The
Revolutionary Risk of Truth
By Soledad Cruz
A CubaNews
translation.
Being edited by Walter Lippmann.
Not yet ready.
The fatherland is better served by those who speak the truth. That is one of Martí’s maxims which I cling to, although it has cost me dearly in the course of my long militancy. I am not saying that I have with me the ultimate truth –something that does not exist— nor that I totally possess dialectical truth, something that is often slippery; I am referring to a vocation which consists of saying what I see, the facts that, as Lenin said, are stubborn; to my small individual truth, nurtured by other truths transmitted to me on a daily basis by my compatriots. But it so happens that I cannot publicize it in the newspaper to which I have been associated since 1970 because –among other Stalinist dead weights which Cuban socialism has not been able to rid itself of— we have kept a type of journalism that is alien to the dynamics of life, to the conflicts which naturally emerge from social coexistence, to the complex framework related to the aspiration of building a more just society in a poor country subjected to a blockade and challenging a world which has been retrogressing ever since the end of the Cold War, except in certain areas such a Latin America, where the banner of hope has again been raised, among other reasons, because of the exemplary resistance of the Cuban revolution.
But this paradigmatic revolution, to which I owe the best of myself, is threatened and might be reversible, as Fidel already warned in his address at the University of Havana in 2005, not only as a consequence of the unquestioned aggressiveness of the enemy, but also of internal problems. Although he himself spoke about the latter in the best revolutionary spirit, they were not debated at the time and continue to be felt in the life of the nation. Meanwhile, the study of their causes continues to be delayed and the piecemeal methods used to solve them reveal a lack of a full comprehension of the phase our society is in nor of the change of mentality which is essential for the project to survive in the long run.
While I read an article signed by Katerinjuk in Rebelión on the topic of the current situation in the former Eastern Block republics and Russia itself, the demons of my anguish and my moral responsibility were unleashed. Firstly, because I had visited some of those countries, in which, since the 1970s, the levels of dissatisfaction vis-a-vis the system had reached such levels that anyone could foresee what was to happen later on, or at least the fact that socialism could not exist such as it appeared in those places. But silence was made around this fact, ignoring that silencing real problems is the best way to enlarge them. Secondly, because in spite of Cuban peculiarities, I find, I perceive in the midst of our society similar dissatisfactions, and not only due to the material shortages that might be understood in the international context, but because of the constant resort to simple formulas when facing the complex mechanisms of society and individuals.
In Cuba, the majority of the population wishes to save the revolution at all costs. The intelligent majority knows that it can expect nothing better from capitalism and much less from the United States or the Miami tramps. They respect and remain grateful for Fidel’s leadership, and they tolerate quite a few unwise decisions because of their thankfulness and their wisdom. But as the popular saying goes, you have to live, and if, in order to do it, your salary is not enough, you have to come up with whatever might be necessary. And it is from that aspect that many of the evils of our society emerge, but they also emerge from the way that the charitable state insists on solving everything in a centralized way without either fomenting or allowing alternative mechanisms in order to permit everyone –according to their personal levels of initiative or creativity— to earn their living. Resorting to those methods is taken as a defeat vis-à-vis capitalism, while forgetting that in the economy there are certain phenomena that are not of an ideological nature: it is only that capitalism has appropriated them, has learned how to use them in favor of its perpetual expansion and of very quickly transforming its productive forces.
Elementary speaking, no one can deny the need to produce, to do it efficiently and to earn profits that can only be socially distributed in a more just way under socialism, in an attempt to equalize people at a level of well-being and not in poverty. But even in those socialist countries that achieved relatively high standards of living, an anxiety persisted for possibilities that, inexplicably, socialism does not offer and are related rather to the spiritual field and to the individual things that are sacrificed on behalf of the mass, ignoring that said mass is composed of individuals.
At a social level, people need to feel that they really take part in decision-making on questions that have to do with how society is ruled, that they are listened to and taken into account; at an individual level, people need to feel that they are the masters of their own lives and that they are not state property, although they support that state. Even if rulers chosen by those people have the best of intentions, they must not forget that their raison d’être is what their voters feel, think and need. But since socialism has occurred in the midst of a bitter struggle with an enemy system that wishes to destroy it, those primary principles of human existence retreat to secondary level and the participation of people is reduced to fulfilling, supporting what it decided at the top, and this deprives them of the true sense of responsibility vis-à-vis what is going on within society. Many of the citizens from the former socialist republics that I found in Paris when I was Cuba’s ambassador to UNESCO acknowledged the harsh problems that their societies where going through, but argued that their stay in Paris had been a personal choice, in spite of the fact that they were working as waiters or masons; others who were only passing through the city said that they could not dream of going to Paris under socialism. Millions of earthlings living under capitalism cannot dream of going to Paris, but it is not forbidden, and that is a nuance that politicians who wish to tilt the world in the direction of socialism must keep in mind. And, in fact, those measures have more to do with a type of simplifying mentality than with problems that affect socialist society, which must be characterized by freedom of choice and not mandatory actions, because when the question is that of actions of a compulsory nature, in the long run what will happen is what took place throughout Eastern Europe.
True, Cuba has an enemy powerful enough to have passed a law that welcomes all Cubans arriving on US territory and extending to them every facility to establish themselves, something that the rest of emigrants cannot enjoy. But the way to circumvent this attack cannot be treating Cubans as children by having them request a permit to leave their country, having their friends or relatives buy a letter of invitation in order for them to travel abroad, having them pay a monthly fee so that they can remain up to eleven months abroad and then, by compulsion, return home or be declared emigrants and therefore never again, except for certain humanitarian cases, be able to live in their country. That was justified in the cases of the bourgeois who left, the counter-revolutionaries who openly attempted against the revolution, but not the new generations of Cubans, born and bred in the revolutionary process and who acknowledge –as does the state itself— their nature as emigrants for economic and not political causes, who wish to seek some money and return to Cuba to spend it with their family or use it to improve their home. But even five years after being retired, people must ask permission from their former workplace in order to make arrangements for any personal trip abroad.
No country in the world allows their citizens to travel abroad if they have debts, pending matters with the judicial system or when they are in possession of sensitive information for national security. But to turn the process of traveling into a real humiliation that denies the right to pay for a ticket, go and return is, I think, an avoidable problem since foreign currency can now freely circulate in our country, most Cubans have relatives or friends abroad who might provide it to them, some even earn it inside the country or can legally change the Cuban peso for foreign currency. Inconveniences for citizens could be avoided if procedures were the common ones everywhere and those who would deny the visas would be foreign governments, even if, in order to make this feasible, a special mechanism might be established to prevent enemy infiltrations: this would be more justified than the bureaucratic apparatus that is susceptible to bribes and inconveniences anyone with mistrusts around the reasons for the trip and the fear that the traveler might not return home.
In the event that someone might not return home, then a real odyssey begins for those who remained in the country, because they will be forced to once more pay for their lodging or for that portion of their lodging that their father or mother bought from the socialist state at very low prices, but these were the prices that were fixed and they are fined, taxed as if those remaining were responsible for the choice made by the one who did not return. It is Kafkian. It also happens if parents die: then, children have to pay for the lodging once again in order to continue to live there. And also the fact that cars cannot be sold even if they rots for lack of maintenance because people lack resources to keep them running and need to sell them in order to go on with their lives, even if in a reduced or less comfortable way
It is then that the problem of property surfaces, and I do not refer to exploitative private property, but to personal property, acquired through labor. Nothing really belongs to you, you cannot yourself decide whether to travel, to move to another house, to sell your car, and all that in order to prevent that segments of society that have amassed wealth by illegal means might appropriate the best of our heritage or might acquire things that in better days the state provided according to workers’ merits. But those who are being punished are citizens that, given the circumstances, try to find solutions to economic problems that the state cannot solve, even if it exhibits the will and the efforts to do so. That is another straight jacket, and once more there is a resort to simplify. Because the state, as elsewhere in the world, might benefit if it taxes any of those transactions: it might even impose them on the buyer to protect the party with less means, for, unfortunately, those endowed with the greater economic possibilities are not the scientists who produce vaccines, nor the Olympic champs, nor the labor heroes, but those who, in spite of every decree and regulation, have become wealthy by illicit means or enjoy some very large income from abroad.
If the bureaucrats who decide on those measures –that lack a socialist base because they harm elementary rights acknowledged by the famous Communist Manifesto— would envisage in-depth solutions to the very complex problems of Cuban society, they would design formulas more responsive to the present-day situation, different from that of the 1980s; formulas that are realistic and, as such, revolutionary formulas. I say “bureaucrats” because I am sure that, if Fidel and Raul knew of these measures and how they are implemented, they could not support them. That is why people who think as I do say: “Just wait for them to find out about it”; but socialism cannot depend on two or three persons, or four or ten who are bright enough to understand that many of those measures are interpreted as ways to additionally annoy and bother people so as to increase the difficulties of day-to-day life.
And I do not say this out of cowardice, to exempt Fidel and Raul from any responsibility, but because, as a citizen of this country, I have heard Fidel say, at the time of the Mariel exodus, that socialism is a grouping of volunteers; and, in the very midst of the crisis of the 1990s— Raúl has said that beans are as important as cannons, to only quote two examples of political realism. That is why I cannot imagine that they have anything to do with that list of humiliating measures, including regulations of relations with foreigners.
I have never read in the daily Granma that it is forbidden to transport foreigners in your car, or to lodge in your house any friends born abroad. But if you transport foreigners in your car you can get a fine for 1 500 pesos, and the like if they stay at your place, except if you request an authorization that is not always granted. It is a way of avoiding the drug trade, prostitution, of getting foreign currency directly in the hands of the state that uses it to guarantee health and education, a minimum quota of subsidized food and a thousand other advantages, no one denies that. But not all citizens are alike, nor do they all undertake shady deals, and not being able to reciprocate hospitality that you have received abroad is quite regrettable. None of those measures are baseless, they all attempt to control situations that have been created by circumstances, but they cannot be simplistic, equalizing and ignorant of the fact that you cannot treat decent people as delinquents.
The anti-prostitution struggle is frustrating true relations between nationals and foreigners. Here, as anywhere in the world, people fall in love or make friends. But no woman, no man can check into a hotel with his or her couple if the latter are not from home, even if they are adults and absolutely responsible for their actions. It is argued that the reason is to prevent inequalities between those who can and those who cannot. But inequalities have always existed and have now become more apparent, and the worst is that at the end, people who successfully bribe or simply go to private houses that do not even pay taxes are the ones who finally access the so-called privileges.
Because it is pointless to pretend to control the minute-by-minute existence of peoples, and most of those measures contribute more to transgressions than to achieve the purposes that motivated them. Those pressures, structured upon clumsiness, already proved their ineffectiveness throughout the former socialist camp, greatly annoy the public, even if –either for gratitude or for fear— they are not questioned on a massive scale and gradually create an unfavorable breeding ground.
Something similar happens with the stubbornness vis-à-vis maintaining state property as sole variant in aspects in which other alternatives have proven better results, such as restaurants and agriculture. And it is not a question of promoting private property, but the degree of collective property that is possible at the present time, that has been very discreetly tested and is, in the long run, the true socialist formula, as others have already pointed out. There is, furthermore, an aspect of cooperative property that can offer a protection against any future trick coming from our enemies and could avoid that, in the event of any adverse circumstance, unscrupulous officials might tomorrow appropriate assets that legally belong to the people, as was the case after the demise of socialism in Eastern Europe. And it is described in Lenin’s The State and Revolution, when he refers to socialist democracy, something that never arrived.
If every parcel of land, each factory, each sports facility, each theater legally belongs to a cooperative council, no one can come some day to appropriate them, because their collective owners will have the means to defend them. And that is socialist property at its best, that you can touch with your hands, in contrast to state property that citizens have never truly felt as being theirs, among other things because neither the ancestral habits nor the natural tendencies of our species can be changed by decree.
After the bitter experiences of socialism in Western Europe, we communists should understand Ghandi’s maxim: If you wish to change the world, change yourself, so that we do not ask anyone to do what we are incapable of doing. Yes, and also the fact –it is true, as some enemy ideologues have rightly said— that the logic of capitalism is closer to the biological atavism of human beings. Less mental efforts are required to join the law of the fittest, as the pack of monkeys does, and capitalism has successfully transformed human miseries into categories for the economy to work by. To be a socialist, to think as a socialist, to feel like a socialist requires a greater spiritual and intellectual effort because it implies to also think of others and to dominate the animal in us.
In order to successfully leave pre-history behind, if we wish for socialism of the 21th century to exist, we will have to avoid the same mistakes that already demonstrated its failure in the 20th century.
Paradigmatic Cuba must shed all the formulas and methods taken from those that were supposedly more experienced but disappeared due to their stubbornness. It must also prevent its internal agenda from being set by the United States with its provocations and much less by the inhuman lot in Miami. And here Fidel and Raúl have a great responsibility as those that must assure the socialist changes that must be in place before they disappear as living beings. In spite of corruption and other evils, there are millions of Cuban revolutionaries ready to take part in the necessary transformations, knowing that nothing will be more harmful to the best ideas than stagnation, and those measures and methods that I have very discreetly referred to, that suffocate and overwhelm people cannot generate the indispensable spirit for socialist performance to be felt as such.
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