[Debate] A Marxist Critique of Communist Cuba

[peter waterman]

*Peter sez:

*Although this piece comes in the middle of a probably on-going exchange,
it seems to me to exemplify - in both form and content - a critical
approach toward 'actually-still-existing' state-socialist systems. Farber
here risks the wrath of a wide swathe of Left-Liberal and Marxist opinion
which puts 'solidarity with the victim of imperialism' in front of any
critique thereof.

I note, further, his simple statement of the incorporation of Cuban trade
unions into and under the state and party - something that may seriously
disturb those internationally who have promoted the CTC as the very model
of a revolutionary trade union.

My own question about the Farber analysis (and as much as the exchange as I
have paid attention to) is the failure to factor in the political culture
of Cuba and the widespread Latin American tradition of 'caudillismo', which
an online dictionary characterises thus:

Caudillismo is a Spanish word which means "leader" or sometimes simply
"boss." In Latin America it has acquired a more pejorative sense where it
has come to be used in reference to any quasi-military regime which is
controlled by a charismatic leader...In every case... it does denote a type
of authoritarianism.
*
*Another deep-rooted feature of Cuban history has been racism -
discrimination against the (increasing) proportion of the population of
African descent. Cuba has dramatically failed so far to overcome this
problem. And in this, also, it reproduces a common failing of
state-socialist regimes.

Recognition must, finally, be granted the Australian 'Links' website for
hosting a civil exchange on such a crucial issue.

*Now read on:*
Debate: Cuba has a state bureaucratic *system* – a response to Chris Slee

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?shva=1#inbox/1386a024938e5f3f


 This article is a reply to "System or siege? Samuel Farber misses the main
cause of Cuba's problems <http://links.org.au/node/2911>", *Chris Slee'*s
review of Samuel Farber's *Cuba Since The Revolution of 1959: A Critical
Assessment* (Haymarket Books 2011).

*[For more discussion on Cuba, click **HERE.]
*<http://links.org.au/taxonomy/term/31>

By *Samuel Farber*

June 26, 2012 – *Links International Journal of Socialist
Renewal*<http://links.org.au/node/2934>-- The driving idea behind
Chris Slee’s critical review of my recent book,
*Cuba Since The Revolution of 1959: A Critical Assessment* (Haymarket Books
2011) is that the undemocratic practices of the Cuban revolutionary regime
have been largely a response to the more than 50-year-old imperialist siege
by the United States government and not a defining characteristic of the
island’s political *system*.

Slee’s viewpoint has a long history among defenders of the Cuban
government, particularly among liberals and the left in capitalist
democracies. But the Cuban leadership did not adopt the USSR’s repressive
model because Washington “forced” them to go in that direction. That
presumes that the Cuban revolutionary leaders did not have a political
ideology of their own. In fact, during 1959, the first year of the
revolution, an ideological and political struggle took place within the
revolutionary government among liberals like Roberto Agramonte and Elena
Mederos; radical nationalist anti-imperialists like David Salvador, Carlos
Franqui and Marcelo Fernández; and the pro-Communist wing headed by Ernesto
“Che” Guevara and Raúl Castro who were then allied with the PSP (Partido
Socialista Popular) of the old Cuban Stalinists (this was before Guevara
began to be critical of the Soviet bloc in late 1960). The growing and open
hostility of the US contributed significantly to the victory, in that
struggle, of the pro-Communist tendency, but that does not mean that it was
Washington that determined the purposes and ideas of the revolutionary
leadership.

These leaders had their own political vision of reality that determined
what they considered the appropriate responses to the danger from the
north, and especially to what they saw as the optimum form of social and
political organisation of their country. While they acted under serious
external and internal constraints, they were nevertheless autonomous agents
pursuing independent ideological visions. These leaders made choices,
including selecting the Soviet road for the Cuban Revolution. As Ernesto
“Che” Guevara declared to the French weekly *L’Express* on July 25, 1963:
“our commitment to the East European bloc was half the result of external
pressures and half the result of our choice.”

It is quite clear that by the early to mid-sixties the Cuban leaders had
succeeded in establishing a version of the system that ruled in the USSR
with a one-party state bureaucracy controlling all of the social, political
and economic life of the country without independent trade unions, the
right to strike or civil and political liberties. In this type of system,
the economic surplus is not extracted in the form of profits from
individual enterprise, nor is it realised through the market. Instead, it
is obtained as a surplus product of the nation as a whole. This surplus is
appropriated directly, through the state’s control of the economy. This
does not occur primarily through the higher salaries for the bureaucrats,
which represent only a small part of the surplus product, as does the
consumption of the ruling class in capitalist societies. The surplus
product also covers accumulation and investment, defence spending, and all
other state expenditures. Naturally, the Cuban system has its own
distinctive characteristics as in the cases of China and Vietnam just as
Japanese and Swedish capitalism differs from the United States, which does
not deny the fact that they are all developed capitalist societies.

Perhaps the most important contribution that the Cuban regime has made to
the history of the state bureaucratic systems in power has been its
emphasis on the mobilisation and participation of the population,
especially during the 47-year rule of Fidel Castro. Nevertheless, it is
indispensable to distinguish between participation and democratic control.
Every type of participation that lacks democratic control – which
necessarily includes free debate and the freedom to organise independently
from the ruling party – is inevitably a form of manipulation. If we take
the famous slogan of the 1968 movement in France, “we participate, you
participate, they profit” and exchange the word “profit” for “rule”, we
would obtain the perfect slogan to describe Cuba since the establishment of
“monolithic unity” many decades ago and recently reiterated by Raúl Castro.
[1] <http://links.org.au/node/2934#_edn1>

It is the failure to distinguish between popular participation and support,
and the government’s manipulation of that support on one hand, and
democratic control from below on the other hand that repeatedly leads Chris
Slee to seriously misrepresent what happened in Cuba during the last 53
years. Fidel Castro historically availed himself of an overwhelming popular
support and of his prestige to rally his supporters behind decisions he and
his close associates had already made behind closed doors and which were
sometimes totally unexpected. For example, in the months preceding the
Agrarian Reform Law, just about every social and political sector of Cuban
society was putting forward its own views on what this law should provide
for. Even the sugar mill owners and landlords were proposing their own
agrarian reform, which unsurprisingly did not attempt to reform anything,
while sweetening their proposals with the donation to the government of
tractors and other agricultural implements. But Fidel Castro did not give
any indication of the kind of law he had in mind or how radical it would be
until he suddenly announced it on May 17, 1959. While the law was certainly
popular, without having established any popular decision-making mechanism,
it was implemented, quite contrary to what Chris Slee suggests, not through
peasant democratic control from below but by the joint efforts of the Rebel
Army and government functionaries working for INRA (the Instituto Nacional
de Reforma Agraria, National Institute of Agrarian Reform). Several months
earlier, in February 1959, a revealing incident took place when the old
Communists of the PSP -- who at this time were still pressuring Fidel
Castro from the left -- encouraged a few instances of “spontaneous” land
seizures. Seeking to forestall any challenge to his control, Castro
announced in a televised interview on February 19, 1959, that any persons
involved in seizing land without waiting for the Agrarian Reform Law would
be deemed as engaging in criminal conduct and would lose their right to any
benefits from the new law.[2] <http://links.org.au/node/2934#_edn2> Three
days later the Communists retreated and agreed “that it was necessary to
put a stop to the anarchic seizures of land” while objecting that Law 87
that had put into effect Castro’s wishes was unnecessary and
dangerous.[3]<http://links.org.au/node/2934#_edn3>

One of the more striking examples of the manipulation of popular support by
the revolutionary leadership was the forced resignation in 1959 of
President Manuel Urrutia who had been appointed by Fidel Castro. Early on
the morning of July 17, 1959, newspaper headlines announced Castro’s
resignation as prime minister without giving the reasons for such a
dramatic, unexpected decision. In the morning, students rallied at the
University of Havana and then marched to the presidential palace demanding
also that Castro withdraw his resignation. Throughout the rest of the day,
the radio reported on the thousands of messages sent to Fidel Castro by
unions and many other popular organisations demanding also that he withdraw
his resignation. The overwhelming majority of these messages were very
similar to those that were conveyed by the university students’
demonstration earlier in the day, and made no mention of President Urrutia.
That evening, Fidel Castro went on national television, and to the surprise
of the great majority of Cubans, unleashed a savage political and personal
attack on President Urrutia that was nothing less than a character
assassination from which the president was not allowed to publicly defend
himself. The personal accusations were in reality a cover for Castro’s main
charge: Urrutia had gone out of his way to attack communism on several
occasions and particularly in a television interview that had aired some
time before Castro’s speech.

The real motive for Castro’s “resignation” was revealed only after the
Cuban people had been “warmed up” all day in support of the maximum leader.
I should add that Urrutia was a superfluous and irrelevant figure who
carried no weight. Castro used his removal to gradually legitimate the
politics of the PSP and their allies in the wing of the government led by
Raúl Castro and Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

It is also his confusing popular participation with control from below that
leads Chris Slee to miss the main point of my analysis of what happened
after the 10th trade union congress of November 1959, a crucial moment that
defined the future of the trade union movement in the island. Fidel Castro
successfully pressured the congress to select a leadership dominated by
those aligned with the old Communists, something that was not warranted by
the number of those delegates at the congress. After the congress
concluded, the labour ministry, under Fidel Castro’s control, assisted by
the Communist union leaders and the minority of 26th of July’s “unitarian”
elements friendly to them, began to purge a very large number of elected
trade union leaders who had resisted Communist Party control.

For Slee this resistance automatically meant that these trade unionists
were right-wing anti-revolutionaries mistaking, or fudging in this fashion,
the difference between anti-revolutionary trade unionists and those seeking
to preserve union independence from the state. But the key point in my book
that Slee ignores, is that the purge took place by means of purge
commissions and carefully staged and controlled union meetings instead of
new elections. Given Castro’s prestige and popularity, there is little
doubt that any slate of candidates he supported would have won in open and
free union elections. However, from the Cuban leader’s long-term
perspective, those new elections would have allowed the unions to retain
their autonomy, and that would have been a serious obstacle to the unions
becoming instruments of the state as was the case in the USSR and Eastern
Europe.

Slee suggests that in spite of the US threat Cuba has taken real steps
towards democratising Cuban society. With respect to the vaunted
democratisation of the state unions in the 1970s, Slee does not mention
that this “democratisation” only applied to the election of low-level union
leaders. It was clear that the government intended to use these low-level
elections to allow the workers to “let off steam”. The newly elected local
union leaders were excluded from setting policy; their role was to be
faithful defenders of the policies of the national union and the country’s
political leadership. Fidel Castro himself declared at the time that “the
[elected official] will have the moral authority of this election, and when
the Revolution establishes a line, he will go out to defend and fight for
that line.”[4] <http://links.org.au/node/2934#_edn4>

In 1973, Raúl Castro justified these sort of practices in clear
substitutionist language: “It is necessary to keep in mind that the working
class considered as a whole … cannot exercise its own dictatorship…
Originating in bourgeois society, the working class is marked by flaws and
vices from the past. The working class is heterogeneous in its
consciousness and social behavior… Only through a political party that
brings together its conscious minority can the working class … construct a
socialist society.”[5] <http://links.org.au/node/2934#_edn5> Raúl was not
referring to a political party formed and controlled by the workers, but to
the single, exclusive political party of his bureaucracy.

Similarly, even though taking note of my criticisms of the discussions
preceding the sixth party congress in April 2011, Slee ignores how these
kinds of “consultations” with atomised groups violate the very essence of
what democracy, particularly socialist democracy, should be about. This
“consultation” process, rather than having involved a democratic debate,
was far more akin to a nationwide oral suggestion-and-complaint box.
Workers put in their individual proposals at meetings and eventually the
party authorities decided what to consider and accept and what to reject.
The Communist Party of Cuba leaders responded to the thousands of opinions
that the Cuban people submitted to them much like the owners and managers
of a capitalist enterprise who implement those suggestions that they find
most helpful to run their business and pacify the labour force. The
discussion or “consultation” process was not even comparable to collective
bargaining, let alone political and economic democracy. Revealingly,
guideline 04 approved at the party congress provided that the structural
and other changes proposed in the party program will be realised in “a
programmatic fashion, with order and discipline, on the basis of the
approved policy, *informing the workers and listening to their opinions”*.
[6] <http://links.org.au/node/2934#_edn6>* *

In other words, workers can opine, but the one-party state decides.
Moreover, the decisions were not even made at the party congress itself.
According to Raúl Castro, almost all the modifications to the original
party guidelines were made *prior* to the congress, on March 19-March 20,
2011, at meetings of the political bureau of the party and the executive
committee of the Council of Ministers. The secretariat of the central
committee, the central cadre of the trade union confederation, other mass
organisations and the Communist youth organisation also participated in
these two-day gatherings.[7] <http://links.org.au/node/2934#_edn7> All of
these bodies are controlled by the political bureau of the Communist Party,
and act as conveyor belts for the policies of the central party leadership.

Slee admits that there is repression in Cuba but insists that it is merely
a product of the mindset created by the imperialist threat of the US. But a
closer look into the matter reveals that this repression is an intrinsic
political characteristic of the system of state bureaucracy: Cuba, like the
USSR, Eastern Europe, China and Vietnam, has recurred to police and
administrative measures, instead of political means, to deal with the
peaceful expression of political differences and opposition. This started
very early on, when the opposition press was confiscated in the spring of
1960; at the time, there was no serious internal threat to a regime that
enjoyed overwhelming popular support in a country without any kind of armed
conflict. This action was taken as a strategic step in the construction of
a system of absolute control, not as a tactical conjunctural response to a
real and present danger.

As I discuss in great detail in my book, censorship in the mass media has
been applied to matters that don’t have any connection to US imperialist
threats, like scandals involving corruption at the highest level of the
government as in the recent case of *Cubana de Aviación,* the Cuban state
airline. Another example is the total media blackout concerning the
demonstration held by hundreds of university students in Santiago de Cuba
in September of 2007, protesting poor living and educational conditions as
well as lack of security for women students. The protest must have been
quite serious, since the government found it necessary to hold a large
official counter-demonstration in early October, reaffirming support for
the regime.

It is also important to note that from early on repression was carried out
against both the right and the left. Thus, in pursuit of what later would
be called “monolithic unity”, in 1961, *Lunes de Revolución*, the weekly
mass-circulation literary and political supplement of the government
newspaper *Revolución, *which published the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre,
Simone de Beauvoir and a wide variety of non-communist independent
left-wing authors from all over the world, was closed. Later on, Castro’s
government persecuted Cuban supporters of *Black Power* (Walterio
Carbonell, Castro’s former ambassador to Tunis and the leadership of the
Algerian FLN then living in that country), sectors of the PSP (Aníbal
Escalante and his associates) and, of course, repressed gays including the
young writer Reinaldo Arenas and the prominent playwright Virgilio Piñera.

In the case of the 75 dissidents sentenced to long prison terms in 2003,
the government invoked the Law for the Protection of Cuban National
Independence and the Economy approved in 1999. Among other things, this law
made it a punishable crime to receive funds from hostile foreign forces,
even if those funds are used to carry out entirely peaceful political
activities or to write newspaper articles for hostile organs such as *El
Nuevo Herald* in Miami. Some of the dissidents imprisoned in 2003 did
receive material aid from the US government in the form of publishing
resources and stipends. But even if every one of the 75 had done so, the
fact that their activities were of a peaceful nature should have made this
issue not a police and criminal matter but rather a political question
appropriate for political debate before the whole of Cuba. People could
then have drawn their own conclusions as to the political trustworthiness
and credibility of the government and its opponents.

In any case, the small publications that the dissidents were producing with
and without US assistance were no match for the Cuban state’s monopoly of
publication and broadcast in the mass media. The Cuban government’s claim
that the long prison sentences imposed on the 75 dissidents was justified
by a military invasion that the US was preparing was a total fabrication.
Washington had entertained such a plan only once during the missile crisis
in the fall of 1962.[8] <http://links.org.au/node/2934#_edn8> It is worth
noting that not one of the many US government’s post-Cold War strategic
scenarios that have been announced or leaked to the press has even
mentioned Cuba, which for more than 20 years has been relegated to a minor
concern of the US military and political authorities.

Chris Slee takes issue with my analysis that the Cuban government is
embarking on the development of a Sino-Vietnamese model in Cuba, by which I
mean the combination of political authoritarianism with an opening to
capitalism, while the state retains a major role in the economy. My
prediction is based primarily on an analysis of the *Lineamientos* approved
at the sixth party congress in April, 2011, and economic changes that have
been made before and since then. Most important in my view are the
proposals approved at the congress that would go a long way to establish
the enterprise autonomy of the *managers *(these proposals include
enterprise bankruptcy and possible
privatisation),[9]<http://links.org.au/node/2934#_edn9>which as we
know only too well can easily open the road to wide-scale
nomenklatura privatisation. As I point out in my book, there is already a
material base for such a development among the civilian and military
managers and technicians that are involved in joint venture enterprises
with foreign capital, particularly Spanish and Canadian. Especially
important in this context are the very important armed forces business
enterprises organised in the corporation called GAESA (Grupo de
Administración Empresarial, S.A.) currently headed by army officer Luis
Alberto Rodríguez López-Calleja, a son in law of Raúl Castro who was
elected to the central committee of the Communist Party at the April 2011
congress.

A final thought: Chris Slee implies that democracy is not possible under a
“socialism” built in unfavourable circumstances. It is highly unlikely that
a socialist revolution will take place under favourable circumstances, even
in economically developed countries. Capitalists are not going to
peacefully hand over their property without significant resistance,
beginning with the sabotage of their factories and offices. But putting
aside these general considerations, it is important to keep in mind that
the “unfavourable circumstances” that undoubtedly existed in Cuba would not
have in themselves brought about a new state bureaucratic system absent the
specific political ideas and practices of the Castro brothers, Ernesto
“Che” Guevara and their close associates.


[Samuel Farber was born and raised in Cuba and is the author of many books
and articles dealing with that country. He has been involved in socialist
politics for more than 50 years.]


*Notes*

[1] <http://links.org.au/node/2934#_ednref1> “Con unidad monolítica Cuba
seguirá adelante, dijo Raúl Castro,” *Diario Granma* 13, no. 208 (26 julio
2009), http://www.granma.co.cu/2009/07/26/nacional/artic27.html.

[2] <http://links.org.au/node/2934#_ednref2> Fidel Castro, *Discursos para
la historia*, (La Habana: Imprenta Emilio Gall, 1959), 1:137.

[3] <http://links.org.au/node/2934#_ednref3> “Declaraciones del PSP: El PSP
pide a los campesinos que impidan por si mismo las ocupaciones de tierras;
Considera innecesaria y peligrosa la Ley 87,” *Hoy*, 22 febrero de 1959, 1.

[4] <http://links.org.au/node/2934#_ednref4> Fidel Castro, “Discurso en la
concentración para celebrar el décimo aniversario de los CDR,” *Granma
Resumen Semanal*, 4 octubre 1970, 4-5, cited in Carmelo Mesa-Lago, *Cuba in
the 1970s*. *Pragmatism and Instituionalization. Revised edition*,
Albuquerque, N.M.: University of New Mexico Press, 1978, 85.

[5] <http://links.org.au/node/2934#_ednref5> Fidel Castro and Raúl
Castro, *Selecciones
de discursos acerca del partido* (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias
Sociales, 1975), 59, cited in Marifeli Pérez-Stable, *The Cuban Revolution.
Origins, Course and Legacy, Second Edition*, New York: Oxford University
Press, 1999, 128-129.

[6] <http://links.org.au/node/2934#_ednref6> VI Congreso del Partido
Comunista de Cuba, *Lineamientos de la política económica y social del
partido y la revolución*, página 11. Farber’s emphasis.

[7] <http://links.org.au/node/2934#_ednref7> Raúl Castro, “Informe central
al VI Congreso del Partido Comunista de Cuba,” *Juventud Rebelde*, 16 abril
2011, http://www.juventudrebelde.cu, 3

[8] <http://links.org.au/node/2934#_ednref8> I am referring here to an
invasion by US military forces, which is what the Cuban government charged
in 2003. Of course, the US-sponsored an invasion staffed by right-wing
Cubans in April 1961, and hundreds of other violent attacks, including
numerous acts of terror and attempted assassinations against the island’s
leadership, particularly Fidel Castro. Cuba has also suffered an oppressive
US economic blockade that has lasted more than 50 years.

[9] <http://links.org.au/node/2934#_ednref9> *Lineamientos de la política
económica y social del partido y la revolución*, Lineamiento 17, página 12.



-- 
*1.* Contribute to Journal Special on 'New Worker
Movements<http://www.interfacejournal.net/2011/06/call-for-papers-volume-4-issue-2-for-the-global-emancipation-of-labour-new-movements-and-struggles-around-work-workers-and-precarity/>
'!
*2. Blog:* http://www.unionbook.org/profile/peterwaterman
*3. EBook 2011, 'Under, Against, Beyond - Essays 1980s-
   1990s* s <http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/under-against-beyond/>
http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/under-against-beyond/
*4.* WorkingPaper *2012*: 'Emancipatory Labour
Studies'<http://www.iisg.nl/publications/respap49.pdf>
:
*5.* Draft EBook 2012: 'Recovering Internationalism - Essays 2000-10'
(draft):
     http://www.scribd.com/doc/82125289/ReCovIntComp-A-2
     http://www.scribd.com/doc/82129474/ReCovtIntComp-B-2
*6. *Essay 2012: 'The 2nd Coming of the World Federation of Trade
Unions': <http://www.unionbook.org/profiles/blogs/peter-waterman-the-second-coming-of-the-wftu-updated>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.fahamu.org/pipermail/debate-list/attachments/20120709/ac4028f8/attachment-0001.htm