Raul's Speech in Camaguey
and Perspectives for Socialism in Cuba
by Narciso Isa Conde, August 24, 2008.

A CubaNews translation by Joe Bryak. Edited by Walter Lippmann.
This is only the first part of the translation. It is incomplete.

I don't have the least doubt: destroying the Cuban Revolution from Miami and Washington, without wiping the island from the map, without exterminating that people, is mission impossible.

Its historical leadership, its political and military cadres, its revolutionary militancy, its people, have amassed too much valor, too much dignity, too much will to be independent, to build its own destiny.

The legitimacy of its present national leadership is very broad and very deep, with an immense power to summon, both nationally and internationally, any necessary deployment of heroism.

The education and training of both its military forces and ordinary people in the conception (inspired by the Vietnamese) of "total people's war" --an expression of the most profound democracy in matters of defense and national security-- make military occupation of the island of Cuba by imperialist armies unthinkable without totally destroying that society and devastating its land.

Raul Castro has every reason in the world to have made Fidel's optimism his own on July 26th in Camaguey: by force the imperialists never would be able to get rid of the "nightmare" that the Cuban revolutionary process represents for them, the first one to open the way for the second independence of our America. [trans. note --he refers to all of Latin America, not the U.S.]

The Risk Is Something Else.

The present problem in the Cuban revolution and its process of socialist orientation is different and is related with what Fidel said at the University of Havana in that important speech of November 17, 2005, warning about the risks of "reversibility" of that process through internal causes; that is, as a consequence of "errors" committed by its own participants, among which corruption stood out.

The revolution, according to Fidel himself, cannot be destroyed from without, but indeed can from within. And this, said from a position of such high political and moral authority, again motivated serious unease and reflection over the future of the Cuban revolution during the phase in which its historical leadership, fundamental origin of its legitimacy and of the democratic relationship between leaders and people, is in a period of physical-biological decline owing to its advanced age.

Reversibility, the possibility of capitalist restoration and imperialist imposition

[Walter, there's an "out" here, I am certain. The word "de" was repeated twice, and then at least a short phrase must be missing. His eye probably skipped while retyping, in a classic "out." I will put a minimal guess of what he would have said--Joe]

. . . on a people in the process of making the transition to socialism--where the historic leadership had already been replaced and entered a crisis of its bureaucratic model . . .

[but still plagued by an out. He must have referred to the USSR. Author should be queried about this para. Joe]

. . . was confirmed for life on the occasion of the fall of the so-called "real" euro-oriental socialism at the end of the '80s and the beginning of the '90s last century.

Independently of the fact that they are not identical or parallel realities, the vanguard of the Cuban process has long delayed a deep examination of the causes for those failures in order to [be able to] reach common conclusions through a process of discussion that would involve all society.

The VI Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba, convoked in October of 1997--the last one to date--did not include in its agenda such an important theme, in spite of the theoretical-political implications--not only economical--of the breakup of the models and structures created in the course of the transition to socialism in the USSR and the other countries of eastern Europe.

The Congress did not include that debate, neither in direct relationship to those processes in particular, nor concerning their negative impact on the uniqueness of the Cuban Revolution.

The latter point is clear, with its proper nuance, given that these are not equal situations nor identical processes. The Cuban Revolution, besides being able to count on a legitimizing leadership of high social sensibility and libertarian vocation, was always faced with the clash between its uniqueness and the effects of pro-Soviet carbon-copying, by the weight of dogma and the resistance of the revolutionary old guard, for the dynamic between bureaucratization and the weight of its creative guerrilla style.

In any event, the bureaucratic state model was able to dig strong roots in Cuba, and therefore it is possible to detect common structural elements among those processes, although it is also valid to underline that in spite of that, in the case of Cuba there has been a smaller degree of corruption and privilege at the same time that a larger and more fair distribution of state income has taken place, along with social advances superior to those achieved in the eastern European countries, as well as more freedom in the artistic-cultural plane, and greater creativity in many aspects.

At any event, then--and now more so yet--it was pertinent to begin that analysis and proceed to preventive changes.

Therefore, before that V Congressxxxxxxxxx

[He said "that" V Congress, as if he were referring to the same, VI, Congress. Should be queried. Meanwhile I'll finesse it, skip number.-Joe]

Therefore, before that Congress, some years after having participated, along with five other secretary generals of Latin American and Caribbean Communist Parties (Schafik Handal, El Salvador; Rigoberto Padilla, Honduras; Patricio Echegaray, Argentina; Humberto Vargas Carbonel, Costa Rica; and myself for the Communist Party of the Dominican Republic) in examining the causes for the political cataclysm of European "real socialism," I dared to write a letter to Fidel containing some of my unease in relation to the Cuban process and its relationship with the events in Eastern Europe.

[The "real" of "socialismo real" above could be "royal," as well as "real"--quite a difference! Should be queried somewhere! Undoubtedly a phrase in common usage in circles I no longer frequent--Joe]

I am not going to take away the slightest credit for the fundamental determination of resistance then expressed by Fidel and the other leaders of the Cuban Revolution.

One must again recognize the great feat implied by having resisted and survived as a revolution from those days until now, which even includes connecting with the new wave of change taking place today in our America, especially with the new process toward revolution taking place in Venezuela, where a transition is demanded toward a new socialism in synch with the experience and changes begun at the beginning of this twenty-first century.

But one must also say--and now with more pressure and right than before--that the danger of the reversibility of the process continues unresolved, and it could become more acute and complex if it is allowed that everything continues more or less the same until the delegitimizing effects of the loss of the historical leadership take place and/or waiting until the structural crisis in development is able to concretely affect the possibility of self-improvement and socialist renovation.

Unease Grows

This is what explalins thte fact that within the calm and stability of the process--a significant fact even after the relative change of the guard of Raul for Fidel--there is so much unease, reflecting and transforming ideas present within the interior of the revolution, in its cadre, in its leaders and in its organic intellectuals.

The U.S. blockade certainly--as Raul says--makes an infinity of damage: it physically affects transport, nutrition and the health of the people. But it has not had, nor will it have, the capability to bring down the revolution.

It was not even able to do it when on top of the blockade were added the devastating economical effects of the collapse of the USSR and the countries of eastern Europe, representing the abrupt elimination of more than 80% of Cuban foreign trade.

The Special Period has not ended yet, but it is being progressively overcome.

The danger lies elsewhere and there is increasing reflection on it, with ever more attention and intensity: it is internal; it is a structural problem. It is the joining of chronic ills generated by the model of the road to socialism still operating in Cuba, strongly--although not totally--influenced in certain sectors by the modality that predominated in the USSR and the countries of the so-called "socialismo real."

The balancing of accounts has not been made, neither with respect to that which happened there, nor as far as the factors transplanted from those failed models to revolutionary Cuba. This in spite of the fact that the theme has been deeply debated in Latin America, the Caribbean and the whole world, and in spite of the fact that therer exist numerous volumes relating the profound causes of the collapse of those bureaucratic state models.

The Limits of Changes in the Special Period

Basically, after the disintegration of the USSR and the European "socialist camp," the leadership of dthe Cuban revolution concentrated on giving a response that would guarantee the economic and military survival of the process, without introducing new structural changes to the existing model.

In that order the hegemonic model coexisted with an opening dedicated to obtaining foreign currency, with partial reforms, the facility of foreign investment, changes in methodology of planning and administration, reopening of the farmers' markets and of free-lance work that, if they did point in the direction of needed changes, did not have the possibility of replacing the [old] model.

Those reforms, not being marked off inside a well-defined alternative model to the dominant statism, has given rise to a "dual economy" (the state-planned part bureaucratically coexists with market-driven corporations), which at times provokes serious distortions and social imbalance; all this in the context of a rigid political system and of highly bureaucratized institutionality (fusion of party-state-social organizations partial deterioration of the organs of Popular Power, growing dogmatization in detriment of creative Marxism).

This makes recurrent--in a process that preserves the capacity to denounce [wrongs], forms of expressing disagreements and strong nostalgia for its initial originality, as well as certain leaders and cadres who are not dogmatic--the critical and self-critical reaction to the accumulated ills and the admission of serious problems inexplicably not overcome.

Fidel, in the speech at the University of Havana referred to spoke with bitterness and dramatically about corruption.

Raul, in the Camaguey speech, reiterates that accusation, admits the absolute insufficiency of the salary that the workers receive and the phenomena of corruption and labor indiscipline that this generates; speaks coarsely of the inefficiency and the irresponsibility of functionaries and leaders, describes the food dependency and the accompanying growth of imports in foods that could be grown in Cuba and bitterly criticizes the large productive shortcomings of the economy of that brother country [Cuba; the writer is Dominican-trans.].

Again: Insufficient Responses

Nevertheless the offered prescriptions--already heard many times before throughout the last decades--although they are worthwhile in themselves, are limited to proposing the necessity of more organized work, more demands, more rigor, more order and more discipline in everything relating to production and services.

He insisted on efficiency, responsibility, sensitivity and political courage to overcome these and other problems which, while not lacking value, does not go to the heart of the matter.

He exhorted "critical and creative sense, without schematicism or decay," and proposed the necessity for "structural and conceptual changes," but without defining their content and extent.

He quoted Fidel concerning "change everything which should be changed," but without being precise about what one must change nor showing how to do it.

It is clear that the problems are so obvious and striking as to show them without beating around the bush and it is also clear that such words show a significant degree of honest preoccupation and awareness of the need to not dilute the [necessary] changes.

Within all this his call to think, to reflect, to debate means a lot. And that certainly is already beginning to make itself felt in certain areas of Cuban society.

Of greater value is his affirmation that the attitude of renouncing the building of socialism is not present in the fundamental forces of Cuban society and the revolution.

And that determination brings him, at the moment of thinking of a new method for foreign investment, to insist on the preservation of the part of the State and of socialist property and to exalt the extraordinary potential force of popular power.

Uncomfortable Questions

But all this in its turn incites us to formulate and answer certain uncomfortable questions.

Is corruption, inefficiency, precarious salaries, indiscipline, food dependency, low production and productivity, the growth of the importation of food . . . cause or effect of a given crisis?

What is understood by the terms structural changes and change of concepts?

What value can there be, in the present Cuban context, in calling for rigor, order, discipline, control, responsibility and efficiency?

What role for the State must be preserved?

What is meant by socialist property?

How can the extraordinary force of popular power be manifested?

Which socialism will not be renounced?

Causes and Effects

Corruption, inefficiency, the salaries ever more insufficient, the search for more income by other means, indiscipline, low production and productivity, limited food production and the necessity of great imports, bureaucratization of productive processes and of a part of public services and institutional function, are effects, and not structural causes, of the crisis of a certain mode of production, distribution and economic and political measures.

Those causes must be sought out in the widespread nationalization of the means of production, distribution and national resources, without either cooperative or self-contained business or social enterprise, in the preponderance of state property (rather than social property) being centrally and antidemocratically administered . . .

[TRANS. OF THESE LAST TWO PARAS IS CLUMSY AND SHOULD BE CHECKED OUT, PARTICULARLY THE COGESTION, AUTOGESTION AREA. TOO IMPORTANT TO BLOW IT]

In the process of bureaucratizing public enterprise and the development of bureaucratic privileges, in the functional ideological dogmatization built into that system, in the progressive and growing fusion of the vanguard party with the State and of both with social organizations and the organs of popular power, in the superimposition of political, state and social functions . . .

In the atrophy of the functions of civil society, in the separation of producers of the property and the condtrol of the means of production-distribution and the continuation of the explotation of salaried work, with the difference in respect to classic capitalism being that those who have power over the surplus are the public functionaries and not private bourgeoisie.

This is the typical structural crisis and model of transition that some essayists have dubbed "State socialism" (although it has little of socialism), and others, "State bureaucracy."

Socialist property is the collective property of the workers controlled by society.

It is socialist cooperatives.

It is shared agrarian or urban enterprise. [CHECK THIS OUT, inc. several paras above]

It is public property locally controlled and/or run by the workers.

It is the equivalent of collective property in all its modalities, it is the property of the means socially appropriated and controlled.

The transition to socialism is called upon to advance toward the dominance of social property in its diverse forms over capitalist property; to socialize the economy and the organs of power with the end of abolishing the State.

To speak of new stdructural changes of a socialist orientation in a society like the Cuban one, where a great part of the means of production, distribution and natural riches were expropriated by the State means to progressively convert state property into social (by enterprises that are cooperatives, run by shares, collectives, self-managed and co-managed . . . )

It means reducing the footprint of the State in favor of society, to separate the function and role of the Party, the State and of social organizations in favor of the greatest democratization, of social control of public institutions, participatory democracy and direct democracy.

It means, without weakening the functions of national defense faced with imperialist aggression, and popular participation in that defense empowered even more--to draw the guidelines and norms that gradually lead to the reduction of the internal coercive power of the State and favor the perspectives of its extinction.

It means to think of the transition to socialism, which is far from being socialism itself, as a continental and worldwide process, given the historical impossibility of building socialism in a single country or a Group X of countries.

It is that way, only that way, that the extraordinary force of popular power can be unveiled, empowering the historical project of the powerless, of totally free society, in its turn.

What to Accept and What to Reject

This shows the importance of asking ourselves:

What heritage do we reject?

Which transition is improperly labeled socialism?

Do we renounce the State modality that was called socialist in the 20th century and that really failed because of the lack of socialism on the way toward it?

Which socialism do we renounce? Which one do we claim allegiance to?

The so-called "State socialism"?

Or that which rescues the values of scientific socialism and of its founders to endlessly deepen them in function of the experiences and changes undergone?

Do we support the reformed State in the capitalist sense, open to transnationalization and coexisting with big, private capital, baptized as "market socialism"? In the Chinese way or pro-China, as it is today?

Those are the dilemmas of today's Cuba, categorically thrown down perversely and destructively by the Washington-Miami [axis]; [it is] the brusque imposition of the capitalist-imperialist counterrevolution, equivalent to the annexation of the island.

I think that one must progressively renounce--with much determination, but also with a lot of prudence and talent--the statecraft inherited from the deviations and deformations of the pro-socialist revolutions of the twentieth century.

I think one has to do it, and not precisely to convert from state to private, nor in order to cause the state to coexist with a great injection of private transnational and national capitalism, but in order to progressively socialize it through self-management, co-management and cooperativization and the collectivization of public property. [[MUST BE LOOKED OVER BY OTHERS!]]

I think one must do it without recourse to forced collectivization of the small and mid-sized existing property; better yet would be to facilitate its incursion in certain areas where state property absurdly rules, instituting cooperative forms and self-managed shared enterprises, facilitating their capital for particular productive initiatives and those of services subject to regulations and co-sharing stimulii. [[MORE MATERIAL NEEDING TWEAKING!!! SORRY.]]

U-turn in the Same Direction

This would be a U-turn, but in the same direction, which the rest of our America needs for a transition which, among other things, in those cases is equivalent to the conversion of the dominant private property into social property.

This would be the road to progressive socialization of the public state and of all the facets of power.

Progressive socialization is equivalent not only to socializing property and the economy, it is also equivalent to an integral transition (including its transformation into a barter economy and not a market one), to a multi-directional transformation that involves socializing and democratizing the political system through process, along with the institutions, male-female and youth-adult relations, family life, intercultural ties, the relationship of State to society, the ties between human beings and the environment. All this, I repeat, toward the extinction of disappearance of the State.

Cuba has won a lot of ground in different directions from those mentioned above. But it certainly needs to do a lot of defining of the essence of the changes called for by the structural crisis in the present model, such as the characteristics of its method of renewal and the new work of the cultural revolution necessary in order to complete all the work of liberation.

I do not believe--and I say it with a certain twinge in my heart--that the temptation toward the so-called "Chinese way," despite the enormous differences (including the historical relationship with the U.S.), will lead to socialization, but to a hybrid of statism and private capitalism where capitalism would have everything to gain, accompanied besides by a quite rigid political system.

The heroic resistance of the Cuban revolution, its great feat of surviving the destruction of the USSR, has presented it with the promising opportunity to join the wave of change taking place in our America, the historical opportunity to join with the unfolding Venezuelan process which, in spite of all its limits and negative heritage, has made concrete the possibility for new revolutions in the continent and in the world, and has brought to the forefront the debate over socialist renovation, over a socialism different from the so-called 'real" socialism of the twentieth century. [[AGAIN, "socialismo real" might have a better trans.]]

Truly, it is a golden opportunity to make a final adjustment to everything that has to change without having to adopt pro-capitalist choices. A great opportunity to recover and reincorporate the most positive values of the original socialist proposal, to recreate the project of transition, to act in favor of a far-reaching socialist project of worthy quality, to enlist Cuba and place it in the vanguard of revolutionary renovation and of the socialist project in tune with the requisites of the twenty-first century, in order to think and promote the transition to socialism in terms of the continental and the world.

The Cost of Heresy

I know that these ideas are very controversial. They have been in Duba for a long time, although to my understanding never like now. As also never before this debate have they had such pertinence and so much urgency.

I have experienced and suffered reactions loaded with intolerance respect to similar proposals or those cut from the same conceptual cloth, which I have been making for quite some time now, not only with respect to the Cuban process but concerning this whole problem.

As for the relationship with the Communist Party of Cuba, with its American Area or Department, with its section of International Relations--over all after the death of the unforgettable comrade and friend Manuel Pineiro (Comandante Barbarroja ["Red Beard"--trans.])--this has cost me more than a little trouble, tension, reactions of disgust and cold shoulders.

There has not been a lack of those who, from the narrowness of their souls, have even come to disqualify those who think this way, although I have never felt that such reactions could have been endorsed by the historic leaders of that process, with whom I have always had a relationship of respect, solidarity and affection.

At times those instances charged with a lot of intolerance concerning the inevitability of revolutionary diversity and full of absurd loyalties having to do with certain dogmas, they have criticized the fact that I have brought forth these ideas, and publicaly, at certain events of the left, always completely respectfully, and always as a necessary component of an open debate, not as a self-willed act, but by the weight of events and the inevitable impact of the most varied opinions.

I have always done this from an undeniable posture of limitless defense and solidarity toward that pioneering revolution of the continental dawn, to which, besides, I owe in part my initial revolutionary commitment, and to which I am bound by very deep and precious sentiments.

For that revolution--I have said it and I have shown it--I am disposed to make all the humanly possible sacrifices except one: to renounce the effort of contributing to rearm the utopia to which I have always aspired, to renounce ideas that could help to recover, enrich and renovate the emancipating dream that moves us to fight to replace capitalism, to renounce being more socialist and more revolutionary, to renounce revitalizing the socialist ideal that has been so misused and mistreated by bureaucracy and dogmatism. That, never!

I am always ready to renounce bad pasat habits, but no the search for truth and goodness inside the liberating process of humanity. Not that, no way.

I am unconditionally ready to sacrifice any mental or material comfort to confront the enemies of any of the revolutionary and socialist variants whatsoever, but never will I renounce the critical heritage, the heretic vocation of people so admired by me as Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci, Mariategui, Rosa Luxembourg, Ernesto Guevara, Camilo Torres, Carlos Fonseca Amador, Monsenor Romero, Schafik Handal, Orlando Martinez, Kiva Maidanik . . .

THAT, NEVER! ABSOLUTELY NEVER!

To claim respect for this attitude that is impossible for me to renounce, is not, in my opinion, anything exaggerated.

But in any event it is valid in this aspect, especially in my case, to further define precisely my attitude toward all intolerance: later for those who insist on the mission impossible of bottlling up a vital debate by administrative methods or who intend to marginalize contrary opinions concerning structure and concepts in crisis.

Certainly those comrades do not bring out the least animosity in my, simply sorrow and shame for them.

August 20, 2007, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

"Anniversary of the infamous intervention of the USSR in Czechoslovakia"

http://www.kaosenlared.net/noticia.php?id_noticia=40081