La Jornada / May 11, 2014

Cuba’s dangerous stroll down China road

Guillermo Almeyra

Since the Moncada attack to the [Rebel Army’s] arrival in Havana and the establishment of the government headed by the bearded ones, the Cuban Revolution was a revolution of youths bent on enacting social democracy, eliminating the time-outs between harvests, and ensuring that everyone had bread and jobs. With this aim, they relied on the mobilization of their country’s best and poorest children and their participation in the working class’s political and armed struggle. Cuba had become politicized as a result of its previous taste of Guiteras’s anti-imperialist radicalism and was thus riddled with ideological clashes among the various existing tendencies –nationalists, social Christians, pro-Stalin communists, pro-Trotsky communists, anarchists– which influenced the students and labor movement. Their revolution wished to end both the grip that Batista and his gang had put on the State and the control that the U.S. companies and their Cuban partners had over our economy. It depended on no one, neither on the U.S.’s attempts to keep a check on it to get rid of Batista nor on the then-Soviet Union, which offered no help at first and chose instead to condemn its radical nature, as did the communist parties. Their victory paved the way for a pluralistic government led by the 26th of July Movement (M26), a bevy of low-ranking anti-Batista army officers, the social Christians of the Students’ Directorate and a group of communists who had defied their party’s policy against the armed struggle to topple Batista. Those groups eventually created the Integrated Revolutionary Organizations which gave rise in turn to a new iconoclastic, innovative, courageous Communist Party that, at first, was open to discuss differences among the revolutionaries and capable of attracting progressive intellectuals, from Cuba and elsewhere, for its brave international-oriented positions and its principles of social justice. This Party was also at loggerheads with its Moscow-led counterparts, as well as with Moscow itself.

Today, more than 50 years later, Party and State have come together as one, the founding youths have grown old in power, and there’s no longer any room for boldness and creativity. The single bureaucratized party has all but lost young people’s militant support and put a damper on the workers’ hopes of steadily improving their standards of living and have well-paid decent jobs. Moreover, it doesn’t depend on the Cuban people but on what may happen at international level, since Cuba imports most of the food and fuel and all the technology used by the island and is in general living on foreign middle-class consumerist tourists, the exportation of the professionals that it goes to any lengths to qualify, and the aid provided first by the Soviet Union and now by Venezuela, that is, on largely uncontrollable and uncertain factors.

Capitalism’s consumerist ideology has pervaded the thoughts of the vast majority of youths, whereas a significant part of the intelligentsia is as imbued with the cynical disenchantment and conservatism found in Leonardo Padura’s novels as it is fearful of a repressive bureaucracy well able to strip whoever voices a critical comment of their few perks or official jobs. The government still boasts the majority’s support, but it’s a passive support born from Cuba’s anti-imperialist nationalistic feelings –which neither accept nor tolerate the reinstatement of U.S. rule in the Puerto Rican style– rather than the struggle for socialism.

The Cuban people have long been living through a period of great changes: those who have dollars as a result of their jobs, illegal activity or exiled relatives live better than those whose wages are paid in Cuban pesos, a situation conducive to the appearance of privileged sectors, if only because they can eat better or twice a day and kept well informed. Noble and doubtlessly necessary professions such as teaching, medicine or lathing no longer hold any appeal for young people, since they can make more money in tourism and its products, be they legal or not. Consequently, emigration is increasingly looking to them like a better choice.

What’s worse, everybody knows that Cuba and the ALBA countries, dependent as they are on oil and the market offered by Caracas, have too much at stake in the war that imperialism and its local allies, plus most of the Venezuelan middle class, are waging on the so-called Bolivarian process. Likewise, the fact that the only politically pluralistic option available to Cuban intellectual is that of the media run by the Catholic Church –opposed to socialism and the Cuban government– is not only a good reason to embrace all sorts of conservative, social Christian or social democratic postures; it also drives a wedge between the people and the intellectuals, who often have to emigrate if they want to write freely even if they still believe in the Revolution.

The construction in the town of Mariel of a duty-free zone to locate industries and a port for deep-drafted freight vessels augurs a new Panama. Taking into account that the Cuban market is very small, staffed with very few young people and lacking in productivity, the government seems to be going for the island’s integration into American capitalism’s world market and trade.

Unfortunately, the new investment law could prove to be a major boost for social inequality and capitalism in Cuba and lay the groundwork for the return to Cuba of all those figureheads, Cuban or not, who left in the 1960s. The government makes the bureaucratic Communist Party and the Cuban workers, who are never consulted and only called upon to endorse decisions previously made by some 10 individuals, totally subservient to the State’s economic needs. If the workers are not given a chance to play a fully active role in the economy’s decision-making process, Cuba, like China, is bound to jump headfirst into the speedy construction of a bourgeois class stemmed from the bureaucracy-foreign capital binomial. We will push back on this.