and the lack of real participation in decision-making at all levels.

This is felt most keenly by the younger generation who are most susceptible to disaffection and emigration.

The charismatic leadership style and immense personal authority of Fidel Castro ― an indispensable asset to the Revolution in past decades ― tended to overshadow its institutions and institutional forms of consensus-building.

New democratic mechanisms and practices will have to be developed now that Fidel is no longer at the helm.

Currents of opinion

What currents of opinion have emerged in the national debate initiated by Raul Castro?

Since this is a debate about how to save Cuba’s socialist project, not how to end it, the views of those who long for capitalist restoration ― because they have material interests or illusions in it ― lie outside this debate.

Besieged by US imperialism, Cuba does not allow political parties other than the PCC or factions within this party.

Raul Castro told the PCC National Conference in January: “To renounce the principle of a one-party system would be the equivalent of legalising a party, or parties, of imperialism on our soil.”

The debate has unfolded in this context. Whatever differences there may be among the PCC leadership, they have presented a united front to the rest of the party and to the nation around the key principles and strategic objectives of the renewal process.

Within the revolutionary camp, two poles can be identified: a renovationist current and those who defend the status quo in words or deeds.

The renovationist current views Cuba’s socialist development model as having exhausted its ability to move society forward, necessitating an urgent and integral transformation of this model to avoid stagnation and retreat.

It insists on the need for public criticism and debate and a dialectical, rather than dogmatic, conception of the socialist-oriented society in Cuba’s conditions.

This current is led by Raul Castro and other PCC leaders. It is concentrated among the revolutionary vanguard organised in the PCC, among intellectuals and artists and youth who identify with the Revolution.

It does not embrace all PCC members, some of whom are opportunists masquerading as revolutionaries. On the other hand, many revolutionaries are not members of the PCC yet are part of the renovationist current.

Within the renovationist current, there is a spectrum of opinion on the key issues in the debate and on how the changes should be implemented.

There can be little doubt about the outcome of the debates held in the lead-up to the Sixth PCC Congress: a solid majority of Cuban society supports the basic principles and objectives of the Economic and Social Policy Guidelines adopted unanimously by the 1000 Congress delegates elected by the party's grassroots.

Leftist critics of the Guidelines worry that too much is being conceded to the market. Some propose a far more sweeping “cooperativisation” of the state enterprise sector than that contemplated in the Guidelines.

They propose radical democratic measures reminiscent of those advocated by the leftist opposition to Lenin and Trotsky’s New Economic Policy in the Soviet Union in the 1920s.

To the right, some economic specialists argue that medium-sized private enterprises should be permitted alongside self-employment and small-scale private and cooperative management of social property. The Guidelines rule out privatisation and the concentration of productive property ownership in private hands.

Opposition

At the other pole are those who are wary of debate and fearful of change, among them many sincere and humble revolutionaries. This conservative current has generational and institutional contours.

It is concentrated among older Cubans and those who zealously guard their administrative prerogatives, and in some cases illicit privileges, from criticism and initiative “from below”.

In a December 2011 interview with Edmundo Garcia, Rafael Hernandez distinguished between “constructive” and “frankly negative” opposition to change.

Constructive opposition is expressed by those unable to directly benefit from the openings to self-employment, small businesses and cooperatives and the projected overhaul of the state enterprise sector. It is also expressed by some of the 20% of the population that, according to some Cuban studies, live below the poverty line.

Among them are retirees dependent on their small state pensions.

These sectors “face these changes with a considerable degree of uncertainty” and “don’t necessarily view the reform process with the expectations, desires and enthusiasm of others”.

There is another kind of resistance that “government leaders have explicitly called the bureaucracy”, Hernandez said. It “doesn't oppose through speeches, it doesn’t oppose the reforms with a document”, but “in its slowness to implement the measures already adopted”.

He said: “It’s very logical that the old mindset, which sees the emergence of capitalism in every expression of the market and in every segment of small-scale private property, should exist, because for a long time... socialism was defined in absolute terms as state-centric socialism.”

Comment: Cuba — towards a new socialist model

Regular readers of my blog deserve an explanation for my not having posted anything since January 18. I had to move house. I'm closer to the ocean now; from my new kitchen window I can see container ships creeping to and from the freight terminal at Sydney's Botany Bay.

A reminder of the intricately interconnected global economy that could be the basis for a planetary socialist society... if we put an end to capitalism before the ecological crisis overwhelms us.

Perhaps the 200 million Chinese industrial, construction and mining workers — concentrated in a few giant metropolises and resembling more the Russian industrial proletariat of the early 20th century than the privileged, sedated "labour aristocracy" of developed capitalist societies — will decide the fate of humanity? If that sleeping giant awakens...

Meanwhile, I hope to return to posting regular translations soon. 

Here is a commentary I wrote for Australia's Green Left Weekly, the second in a series of articles on the debates and changes in Cuba. A slightly edited version has been published on the Green Left website here.

Cuba: towards a new socialist model

By Marce Cameron

As reported in GLW #905, the Sixth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC), held in April, “endorsed for the first time a fundamental change in the political and economic model”, according to respected Cuban political scientist and Temas magazine editor Rafael Hernandez.

This does not mean the abandonment of Cuba’s socialist project, but the renewal of this project after two decades of the post-Soviet “Special Period”, a deep structural crisis of Cuba’s post-capitalist, centrally-planned economy and an ideological and ethical crisis of the nation’s socialist vocation.

The changes underway in Cuba point to a socialist-oriented society purged of excessive idealism, elements of Soviet bureaucratic “socialism”, the crisis-driven improvisation of the Special Period and the pernicious habits engendered by the survival imperative amid this systemic crisis.

Contrary to the notion that political processes are either “top down” (as in the Greek austerity measures) or “bottom up” (as in the Arab Spring), Cuba’s socialist renewal unites revolutionary leaders and masses in a common struggle to “change everything that must be changed”.

This common struggle is the fruit of a democratic national debate of unprecedented candour, depth and detail on the draft Economic and Social Policy Guidelines. 

The final version of the Guidelines, adopted by the Sixth Congress and subsequently by Cuba’s national assembly, bears the imprint of this consultative process.

Special Period

In the late 1980s, Cubans enjoyed the highest living standards in Latin America thanks in part to Soviet fair trade. Then the USSR and its satellite states – and the dogmatic certainties of Soviet “Marxism-Leninism” – abruptly crumbled.

A bitter truth was revealed: Soviet bureaucratic “socialism” was a brittle caricature of the real thing. As the Berlin Wall fell and Czechs, Poles and Romanians smashed statues of Marx and Lenin in public squares, Cuban leader Fidel Castro invoked the heroism of the young Soviet republic under Lenin’s leadership.

The Fourth PCC Congress, held in 1991, resolved to continue the “Rectification” process launched at the Third Congress in 1986. At the heart of Cuba’s “recification of errors and negative tendencies” was the abandonment of elements of the Soviet “model” that had been uncritically assimilated.

But the search for a new Cuban model of socialist development, free from both idealistic errors and the malign influence of Soviet Stalinism, was overtaken by the need to survive. The collapse of Cuba’s foreign trade with the Soviet bloc meant industrial paralysis, severe shortages and long queues.

Cuba’s communist leaders were preoccupied with ensuring that what little there was was shared as equitably as possible; that no schools or hospitals closed; that idled workers were not left destitute.

In a word, that social solidarity prevailed over selfishness. 

They had to ensure, for example, that every Cuban child continued to receive a litre of highly subsidised milk each day. Cuba had bartered its lobster for the powdered milk of East German cows. 

With East Germany absorbed into the capitalist West and the simultaneous tightening of the US economic blockade, milk had to be bought at market prices from as far away as New Zealand.

The concessions to the market made during the 1990s to stimulate economic recovery, from the opening to foreign tourism to turning huge state farms into cooperatives under state tutelage, were essentially emergency measures rather than the building blocks of a new socialist model.

During the Special Period the building of socialism had to be put on hold. The Cuban Revolution had to strive to preserve its core social achievements, above all free and universally accessible health care and education at all levels, and adjust to the new world in which US imperialism had emerged as the hegemonic superpower.

Cuba’s revolutionaries would have to come to terms not only with the Soviet debacle and its political lessons for Cuba, but with the Revolution’s own errors, some of which date back to the 1960s. 

The spectacular rise of capitalism “with Chinese characteristics”, and Vietnam’s tightrope walk between socialist commitment and capitalist restoration, would also have to be studied critically.

Finally, no overhaul of Cuba’s socialist model – a configuration of concepts, structures, methods and mentalities that seeks to embody the nation’s socialist objective – could proceed without striving for political consensus, first among the PCC leadership and then among its broad social base, the big majority of Cuba’s working people.

All this has taken two decades.

Persuasion

Contrary to the nonsense peddled by the corporate media, revolutionary Cuba is not a police state; its repressive forces have never been used against the people. It is the force of persuasion, rather than the persuasion of force, that is the outstanding feature of Cuban politics since 1959. 

This is in stark contrast to both Stalinist totalitarianism and capitalist “democracy”.

Unlike capitalist politicians, who may resort to state violence to persuade citizens to accept “what’s good for the country”, Cuba’s communist leaders have to explain and convince. This is why Fidel used to give such long speeches, interrupting baseball telecasts and soap-operas for hours on end. As Havana University’s Jesus Arboleya has observed, Fidel has been the Revolution’s sternest loyal critic.

Striving for consensus, while acknowledging that differences of opinion are healthy and inevitable, will become even more important in the approaching post-Fidel era, when Fidel’s generation of revolutionary leaders – with their unique personal authority forged in heroic deeds in the Sierra Maestra mountains and in the prisons of the Batista dictatorship – are no longer around.

Cuba today is not the same as in 1989. The market concessions have succeeded in stimulating a partial economic recovery amid a growing social differentiation based on access to convertible currency.

A substantial minority of Cubans can live relatively comfortably thanks to remittances, theft from the socialist state and other black market activities and employment in sectors linked to tourism and foreign investment. With state salaries insufficient to cover all basic living costs, most Cubans have had no choice but to turn to the black market to make ends meet.

When workers are obliged to steal from their workplaces in order to live with dignity, they tend to turn a blind eye to corrupt administrators. How to instill a sense of individual and collective responsibility for socially-owned productive property when it has come to be viewed by many workers and administrators as a source of illicit personal enrichment?

Convergence

This touches on an old problem that predates the Special Period. Hyper-centralised management of Cuba’s centrally-planned economy reduces the scope for worker participation, while excessive egalitarianism in the sphere of wages tends to breed contempt for social property: less politically conscious and committed workers may think, “Why bother working hard when I’ll get paid the same low wages?”

This is one example of the convergence of elements of Soviet bureaucratic “socialism” with excessive revolutionary idealism.

Others are Cuba’s wholesale expropriation of urban small businesses in 1968, a policy that is now being reversed, and the all-pervasive nature of the socialist state, which is now retreating to its appropriate functions and dimensions in a society that envisages its eventual “withering away”, as Karl Marx put it. 

“For the worker to feel like the owner of the means of production, we cannot rely solely on theoretical explanations – we have been doing that for about 48 years – nor on the fact that their opinion is taken into consideration in the workplace meetings. 

"It is very important that their income corresponds to their personal contribution and to the work centre’s fulfilment of the social objective for which it was constituted”, Cuban president Raul Castro told the National Assembly in July 2008.

In a panel discussion on work in Cuba published by Cuba’s Bohemia magazine on October 13, 2010, Cuban researcher Jose Ramon Fabelo asked:

“If I'm not able to decide what is produced, nor to what end, nor participate in management, in planning, and much of the time what I earn is not related to what I do, what sense of ownership am I going to have, am I going to extract this out of pure ideology? Sometimes yes, but not in the majority of cases... 

“We've often debated between these two extremes, between moral or material incentives, consciousness or money. I consider this contraposition to be very anti-dialectical. 

"We need to harmonise the two, and I would caution: today we cannot go to the extreme of hoping that economic mechanisms by themselves will stimulate and restore the value of work to its rightful place. Educational, pedagogical, political and juridical work is very important in the here and now.”

Comment: Cuba strives for socialist renewal

This is the first in a series of articles on the debates and changes in Cuba written for Australia's Green Left Weekly. The series will examine the socialist renovation process thematically. Green Left takes a break over the Christmas-New Year period, so the next instalment will be published in early 2012.

A link to the article on the Green Left website is here.   

Cuba seeks socialist renewal

Green Left Weekly No. 905, November 28, 2011

By Marce Cameron

Fidel, Raul sing the Internationale at Congress close

The Sixth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC), held April 17-21, coincided with the 50th anniversary of Cuba’s historic defeat of the US-backed invasion at the Bay of Pigs and Fidel Castro’s proclamation of the socialist character of the Cuban Revolution.

When Fidel, 85, made a surprise appearance at the Congress closing session, many of the thousand delegates were overcome with emotion as aides helped him to his seat next to President Raul Castro.

Fidel, who retired from the presidency in 2006, makes very few public appearances. His participation symbolised the continuity of Cuba’s socialist project.

“Cuba is changing,” respected Cuban journalist Luis Sexto observed in August 2009, “and it changes so that it may remain socialist”.

He added: “Cuba, rigid for many years, shakes off the starch that immobilised it to change what is obsolete ... without compromising the solidity of the Revolution’s power.”

Political scientist and editor of Cuba’s Temas magazine, Rafael Hernandez, told the London Financial Times: “[The Congress] endorsed for the first time a fundamental change in the political and economic model.”

Guidelines

The Congress approved a policy document, the Economic and Social Policy Guidelines. It was substantially modified on the basis of an unprecedented popular debate, involving PCC members and non-members, in the lead-up to and during the Congress.

President Raul Castro told the Congress the debate had been “a truly extensive democratic exercise” in which “the people freely stated their views”.

The Guidelines were endorsed by Cuba’s National Assembly of People’s Power in August, which established a special commission to oversee its implementation and to draft, in Raul’s words, “the integral theoretical conceptualisation of the Cuban socialist economy”.

Raul told the Congress that given the depth, scope and complexity of the projected changes, they would take “at least five years” to implement. This would be done “without pause but without haste”.

He had bluntly warned the National Assembly in December: “Either we rectify or our time of skirting the precipice will be over, and we will destroy ... the efforts of entire generations.”

Raul said Cuba must abandon “erroneous and unsustainable conceptions of socialism [i.e. the socialist-oriented society] that have been deeply rooted in broad sectors of the population over the years as a result of the excessively paternalistic, idealistic and egalitarian approach instituted by the Revolution in the interests of social justice.”

The Guidelines foreshadow a new Cuban model of socialist development. This is emerging, slowly but surely, as Cuba’s revolutionary leadership initiates reforms that make inroads into a patchwork of errors, obsolescence, crisis-driven improvisation, bureaucratic inertia and the legacy of the post-Soviet “Special Period”.

The Guidelines are prefaced with a quote by Fidel: “Revolution means having a sense of the historical moment; it is changing everything that must be changed.”

They also feature one by Raul: “The economic battle constitutes today, more than ever, the principle task and the main ideological work of the cadres, because the sustainability and preservation of our social system depend on it.”

In a departure from Soviet-inspired orthodoxy — ossified into dogma in the minds of many Cuban revolutionaries— and a return to classical Marxism’s conception of the transition from capitalism to socialism, the Guidelines project a mixed economy with an expanded role for self-employment, small businesses and cooperatives.

There would be greater scope for market mechanisms, subordinated to the dominant state enterprise sector and central planning.

Planning and the market

Cuba’s post-capitalist economy underpins its sovereignty and social justice. Were Cuba to renounce central planning, it would mean handing over the country to the Cuban bourgeoisie based in Miami.

Cuba would revert to a US neo-colony with levels of poverty and social inequality comparable to Nicaragua or Honduras.

Were this tragedy to befall Cuba’s working people the vengeful counterrevolution would exact a terrible retribution, just as the colonial and imperialist powers have punished neighbouring Haiti for centuries for the “Black Jacobin” Revolution of 1791.

The challenge is to harmoniously combine the advantages of central planning with those of small-scale private and cooperative initiative, without resorting to the privatisation of social property and its inevitable sequel — a far deeper social divide than the one based on access to convertible currency, corruption and the black market that has emerged during the Special Period.

To prevent the emergence of a Cuban capitalist class that would conspire with its counterparts in Miami and Washington to restore capitalism, Guideline No. 1 states: “The socialist planning system will continue to be the principal means to direct the national economy.”

Guideline No. 3 affirms that “in the forms of non-state management [of social property] the concentration of property by juridical or natural persons shall not be permitted”.

The emphasis on small-scale private and cooperative enterprise is a necessary, and long overdue, correction to the near-absolute dominance of socialist state ownership and management of the economy — and the hyper-centralisation of decision-making that stifles individual and collective initiative.

Centralised management of such things as local bakeries, and well-intentioned but counterproductive bans on such things as people buying and selling their own homes, have necessitated a vast, unproductive administrative apparatus with a strong tendency to corruption amid the hardships of the Special Period.

Cuba is not ruled by a totalitarian bureaucracy — the revolutionaries have the upper hand in the Communist Party and the state — but it bears the imprint of its former Soviet benefactor, which still casts a long shadow over Cuba.

Its malign legacy, above all a substantial layer of corrupt administrators with capitalist aspirations, is a formidable obstacle to Cuba’s socialist renewal. In November 2005, Fidel warned that corruption could destroy the Revolution from within.

Raul is leading Cuba’s revolutionaries in the Revolution’s life-and-death struggle to overcome administrative resistance to the implementation of the Guidelines and to dismantle, or reduce to the unavoidable minimum, “the bureaucracy”.

“I warn you,” Raul said in August, “that bureaucratic resistance to the strict fulfillment of the Congress decisions, which have the massive support of the people, is useless”.

Special Period

The reforms aim to pull Cuba’s post-capitalist economy out of the deep structural crisis caused by the demise of Soviet bureaucratic “socialism” in the early 1990s.

The Soviet bloc had accounted for 85% of Cuba’s foreign trade. Its disintegration caused the Caribbean island’s economy to contract by 35%.

Cuba’s economic relations with the Soviet bloc were based on preferential terms that shielded Cuba from the capitalist world market’s systematic exploitation of the Third World.

During the 1970s and '80s, this underpinned the highest living standards in Latin America and the twin pillars of Cuba’s relative social equality: world-class free health care and education.

As the Soviet bloc reverted to capitalism, US imperialism intensified its economic blockade of Cuba in the hope that hunger and despair would lead to an uprising against the socialist government and US-backed “regime change”.

Not for the first time, the imperialists underestimated the Cuban Revolution. Thanks to the Cuban people’s political awareness and stoic resistance, it has weathered the storm with its social achievements battered but largely intact.

Above all, Cuba has preserved its sovereignty and the cardinal achievement of the 1959 revolution: political power in the hands of the working people.

The opening of the socialist revolution in Venezuela has broken Cuba’s isolation and delivered vital moral and material reinforcement. The relationship between Cuba and Venezuela is that of two sister socialist revolutions whose paths are converging, as Chavez’s revolutionary government builds up a socialist state sector through expropriations and Cuba reverses the 1968 “Revolutionary Offensive” that expropriated urban small businesses.

Yet this mutually beneficial relationship won’t by itself reinvigorate Cuba’s socialist project.

It has become obvious over the past decade that the configuration of concepts, structures, methods and mentalities that allowed the Revolution to weather the harshest years of the Special Period has become an obstacle to it exiting this crisis period — that is, to resuming the building of socialism.

[This is the first in a series of articles on the debates and changes in Cuba.]

Comment: Cuba and sustainable development

Cuba: Breaking corporate power allows sustainable development

Green Left Weekly, September 24, 2011

By Marce Cameron

Cuba is a world leader in ecologically sustainable practices. It is the only country to have begun the large-scale transition from conventional farming, which is heavily dependent on fossil fuels, to a new agricultural paradigm known as low-input sustainable agriculture.

Thriving urban organic farms feed and beautify Cuba’s cities, strengthen local communities and employ hundreds of thousands of people thanks to government support. 

These farms provide about 80% of the fresh fruit, vegetables, herbs and medicinal plants consumed by urban residents. They are now being complemented by “green belts” on the urban fringes aimed at local self-sufficiency and ecological sustainability.

Cuba was the first country to replace all incandescent light globes with energy-saving compact fluorescents and to ban the sale of incandescents. 

It has also pioneered the decentralisation of electricity generation by installing thousands of diesel generators the size of shipping containers where they are needed. This has cut transmission losses and made the grid less vulnerable to disruption.

Many sugar mills burn crop residues to generate electricity for the grid, and rural schools and other social facilities have been fitted out with solar panels. Bicycles have been promoted as a sustainable transport mode and neighbourhood committees play a key role in recycling.

Tree cover is increasing thanks to reforestation efforts. From coral reefs to cloud forests, Cuba’s network of protected areas makes it the ecological jewel of the Caribbean. For visiting ecologists, a trip to Cuba is like stepping back in time.

Like all countries, Cuba has serious environmental problems, from recent severe droughts and flooding that may be linked to climate change, to soil erosion, pollution and loss of biodiversity as a result of unsustainable practices past and present. A small Third World country subjected to a crippling US economic siege since 1962, Cuba cannot afford many expensive green technologies.

Yet Cuba has become a social laboratory for the application of sustainable practices that environmentalists in developed capitalist societies such as Australia can only dream about.

One reason why Cuba leads the world in sustainable practices is dire necessity: Cuba has had to adapt to acute shortages of energy, raw materials, manufacured goods and financing as a result of external circumstances. 

At the beginning of the 1990s, the Soviet Union and its eastern European allies, which accounted for 85% of Cuba’s foreign trade, cut ties with Cuba as they reverted to capitalism. The sudden demise of Soviet bureaucratic “socialism” caused Cuba’s own post-capitalist economy to contract by 35%.

But thanks to the solidarity embodied in its deeply popular socialist revolution, Cuba avoided the descent into abject poverty and political chaos that would have taken place had Cuba not abolished capitalism in the early 1960s.

Cuba turned to oxen to plough the fields because there was no alternative: thousands of Soviet tractors stood idle for lack of fuel, lubricants and spare parts. But once farmers got used to ploughing their fields with oxen, they discovered that oxen offer many advantages over tractors, particularly in small-scale agriculture. 

Oxen are cheaper to “run”, eat grass rather than consume oil, compact soil far less and produce free, natural fertiliser. Integrated into agricultural systems designed for low cost and ecological sustainability, oxen are a step forward as well as a step “backward”.

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but many good ideas for how to begin the transition to a more sustainable civilisation are destined to remain marginal as long as capitalism dominates the planet — even when capitalist societies experience economic crises of the magnitude of Cuba’s post-Soviet “Special Period”.

The very nature of capitalism tends to prevent such good ideas from being applied on a sufficiently large scale to make a real difference. This is mainly because it’s more profitable for capitalist corporations to continue plundering the planet.

Cuba’s socialist revolution abolished capitalist ownership of large-scale productive wealth and replaced the capitalist market with central planning to meet social needs. There is a subordinate role for market mechanisms, cooperatives and small private businesses.

Unless corporate power is overthrown and replaced with a state based on the democratic self-organisation of the millions of workers and farmers that produce most of society’s wealth, corporate power will remain an insurmountable barrier to Australia, and other nations ruled by the corporate rich, following in Cuba’s footsteps.

Cuba treads lightly on the Earth. In 2006, a World Wildlife Fund study concluded Cuba is the only country in the world with both a high UN Human Development Index — a composite ranking based on quality of life indices and purchasing power — and a relatively small “ecological footprint”, a measure of the per person use of land and resources.

The study concluded that if the world followed Cuba’s example we’d only need the resources of one Earth to sustain us indefinitely. By contrast, if the world followed the example of Australia’s capitalist economy, we’d need about 3.7 Earth-like planets. Recent telescope surveys suggest such planets may be dotted throughout our galaxy, but even the nearest one would be unimaginably far away.

As global capitalism drags humanity towards an ecological meltdown on our own planet — the early stages of which are unfolding before our eyes — the need to replace capitalism with a democratic social order based on common ownership of large-scale productive wealth and human solidarity will be posed ever more sharply. Yet people will struggle for such a society only if it seems possible, realistic and necessary. Here too, Cuba leads the world.

Not only does Cuba offer an inspiring example of what’s possible when even a small, poor country frees itself from the tyranny of the corporate rich, Cuba and Venezuela lead a bloc of Latin American countries with progressive governments — the Bolivarian Alliance for Our America (ALBA) — on the world stage in the struggle for social and environmental justice.

At the United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen in 2009, the ALBA countries denounced capitalism as the root cause of the ecological crisis, and scuttled a backroom deal that would have placed the burden on the poor countries that are least responsible for rising greenhouse gas emissions.

Next year’s UN Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, will mark 20 years since the first UN Earth Summit. It’s worth recalling the words of then-Cuban president Fidel Castro at the 1992 summit. Castro pointed out that a fifth of the world’s population “consume two-thirds of all metals and three-fourths of the energy produced worldwide”.

“They have poisoned the seas and the rivers. They have polluted the air ... They have saturated the atmosphere with gases, altering climatic conditions with the catastrophic effects we are already beginning to suffer.

“The forests are disappearing. The deserts are expanding. Billions of tons of fertile soil are washed every year into the sea. Numerous species are becoming extinct.

“Population pressures and poverty lead to desperate efforts to survive, even at the expense of nature. Third World countries, yesterday’s colonies and today nations exploited and plundered by an unjust international economic order, cannot be blamed for all this...

“Enough of selfishness. Enough of schemes of domination. Enough of insensitivity, irresponsibility and deceit. Tomorrow will be too late to do what we should have done a long time ago.”

Comment: Raul Castro's National Assembly speech

Raul Castro gave a brief closing speech to the National Assembly on August 1. Earlier, the Assembly had voted unanimously to approve the Economic and Social Policy Guidelines for the Party and the Revolution, on the recommendation of the Sixth Communist Party Congress in April. 

This means that the Guidelines are now state policy. In his speech, Raul said that a special National Assembly commission has been established to "oversee the process of updating the economic model" and that one of its tasks would be to "draft the integral theoretical conceptualisation of the Cuban socialist economy", which "will require much time and effort".

The Guidelines are not a theoretical document but a practical one. While there are references to key principles, such as the socialist distribution formula "to each according to their work" and not allowing the concentration of productive property ownership, there is no coherent theoretical framework and no discussion of the historical experiences and lessons that underpin the Guidelines. 

Presumably, this is because the PCC leadership felt that the most important thing was to strive for consensus on what needs to be done, on a set of tasks and objectives that chart a course towards a new Cuban socialist-oriented economic model, and that an overly theoretical document may well have muddied the waters rather than served clarity at this stage. In the unfolding of the renovation process, the sequencing and timing of the revolutionary leadership's initiatives, including those related to consensus-building, are paramount.  

On the other hand, the PCC leadership has not ignored the theoretical and historical questions involved. Raul took up some of these issues in the main report to the Sixth PCC Congress in April, as well as in other speeches. Neither have the theoretical issues and historical lessons been absent from the public debate, as can be appreciated from the translations of commentaries published on this blog. Yet an "integral theoretical conceptualisation", as Raul puts it, is still a pending task. 

There are several reasons why such a document is needed. 

For Cuba's revolutionaries, it would further the process of striving for clarity and consensus on the broad outlines of the new model that is beginning to emerge. By drawing on the theoretical and practical legacy of revolutionary Cuba's own rich experience of building socialism over the past five decades, as well as those of other socialist revolutions past and present, it could help safeguard the renewal process from the danger, inherent in allowing greater scope for market mechanisms, of a pragmatic drift in the direction of capitalist restoration. It would arm Cuba's revolutionaries ideologically in the face of such pressures. 

At the same time, a clear theoretical justification for the renovation process could also help guard against the opposite tendency, that is, for the renovation process to lose momentum because of unjustified fears, cynically exploited by those in the administrative apparatus that want to preserve their fiefdoms and illicit privileges derived from corruption, that any concessions to the market imply the abandonment of "socialism".

In his August 1 speech, Raul had this blunt message for such officials: "We shall be patient but also persevering in the face of resistance to change, whether conscious or unconscious. I warn you that bureaucratic resistance to the strict fulfilment of the Congress decisions, which have the massive support of the people, is futile."

Finally, such a document would be part of the legacy of the historicos, Fidel's and Raul's generation of revolutionaries, to the newer generations of revolutionaries who will have to carry through the renovation process and put their own stamp on it. It would also be of great value, and no doubt of great interest, to revolutionary socialists internationally, as well as to the Cuba solidarity movement.

Yet the need for theoretical clarification is far from the most pressing challenge confronting the renovation process. As Raul stressed on August 1: "The greatest obstacle which we face in terms of implementing the decisions of the Sixth Congress is the psychological barrier created by inertia, resistance to change, pretence or double standards, indifference and insensitivity, a barrier which we are obliged to surmount with constancy and firmness, starting with Party, state and government leaders in the various national, provincial and municipal bodies."

He concluded that "without a change of mentality, we will be incapable of carrying out the changes needed to guarantee the sustainability or, what amounts to the same thing, the irrevocability of the socialist character of the political and social system enshrined in the Constitution of the Republic." 

Key to this change in mentality is respect for differences of opinion: "All opinions must be discussed and when a consensus is not reached, the differences will be raised before higher bodies authorised to make decisions. Knowing Cubans and given its importance, I repeat: all opinions must be discussed and when consensus is not reached, the differences will be raised before higher bodies authorized to make decisions and, moreover, nobody is entitled to prevent this."

An official translation of Raul's August 1 speech is here. It's a short speech that's well worth reading in full.

Socialist Alternative misunderstands Cuba, again

Below is my response to a May 5 commentary "Is Cuba heading towards the free market?" by Liz Walsh, a member of the Australian organisation Socialist Alternative. I wrote it for LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal, an online publication based in Australia. 

Socialist Alternative misunderstands Cuba, again

LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal (Australia)

By Marce Cameron

Socialist Alternative, an Australian socialist organisation, denies that a genuinely popular revolution, let alone a socialist revolution, ever took place in the Cuban archipelago from 1959 onwards. It seems they believe in miracles: the Cuban state "is a product of a revolution carried out by a few hundred or, at best, a few thousand guerrillas". The decisive role of an extensive urban popular movement in the overthrow of the US-backed Batista dictatorship simply vanishes from this falsified account. "There was no 'forcible entrance of the masses onto the stage of history', to borrow Trotsky’s description of revolution." In other words the Cuban Revolution is a myth. It was just Fidel and a few hundred or a few thousand guerrillas. Indeed, "what is striking" — to Socialist Alternative — "about the Cuban Revolution is the general lack of self-activity in the revolution itself either by workers or peasants." 

The million-strong demonstrations in support of the revolutionary government throughout the past five decades; the mass literacy campaign in which thousands of youths left the classrooms, lanterns and textbooks in hand, to eradicate illiteracy in 1961; the half a million Cubans who volunteered to serve in Cuba's internationalist mission in Angola and Namibia; the outpouring of solidarity after each hurricane that passes over the island; the neighbourhood committees that organise blood donations, guard duty, recycling, attention to the needs of vulnerable children, the elderly and the infirm; Cuba's untiring and selfless contribution to health care, education and sports programs in small, poor countries such as Kiribati and Tuvalu that are all but invisible on the world stage — none of this registers with the comrades from Socialist Alternative. Or perhaps they are ignorant of these deeds.

The revolution, or the "revolution" as they see it, is not the work of millions of ordinary women and men who have given of themselves, sometimes even their own lives, to make Cuba what it is today. All this is the work of what Socialist Alternative describes as the "Cuban ruling class", and they're not talking about the octogenarian Cuban-American bourgeoisie in Miami. They're talking about a creature of their own imagination: a ruling bureaucracy in Cuba like that of the Soviet Union from Stalin to Gorbachev. Given their dogged blindness to the reality of a deeply popular revolutionary process in Cuba and their inability to perceive the crucial distinction between bureaucratism and a ruling bureaucracy, it's not surprising that Socialist Alternative are unable to grasp the class essence of the debates and changes underway on the island today.

Debate on the Guidelines

"The Cuban Communist Party (PCC) finally held its sixth national congress on the 16-19 April. This congress, the first since 1997, was convoked to allow the PCC leadership to obtain endorsement for a whole plethora of changes to Cuban economic policies. Unsurprisingly the conference endorsed the 311-point reform package unanimously". That the nearly 1,000 delegates to the PCC's Sixth Congress voted unanimously to approve the final draft of the Economic and Social Policy Guidelines for the Party and the Revolution is not surprising, but Walsh doesn't explain why.

The Guidelines approved by the Congress were the culmination of a years-long process of public debate and consensus-building initiated by Raul Castro in July 2007, when he called for structural and conceptual changes to Cuba's model of socialist development and invited Cubans to debate the country's problems and propose solutions, repeatedly urging a free and frank debate without false unanimity. The draft Guidelines published in October 2010 were based on the mass consultation process carried out in late 2007. Between December and February the PCC leadership again called on Cubans, both party members and non-members, to debate the draft Guidelines in their work and study centres, neighbourhoods and in PCC base committees. Total attendance at the 163,079 grassroots debates was more than 8.9 million in a country of 11.2 million people. Two thirds of the original 291 guidelines were modified on the basis of the public debates, the December session of Cuba's National Assembly of People's Power, the provincial and municipal committees of the party and the deliberations of the five PCC Congress working commissions.

The unanimity of the final vote on the Guidelines at the Congress was not a reflection of unanimity; the delegates would not have agreed with every word of every Guideline, as seen in the televised debates during the Congress in which not all the votes on proposed amendments were unanimous. Rather, the unanimous vote was a reflection of delegate's confidence in the process of drafting, debating and amending the Guidelines. The only principled basis for a delegate to vote down the Guidelines would be if they disagreed with the overall direction of the changes proposed in the document. They would then have been obliged to propose an alternative set of guidelines for adoption by the Congress. Since no such alternative document emerged during the process of elaborating the Guidelines, it's not surprising that the final vote was unanimous. The delegates were not hand-picked by the PCC Central Committee. They were elected from the party base in the municipalities.

Walsh is silent on all this. She continues: "These changes to the economy, as always, are being driven from the top, in particular by Raul Castro." It's true that the national debate was initiated by Raul Castro and that the PCC leadership is driving these changes. So what? Isn't this what leadership is all about? Under the heading "No democracy in Cuba", Walsh dismisses the popular debates as nothing more than window-dressing.

"[S]ome defenders of the regime disagree and point to the fact that there has been widespread consultation of local party branches and neighbourhoods. But consultation is not the same as democratic control, far from it." Walsh fails to grasp the reality that Cuba is not, and could not possibly be, a fully communist society in which the distinction between a class-conscious vanguard of the working people and the mass of working people — from which flows the historical necessity for a vanguard party of the socialist revolution — has withered away. Without a Marxist-Leninist party at the head of the Cuban Revolution there would be no revolution and none of the impressive social achievements that even Walsh does not completely ignore in her commentary.

The important question is not whether 11 million Cubans were summoned to vote on each and every Guideline to satisfy Walsh's utopian (in Cuba's conditions) conception of a "real" socialist democracy. What's important is (a) whether or not the content of the Guidelines coincides with the class interests of the working people in the concrete conditions of Cuba today; and (b) whether or not the PCC leadership modified their proposal on the basis of the popular debates to improve this document in the class interests of the working people, that is, to what extent they were able to involve the masses in the process of elaborating this document. On both counts the facts speak for themselves. By the time the final draft of the Guidelines was voted on by the Congress delegates in April it was no longer just the PCC leadership's document, it was a document of Cuba's working people and their political vanguard organised in the PCC.

Walsh disagrees: "This consultation really only amounted to an exercise in testing the water to see if there was going to be substantial uproar. Indeed there was avalanche of criticisms at these meetings, helping to delay the implementation of some of the cuts." The fact that the Council of Minister's initial timeline for the first round of state-sector employment rationalisations was scrapped, a decision that reflected the concerns expressed by workers in the debates on the Guidelines, illustrates my point about the PCC leadership listening to the people. If the PCC leadership were as cynical as Wash suggests, why would they bother with a consultation process at all? Why bother "testing the water to see if there was going to be substantial uproar?" Why not do what capitalist governments routinely do, just ram through unpopular changes and confront the people with riot police on the streets? Walsh's cynical dismissal of the PCC leadership's efforts to strive for a genuine consensus on what must be done to renew Cuba's socialist project just doesn't add up.

"For all the consultation, there is no mechanism for these discussions to be binding in any way on any of the ruling state bodies". According to Socialist Alternative's utopian, anarchist pipe dream of how they imagine socialist democracy should function in a Third World country besieged by imperialism, Cuba's socialist state should dissolve itself into the grassroots debates. Not at some point in the distant future with communism on the horizon, but now. This is kindergarten Leninism, detached from the real challenges faced by Cuba's revolutionaries today — among them the PCC leadership — in striving to deepen Cuba's socialist democracy.

"What’s more there was no mechanism for individuals to put forward an alternative program to the regime’s, let alone organise a cohered political opposition to the reforms. The Communist Party after all is the only legal political party in Cuba. Organising any political current outside of and in opposition to the party is illegal." I can see where this is going. Socialist Alternative, who equate proletarian democracy with bourgeois democracy, would like Cuba's socialist state to lift the ban on opposition parties.

"While Cuba is no North Korea or Burma, any open political opposition to the regime is carefully monitored and frequently suppressed. The regime attempts to intimidate dissidents by threatening to sack them from state employment, by monitoring their homes day and night, or by organising “repudiation meetings”, where vigilantes are bussed in to surround dissidents’ homes to yell insults, throw objects etc. Or sometimes political opponents of the regime are imprisoned. Today, it is estimated that there are still over 200 political prisoners in Cuba’s jails, the great majority of these jailed for activities of an entirely peaceful political nature."

Walsh evidently doesn't keep up with developments in Cuba: as of May 5, when her commentary was published on the Socialist Alternative website, most of these so-called political prisoners had been released following discussions between Raul Castro and the head of the Catholic church in Cuba. More importantly, Walsh does not tell her readers about the crimes for which these "dissidents" were charged, convicted and imprisoned: accepting money or payment in kind for collaborating with US agents in Washington's efforts to organise a pro-capitalist opposition movement on the island as a step towards carrying out an Iraq-style "regime change". Whether or not such activities are peaceful, Cuba, like every state, has laws aimed at protecting its national sovereignty. Collaborating with a foreign power bent on imposing its economic and political system on Cuba is considered a serious crime. The truth is always concrete, said Lenin, but not for Walsh.

Neoliberalism or socialist renewal?

Turning to Walsh's analysis of the content of the Guidelines and changes in this direction that are already underway, she claims that these reforms involve "implementing a neoliberal program of rationalisation, slashing state jobs and winding back welfare programs to achieve what some of the regime’s supporters on the international left have called a more 'efficient socialism'. On top of these cutbacks, the Cuban state is trying to provide greater openings for small private business and foreign investment."

Presumably if Walsh and her Socialist Alternative colleagues were running a socialist state they would not aspire to a socialist-oriented economy hampered by chronically low labour productivity, endemic theft and petty corruption and a host of other serious problems, such as the persistence of a cumbersome and divisive dual-currency monetary system and universal subsidies other than free health care and education that reinforce, rather than reduce, social inequality by allowing households with higher incomes to purchase subsidised rationed goods. That's because such an economy cannot raise living standards, reduce social inequality and be the material basis for the building of socialism.

Cuba's economic problems — a consequence of the US blockade, two decades of the harsh-post-Soviet "Special Period" crisis and mistakes made over the past five decades — cannot be solved within the framework of the existing "model" of socialist development which is a patchwork of obsolescence, erroneous ideas and much else that is of enduring value. What is needed for Cuba to pull itself out of the Special Period and resume the building of socialism is nothing less than a new model of socialist development characterised by, among other things, a different balance of social, cooperative and small-scale private ownership and management of productive property and thus a greater role for the market within the framework of the planned economy; the decentralisation of economic management from the ministerial to the state enterprise and municipal levels to reduce the administrative apparatus to a minimum and allow greater scope for worker participation in decision-making; and a reassertion of the role of wages, rather than universal state subsides, as a means allocate access to goods and services — other than the right to free health care and education and subsidised sports and cultural activites enshrined in Cuba's socialist constitution — according to Marx's formula for the transition period: "to each according to their work".

According to Walsh, "the centrepiece of the current economic reforms is the slashing of state sector jobs. The figures are quite dramatic. Raul wants to slash around 1.3 million “excess” workers from the state’s payroll over the next five years. That’s 20 per cent of the workforce. In a speech that smacked of neoliberalism’s emphasis on “personal responsibility and hard work”, Raul Castro declared his determination to “erase forever the notion that Cuba is the only country in the world where one can live without working”. Indeed this speech sounded eerily similar to one [Australian Prime Minister] Julia Gillard recently delivered about the need for welfare recipients in Australia to learn “a new culture of work”.

The figures are indeed dramatic and there's no denying that this is a wrenching change in a country accustomed to the state providing all citizens with a job. But Walsh does not contextualise these figures. Firstly, all Cubans enjoy free health care and education, social security and subsidised access to sporting and cultural activities. Most households own their homes and rents are capped at 10% of household income. For the time being, some basic consumer goods are highly subsidised and distributed via egalitarian rationing. Secondly, as a consequence of the Special Period economic crisis, a substantial proportion of the state-sector workforce no longer depends on wages or salaries as their primary form of income but on remittances, tourism tips or supplementary black-market activities often linked to workplace theft and corruption. Thirdly, Cuba's licensed self-employed enjoy the same pensions and other benefits, such as paid maternity/paternity leave, as the rest of the workforce and tend to earn higher incomes.

Taken together, this means that losing one's job in Cuba cannot be compared to losing one's job in a capitalist country where the "free market" determines such things as access to housing, health care and education. As for Raul Castro's notion that Cuba is the only country in the world where one can live without working, this is not quite true: it's only the working people, the vast majority of people in capitalist societies, who cannot live, or live decently, without working. In socialist-oriented Cuba, where the parasitic bourgeoisie has been expropriated, there are essentially two kinds of social parasites: corrupt functionaries and Cubans who are perfectly capable of working but who choose not to because they can live relatively comfortably on remittances or illicit incomes linked to theft from the socialist state.

The PCC leadership is leading the struggle against bureaucratism and corruption. The implementation of the economic reforms outlined in the Guidelines involves dismantling much of the bloated administrative apparatus of Cuba's socialist state, reducing this apparatus to a minimum and widening the scope for democratic accountability and decision-making by the producers. Internally, that part of the administrative apparatus that is resistant to change and unwilling to give up its administrative prerogatives and, in some cases, illicit privileges is the main obstacle to carrying through the necessary and urgent reforms. The real dynamic of the struggle in Cuba today is not the PCC against the working people, but the revolutionaries in the PCC together with the class-conscious majority of the working people against bureaucratism and other forms of social parasitism.

As for those Cubans who are of working age and are capable of working but choose not to, if Walsh wants to defend the "principle" that work is optional in the transitional society, she'd better explain why Marx was mistaken when he insisted, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, that other than universal rights such as (in Cuba's case) free health care and education, distribution must be based on the principle "to each according to their work". She doesn't even have to read Marx. Common sense tells us that it is both ethically unacceptable and economically unviable this side of communism — achievable only on a global scale and on the basis of profound changes in both the level of development of the productive forces and the social awareness of individuals — to allow some people to opt out of making a labour contribution to society if they are capable of doing so.

Walsh criticises the gradual elimination of the ration book without mentioning that those in genuine need of subsidies will continue to receive them. Given the social differentiation that has emerged during the Special Period, and the need to accept a degree of social inequality based on individuals' or work collectives' labour contribution to society, the social welfare emphasis must shift from universal subsidies to subsidies targeted to those in need of assistance. Walsh also glosses over Raul Castro's insistence, in the Main Report to the Sixth PCC Congress, that the rationing system would be eliminated gradually in step with economy recovery: "No member of the leadership of this country in their right mind would think of removing that system by decree, all at once, before creating the proper conditions to do so, which means undertaking other transformations of the economic model with a view to increasing labour efficiency and productivity in order to guarantee stable levels of production and supplies of basic goods and services accessible to all citizens but no longer subsidized."

According to Walsh, "those who enjoy positions of power within the state bureaucracy have always had access to consumer goods." It's not clear what she means by this. If she is implying that public officials in Cuba have privileged access to consumer goods on the basis of their legitimate employment, this is nonsense. Cuba is not like the Soviet Union from Stalin to Gorbachev where the nomenclatura enjoyed exorbitant salaries and perks such as fancy cars, country estates and a network of special stores with luxury goods. Of course, to carry out their jobs effectively some officials get driven around, travel overseas frequently and so on, and there may well be instances in which some such "privileges" are unjustified. If Walsh is talking about illicit privileges linked to corruption, it's true that corrupt officials enjoy privileged access to consumer goods that are out of reach of most Cubans thanks to their illict incomes. What is the attitude of the PCC leadership at the helm of Cuba's socialist state to such instances of corruption? As I pointed out earlier, the PCC leadership is waging a tenacious struggle against corruption and the Guidelines are an implicit declaration of war on what many Cubans call "the bureaucracy".

Walsh notes that "a key element of the economic reform program is the growth of the private sector in Cuba. The government hopes that some of the “excess” 1.3 million workers will be absorbed into this sector. Raul has already made available 250,000 new self-employment licences. The government is relaxing laws that forbid small businesses hiring and exploiting workers other than family members. In other words, the Cuban regime is trying to create a legal petty bourgeoisie for the first time since 1969, when it nationalised all small businesses."

There are two factual inaccuracies here. The nationalisation of small businesses occurred in March 1968, not 1969, and involved only non-agricultural small private businesses, not Cuba's peasant farms. She continues: "The government is also proposing to absorb 200,000 workers into the co-operative system. This will mostly mean that the government will hand over small state-run firms, like beauty parlours and barber shops, to the workers. By making them into co-ops, the state no longer has responsibility for their operation or for paying the workers’ salaries. They hope these workers will be driven by economic necessity to work harder and increase their own rate of exploitation. Many of these co-ops will fail or, to balance the books, they’ll be forced to reduce their own wages or eliminate jobs."

Most leftists would welcome the move to encourage the establishment of a non-agricultural cooperative sector in small-scale production and services. Yet Walsh tells us that the evil PCC leadership must be gloating at the prospect that "these workers will be driven by economic necessity to work harder and increase their own rate of exploitation". Cooperative members may well be obliged to work hard and produce quality goods or efficient services. That's life. But how the members of a cooperative, who decide collectively and on an equal basis how the earnings of their enterprise are allocated, can "increase their own rate of exploitation" Walsh doesn't tell us. For Marxists, exploitation is an unequal social relation in which one person or some people exploit others on the basis of their ownership of means of production. In a cooperatively owned or a state owned, cooperatively managed enterprise in a post-capitalist, socialist-oriented society, who is doing the exploiting?

Walsh concludes her commentary as follows: "Therefore, the current economic reforms being embarked on in Cuba do not represent a transition from socialism to capitalism. Cuba never ceased being a capitalist society. Rather, the Cuban ruling class is attempting to deal with their economic problems by modifying their state capitalist economy." There is only one true statement in this muddle of theoretical confusion, intellectual laziness, prejudice and ignorance: the current economic reforms being embarked on in Cuba do not represent a transition from Cuba's socialist-oriented society back to capitalism. At least we can agree with Walsh on something.