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Cuba
What will happen after Castro?
Will Cuba inevitably go the way of Russia and
Eastern Europe following the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, with
the return of a virulent capitalism? This question is prompted by the
recent illness of Fidel Castro, reportedly suffering from intestinal
problems, and his temporary handing over power to his brother Raúl
Castro in August. PETER TAAFFE analyses the situation.
US IMPERIALISM CERTAINLY expects ‘regime change’,
not just in the government of Cuba but also in its social system. In
July, a special report of the Bush government’s Commission for
Assistance to a Free Cuba set aside $80 million (£43m) to achieve this
objective. Ominously, unlike previous reports, parts of it were not
published, "classified for security reasons", with the clear implication
of future US military intervention in Cuba. Castro’s illness led to
delirious celebrations among sections of the 650,000 Cuban exiles,
particularly the parasitic rich elite who salivate at the prospect of a
return of ‘their property’, which they expect would quickly follow the
death of Fidel Castro.
Conversely, millions of working-class people and the
poor, particularly in the neo-colonial world and especially in Latin
America, are hoping against hope that the predictions of the imminent
collapse of Cuba will prove wrong. The Cuban revolution, right from its
inception in January 1959, and through its planned economy, gave a
glimpse of what was possible for humankind as a whole if the
straitjacket of landlordism and capitalism was eliminated. Fidel Castro
and Che Guevara were then, and remain today, heroic figures for many
workers and youth throughout the world.
If anything, Cuba’s reputation has been enhanced
when set against the background of the brutal neo-liberal offensive of
capitalism worldwide throughout the 1990s and the first part of this
century. The achievements in health, housing and education are
spectacular when compared to the dismal record of landlordism and
capitalism in the neo-colonial world. Even while the bourgeoisie of the
world and its hirelings seek to use the illness of Castro as an excuse
to pillory Cuba and its revolution, other, more serious, journals of
capitalism are compelled to recognise Cuba’s achievements.
For instance, El País, the Spanish journal, recently
outlined Cuba’s impressive performance in key fields. There are 200,000
teachers in a population of 11.4 million. This means there is a teacher
for every 57 people, one of the best ratios of teachers to pupils
anywhere in the world, never mind the neo-colonial world. Moreover,
following the Pakistan earthquake in 2005, Cuba sent 2,660 doctors and
health technicians to help in the worst areas. In six months in
Pakistan, they dealt with 1,700,000 patients – 73% of those affected by
illness – and carried out 14,500 operations. In addition to this they
offered 1,000 courses to young people from the worst-hit areas to study
medicine in Cuba. Thirty-two temporary hospitals were left by the Cuban
government to be used by the Pakistani people to combat serious
illnesses. Naturally, this raised the profile of support for Cuba in
Pakistan. In Indonesia, following the earthquake in May 2006, 135 Cuban
health workers attended 100,000 patients. Two hospitals were built and
left by the Cubans when the medical expedition left the country.
Thirty-six thousand Cuban health professionals and technicians are
working in 107 different third-world countries. In addition to this,
Venezuela and Cuba have announced a project, ‘operation milagro’
(operation miracle), to provide six million Latin Americans with free
operations if they cannot afford them over the next ten years. Cuba has
also offered 100,000 places in Cuban universities to train Latin
American doctors free of charge.
The propertied classes worldwide fear that this
example (the product of a planned economy, albeit one not managed or
controlled by the working class but by a bureaucracy), will become even
more attractive to the starving masses of poor in the event of an
economic tailspin in world capitalism. Notwithstanding these
achievements, however, the maintenance of a planned economy is,
unfortunately, not at all guaranteed on the present basis, particularly
in the event of Fidel Castro’s death. His towering figure, together with
the image of the martyred hero of the revolution, Che Guevara, combined
with the solid social achievements of the revolution, have warded off
previous attempts at counter-revolution, even in the most difficult
circumstances of the ‘special period’ of the 1990s.
Hanging by a thread
FOLLOWING THE RESTORATION of capitalism in Russia,
the former Stalinist bureaucracy, which was then in the process of
transferring to capitalism, inflicted colossal economic damage on Cuba.
Castro commented about this period: "In no historical epoch did any
country find itself in the situation in which ours found it, when the
socialist camp collapsed and remained under the pitiless blockade of the
USA. No-one imagined that something as sure and steady as the sun would
one day disappear, as it happened with the situation of the Soviet
Union". (Fidel Castro: A Biography, Volker Skierka, p282) He went on to
declare: "We will defend ourselves on our own, surrounded by an ocean of
capitalism in this ‘periodo especial’". (ibid, p283) An author recently
commented: "Rationing of food was introduced but there was virtually no
butter, with milk only for small children, old people and those in
special need; the bread allowance was 250 grams a day. Soap, detergents,
toilet paper and matches were not often seen".
The economy declined by 2.9% in 1990, 10% in 1991,
11.6% in 1992, and 14.9% in 1993. Malnutrition, unknown since the
triumph of the revolution, became widespread. The historic achievements
of free education and medical attention were preserved, but a brutal
austerity programme was inflicted on the great mass of the population.
One of the most important economies was the slashing of energy
consumption by 50%. As one commentator put it: "Cuban society almost
literally stopped moving – until the commandante [Castro] had the saving
idea that the mass of the population should ride back to the future on
horse-drawn carts and bicycles". Making a virtue out of a necessity,
Fidel Castro declared: "The special period also has its positive sides –
like the fact that we are now entering the age of the bicycle. In a
sense, this too is a revolution".
Undoubtedly, cycling was good for the average
Cuban’s health, as was the absence of McDonald’s and other US junk food,
but this austerity programme in itself is not enough to satisfy the
hunger of young people and workers for access to modern technology,
modern goods, rising living standards, and freedom. Forced back on its
own resources, Cuba was also able to tap into the ingenuity of the
population with the spectacular development of bio-technology, for
instance, which resulted in Cuba, in the early 1990s, becoming "the
world’s largest exporter of such products, the demand being particularly
high in the field of skin regeneration and immunisation against
meningitis, hepatitis B and other diseases". Opposed by the capitalist
multinationals of the USA and Europe, Cuba was already making a profit
by 1991 and aggressively competing as a supplier of low-priced products,
especially to third-world countries. Nevertheless, this successful
sector of Cuban production has only amounted, still, to a share of total
exports of 3-5%.
The ability of Cuba to compete in the pharmaceutical
market was linked undoubtedly to the maintenance of the splendid health
sector, a direct product of the planned economy. It continued to employ
340,000 staff and 64,000 doctors throughout the years of the special
period. Currently, there are 70,000 doctors, a ratio of one doctor per
193 inhabitants, compared to one per 313 in Germany. Castro was able to
contrast the life expectancy in Cuba with that in the ex-Soviet Union,
which fell drastically as a result of a return to capitalism: "Life
expectancy in the part of the USSR which is Russia is now 56 years, 20
years less than in Cuba, 20 years!" Despite this, because of its
isolation, Cuba still experiences severe shortages even in the field of
medicine.
Moreover, unemployment, hitherto an unprecedented
phenomenon, began to rise, with a minimum figure of 8% unemployed in a
total labour force of 4 millions. A Spanish institute at the time
estimated, "in May 1999 that nearly a third of all Cuban workers were
either jobless or unemployed". In 1999, the United Nations Economic
Commission for Latin America (CPAAL) estimated "that in 1999 the Cuban
revolution reached the point at which it had been 40 years before, in
1959". In the early 1990s, the revolution hung by a thread and, for the
first time since the Bay of Pigs invasion, the threat of
counter-revolution, the return of the ex-landlords and capitalists based
in Miami, and US imperialist domination loomed.
Castro was consequently forced to make concessions
to the ‘market’, that is, to capitalism. Through ‘dollarisation’, a
parallel economy developed, which resulted in relative privileges for
those involved in tourism, where they were paid in dollars, and in
sectors involving ‘joint ventures’. Paradoxically, those who remained
firm supporters of the planned economy, such as doctors, teachers, etc,
continued to be paid in pesos and suffered accordingly. Richard Gott, a
well-known left-wing author on Cuba, wrote that "the state monopoly over
foreign trade was abolished in 1992, and the constitution was amended to
permit the transfer of state property to joint ventures with foreign
partners". This implied that Cuba was on the way to the return of
capitalism, if it had not already arrived at that point.
It is true that a legal amendment in 1995 to the
Cuban constitution even introduced the provision whereby foreign capital
could acquire 100% stakes in companies, although in practice this was
rarely followed up. Castro himself declared: "There are no rigid
prescriptions. We are ready to consider any kind of proposition".
However, despite all the difficulties, Cuba has essentially remained a
planned economy. Import and export operations were carried out by Cuban
enterprises and other duly authorised "entities registered at the
National Registry of Importers and Exporters attached to the chambers of
commerce". (Official report of the Cuban Chamber of Commerce) Foreign
enterprises required authorisation from the ministry of trade to perform
their operations.
Simmering discontent
A CERTAIN DECENTRALISATION took place. An estimated
350 enterprises were permitted to import and export on their own
authority. This undoubtedly was a gap through which foreign capital and
its domestic Cuban supporters could find a basis. But Cuba still
maintained significant non-tariff barriers and the government inspected
and approved most imports. Castro made it clear in 2000 the limits of
such concessions to capitalism. He remarked to the UNESCO director,
Frederico Mayor Zaragoza: "As a general principle, nothing will be
privatised in Cuba that is suitable for, and therefore can be kept
under, ownership by the nation or a workers’ collective. Our ideology
and our preference is that socialism should bear no resemblance to the
egotism, the privileges and inequalities of capitalist society. In our
country, nothing ends up as the property of a high-ranking official, and
nothing is given away to accomplices or friends. Nothing that can be
used efficiently, and with greater profit for our society, will end up
in the hands of private individuals, either Cubans or foreigners".
However, it is not true, as Fidel Castro argued,
that inequalities did not exist in Cuba. The periodic denunciations and
campaigns against corruption, pilfering and privilege, which Castro
himself has conducted, are indications of the real situation. In fact,
the dollarisation of the economy was a severe blow to revolutionary
pride and opened up divisions in Cuban society, leading to a further
growth of a privileged elite. A change in the law granted small business
activity and had a significant effect in creating a relatively
prosperous petty bourgeoisie in the urban areas. Like many similar
reforms introduced by Stalinist regimes prior to their collapse in 1989
in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union or China, this led to a
burgeoning capitalist sector. The austere period inevitably generated
discontent and the lifting of the controls on the dollar was a response
of the Cuban regime to the pressure of the population from inside the
country.
But it was not sufficient, as shortages persisted.
The simmering discontent with this resulted in a riot in central Havana
of several thousand people in August 1994. Mostly young people moved
through the city throwing stones at the windows of hotels. For the first
time, anti-Castro slogans could be heard: "We’ve had enough! We want
freedom! Down with Fidel!" They were met by 300 policemen firing warning
shots in the air and a major confrontation appeared to loom until
"suddenly, the maximo leader himself [Castro] appeared on the scene with
a large entourage and launched into a discussion with the young people.
The crowd immediately calmed down, listened to him, and dispersed". This
is a striking example of the colossal authority which Castro and the
revolution had then and still probably enjoys today. On this occasion,
it was enough to prevent the protest spilling over to involve a wider
movement. The discontent still existed but was forced once more
underground.
Clampdown on corruption
ALTHOUGH THE CUBAN economy has recovered, partly as
a result of economic assistance from Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, trade
deals with China, etc, shortages, combined with corruption, still exist
and were recognised clearly by Castro on the eve of his illness. Leaning
on 30,000 young people, the trabajadores sociales (social workers),
Castro launched a ‘battle of ideas’ to maintain the present system in
Cuba and, in particular, mobilisation of vigilantes against corruption.
This force, sympathetic to Castro and the revolution, was similar to Mao
Zedong’s mobilisation of the Red Guards in the 1966 Cultural Revolution.
Before his illness, flushed by the economic benefits flowing from
tourism, as well as the benevolence of the Venezuelan regime, Castro was
involved in the process of recentralisation and curtailing of the
pro-capitalist concessions made in the 1990s. He was also conscious of
the consequences for Cuba if he was no longer on the scene. In
particular, he was concerned about the corruption which inevitably
flowed from the two-tier economic system. He therefore was engaged in a
Cuban version of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, although obviously not on
the same scale nor with the same brutal hooligan methods.
Five of the 14 provinces have seen the top Communist
Party officials replaced. So have the ministries of light industry,
higher education, and audit and control. Some members of the 21-strong
Politburo have been sacked abruptly for ‘errors’, which included ‘abuse
of authority’ and ‘ostentation’. In a speech to Havana University,
Castro painted a picture of widespread graft throughout the
state-controlled economy. He said that this was endangering the
‘communist’ system: "We can destroy ourselves and it will be our own
fault". The student ‘social workers’, dressed in black or red t-shirts,
were mobilised, for instance, in petrol stations to check on the sale of
scarce petrol resources. This exercise revealed that, previously, about
a half of all fuel sold was not accounted for.
But the question naturally arises: How is it, in a
‘democratic’ socialist Cuba, where in theory power is vested in the
masses and their organisations, such a scale of corruption can suddenly
be revealed? Following from this, the new Cuban ‘red guard’ has been
‘mobilised’ on ‘missions’ to audit state companies, where they
discovered ‘rampant pilfering’. Sections of the armed forces have also
been pressed into ‘anti-graft duty’. The army is now managing Havana’s
port, where it has been discovered entire containers went missing when
civilians were in charge. Castro is obviously haunted by the example of
the collapse of the Soviet Union and hopes to develop a system which can
prevent Cuba from following a similar path.
However, the blunt instrument of students and shock
brigades will not solve the problem. The issues of corruption, graft and
bureaucratism are not questions of red tape or a few minor
misdemeanours. The very character of Cuban society, where power is
concentrated in the hands of the officialdom in the state, the army and
the Cuban Communist Party, inevitably leads to abuse. In the early
1990s, faced with the catastrophic economic situation, the Cuban
leadership, led by Fidel Castro, did open up a discussion on the
constitution and constitutional amendments to the National Assembly,
including a form of direct elections. However, this was still in the
context of only one candidate for each seat in parliament. That
candidate would be a party loyalist, who would have been gone over ‘with
a fine tooth comb’. At best, it was a form of ‘democracy’, which allowed
voters to select a candidate for a list but from just one party. At the
same time, the members of the Central Committee, Politburo, and the
Council of State, ultimately were subject to the will and veto, if
necessary, of Fidel Castro.
This exercise did result in a cutting down of the
bureaucracy – for instance, party members were reduced by two thirds,
the number of Central Committee secretaries halved from 19 to nine – but
this did not fundamentally solve the problem of power being concentrated
in the hands of a bureaucratic elite, many of whom enjoyed a privileged
existence in comparison to the mass of the population. Castro himself,
despite the recent absurd claims of Forbes magazine that he was one of
the richest men on the planet, is not personally corrupt, and does not
lead an overtly privileged existence. But the problem is not just of one
man or a small number of men and women, devoted to maintaining the
planned economy, but the fact that real power is in the hands of a
top-down elite. The great majority of the workers are elbowed aside, at
best ‘consulted’, but without real power, control and management being
vested in them.
Workers’ democracy
SEVENTY YEARS AGO, in Revolution Betrayed, in
relation to the Soviet Union, Leon Trotsky posed the question: "Will the
bureaucrat devour the workers’ state, or will the working class clean up
the bureaucrat?… the workers fear lest, in throwing out the bureaucracy,
they will open the way for a capitalist restoration". (p215, Dover
Publications) For big sections of the population, this probably sums up
the mood in Cuba today. But the discontent is growing, particularly
among the new generation; 73% of Cuba’s population were born after the
triumph of the revolution in 1959. This alienation of the new generation
may lead, as one commentator put it, in the long run to a "revolution
with no heirs". Castro does not appear to recognise the problem, nor is
he or the group around him capable of implementing measures to guarantee
the gains of the revolution. He has declared: "I don’t believe it is
really necessary to have more than one party… How could our country have
stood firm if had been split up into ten pieces?... I think that
exploitation of one human by another must disappear before you can have
real democracy".
However, without real workers’ democracy – the
ending of the one-party monopoly, fair elections to genuine workers’
councils with the right of all those (including the Trotskyists) to
stand in elections, strict control over incomes, and with the right of
recall over all elected officials – the Cuban revolution is in danger,
especially if Fidel Castro is off the scene. Cuba is not a ‘socialist’
state. Even a healthy workers’ state, with workers’ democracy, in one
country or in a few countries, would be transitional between capitalism
and the starting point for socialism.
Cuba is not a healthy workers’ state as understood
by Lenin and Trotsky, and generally accepted by Marxists following them.
Nor is it a ‘workers’ state with bureaucratic deformations’, as some
have recently argued. Such a regime did exist in the first sage after
the Russian revolution between 1917-23. The Bolsheviks, in the words of
Lenin, because of the cultural backwardness of Russia, had been forced
to take over "the old tsarist state machine with a thin veneer of
socialism". This problem could only be overcome on the world arena by
the spreading of the Russian revolution. In the state which existed even
after 1923, Trotsky and the Left Opposition fought for ‘reforms’,
measures to cut down the ‘bureaucratic deformations’. However, the
consolidation of the bureaucratic elite, personified by the rise of
Stalin, posed the issue not of ‘reform’ but of the Stalinist state and
the bureaucracy being removed if Russia was to move towards socialism.
Cuba and its revolution had many different features
than the Russian revolution, and Castro was not Stalin, as we have
explained elsewhere (See Socialism Today No.89, and the book, Cuba:
Socialism and Democracy). But the existence of a defined caste, a
bureaucracy, with interests of its own, now counterposed to maintaining
the Cuban revolution and its further advance, is confirmed by Castro’s
alarm for the future and the measures he initiated against the
bureaucracy before he fell ill.
Cuba is what Trotsky called a ‘deformed workers’
state’, a planned economy, but with power in the hands of a privileged
caste of bureaucrats. Flowing from the characterisation of Cuba as
merely ‘a workers’ state with bureaucratic deformations’, some argue
that what is needed is ‘reforms’ and not a ‘political revolution’. But
historical experience has shown that a ruling, privileged layer of
society, whether it be capitalists or a bureaucratic elite, is conscious
of its power and will fight to retain it, sometimes using the most
ruthless means.
The need for a political revolution in Russia,
advanced by Trotsky, was a scientific description of what was required
to free the planned economy from the grip of a wasteful, greedy
bureaucracy. It was not a day-to-day action programme, with
‘Trotskyists’ in Russia urged to go out onto the streets and proclaim
‘political revolution’. They argued for ‘workers’ democracy’.
The starting point for socialism would be a higher
level of production and technique than the highest level reached by
capitalism up to now. This means that the beginning of socialism would
imply a higher level of technique and therefore of living standards than
the US, which is only possible through a world plan of production
controlled by the working class. However, with the absence of workers’
democracy, the transition towards socialism in one state or a number of
states is impossible and might lead, as the example of the Soviet Union
implies, not to socialism but to a degeneration and, ultimately, to a
collapse back to capitalism. The real danger to an isolated workers’
state, as Trotsky commented, lies not so much in a military invasion but
the "cheap goods in the baggage train of imperialism". A huge influx of
tourists, particularly millions from the US with dollars in their back
pockets, would pose big problems for Cuba and strengthen the elements of
capitalism that already exist.
Divisions in the regime
BUT FOR THE stupidity of US imperialism,
particularly in the 1990s under Clinton with the introduction of the
Helms-Burton legislation, an isolated, besieged Cuba may not have even
been able to hold out to enjoy the position it has today. This act ruled
out that a future government in Cuba could endorse, by parliamentary
means, the takeover of industry and property of the 1960s, as had been
done by the capitalist government of Germany when it reunified. Germany
ratified all expropriations of land by the state of over 100 acres in
East Germany that the Soviet occupation authorities carried out after
the second world war. If the Helms-Burton act was implemented to the
letter, this would be ruled out by a future capitalist Cuba, which would
mean "that Cuba’s future development, a return to the old property
relations, would be as catastrophic as an obligation to pay compensation
at today’s values". (Fidel Castro: A Biography, Volker Skierka, p313)
As another commentator has put it: "The Helms-Burton
act is a blunt law for custodianship over a future Cuba: its aim is not
democratisation of the political system and its institutions, but
reappropriation of the island by its neighbour to the north. A return of
large chunks of the Cuban economy to private US corporations would not
only mean restoring the (scarcely desirable) conditions existing before
the revolution. The people of the island would still bear the burden of
interest, and interest on interest, for generations to come, while the
real beneficiaries would include the offspring of those Mafiosi who came
into their possessions through violence and repression, corruption,
theft, tax evasion, and the filing of dubious ownership claims". (ibid,
p314) The Helms-Burton act also has the effect of reinforcing the
‘rigidities’ of the Cuban system in the sense that even those
bureaucrats who wished to see the dismantling of the planned economy
"are shown only a deep precipice but no space in which to carry out a
reform in dignity".
And there are divisions within the bureaucratic
elite of Cuba. There is a section which wishes to ‘open up’ to
capitalism, in a ‘democratic’ form. There is undoubtedly another wing
which will fight to maintain a planned economy. Marxists, as Trotsky
advocated, would seek a principled bloc with this layer of the Cuban
leadership and bureaucracy, and seek to mobilise mass Cuban resistance
to any threat to return to capitalism. But by its very nature, this bloc
would inevitably pose the issue of how to free Cuba from the dead hand
of the bureaucratic officialdom as a means of safeguarding the
revolution. Some Marxists have posed the question of abandoning the idea
of the political revolution to remove the bureaucratic elite. In its
place is advanced phrases about workers’ democracy. But this is sheer
demagogy. The idea of a political revolution and workers’ democracy are
the same. While Trotsky gave critical support to this or that measure
with which the bureaucratic elite was prepared to defend the planned
economy for its own ends, this did not mean the abandonment of the idea
of the political revolution. He pointed out: "The revolution which the
bureaucracy is preparing against itself will not be social, like the
revolution of 1917. It is not a question this time of changing the
economic foundations of society, of replacing certain forms of property
with other forms. History has also known elsewhere not only social
revolutions which substituted the bourgeois for the feudal regime, but
also political revolutions which, without destroying the economic
foundations of society, swept out an old ruling upper crust (1830 and
1848 in France, February 1917 in Russia, etc)".
The replacement of a privileged caste which
undoubtedly exists in Cuba by workers’ democracy does not necessarily
have to be violent but will have to be deep going, giving real control
and management to the masses in place of the top-down control exercised
by the present Cuban leadership, even when this is implemented by
charismatic leaders. Workers’ democracy in Cuba would hold out the hand
of friendship to the Latin American masses. Almost immediately, a real
democratic workers’ confederation could be formed between Cuba and
Venezuela, especially if the revolution is completed in the latter, and
the same with Bolivia. Along this road is the only hope for maintaining
the gains of the Cuban revolution. Without a planned economy, Cuba will
be thrown back for decades and the expectations of the socialist
revolution in Latin America and worldwide will suffer a severe blow. The
maintenance of this revolution should not be placed in the hands of one
man, or in a group of men and women, but in an aroused, politically
conscious, Cuban working class.
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