Cuba. Dilemma y hope (II)

If the economic policies applied for the past 13 years haven’t freed us from the special period, we must analyze what has failed and what must be changed. The reaffirmed state control of the economy will increase bureaucracy, corruption and the popular dissatisfaction which will necessarily act as a catalyst through some juncture.

CubaNews translation by Dana Lubow, August 16, 2007.
Edited by Walter Lippmann.

Original:
http://www.kaosenlared.net/noticia.php?id_noticia=38343

Pedro Campos (Para Kaos en la Red) [13.07.2007 17:27] – 318 readings  - 24 commentaries

We Cubans associate the Special Period with the worst economic crisis of the revolutionary phase: it is synonymous with scarcity, food shortages, blackouts, bicycles as transportation, houses in deplorable, almost irreversible condition, little television transmission, the disappearance of numerous newspapers, reductions of print runs of major newspapers, a drastic reduction of most leisure options for the populace, constant siren alerts in the face of possible imperialist aggression, massive mobilizations to dig tunnels, evacuation exercises, training of territorial militias and other similar actions.

There are regions of the country where the situation is worse than in others, above all in the supply of food, transportation and housing; but many of those things have changed a lot—more for some than others—and others have improved, although almost nowhere is there any comparison with the worst moments of the Special Period. Thus, the appraisal made recently by Carlos Lage is very correct, when he stated that we still haven’t left the special period, despite the changes and some improvements we have experienced.

It is our duty to ask why, thirteen years after the application of economic and social policies characterized by the strengthening of state neocapitalist socialism, with several years of highs and sustained economic growth, and when nine years ago, in 1998, it was said that we were beginning to leave the special period? We still haven’t managed to get out of it entirely, while it is observed that there are persistent food shortages, serious problems in public transportation and in the maintenance and construction of housing, major problems which continue to affect the majority of the people.

If Fidel said at the University on November 17, 2005, that we revolutionaries could destroy the revolution and called upon all of us to us contribute to discussions and solutions, and Raúl called upon us at the end of last year, at the 8th period of National Assembly sessions for discussion of our problems, what factors, what mechanisms and who are preventing the necessary debate among revolutionaries which they are asking for, unquestionably related to this problem?

It is necessary to analyze what we are doing, to appraise the limitations of applied policies and to redefine the necessary changes. If we do this with a self-indulgent eye, we conclude that we must continue doing what we have been doing, because some things did improve. If we do it with a self-critical eye, then the deficiencies would be put in the forefront in order to look for their root causes, to identify the incompetence of the accumulation model which was conceived to solve those basic problems and, consequently, to define changes in the applied policies.

From the  study and analysis of all published information about the ninth session of the National Assembly of People’s Power, it can be concluded that the current direction of the Cuban party-government-state—despite the limited progress and the broad popular discontent—reaffirms the current state-centrist course of the economy, based on state neocapitalism, with state property and salaried work as its axis, and which persists in its accumulation model based on the centralized control of the social surplus. 

This position doesn’t seem consistent with the acceptance that we haven’t managed to leave the Special Pperiod and that we continue with serious insufficiencies in the main problems that affect the majority of the population. Do we need disasters like the sugar harvest of ten million or the fall of the Socialist camp, in order to apply important changes that reaffirm the distinctly socialist course of the economy?

Recently the Minister of Economy and Planning, José Luís Rodríguez, expressed it clearly when he pointed out that the Cuban model will continue being state-controlled with whatever adjustments that were necessary. So as to leave no doubt, the official rejected a commission of the Academy of Sciences, which would study the forms of production in socialism, because it was “nongovernmental.”  Whom does the Academy of Sciences answer to? Is its Institute of Philosophy “nongovernmental”?

Now we learn through a newspaper of the international left that the Central Committee had approved the research of socialism of the 21st century among the priorities of the social sciences since 2007. It is the academics’ job to rationalize all experience and offer options, but in some fashion also to confront and give solutions to socialism’s problems, which concern in the first place the workers, the party, and all of the people.

Eliades Acosta, newly named head of the Department of Culture of the Party’s Central Committee, recently called for a dialogue among revolutionaries, to confront the sick part of capitalism in our society. How to achieve it without an in-depth discussion with the people about the problems affecting our socialism?

To continue with that unwise state-controlled course, they are ignoring the experiences—widely evaluated and spread by many academics and communist politicians throughout the world—which associate economic centralism with the causes of the fall of socialism. Also ignored is Cuba’s own experience, with statistics so simple that any worker can understand them, such as the fact that cooperativists and peasants produce 60 percent of agricultural production on only 30 percent of the land, and the fact that the besieged small family businesses produce with better quality and receive more benefits than state businesses of the same size, and the fact that that the workers in practically all of the production or service centers are in the majority dissatisfied with the way the economy is run, because it clearly sustains the diversion of resources, the extractions, the prevailing corruption, lack of discipline, etc.

How many more years of state neocapitalism would we have to bear in order to leave the Special Period and return to the previous years when the hypercentralization of the “policy of correction of errors and negative tendencies,” —the essence of what is currently being pursued—was the preamble and foundation of the disaster that crystallized with the fall of the USSR and the socialist camp? Don’t we realize that for years we have been in a vicious cycle of “less centralization/more centralization,” without really advancing with core changes towards the relations of socialist production?

Measures such as increasing the purchase price of milk and paying farm workers’ debts, are positive steps to search for ways to increase domestic agricultural production, but do not change at all the essence of state neocapitalism which already demonstrated its failure everywhere it was applied.

Again, they are projecting centralized and gigantic plans and investments of millions in irrigation for the reactivation of large expanses of idle land, the building of hundreds of thousands of housing units, the fixing of highways, etc. Money that will be controlled by the same ministries, which until now have been incapable of putting to productive use the resources that they have had at their disposal for decades. Capital which, in good part, will again be wasted, diverted and unproductive; but the central government will remain “clean of responsibility” since it “made the plan, allocated the money and the resources.”

That won't solve the problems. It isn’t simply a matter of allocating resources, but the way in which they are organized and for what purpose. There isn’t a single word in these plans about new systems of organizing production, a move toward cooperativism, to convert the Basic Units of Cooperative Production into real productive cooperatives or self-managed enterprises, or to stimulate processes of self-management or worker-state co-management, but only vague references to “business improvement.” To the contrary, the current secretary general of the CTC said he didn’t want any cooperatives in industry and services.

The workers and the people will find out about these plans—decided by the central apparatus—after they have been approved without changes and with few discussions by the National Assembly, where the comrades scarcely have time to study the documents they have to vote on. These decisions, which may or may not be shared by the people, are made by members of the National Assembly, the majority of whom are also ministers, party and state leaders: judge and party.

A positive step has been the development of meetings of the commissions of the National Assembly, at which we have the same composition of officials and the same lack of necessary time, where what predominates are the ministers’ explanations of productivity results and not the independent research which should be carried out be the organizations of People’s Power through their own means about the course of investments and production plans, compliance of the schedules, costs and expenses. Auditing should be done in the field.

There is a conspicuous absence of popular participation in decisions: they are not consulted at all. The current provisions of the business improvement plan, which is only applied in a portion of the businesses, suppose that the workers “discuss” a plan that has already been approved. The plan and national and regional budgets are never debated or approved by the people in any degree, since the current representative system doesn’t allow a real participative and direct democracy of the masses, as would be expected of a society that aspires to be truly democratic and socialist. We must advance in that direction.

The blame for the things not getting done, then, will fall in part on the “incapable” ministers, vice-ministers, directors and all of the other appointees—unelected—who within three or five years, when the failures become evident, will have to be removed and transferred from positions, although many may “fall sideways and even up,” since they go to another ministry or to leadership of the People’s Power, of the party or of some other political organization, in a clear exercise of bureaucratic recycling. The main responsibility will be made to fall, as always, on the workers who “don’t have an economic education, are undisciplined, steal materials and use the tractors to go for a ride,” but they can’t be replaced, there is no longer a lower job for them.

In order to really be socialism, it must be participatory, democratic, self-managing, inclusive and integrated. Participatory, because it must permit the broadest participation of all affected parties in the development and approval of all of the important economic, political, and social decisions; democratic, because the methods that are used to make the decisions can’t be based on the policy of “I order and direct,” in the imposition from above, but on the  will of the majority expressed through democratic methods; self-managing, because only self management and cooperation are capable of creating collective conditions for the development of a truly democratic society, without exploiters or exploited, equitable and with a new collective mentality; inclusive, because it must include and mobilize all levels of society, including the most fallen behind, for the great common socialist plan; and integrated, because it must move toward economic, political and social integration with other peoples who make are struggling to build socialism, prioritizing all types of commerce or exchanges and joint investments with these countries above any relations with international capitalism.

More centralism, more money for the current state plans, will not carry us to socialism; quite the contrary, it moves us away from the socialization of property as much as from the  socialization of the surplus. “Socialism” isn’t based on the form of distribution, but on the relationships that men establish in order to produce.

Why insist on maintaining a course that history has shown to have failed everywhere? Why not give direct participation to workers in all decisions that need to be taken in every production or service center, and distribute part of the earnings equally among them? Why persist in maintaining salaried work, which is capitalism’s means of existence? Why continue with state capitalism, which Che criticized and which Stalin identified as “socialism” and lead to the failure of that process? Why not distribute those large budgets by province, municipality, business and allow them to democratically administer them, with productive economic and self-management criteria? What explains their reluctance to replace the model of centralized accumulation with another, more democratic and efficient one?

These questions will likely not have an answer. It has become customary to ignore and dismiss opinions that come from the left flank of the revolution: they don’t receive any internal publicity. The supporters of mercantilism, trade with the enemy and state capitalism do have a voice and vote. We’re going in the wrong direction. It doesn’t matter that the left has participated in all the revolutionary and internationalist struggles, that it has shared in all of the difficult moments the revolution has been through, that it hasn’t made the slightest concession to the class enemies, that it has been in the front trenches of combat and that, even though it didn’t agree, has been quiet about the many violations of democratic centralism and other excesses in order to avoid the magnification of such problems by the enemy, not to create inernal divisions and to try to preserve the image of unity which has been demanded in the name of the revolution.

Once it was said that the revolution didn’t devour its sons like Saturn. Really it hasn’t devoured them but it does discriminate among them: the “obedient” sons and the “bootlickers”—their mistakes don’t matter—they are untouchable; the nonconformists who accept in silence aren’t bothered; but the protesters, those who frankly say what they think, those who have decided—as Che and Fidel taught us—to criticize all that is done poorly, the “usual rebels” have been removed, sanctioned, retired, sent to bed or simply separated with any pretext or for  a minor error.

Bureaucratism, a phenomenon that tends to the creation of a poltical class which assumes real control over the means of production, has been consolidating itself in Cuba since the measures taken in the Special Period. They strengthened state capitalism, such as investments from overseas, tourism for foreigners, the development of corporations which produce for a foreign market, the double currency, and others of a similar profile. When the revolution is in danger and the main threat comes from its own bureaucracy revolutionaries have no other choice but to putting this down in black and white to try to save it.

This isn’t a personal attack on anybody: these analyses, these criticisms and these proposals rise from the need of correcting this course which statism generates. We know of the selfless work and total dedication of thousands of comrades in the apparatus of the party and the state who don’t profit from their positions and suffer because of the impossibility of solving the problems they face. The blame is not theirs, nor is it necessary to look for people to blame in such an arduous and complex process, with such an enemy a few miles away; the revolution must simply be put back on the road towards the dignifying of man and work that socialization would offer. 

The process of Stalinist stagnation in the USSR was the real reason for socialism’s disaster in the 20th century. It had its economic basis in the centralization of property, resources, surpluses and in centralized planning, combined with state capitalism which exploited salaried work. Its social support was the bureaucracy engendered by all of that statism. Experiences should be useful. Or is it that socioeconomic laws, those of class struggle, aren’t valid for Cuba and our revolution? Will the good intentions of the highest leadership, their honesty and dedication be able to save us from those objective conditioning factors if we don’t manage to change them?

If Cuba were to fall, America would fall into the hands of imperialism, as Martí told us.

Our responsibility is too great to allow bureaucracy to continue advancing and destroying the revolution, as Fidel announced, and also for the hopes of the people who made it and have defended it with their lives to be annihilated, as well as those of millions of revolutionaries and communists around the world that trust in this bastion and see how Cuba stays in the fight despite all of the imperialism’s aggressions and blockades.

The defense of the revolution is necessary today more than ever, coming not from its apologia, which would not protect it, but from the criticism of its errors and deviations, which is the only thing that can save it from the restoring capitalist abyss which threatens it from the unconsciousness of its own bureaucracy.

The predominant state-centrist concept is driving us to failure. Those of us who think this way are going to continue clarifying these positions through all of the possible channels, trying to convince those whom we think are wrong and to achieve a change in that policy without making the least concession to imperialism and its lackies, without allowing any interference in our internal affairs on the part of any foreign government, and without doing any acts which could fracture the revolutionary front.

What we are proposing does not at all suit the enemy since it doesn’t serve its interests. They know that our proposals strengthen socialism which they hope to destroy, precisely with the help of the methods we are criticizing. Cohesion—not false unanimity—is essential.

In the former socialist Europe, these types of analysis were considered leftist deviations, diversionist and revisionist. All of those charges were weapons used in favor of stagnation in other times against revolutionaries, but it is now no longer possible to repeat those mistakes. Those who would try it would be clearly identified as intolerant, opportunist, dogmatic and Stalinist, condemned by history, signs that nobody wants to wear around his neck nowadays because the cutting weight is too great.

Nor do we believe that those who defend the current course are pro-imperialists, annexationists, unpatriotic or anti-party, although we know that the road that they are currently pushing forward, toward the strengthening of state capitalism, leads to the consolidation of bureaucratism, the destruction of the revolution and the restoration of annexationist capitalism. It is a matter of a lack of political-ideological clarity.

It is evident that our defenders of state neo-capitalist socialism don’t understand or are not studying one of the fundamental theoretical problems of philosophy, economy and politics: it isn’t possible to build the new society with the methods of salaried organization of work which characterizes capitalism. They don’t understand that there exists a flagrant contradiction between capitalist measures and socialists ends. It isn’t possible to build feudalism with slaves, capitalism with serfs or socialism with wage-earners.

Socialism needs another kind of worker: cooperativist and self-managing, since the new relationships of production aren’t going to be those typical of capitalism but those generic to socialism: cooperativism, self-management and co-management (worker-state). Nor do they understand that state socialism isn’t viable from the point of view of political economy, because its egalitarian distributive system violates its salaried form of production and inevitably leads to systemic and continuous production shortages and scarcity. (1)

What we are dealing with is an erroneous conviction of what socialism is, a capricious insistence based on the good will of a group of revolutionaries who don’t realize that they are engendering a bureaucracy that can put an end to the work of the revolution and to them as well if it isn’t stopped, by the path of true socialization of the appropriation of property and the surplus.

The current leadership needs to show confidence in the working class so that it may directly  manage the economy as socialism requires; it should take firm steps aimed at making the administration of the means of production by workers’ collectives effective, support with those funds the organization of the new socialized forms of production (cooperatives, self-management and co-management) in agriculture as much as industry and services, in order to integrate everything in a common plan of national development; empower  even more self-employment—which isn’t capitalist and has a self-managed nature—and consolidate the real power of the organs of the People’s Power, decentralizing parts of those ministry funds—which should be for methodological and general control functions —and give them to the organs of People’s Power at different levels.

If the central government doesn’t proceed in the direction to socialize and democratize the economy, and with it society, the workers’ and people’s discontent will increase, and they will take it upon themselves to carry out the qualitative changes that inevitably will follow the quantitative accumulation of dissatisfaction which has been adding up for years. The silent rebellion, which has been showing itself for some time, not against the revolution but against its deviations, imperceptible to the eyes of those dazzled in their self-complacency, may turn into an actor when catalysed by any unexpected event.

Fidel in his “Self-criticism of Cuba” just made a scathing criticism of bureaucrats who waste resources and don’t take into account the dangers we face. Let us finish by organizing production based on worker control in every aspect, so that that disorder may be made impossible.

In the USSR, the coup d'etat against Gorbachev and his badly named—or however it was called—reform process, was the trigger which catalyzed the growing mass discontent with the centrist system and hurled the people into the streets, a situation which was capitalized on by Boris Yeltsin and the pro-capitalist forces of the bureaucracy, allied with the mafias who quickly found recognition and all kinds of support from imperialism. In the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Stalinist and neo-stalinist currents predominated and those of the left had been crushed since the time of Stalin and later were stigmatized as “revisionists” and other “isims” by the opportunists, statists,  and conservatives.

If previously Fidel’s leadership and the people’s confidence in him were a brake in the face of possible popular protests, his current convalescence, which unfortunately could be definitive, and his evident and obligatory absence from the domestic political scene could favor circumstantial street demonstrations. Remember that in 1994 it was only the direct presence of Fidel in the streets of Havana which averted a major riot. The eventual repression of a massive incident could mark the beginning of the end of the revolution. The counterrevolution and imperialism could attempt this kind of provocation.

“The people are already tired of justifications,” said Raúl Castro. How true his words are! We Cubans, for the most part, want the revolution and socialism, but we are tired that everything continues with the imperialist blockade; we can no longer stand the ration book, the low salaries, the high prices of basic necessities, the lack of public transport. Meanwhile almost all of the bureaucracy rides in cars, the overcrowding of families of three and even four generations in badly maintained housing, the double currency which conceals exploitation and doesn’t come to everybody, the salaried exploitation of the workers by the neocapitalist state, the disaster of our agriculture and the premature destruction of our sugar industry, mainstay of our nationality, dependency for food on our historic enemy and its negative consequences for the Cuban countryside, the unsanitariness of Havana neighborhoods, the exploitation of our professionals and workers by foreign businesses, the hustling to varying degrees which has attracted hundreds of thousands of youth of both sexes so that they can bring food home and dress decently, the corruption imposed on the working class which has had “to invent” diverting resources to guarantee social self-reproduction, the long lines and wasted time to resolve any bureaucratic problem, bureaucratic abuses, extortion against the self-employed, the low prices of the state monopoly of  agricultural products, the abandonment of the countryside, the discrimination of Cubans in tourist areas in their own country, the racial veil and many other unbearable questions, and on top of the shabby society, the triumphalist discourse and self-complacency of government officials in the press and on television. We don’t accept any of that, because none of that is socialism.

For these reasons, so many  wish to leave the country in any way possible, whether it be to internationalist missions, work contracts, family visits or for whatever reason, and hundreds of thousands fill out forms for the U.S. lottery and risk their lives in the Straits of Florida, attracted by the siren song of the murderous Cuban Adjustment Act. These are the real causes, and not the “consumerist ideological weaknesses” that are attributed as reasons to many of those that go and want to go.

If we revolutionaries and communists don’t show our discontent more openly it is because we trust that a change in course towards more socialism will take place at any moment, and because we don’t want to set off a fracturing of the revolutionary camp that could open the road to an eventual return to the capitalist past—that now would be necessarily annexationist—not desired by the great majority of the people. Because of that we promote cohesion from intrarevolutionary discussion for consensus.

The Italian theoretician of modern socialism, Antonio Gramsci, wrote: “If the dominant class loses consensus it stops being the ruling class, it becomes uniquely dominant, it scarcely maintains coercive power, which goes to prove that the great masses have moved away from traditional ideology, no longer believing in what they believed before.” And that, right now, is happening to us in Cuba. We understand that there is no longer consensus in society about the way in which the revolutionary project is being conducted: no longer is there direction but rather imposition. Let us search for consensus or we will end up losing credibility with the masses, which is already quite affected.

This situation is becoming more and more complicated due to the stubbornness to continue on a wrong course, one in which announcing progress really leads to us falling behind in socialist relations of production (cooperatism, self-management and co-management). It may end in a disaster for socialism in Cuba or in a rebirth of the revolution which has to reach a truly socialist phase: the socialization of the means of production.  A Stalinist type of tyranny which nobody wants is ruled out, in which repression against the people and the communists would be the death of the process.

If we don’t manage to solve the problems of corruption and bureaucracy, the current contradictions will intensify until some conjunctural situation may catalyze, and then all will depend on whoever manages to capitalize on the discontent of the masses: the imperialist enemy with its internal pro-annexationist allies, or the ordinary revolutionaries who beat strongly in the heart of the people, the Communist Party and its leadership.

The forces that are the most revolutionary and not contaminated by bureaucracy in the leadership of the revolution, with Fidel and Raúl at the front, will not disappoint the trust that the people have deposited in them.

July 12, 2007. perucho1949@yahoo.es

1- Essay by the author. ¿Qué es socialismo? [What is socialism? ]

http://www.kaosenlared.net/noticia.php?id_noticia=24223

Translated by Dana Lubow 8-16-07



 

Pedro Campos Santos. Born 1949. Holguín. BA. in History. Former Cuban diplomat, assigned to Mexico and before the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva, International political analyst, chief project investigator at the Center for United States Studies at the University of Havana, and author of dozens of article and essays on Socialism, Cuba, the United States and Latin America. Author of books, including to be published "Workers  and Social Entrepreneurial self-management: Its urgency as a guarantee for the socialist revolution","Socialism, Yes" and "The Cuban Revolution and socialist self-management." Currently retired.