Discusión Farber -
Landau
Foreign Policy In
Focus, 07/05/08
In their contributions to the
Foreign Policy In Focus strategic dialogue on Cuba, Samuel
Farber discusses the problematic economic reforms and
nonexistent political reforms in Life After Fidel
while Saul Landau looks at the fragile achievements of the
Cuban revolution and the hostile U.S. policy toward the
island in Cuba: The Struggle Continues. Here, they
respond to each other.
Saul
Landau
I
agree with Samuel Farber that the left should rid itself of
illusions about that nature of the Cuban regime. Cuba does
not serve as a model for other third world countries. But
neither does China or Vietnam – unless savage capitalism
run by Communist parties is somehow preferable to the state
socialist system in Cuba. Farber does not offer other models
because there are none.
I
feel frustrated when I read essays that use the speculative
sport of Cubanology as if some mysterious crystal ball
clearly shows the correct path for Cuba’s healthy future.
In this game, people like Vice President Machado Ventura
acquire “hard liner,” labels, meaning that they are
“dedicated to preserving the ideological purity of the
system.” I think of Machado Ventura as a practical man,
who would chuckle if he heard himself referred to as an
ideological purist. Others like Vice President Carlos Lage
is “reputed to be a moderate.” If Fidel or Raul offered
these labels I would accept them. From those who have never
met or interviewed these Cuban leaders, such descriptions
seem almost funny, or gossipy, the kind of thing former CIA
analyst Brian Latell offers to his commercial clients.
Latell, who for decades was the CIA’s man on Cuba, never
went to the island or met any of its leaders.
I
have met many of these leaders over the decades and still
have no idea what “hard” or “soft” means in
practical terms in 2008. Nor can I discern the meaning of
ideological purity on an island whose economy and social
structure have seriously decayed for 17 years. Similarly,
the Talibanes label Farber gives to some of the
younger leaders doesn’t help describe the nature of the
current debate.
Cuban
history, according to Celia Sanchez in a 1957 letter to her
father, called for a caudillo to liberate the
island. “Fidel,” she wrote, “is our caudillo.”
Cubans like most other people cannot erase their history,
the centuries of formal Spanish rule and 60 years of
informal U.S. domination, the legacies of bureaucracy,
hierarchy, racism, and corruption. The revolution has taught
egalitarianism, social consciousness, and the best of
socialist values. Once out of school, however, Cubans find
such values difficult to practice in an economy of shortages
and scarcity – the description that fits most third world
countries.
If
one measures success by comparing goals to achievements, the
Cuban revolution, which began in the 1860s, succeeded in
creating sovereignty, independence, and a healthy and
educated population. It converted Cubans and Cuba from a
hapless colonial experience into one where Cubans have
become actors on the world stage. Countless poor people in
several countries owe their eyesight and other health
improvements to Cuban doctors. How ironic that Havaneros
complain about the shortage of doctors because so many have
gone abroad to tend to other people. Even with the
“shortage” Cuba’s doctor–patient ratio is close to
that of Beverly Hills.
Cuban
painters have exhibitions in Paris, New Delhi, and New York.
Their athletes win a disproportionate (to the size of the
population) number of Olympic medals. But they do not
practice Trotskyist–style democracy – and never will.
I
ask myself: what would I have done had I been a member of
Cuba’s governing elite when faced with five decades of
real U.S. threat while attempting to build a model society
steeped in equality and justice?
Democracy
and military force, openness and state security police do
not produce harmony. Cuban leaders opted to protect the
revolution, and that decision became the defining guidelines
for Cuban socialism. Cuban socialism became a system based
on orders from above, participation from below – but
little choice. Such a system worked with the Soviet model
and with certain strands of Cuban culture and history.
The
collapse of the Soviet system forced the Cuban state to
break its social contract with the people. Its leaders opted
for political control, eschewing economic models that
purported to deal with “transition.”
Social
inequality emerged more dramatically than ever, thanks to
Cuba’s economic desperation. But Washington could not
successfully punish the disobedient upstart. Cuba survived
– but not as viable social order.
I
can say from my own conversations with some of Cuba’s
leaders that there is a lively debate about where to go,
which models or parts of them, to follow.
China
and Vietnam have converted decades of struggle and bloodshed
into a thriving capitalism wrapped in communist ribbons. All
of Cuba’s leaders see clearly the pitfalls of such a path.
And they do not see enough accumulated wealth on their
island to begin to forge a European–style social
democratic model.
Over
the past months, Cubans have been discussing these themes
formally and informally. While the U.S. media write of the
cell phone fad and the availability of appliances, few
journalists have underscored the key facts. Cuban leaders
continue to invest in infrastructure, refurbishing the badly
damaged electrical generating capacity. They have bought
thousands of new busses. And to counteract the failure of
Cuban agriculture, the government had to import 84% of the
island’s food.
While
building a new model amid constant harassment from the
United States – even if the “invasion threat” was
overblown – Cuban leaders made mistakes. Two million
people live in Havana, for example. Most do not produce
anything – other than services for tourists – that
yields foreign exchange, but all consume, although not as
much as they would like. Walk the streets of Havana during
work day hours and see thousands of people hanging out,
catching the rays. Official unemployment (2%) is a joke.
Cubans are horribly underemployed, one of the gaping holes
in its economic system – especially in urban areas. How
did this happen after Fidel literally starved Havana of
investment for the first 10 years of the revolution? When
people become educated, they don’t want to work the land.
What
can a non–Cuban do in the way of action or suggestion in a
situation where socialism on one island – albeit state
socialism – remains threatened by powerful U.S. forces?
Work to get the U.S. embargo lifted, says Farber. I agree.
But such a solution would also leave Cuba naked. Try to
calculate the impact of a million US “tourists,” some
with fat wallets, looking to invest in anything that looks
lucrative or sexy. All that money circulating without
control by state authorities would transform the island
rapidly into…well, we will eventually see.
***
Samuel
Farber
“Too long have the workers of the world waited for some Moses to lead
them out of bondage. I would not lead you out if I could;
for if you could be led out, you could be led back in again.
I would have you make up your minds there is nothing that
you cannot do for yourselves.” (Eugene
Victor Debs, 1905)
I
agree with Saul Landau that holding high the values and
practices of sharing and equality are critical to any
socialist society worthy of the name. But holding high the
values and practices of democracy and civil liberties are no
less important to a socialist society. Landau seems to
minimize the importance of these, and mentions them almost
as if these were an “extra” feature instead of being a
fundamental cornerstone of socialism.
Cuba’s
one–party state is, by its very nature, antithetical to
socialist democracy. Its constitution enshrines the
political monopoly of the Cuban Communist Party and
criminalizes other competing parties. The constitution also
enshrines the ruling party’s monopoly over Cuba’s mass
organizations, such as the state’s trade unions and
women’s organizations, which are to act as its
transmission belts. This outlaws all independent
organization of unions, women, blacks, gays, and other
groups.
Landau
may cite Fidel Castro’s slogan that “inside the
revolution everything; outside the revolution; nothing.”
But in light of Cuba’s political system, this slogan is
disingenuous and misleading since it is up to the top
leadership to decide what and who qualifies as being
“inside the revolution.” It should be noted that when
the slogan was originally coined back in 1961, it was
accompanied by repressive measures directed not against
counterrevolutionaries but against other leftists. That is
when those new cultural policies were used to shut down Lunes
de Revolución, the weekly mass circulation literary
and political supplement of the government newspaper Revolución,
which published a wide variety of non–Communist
independent left–wing authors from all over the world. The
documentary titled PM, depicting the apolitical
pleasure– loving night life of poor people in Havana and
directed by Saba Cabrera Infante, the brother of Guillermo,
the editor of Lunes, was also suppressed.
The
very real economic harm inflicted by the U.S. imperialist
blockade has obfuscated the other major source of economic
problems in Cuba: the inefficiency and waste inherent in the
bureaucratic administration of the economy. The old maxim
attributed to Soviet and East European workers that “they
pretend to pay us and we pretend to work” fully applies to
Cuba. There is a very visible lack of care, attention, and
maintenance of every kind of public sector property. While
economic hardship and the U.S. blockade may explain the lack
of building materials necessary to carry out certain kinds
of maintenance and upkeep, it does not explain the absence
of the simple, labor–intensive activities that have no
significant capital components such as cleaning, sweeping,
and just run–of–the–mill neatness. The fundamental
problem in Cuba is the lack of initiative, motivation, and
both managerial and labor discipline. Over the centuries,
capitalism developed methods to make workers perform at a
certain level of competence prodded by sticks (produce or
you will get fired) and carrots (the promise, if not the
reality, of higher wages and promotions).
On
the whole, Cuba and the other Soviet–type systems have not
been able to develop a parallel type system of motivation
that could at least match the effectiveness of capitalist
methods. Workers in this equally, if not more, bureaucratic
and hierarchical system do not grasp any better than in
capitalism what the whole process of production is for or
about. One of the “sticks” available to the single
government employer was removed by the policy of overall
security of employment (except for those who get in
political trouble with the authorities). The built–in,
systematic scarcity of consumer goods characteristic of what
the Hungarian economist Janos Kornai called “shortage
economies” has taken care of removing a good part of the
carrots.
Since
the early years of the revolution, the Cuban regime has
oscillated between so–called “moral” and
“material” incentives to address the lack of motivation
among Cuban workers and peasants. But it never even
considered the “political incentives” of opening the
economy, polity, and society to democratic control,
including the control of the workplace by working people. It
never considered the possibility that by participating and
controlling their own productive lives, people could become
interested and responsible for what they do for a living day
in and day out; that only thus would people get to care and
give a damn. Workers’ democracy is not only a good in
itself – people controlling their own lives – it can be
a truly productive, economic force.
Instead,
the bureaucracy on the island, since its early institution
in the 1960s, has inevitably led to systematic
misinformation such as inflated production figures because
nobody wants to take responsibility for the failure to meet
production targets. This in turn has led to poor planning
based on imagined inputs. The lack of an open press and mass
communications has facilitated cover–ups, corruption, and
inefficiency. These problems, common to all Soviet–type
bureaucratic systems, were exacerbated in Cuba due to the
arbitrary interventions in economic affairs by the
commander–in–chief.
Although
Fidel Castro is undoubtedly a very intelligent and talented
man, he is not an expert on everything under the sun. The
overall balance of his personal interventions in economic
affairs has been quite negative, like his economically
disastrous campaign for a 10–million–ton sugar crop in
1970; the predictable failure of the F1 hybrid cows, a new
breed of cattle, against the advice of British experts he
brought to Cuba; the economic “gigantism” of such
projects as the unnecessarily wide and wasteful eight–lane
highway traversing a good part of Cuba; and more recently in
the economic disruptions and improvisations that were part
of his “Battle of Ideas.” Fidel Castro’s strong
tendency to micro–manage also silenced and paralyzed the
initiatives of responsible and capable people who were
simply afraid to contradict him. All in all, Castro created
a perfectly avoidable economic chaos. This kind of chaos
cannot be confused with the creative chaos that can result
from enthusiastic mass participation and is more than
compensated by people’s involvement and excitement with
what they do. Avoidable waste is a crime against the time,
effort, and sacrifice of working people.
Citing
Eduardo Galeano, Landau points out that the development of
democracy in Cuba has been blocked by the actions of U.S.
imperialism against Cuba. There is no doubt that U.S.
aggression was and has been decisive in creating a siege
climate on the island, which has facilitated the growth of
undemocratic practices and ideas. However, this view
unwittingly deprives the revolutionary leaders, such as the
Castro brothers and Che Guevara, of any ideological and
political agency and responsibility. As I show in my The
Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered
(University of North Carolina Press, 2006), prior to the
revolutionary victory these leaders did have clear
ideological and political tendencies, if not fully formed
ideas, about what they would do once they came to power.
These tendencies were incompatible with a view of socialism
that placed the ideas and practices of workers and
peasants’ democracy and self–management as a top
priority.
The
existing political structure is based on popular support,
although it has greatly declined since the early 1990s. But
it depends on the manipulation of that support as well as on
censorship and repression. There are 200–300 political
prisoners in Cuba today; the great majority of these have
been jailed for activities of an entirely peaceful political
nature. As recently as April 21, 10 women belonging to the
organization “Women in White” were roughed up and
arrested when they were peacefully demonstrating in support
of their imprisoned relatives. The government claims that
these women, along with other dissenters, are influenced and
financed by U.S. imperialism. Even so, the peaceful
political nature of these dissidents’ activities turns
this into a political, not a police
matter. It should be openly debated with the opposition in
front of the Cuban people, who should be the ultimate judge
of who is right and wrong in these questions.
Saul
Landau says that when the Cuban artists and intellectuals
declared they would not tolerate censorship, the leadership
agreed with them. But nothing has been done to alter the
institutional arrangements that maintain Cuban censorship,
particularly those in the mass media organs under the
control of the ICRT (Cuban Institute of Radio and
Television). Thus, for example, the official Cuban press,
radio, and television have been silent about the major
protest at the University of Oriente in September 2007 and
its aftermath. This is consistent with the long censorship
record of the Cuban mass media, including the days–long
delay in broadcasting the news of such major events as the
Soviet Union’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, the Cuban
radio stations’ decades–long ban of the music of Celia
Cruz, and the extremely limited and distorted coverage of
the Cuban intellectuals’ protest at the beginning of 2007.
Sometimes
this censorship has been quite crude. One example is the
deliberate failure to translate into Spanish Noam
Chomsky’s critique of the human rights situation in Cuba
in an appearance on Cuban television during a visit to the
island a few years ago. Another example is the reporting on
Javier Bardem’s recent visit to the country by the
newspaper Juventud Rebelde, where a very detailed
biography of the Spanish actor omitted mention of his first
Oscar nomination for playing the role of the Cuban dissident
writer Reinaldo Arenas in Julian Schnabel’s Before
Night Falls. Censorship reflects the state’s lack of
trust in what people may think and do when privy to
unfiltered information.
The
same lack of trust underlies the regime’s approach to
democratic rights. While it is true, as Landau indicates,
that Cuba recently signed the UN covenants on human rights
and labor, there is no evidence to suggest that the Cuban
government intends to amend the constitution and laws of the
country to comply with these new international commitments.
This may happen only to the extent that the open protests
from below that began in 2007 grow in strength and intensity
and become national in scope. In the last analysis, it is
only through the efforts of independent popular
organizations that the majority of the people can defend
themselves against the privileges and abuses that erode
their civil rights and liberties. The same applies to
maintaining the equality and sharing that are indispensable
to socialism.
However,
the issue is not about equally sharing poverty but sharing
in an improved standard of living for all. Landau seems
worried about whether Cubans will “succumb to the shiny
lure of mass consumerism.” Besides being premature, such a
judgment lacks any sense of proportion and is thus
insensitive to the huge differences between Cubans on the
island and the far wealthier North American consumers.
“Consuming” for the majority of Cubans on the island is
not primarily about the purchase of sophisticated electronic
goods but the daily struggles of trying to obtain scarce
construction materials to fix either their leaking or
collapsing roofs, eating adequately without having to spend
endless hours and scarce hard currency securing food, and
acquiring the expensive and sometimes hard–to–get soap
and other toiletries that are so essential to human
self–respect and dignity in a modern society.
A
socialism without democracy and civil liberties, where
equality is limited to sharing poverty, is little different
from a beehive with a Queen Bee in command. In such a
society individualism would surely be eliminated, except for
the Queen Bee’s, but so would political pluralism and
individuality, which is not the same thing as individualism.
(*) Samuel Farber was born and raised in Cuba. His most recent
book is The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered
(University of North Carolina Press). Saul Landau, an
internationally–known scholar, author, commentator, and
filmmaker on foreign and domestic policy issues, has been a
fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies since 1972. He
has written 13 books, thousands of newspaper and magazine
articles and reviews, and made more than 40 films and TV
programs on social, political, economic and historical
issues. He is professor emeritus at Cal Poly Pomona
University. Both are contributors to Foreign Policy In
Focus.
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