Red Pepper » Cuba

That Cuba feeling

admin — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 10:00:37 +0000

A CND march at Aldermaston
On 14 October 1962, a US Air Force U-2 reconnaissance plane flew over Cuba taking photographs of the ground below. The next day, Central Intelligence Agency analysts examined the pictures – and concluded that they showed the construction of a launch site for Soviet missiles, confirming their suspicions that Moscow was creating a nuclear forward base in the Caribbean.
Thus began the Cuban missile crisis – a 13-day standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union that brought the world closer to all-out nuclear war than at any time before or since.
US president John F Kennedy spent the best part of a week working out how to respond. He was still smarting from the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs, the unsuccessful US-backed Cuban-exile invasion of the island in 1961 to overthrow Fidel Castro’s by then pro-Soviet revolutionary regime, and he resisted pressure from hawks to launch an immediate invasion. But the strategy he eventually adopted was high-risk. The US imposed a naval blockade on Cuba and promised not to invade if Moscow withdrew its missiles – but backed up the offer with a secret ultimatum threatening immediate invasion if it did not comply, with the only sweetener a secret promise to withdraw US nuclear missiles from Italy and Turkey.
Both superpowers put their military forces on full alert, and for a week it seemed to the whole world that nuclear Armageddon was imminent. Nikita Khrushchev, general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, denounced the naval blockade in fiery language; the United Nations security council met in emergency session and resolved nothing; a Soviet surface-to-air missile shot down an American U-2 over Cuba…
But then Khrushchev blinked. Out of the blue, he agreed to Kennedy’s deal: no Soviet missiles in Cuba, no American missiles in Turkey or Italy. At the time, because the US withdrawal of missiles from Turkey and Italy was not made public, it looked like a straightforward Soviet climbdown – and Khrushchev’s authority in domestic Soviet politics took a blow from which it never recovered: he was ousted two years later. Kennedy won, but he did not live long to savour his victory – he was assassinated in November 1963 – and the hubris that the successful resolution of the crisis instilled in the American establishment played a disastrous role in escalating US intervention in Vietnam.
Britain and CND
Britain was not an actor in the missile crisis. Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government was kept in the dark by the Kennedy administration in its early stages. Macmillan privately expressed polite concern to Kennedy that the US might be going too far in ratcheting up the confrontation with the Soviets – he was worried most of all by the implications for West Berlin, which he feared could be subjected to another Soviet blockade or even invasion – but in public he gave robust support to the Americans.
For the British people, though, the problem was not the future of Berlin but what appeared to be the strong possibility of nuclear war. Newspaper circulations soared as, day by day, tension mounted.
But the crisis didn’t benefit the movement for nuclear disarmament. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), founded in early 1958 with the support of the Labour left and its weekly papers, the New Statesman and Tribune, had enjoyed a spectacular political success in 1960, when its lobbying of trade unions and constituency Labour parties led to the Labour conference adopting a policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament, against the histrionic opposition of the party leader, Hugh Gaitskell. But Gaitskell and his allies had overturned unilateralism at the next year’s conference – and the CND leadership subsequently found itself without a viable political strategy and facing a barrage of criticism from activists for putting all its energies into Labour. By 1962, its influence was on the wane.
There was still life in the peace movement. CND’s Easter 1962 annual march from the Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Research Establishment to London attracted 150,000 to its closing rally, its biggest ever crowd. But the impact of the Cuban crisis was demobilising. On one hand, it showed the futility of demonstrating – and on the other it showed that the leaders of the superpowers were not in the end prepared to launch a nuclear war. Activists drifted away from the movement; the nuclear powers agreed a Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963 that seemed to indicate there was hope of multilateral nuclear disarmament by negotiation; and by 1964, when Labour won a general election under Harold Wilson, the movement for British unilateral nuclear disarmament was part of the past. Its activists moved on, to housing campaigns, workplace militancy and opposition to the US war in Vietnam.
The second wave
CND kept going as a small pressure group with a few thousand members through the 1960s and 1970s, a forlorn survivor that few thought would again play a significant role. Meanwhile, international nuclear diplomacy ground on. The Partial Test-Ban Treaty was followed by the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty, which committed non-nuclear states to remaining non-nuclear and nuclear states to keeping nuclear know-how to themselves (though its impact was limited because India, Pakistan and Israel refused to sign and subsequently developed their own nuclear weapons). The two superpowers negotiated interminably, reaching significant agreements on limiting strategic nuclear forces and anti-ballistic missile systems in 1972 (SALT-1 and the ABM treaty) and a further agreement on strategic arms in 1979 (SALT-2), though it was not ratified by the US Congress.
But then everything changed. What had seemed to be an inexorable process of winding down the cold war – the 1970s saw not only nuclear arms agreements but also the Helsinki accords guaranteeing borders in Europe and respect for human rights – suddenly went into reverse. In December 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Days later, Nato announced that it would be deploying new American intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe – cruise and Pershing 2 – if Moscow did not withdraw its own new-generation intermediate-range missiles from Europe.
The Nato announcement thrust nuclear arms into the political limelight for the first time since the Cuba crisis. One man in particular made the running in Britain, the historian E P Thompson. He wrote a furious polemical piece for the New Statesman; followed it with a pamphlet for CND, Protest and Survive, excoriating the government’s asinine advice on how to cope with a nuclear war; then, with Ken Coates, Mary Kaldor and others, launched the European Nuclear Disarmament Appeal, a manifesto for a ‘nuclear-free Europe from Poland to Portugal’. By summer 1980 – when the Thatcher government announced that it would be replacing Britain’s ageing Polaris submarine-launched ballistic missiles with American Trident SLBMs – anti-nuclear protest groups had sprung up throughout Britain and CND was a mass movement again. Labour adopted a non-nuclear defence policy at its autumn 1980 conference; the next month Michael Foot, a founder member of CND, became Labour leader. In 1981, feminist pacifists established a peace camp outside the US base at Greenham Common in Berkshire, where the first batch of cruise missiles would be based.
For the next six years, the movement against nuclear arms was central to politics in Britain. It was huge: at its height in 1983‑84, CND estimated that it had 100,000 national members and perhaps 250,000 in affiliated local groups, and its demonstrations were massive, with 300,000 turning out in London in 1983. The movement was also much more sophisticated than in its first wave: there was no serious argument between advocates of working through the Labour Party and proponents of direct action; and END provided it with leadership that could not easily be dismissed as pro-Soviet or hard-left (though the Tory government did its very best to persuade voters otherwise).
But Labour lost the 1983 election; cruise arrived in Britain in 1984; and work started on the Trident submarines. Meanwhile, Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet leader and soon made it clear that he wanted an end to the new cold war. Under Neil Kinnock, who succeeded Foot as Labour leader in 1983, Labour stuck to a non-nuclear defence policy through the mid-1980s – but after Labour lost again in 1987, with a new détente apparently in the air and the peace movement much less vocal, he wavered. Gorbachev and US president Ronald Reagan agreed a deal to remove all intermediate-range nuclear weapons from Europe, codified in the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty signed in December 1987. Kinnock declared that the agreement changed everything and announced the abandonment of the non-nuclear defence policy. It took two attempts to get it through Labour conference, but by the time the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 Labour was fully signed up to retaining British nuclear arms to resist a threat that had ceased to exist. The dwindling band of peaceniks pointed at the emperor’s new clothes, but no one took any notice.
Disarmament stalls
The INF treaty was signed nearly 25 years ago, and it should have inaugurated an era of nuclear disarmament – particularly after the implosion of the Soviet bloc and Soviet communism between 1989 and 1991. At first it seemed to have done so. In 1991, the US and the Soviet Union signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START-1), and the result, combined with the effect of the INF treaty, was a significant reduction of US and Soviet (after 1991, Soviet successor states’) stockpiles of nuclear warheads. The global total halved by 2000, from 70,000 in 1987.
But the disarmament momentum soon ran out. Russia balked at further reductions of its nuclear weaponry; the US cooled on the whole disarmament process; and the smaller nuclear powers – Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel – either refused to engage or made minimal gestures towards denuclearisation. START-1’s successor, START-2, was signed but not implemented and replaced by an interim Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT).
Meanwhile, it became clear that nuclear weapons were not central to the international crises of the time – Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, the break-up of Yugoslavia, the bloody conflicts in Africa, the rise of al-Qaida, 9/11 and its aftermath – and that insofar as nuclear weapons were an issue the key problem was that the anti-proliferation regime was not working. Iran and North Korea were close to joining India, Pakistan and Israel as nuclear powers – and neither they, nor the Indians, Pakistanis or Israelis, were prepared to disarm.
US-Russian nuclear arms negotiations have continued: the START process was revived and concluded with a new treaty in 2010, when US president Barack Obama and Russian president Dmitry Medvedev agreed to deep cuts in strategic arsenals. Both Russia and the US have since reduced the number of actively deployed nuclear warheads to 2,000 apiece. But the stockpiles remain frighteningly large. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the US retains in reserve nearly 6,000 and Russia more than 8,000. The total global warhead count in 2011 was around 20,000 – not quite as many as at the time of the Cuba crisis, but not far off.
The nuclear threat now
British anti-nuclear-arms campaigners didn’t give up after 1987. Some went off to create think-tanks, others put their efforts into making CND an alternative foreign policy pressure group. During the 1991 Gulf war, the campaign formed the core of the anti-war movement. Almost simultaneously, however, came a calamitous collapse of membership and an austerity drive that closed down Sanity, CND’s monthly magazine. The organisation never quite went under, but it returned to the margins. Whereas in 1991 it had set the agenda for opposition to the military intervention against Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, a decade later it was reduced to a minor supporting role in the organised opposition to the US and UK military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Nuclear arms are still there, but the politics of nuclear arms has changed. The future of Britain’s own bomb is more at risk from government budget cuts than it ever was from CND-inspired Labour opposition; and the threat of nuclear war no longer appears to come from a suicide pact between Washington and Moscow. For the past decade or more, the most likely sources of Armageddon have been India and Pakistan, Israel and Iran, and North and South Korea – all standoffs that no one in Britain can realistically hope to influence. That Cuba feeling, that we’re powerless to effect change, is back again, and it’s difficult to see how we can get rid of it.

Cuba and the ‘updating of socialism’

admin — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 15:40:33 +0000

Cuba, for many on the left the most enduring socialist experiment in the history of the western world, has once again embarked upon a process of wide-ranging transformation. In an attempt to reverse the stagnation of the economy, the leadership of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) at its sixth congress in April approved a raft of measures that will transform the economic landscape of the country, create a new petit-bourgeois class, open the island to greater foreign investment and fundamentally alter the role and nature of the state. Though the changes might rightly be called reforms elsewhere, in Cuba the process has been euphemistically labelled as ‘updating the Cuban socialist model’.
President Raúl Castro, who first began to exercise the powers of president in an acting capacity in 2006 (officially replacing of his brother Fidel as president in 2008), is one of the most enthusiastic advocates of the changes. He has overseen a process of consensus building, the scale of which has not been seen before. However, the motivation to make the changes is not merely ideological; necessity seems to be the mother of this invention.
In addition to the effects of the US trade embargo, Cuba has been hit by the global economic crisis, a reduction of exports by 15 per cent and the consequences of 16 hurricanes (three in 2008 alone) that have devastated the island since 1998. With the addition of a persistent drought in eastern areas, it is estimated that natural phenomena have caused a loss of almost half the annual GDP.
The Cuban government is simply no longer able to be the sole driver of the economy. With world food prices on an irreversible upward trend, it can no longer afford to provide subsidised food for its 11 million people. Opening the economy to private enterprise is the answer and it raises a number of issues for the worldwide left.
Is Cuba moving slowly towards capitalism? Is it adopting the Chinese model? Or is this an emancipatory process moving Cuba towards a new form of socialism with less paternalism and a more prominent role for the population? More importantly for some, the question arises as to whether or not the Cuban government is capable of overseeing the transformation without some kind of social rupture that might lead to a collapse.
To take the last question first, the possibility of a collapse is remote, although anxiety about the changes and their speed is undoubtedly evident. Foreign media reporting has been alarmist but the changes have in fact been incremental over the past four years. Raúl Castro hit the ground running in 2006 promising ‘structural reforms’ and immediately initiated a consultation process that involved every mass organisation. Some seven million people attended more than 160,000 meetings held across the country to debate and contribute to the process that culminated in the congress in April this year. After the congress, the party published a dossier in which the original proposals, amendments suggested to them and the final composited resolutions were listed for the population to see.
What this means is that although the ramifications of the changes have caused anxiety, they are not traumatic. The restructuring is taking place in calm and ordered fashion. If it works, increased productivity will improve living standards and therefore lessen the prospect of social disturbances.
Fundamental redirection
However, one should not underplay the significance of the measures. They imply a fundamental redirection in the way both the economy is organised and the ideology that underpins it. In short, they spell the end of the centralised Soviet model of social and economic planning and the introduction of ideas that have almost certainly been drawn from the Chinese and Vietnamese experiences.
Under the proposals the state will no longer be the administrator of small-scale, local enterprise and will instead become the regulator – allowing the work to be done by a new petit-bourgeoisie in the form of self-employed workers, privately owned businesses and workers’ cooperatives. Egalitarianism as a goal has been jettisoned in favour of the concept of ‘equality of opportunity’ – an idea with more in common with social democracy than Marxist-Leninism.
In the first part of a new economic strategy, some 500,000 state workers – around a quarter of the current workforce – are to be redeployed into the private sector. The idea is to improve productivity, reduce the state payroll and generate revenues through taxation. The process will be difficult, requiring the introduction of new regulations, supervisory mechanisms, revenue collection measures, credit systems, infrastructure for distribution and adjustment to the welfare system for those unable to find work. This is the phase that is currently under way.
The ultimate target is to redeploy more than one million of the 4.3 million state employees, increasing the proportion of Cubans working in the non-state sector from its current level of 16 per cent to around 25 per cent by the end of 2015.
All areas will be affected, including administration, public services and state-owned enterprises. The months before the congress saw a series of behind-the-scenes consultations involving senior figures from the government, ministries and trade unions. It is significant that it is the CTC trade union confederation that is administering the process of choosing which workers are to be redeployed. Layoff will not mean destitution. The high incomes earned in the existing private sector and the removal of the cap on earnings mean many will prosper. 200,000 workers will not, in fact, lose their current jobs but merely cease to draw a salary from the state and instead start to draw it from the revenues of their enterprise. These new co-ops will pay the state a rent for the property they use and a tax on their earnings. The new regulations also permit them to sell their services to the state, opening the way for all kinds of enterprises, from refuse collection to office cleaning and catering.
Workers are being encouraged to start their own businesses in some 125 new trades and occupations that have been legalised. It is widely assumed that a large number of state employees already have illegal or quasi-legal ‘off the books’ jobs and the expectation is that they will now be able to pursue these activities legitimately full-time. In another significant change, the self-employed will be allowed to employ workers, opening the way for small and medium sized private enterprises (SMEs) in both production and distribution. In addition, state land has been given to some 200,000 citizens to become small farmers, while the prices that the state pays for their produce has been increased to incentivise production.
An internal PCC document anticipates that 465,000 new non-state jobs will be created in 2011, with 250,000 new business permits issued. The rest of the displaced workers are to be absorbed into construction and an expanding state-owned business sector, principally in tourism, oil, biotech and pharmaceuticals.
Following China?
It is here that the next big clue as to where Cuba is heading can be found. The possibilities for foreign investment in property – especially in the construction of golf courses and marinas – were increased significantly by Raúl Castro when he increased the maximum length of a lease on state land from 50 to 99 years. Negotiations are underway with foreign investors for the construction of 16 golf courses across the island and the sale of leases on houses and timeshares in these areas. In addition, for the first time since 1959, foreign investment in agriculture has been allowed, with a deal being made recently for a Mexican agribusiness to start soya production in association with a state‑owned firm.
Is this the Chinese model? It is perhaps inevitable to make comparisons and point to official recognition of the Asian tiger. For example, on 17 November 2008, the daily newspaper Granma published an article entitled ‘China continues demonstrating the validity of socialism’, in which it cited Fidel Castro: ‘China has become objectively the most promising hope and the best example for all of the countries of the third world.’
To be realistic, in terms of territory, population, historical traditions and cultural identity, the differences between Cuba and China are so great that it is simply impossible for the island to copy the development model of the Asian giant. Cuba does not have a massive, impoverished rural peasantry ready to migrate to work for low wages in export-oriented factories in new enterprise zones. Nor is Cuba going to jettison its free education, health and welfare system, as has happened in China. More visibly, major multinational corporations are not evident on the advertising hoardings in Cuba cities as they are in Vietnam and China. It is Che, not Sony, that stares out of the billboards in Havana.
However, as the veteran Cuban diplomat and professor of international relations Carlos Alzugaray Treto has written, various aspects of China’s process are valid for Cuba. He lists these as: prioritising production to achieve socialist ends; accepting that socialism is constructed on the basis of the specific characteristics of each country; adopting market mechanisms under socialist control, and making adjustments constantly as needs arise. However, the most important lesson from China, says Alzugaray, lies in the famous Confucian phrase of Deng Xiaoping: ‘It doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white, what’s important is that it catches rats.’
It is not a question, therefore, of Cuba copying the Chinese model but rather of it adopting a set of pragmatic principles. Whether what results is an ‘updated’ version of socialism or a Cuban variation of state capitalism remains to be seen. However, the most radical outcome might be in the sphere of diplomacy rather than domestic policy, where the cat might catch the biggest rat of all – an end to the US embargo.
The ‘updating’ will increase the demand from the business lobby and the Cuban-American population in the US for an easing of the embargo. Pressure is building on Obama to take steps to further ease restrictions on travel to Cuba by US citizens. If Obama wins a second term, this will become inevitable. Once significant numbers of Americans are allowed to visit, Cuba’s current economic woes will be over and other problems will take their place.
Dr Stephen Wilkinson is director of the Centre for Caribbean and Latin American Research and Consultancy at London Metropolitan University

Cuba in context

Sandra Lewis puts Cuba’s economic reforms against the backdrop of global austerity

Stephen Wilkinson (above) infers that the reforms in Cuba will spell the end of the centralised Soviet model. The state, he says, will no longer directly administrate a bureaucratic centralised economy but will become the regulator of an expanded private sector.
In reality the same centralised system will stay in place in regard to large-scale production, as well as within the governmental structures. Those making the decisions (and responsible for decades of inertia) will maintain their positions – and the ones who will suffer are the working people.
Much of what is taking place in Cuba is clouded by a smokescreen of propaganda. What we are actually witnessing is classic neoliberalism. It must be analysed in the context of global austerity and the theft of resources by those in power.
The truth is that the Cuban economy is bankrupt. The US embargo has certainly compounded the problems, but to treat it as the chief cause of today’s woes is far too convenient.
The government’s plan – like many states these days – is to ‘balance the budget’ by laying off 1.5 million state workers – a quarter of the total. Wilkinson implies that this will not be too traumatic for the Cuban people because the state plans to slowly ‘redeploy’ (to use his euphemism) these laid-off workers into the private sector.
Fortunately the plan is on hold because even the Cuban state realised that, at least right now, it is untenable.
Initially the layoffs were postponed because out of the 200,000-plus permits for ‘private sector’ work, which were made available early last year, two thirds were quickly taken by people already operating the same small businesses on the black market. Hence this new ‘private sector’ mainly comprised the legalising of black market enterprises, many of which had been functioning under the table in Cuba for decades. It therefore left little room for the expected mass of laid-off public workers.
What jobs there are in the private sector – from construction labourer to bathroom attendant – are hardly an easy transition for highly educated professional public sector workers to make. Shoe‑shiners and manicurists are now fully legalised, being brought ‘out of the shadows’ of the black market and getting widespread international press for being the new Cuban ‘petit-bourgeois’. But while the government did postpone the layoffs, it didn’t postpone its investment in large-scale industry and international joint ventures, primarily those related to tourism.
While many were touting the ‘expansion’ of the private sector and the ‘deconstruction’ of the centralised model, the industries that generate the most income for Cuba – tourism, agriculture, pharmaceuticals – remained highly centralised and controlled in the same top-down manner as before. The goal was always the maximisation of profits, even if this meant sacrificing many of the historic gains of the revolution. Advocates of an expansion of workers’ cooperatives and self-management were left sorely disappointed when they realised that those in power had no intention of reforming the centralised model. The plan, it appeared, was to scale down government to maximise profits on the backs of the Cuban workers.
Supporters of a more decentralised cooperative model were certainly involved in all levels of discussion – within the Communist Party as well as outside of its structures. But now that the decision has been made to maintain centralisation by those on high in the party, those who fight for a truly socialist Cuba, where working people enjoy the fruits of their labour, continue to fight for greater worker control of resources both within the party and autonomously.
We have seen recently worldwide resistance to the austerity measures being inflicted upon working people. Cuba is no different in this respect. The strategy of government is, as always, to centralise as much power and wealth into its own hands as it can. It is the goal of many in Cuba to decentralise the state structures – and once again return these resources and institutions into the hands of the Cuban people and to advance the revolution towards a truly liberatory socialism.
Havana Times: www.havanatimes.org
Observatorio Critico Network: observatoriocriticodesdecuba.wordpress.com

Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution

admin — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 19:04:22 +0000

In my first A-level economics class, at the age of 16, I was taught these guiding principles; people only produce if they can make a profit, humans have infinite desires, while resources are limited, so everything must be rationed through the price mechanism – demand and supply.

No concept of production for need or socialist economics appeared on the curriculum. This was the early 1990s, the socialist bloc had collapsed and neo-liberalism was triumphant, or so we were told. Over the previous ten years, British Telecoms, the British water industry, British Rail, British Gas and British Coal had been packaged up and sold off to corporations and share holders.

Rational economic man, it was said, would ensure efficiency through privatisation and competition, even while, in the following years, prices rose and accidents increased in these fundamental services of the economy. Darwinism was recruited to the cause, as underdeveloped countries were forced to ‘liberalise’ their economies, selling their natural resources to foreign investors, rolling back the state, and removing obstacles to the ‘revolutionising’ power of market forces. In Latin America, the ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s and the ‘Washington Consensus’ of the 1990s saw debt crisis, restructuring and liberalisation plunge millions more into destitution, with or without inflated GDP statistics.

Amidst this neoliberal onslaught, Cuba stood almost alone. The collapse of the socialist bloc countries between 1989 and 1991 cut off 80 per cent of Cuba’s trade, GDP plummeted by 35 per cent and food shortages decreased caloric intake by nearly 40 per cent. The crisis was exacerbated by punitive laws tightening the US blockade in 1990, 1992, and 1996. Despite entering a ‘special period in time of peace’, the Cuban revolution did not renege on political commitments to socialist welfare, state planning and the predominance of state property, even while forced to introduce pragmatic reforms – limited concessions to market forces – to stimulate the economy and get vital goods to the people.

Following my A-levels, in the mid-1990s, I lived in Cuba with my sister – an austere time during the ‘Special Period’. Cubans dug deep to find what they needed to survive, as individuals and as a socialist society. In December 1995, we participated in the first solidarity brigade of the campaign from Britain, Rock around the Blockade, staying in an agricultural camp where hundreds of young Cubans had volunteered to labour in the fields, conscious that the revolution’s future depended on the population’s ability to feed itself. This was my first glimpse of the important relationship between consciousness and production, which lies at the heart of the economics of revolution.

Like anyone who has visited Cuba, I felt the omnipresence of Che Guevara on the island. What became clear, however, that Cubans recognised a more multifaceted individual than the one caricatured outside the island; the romantic guerrilla fighter with idealistic notions of how human beings are motivated and how social change is brought about. In the mid-1980s Cuba had pulled back from the Soviet model of socialism, entering a period known as ‘Rectification’. This involved an overt return to the ideas, approach and symbolism of Che. Two Cuban academics, Fernando Hernandez Heredia and Carlos Tablada, published seminal works providing the theoretical basis for this move – linking Che’s promotion of voluntary labour and consciousness to his Marxist analysis of capitalism and his critique of the Soviet system which had relied on capitalist tools to build socialism.

Che was not alone in the 1960s in criticising the USSR for neglecting questions of consciousness and failing to put human beings at the centre of development – many Marxist intellectuals in Western Europe and the US had done the same. Having seized state power, however, the Cuban revolutionary leaders moved beyond the critique to the task of transformation. Che faced the challenge of demonstrating that there was an alternative approach – the possibility of carrying out the transition to socialism in an underdeveloped country, without relying on capitalist mechanisms (the law of value, the profit motive, competition, material incentives, and all those A-Level principles). What practical policies could be implemented to transform the consciousness of individuals and put the working class in control, whilst increasing the wealth of the country?

My historian’s curiosity was stirred. Hardly any information about Che’s practical work as a member of the Cuban government between 1959 and 1965 was available. Che had created a system of economic management which was unique to socialism – the budgetary finance system; but what did that involve and how was it different? I set out to Cuba to find out.

This book is the result of six years of research, analysis, writing and editing. My investigations uncovered new archival material, including the internal transcripts of the bimonthly meetings in the Ministry of Industry headed by Che from 1961 and his critical notes on the Soviet Manual of Political Economy, predicting the return of capitalism to the socialist bloc; a document so controversial that it was kept under lock and key for 40 years. I met and interviewed fifty of Che’s closest colleagues and compañeros, some of whom had never spoken formally about their experiences of working at Che’s side while he served as President of the National Bank, head of the Department of Industrialisation and Minister of Industries between 1959-1965.

The early 1960s in Cuba was a period of turmoil and transition; nationalisations, the shift in trade to the socialist bloc, the introduction of planning, the exodus of professionals, the imposition of the US blockade, attack, sabotage and the threat of nuclear conflagration. Yet under Che’s leadership, Cuban industry stabilised, diversified and grew – testimony to his capacity for economic analysis, structural organisation and the mobilisation of resources, both human and material. His approach was based on his study of Marx’s analysis of the capitalist mode of production, his engagement with socialist political economy debates and his recourse to the managerial and technological advances of capitalist corporations. Che’s promotion of voluntary labour and his emphasis on consciousness were not idealism but part of the search for ways to undermine the law of value, moving away from capitalist mechanisms in the construction of socialism.

As Minister of Industries, Che set up nine research and development institutes, studying everything from the mechanisation of the sugar harvest and a sugar derivatives industry, nickel production, green medicine, oil exploration, the chemical industry, to computing and electronics (at a time when there was just one computer on the island – a betting machine for the greyhound races). He integrated psychology as a management tool, secretly organised the printing of new banknotes, devised a new salary scale, promoted workers’ management, inventions and innovations. In six tumultuous years, Che made an indelible contribution to Cuban development.

There have been few more poignant moments in history to talk about the economics of revolution. 2009 is the 50th anniversary of the Cuban revolution – contradictions and challenges persist, but the Revolution remains vibrant. We see the growing radicalisation of social movements and governments in Latin America and the consolidation of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) trade and cooperation agreements between them. This is also a period of acute crisis for the global capitalist system.

In late September 2008, George W Bush, perhaps the US’s most neoliberal, anti-regulation, aggressively imperialist frontman in history declared: ‘The market is not functioning properly.’ Bankers, entrepreneurs, and moneyspinners, went from being hailed as the good guys who kept the economy dynamic, to facing public opprobrium and shareholder rage over the bonus systems which rewarded incompetence and greed.

Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, has poured enormous sums of money into the US economy, propping up failing banks and financial services, car manufacturers and the housing sector. Rational economic man has given way to an unprecedented level of state intervention in a desperate attempt to save the capitalist system – well beyond the state subsidiaries so mocked and criticised in the socialist countries by neoliberal commentators.

Huge companies like General Motors are going bankrupt, not because they are technologically stagnant or unproductive, but because of the restraints imposed by capitalism’s financial mechanisms and the crisis of profitability. Workers, skilled and manual, are being made redundant. Hundreds of US citizens join tent cities scattered around the capitals of highly industrialised US states, not because there are insufficient houses, but because families are thrown onto the street when they can’t afford to pay rent and mortgages. Where is the rationality in any of this? In London, at the G20 in April, Obama and Prime Minister Brown recognised the end of the Washington Consensus. After years of rolling back the state, governments around the world are now impelled to intervene.

Guevara was right to recognise the technological advances of the capitalist corporations and aspire to their high productivity and efficiency. But he was also correct in the view that state planning and centralised budgets are the only rational way to organise the economy; with production for people’s need, not for financial profit. In rescuing Guevara’s work as a member of the Cuban government, this book hopes to place his economic ideas firmly on the table for consideration in the search for alternatives to the bitter legacy and human suffering of collapsing market economies.

Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution by Helen Yaffe,
Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 368pp, hbk £70, pbk £17.99

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No workers’ paradise

admin — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 20:28:18 +0000

Seen some of the news stories coming out of Havana lately, Diana? Here’s a taster: Carlos Mateu, vice-minister of labour and social security, has announced a radical shake-up of the pay structure in the public sector, which comprises 90 per cent of the Cuban economy.

‘Egalitarianism is not convenient,’ announces one government newspaper – not that there are any other kinds of newspaper in Cuba, of course. So while workers are to be eligible for a bonus of up to 5 per cent on their meagre £10-a-month salaries, managers are set for pay rises of 30 per cent.

Meanwhile, many analysts – including some of those on the spot – are predicting moves towards the reintroduction of capitalism in the contemporary Chinese or Vietnamese variant of authoritarian Market-Leninism. You insist this isn’t happening; we shall see.

I guess that, at bottom, the point of my objections to your starry-eyed support for Cuba is that I am not convinced that the government is pursuing a socialist project. As the genuine left used to point out to Communist Party fellow travellers after the rise of the Berlin Wall, a country cannot be a workers’ paradise if so many workers are prepared to risk their lives to get the hell out.

Of course the affluence of Miami accounts for a lot. But it is not the main reason for discontent on Havana’s streets, as you will know if you talk to many ordinary Cubans. The desire for greater political freedom is very real.

I don’t know whether or not you consider yourself a Marxist, Diana. But as the Cuban leadership applies that designation to itself, let’s consider Cuba from the standpoint of the Marxist theory of the state.

For a start, the working class played no central role in the 1959 revolution. That was entirely by design; it was not accorded any significant part in the plans of the 12 members of the 26 July Movement who survived the Granma landing, who did not at that point consider the revolution socialist in conception.

At no subsequent point did workers and peasants gain control over Cuba’s economy or society. A small strata – and yes, I would call them a ruling class – exercises this instead. It is this elite that directs the nationalised industries and runs the collective farms.

If Cuba has not degenerated into a family business, how come it is in the gift of a sickly Fidel simply to announce that kid brother is taking over?

Nor is the Cuban state in any sense withering away, as the continued influence of the armed forces underlines. Far from being some sort of souped-up revolutionary militia, as you seem to believe, the Cuban military – which was quick to move onto the streets when Fidel announced he was standing down – remains a body of armed men that in the last resort guarantees the rule of the elite over the subordinate classes. That’s not my idea of socialism.

‘Poder popular’ is anything but people’s power. It represents essentially a devolution to the local level of the detailed implementation of government plans and strategies. It is a top-down exercise, a transmission belt for a ruling party, in which all candidates for local office come pre-approved by that ruling party. The ‘limitations’ Diana cites are actually the entire point of the system.

None of this is to apologise for the neoliberalism of the British state. But let’s not put scare quotes around ‘democracy’ in reference to the UK, either. As a university lecturer, Ms Raby tables her criticisms of the political system from the safety of a reasonably well-paid public sector job. In Cuba, this would put her behind bars.

And while I would allow that Chavez deserves a certain degree of credit for his brand of populist petro-social democracy, the model is simply not transferable to countries that lack Venezuela’s oil endowment, with or without Cuban inspiration.

But to speak of some sort of new radical axis in Latin America is to miss the point. Apologetics on behalf of illusory workers’ fatherlands should not inform the British left’s current thinking. The tasks we face are rather closer to home.

Cuba: response to Dave Osler

admin — Thu, 29 May 2008 15:58:37 +0000

Dave Osler’s reply to my initial piece on Cuba is a caricature. I find it sad that such a dedicated activist on the socialist and democratic left should fall so completely for liberal clichés.

To begin with a few of Dave’s specific allegations. It is a myth that the ‘Castroites’ were fundamentally middle-class. Although some obviously fit that description, the majority of the revolutionaries were of worker or peasant background.

Secondly, the Cuban leadership is not ‘a family business’. Raul is there on his merits, having played a leading role in the struggle alongside his brother from the beginning. None of Fidel’s children has a significant role in the government.

It is also a caricature to compare Cuba to former Latin American military regimes. This is a revolutionary army which shares the same values and conditions of life as the majority of Cubans and has never taken repressive action against its own people; and in any case the regular military establishment has been reduced in size in recent years with the adoption of the ‘War of All the People’ defence strategy.

But Cuba, for Dave, is ‘a dictatorship’ and ‘not a democracy of any sort’. What exactly does he mean by this? In particular, what is a democracy? The remarkable success of liberal ‘democracy’ in the UK, the US or most capitalist countries in co-opting, neutralising or dividing any movement for real popular empowerment should give pause for thought. (In no way is this an apology for arbitrary rule, but rather a plea to consider seriously alternative mechanisms of popular empowerment.)

Democracy – rule by the people – begins from below. It means direct engagement of communities, beginning at street and neighbourhood level, in running their own affairs. Similarly at the workplace, in factory, field, office or school, it implies direct worker and citizen involvement. At one remove, democracy is the coordinated authority of local communities in running municipal, county or provincial affairs, and at further remove, in national government.

Cuba has a vigorous system of local democracy. The direct nomination of candidates in community meetings and their election as delegates of popular power in multi-candidate, secret-ballot elections, plus their obligation to report back in person every six months in not just one but several local meetings (with a real possibility of recall), guarantees a degree of local control unimaginable in the UK. I have witnessed such meetings myself and they are quite impressive.

True, at higher level there are limitations, but there is still a very real effort to ensure popular input into decision-making through systematic consultation processes by commissions of the National Assembly, ‘workers’ parliaments’ and similar devices.

To say that Cuba has ‘plenty of political prisoners’ is also seriously misleading. Even the numbers given by international agencies are quite small, and virtually all of them are detained for illegally taking financing from the US interests section.

So long as the US is actively committed to the overthrow of the revolution it is impossible to have a legitimate and independent opposition in Cuba. Yes, this does limit the full expression of socialist democracy, but analysis has to be based on actual existing conditions and not just on abstract ideal models, which is what David Osler does.

Another myth repeated by Dave is that Cuba faces ‘economic sclerosis’. In actual fact it has enjoyed steady recovery for 14 years since the depth of the crisis in 1994, and last year posted the highest growth rate in Latin America at 12 per cent. Reforms are needed (particularly in agriculture) and are being introduced, but on neither neoliberal nor Chinese lines, both of which have been explicitly rejected.

Nominal salaries in Cuba are indeed tiny by Western standards, but the importance of the ‘social wage’ and of worker entitlement makes comparisons very misleading. It is not only a matter of free health care and education, but highly subsidised rates for electricity, gas and other utilities, housing laws which ensure that rents and mortgages do not exceed 20 per cent of household income, and other measures to ensure a basic civilised minimum for all. Direct worker involvement in enterprises, unions and People’s Councils also means that arbitrary sackings, excessive overtime or other infringements of labour rights are virtually unknown.

Of course there is a scarcity of consumer goods in Cuba, but this is an inevitable consequence of the blockade and also of the attempt to achieve a rational system of distribution. If the world ever adopts the kind of environmental measures advocated by green activists as essential for human survival, we may all have to accept restrictions which will make Cuban rationing look like a consumer paradise.

Finally, Dave completely ignores my point about Cuba’s significance for the new wave of popular and progressive governments in Latin America. But then they probably don’t measure up to his high standards either.

If the revolution does not go forward, it will go backwards

admin — Wed, 14 May 2008 12:57:33 +0000

China has become a huge neoliberal sweatshop with the unbelievable impertinence still to fly the red flag. North Korea is little more than a famine-ridden hellhole suffering under a particularly oppressive hereditary quasi-monarchy. But many want to believe that there an island nation in the Caribbean that can meaningfully call itself socialist without obvious breach of the Trade Descriptions Act.

For comrades such as Diana Raby, Cuba is ‘living proof that another world really is possible’. The key point in her argument seems to be that the Cuban system – unlike its analogues in eastern Europe – wasn’t imposed by the Red Army. It emerged instead from a indigenous revolutionary process that grew over from nationalism into what she calls ‘socialist democracy’.

Cuba is a dictatorship

We’ll come to the issue of the dynamics of the Cuban revolution later. But at this point, it is crucial to be clear about one thing; Cuba is not a socialist democracy. Indeed, it is not a democracy of any sort. The country is a one-party state. There are no independent trade unions, and the regime maintains the strictest imaginable censorship over the media. There are no gulags as such, but plenty of political prisoners.

In plain English, Cuba is a dictatorship. It would be unforgivable to utilise the slogans of Seattle here; Cuba is anything but a foretaste of the kind of world for which the anti-globalisation movement stands. Yet Diana contends that Cuba was ‘never really Stalinist’. What are we supposed to gather from the word ‘really’ here? If Cuba genuinely was not Stalinist, it has to be said that its impression was right up to Rory Bremner standard on this score.

Diana rightly maintains that the driving force in 1959 and afterwards was Castro’s 26 July Movement, rather than the Moscow-aligned Partido Socialista Popular (PSP). But that is to miss the point. The defining characteristic of Stalinism is not alignment to Moscow, but the capture of state power by a new potential ruling class that proceeds to operate on the basis of a collectivised economy.

Stalin positively didn’t want Tito to take over Yugoslavia, and dithered in his support for Mao until the Chinese revolution was a fait accompli. Diana would presumably see both Yugoslavia and China as examples of what she calls ‘original revolutions’, but that does not mean that the resultant states were not Stalinist in the sense Marxist theory uses the term.

The ouster of Batista paved the way not for workers’ control or some form of socialism from below, but initially the exercise of government by the middle-class based Castroites in league with elements of the army. The PSP was subsequently incorporated into the hegemonic bloc. The presidency in Cuba thus became a family business, the private property of Fidel to hand over to his younger brother at a suitable juncture. Not coincidentally, Raul was previously head of Cuba’s military. Ultimately, power resides – as in many other countries in Latin America – with the men in the olive green fatigues.

What is Raul going to do now he is in the top job? Well, Cuba currently faces economic sclerosis, despite the virtues some would see in its brand of central planning. The new president – according to many commentators, anyway – is looking at China as a role model for his nation’s future. If such speculation is correct, it is difficult to guess what will be left for starry-eyed Cuba-watchers to cheerlead in five or ten years’ time.

Polarising of Cuban society

Yes, of course the US embargo and the impact of the collapse of the USSR are part – although by no means all – of the explanation for the predicament in which the country now finds itself. But there is no getting away from the conclusion that Cuban society is rapidly polarising, and on class lines at that. Beyond party cadre and those in high-ranking state jobs, the government enjoys few strong supporters. The younger a person is – and the darker the colour of his or her skin – the more likely they are to openly admit they would rather be living in Miami.

Meanwhile, another layer in Cuban society certainly isn’t hard up. Entry to Havana’s premier salsa spot costs more than a month’s white-collar wages. Yet most of the several hundred strong crowd are young Cubans. Many of the conspicuously well-off benefit from remittances from abroad. Others have jobs – formal or informal – in the tourist sector. Some of the women are not prostitutes, you understand; they just put out for foreign men with enough hard currency to show a girl a good time. Even bellboys earn more than university professors, so long as they pick up tips en convertibles. And to get to be a bellboy – so I was told by a qualified architect currently working as a cinema usher – you need ‘connections’.

Of course there are counter-arguments, and Diana rehashes most of them. Important as democracy is, it is not the sole criteria on which to judge a country. Turkey holds regular elections, but still brutally represses the Kurdish population. In multi-party India – the self-styled ‘largest democracy in the world’ – hundreds of millions starve. Cuba, on the other hand, provides universal education and the highest standards of health care in the third world. It’s the only poor country I have ever seen that isn’t scarred by shanty towns. Even those locals that grumble most don’t dispute that.

Havana might not be heaven

Havana might not be heaven, but it sure ain’t Haiti either. It’s just that – not unreasonably – the population wants a system that provides them with toilet paper. Oh, and some fresh fish once in a while would be good.

For the democratic left, then, the conclusions are clear. We should oppose the US embargo on straightforward democratic grounds. But at the same time, we need to stress that a democratic opening is essential if Cuba is to avoid upheaval on the scale of 1989 in the Soviet satellite states. If the revolution does not go forward, it will go backwards. I’d hate to go back in a few years and find that heart-stoppingly beautiful Old Havana had reverted to its former role as one big extended casino-cum-whorehouse theme park for gringos.

David Osler is a journalist and author. See his blog here www.davidosler.com

Why Cuba is still important

admin — Wed, 14 May 2008 11:42:20 +0000

Many people admire Cuba for its achievements in health care, education and sport, but argue it should be more democratic and adopt liberal political reforms. With all the excitement generated by new popular and revolutionary processes in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador and the creative ferment of Latin American social movements, Cuba is dismissed as old hat, no longer relevant, or even (heaven forfend!) Stalinist.

But Cuba was never really Stalinist, even if the Cold War climate caused it to adopt inappropriate aspects of the Soviet model. It was an extraordinary and original revolution which took everyone by surprise in 1959 and the 1960s, inspiring the left throughout the world and igniting an unprecedented wave of revolutionary struggles across the region. Its inspiration was profoundly Cuban and Latin American: in Fidel’s words it was ‘as Cuban as the palm trees,’ deriving its ideas from José Martí, ‘our Apostle, who said that the fatherland belonged to all and was for the good of all,’ and from the Afro-Cuban Mambí freedom fighters of the 19th century wars against Spanish colonialism.

It was not the old Communist Party (the Partido Socialista Popular, PSP) which made the Cuban revolution, but the 26 July Movement (M-26-7), a broad, democratic and flexible popular movement dedicated to social justice and anti-imperialism. The PSP jumped on the bandwagon at the last minute when it was clear that the insurgency was going to win. It provided trained and dedicated cadres who helped to make possible implementation of the revolution’s ambitious social and economic programmes, but it never really ran the show. This was made clear in the Escalante affair early in 1962, when Fidel denounced the opportunism of the old PSP leader Hernán Escalante who was trying to put old party hacks in key positions and exclude genuine revolutionaries. Escalante was packed off to a diplomatic exile in Prague and from then on, despite inevitable Soviet influence, ultimate decision-making power remained in the hands of the brilliant, unorthodox and creative guerrilla fighters of the Sierra Maestra.

Traditions of revolutionary struggle

Fidel, Che, Raúl, Camilo Cienfuegos, Celia Sánchez, Juan Almeida and their companions were successful because they sprang from the popular culture of Cuba and the unbroken tradition of revolutionary struggle since the mambises: they were the true organic intellectuals of the Cuban popular movement. And they also – especially, but not only, Che Guevara – represented the Latin American spirit of rebellion, unity and collective struggle going back to Simón Bolívar. ‘Above all we feel the interests of our Fatherland and of Nuestra América [Our America], which is also a Patria Grande [a Greater Fatherland],’ declared Fidel only three weeks after victory.

This feeling was shared by other Latin Americans: in February 1959 the then Chilean Senator Salvador Allende declared that ‘the Cuban revolution does not belong only to you…we are dealing with the most significant movement ever to have occurred in the Americas.’ Two months later Gloria Gaitán, daughter of the assassinated Colombian popular leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, proclaimed that the Cuban experience was ‘the beginning of the great liberation of Nuestra América.’

Popular political empowerment

The ideology of the revolution was one of popular empowerment, unity, collective liberation and distrust of political parties, and conventional politicians of all stripes; remarkably similar to the spirit which animates today’s Latin American transformations and the anti-globalisation movements around the world. It followed no dogmatic formula, indeed, socialism was not even mentioned in the early discourse of the leadership. It was not until April 1961, two years and four months after the initial victory and during the counter-revolutionary Bay of Pigs invasion, that Fidel declared that it was a socialist revolution. For sure, as US hostility intensified and the need for Soviet support became critical, he proclaimed himself to be a Marxist-Leninist, thereby signalling a cold-war alignment with Moscow; but Cuba never entirely lost its originality, and since 1989 it has gradually returned to its Latin and Caribbean roots while striving to preserve its remarkable socialist achievements.

Cuba’s relevance today consists not only of the admirable example of its achievements in health, education and social welfare, but also its direct practical assistance to other countries embarking on processes of radical transformation. Without the assistance of thousands of Cubans Chávez would have found it almost impossible to implement the remarkable Barrio Adentro health mission or the Robinson literacy mission. Similarly Evo Morales would have been unable to implement such programmes in Bolivia, at least in the short run – and given the critical political situation in both countries, the short run was and is crucial.

But also, in broader political terms, without Cuba Chávez (and hence, at one remove, Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador) would have had much greater difficulty in gaining credibility for projects of popular political empowerment implemented through the appropriation and transformation of the state. The political disorientation of the global left was such that only a totally unexpected movement like that of Chávez could offer a way forward and without Cuba’s inspiration and support at crucial moments, Chávez might well have failed. Without Cuba, then, no Venezuela and without Venezuela, no Bolivia, no Ecuador, and no rebirth of Sandinista Nicaragua.

This does not mean that Venezuela, or the other countries, are copying Cuba. They are very clear that they are pursuing independent paths, borrowing from and supporting each other and Cuba, but without making the old mistake of trying to impose a uniform orthodox template. In any case the Cubans have been explicit in saying that they do not regard their own socialism as a blueprint to be copied.

Does Cuba need to democratise?

Unlike in Eastern Europe, in Cuba socialism is home-grown and not imposed by the Red Army; and by comparison with Russia or China, Cuba had the virtue of being a much smaller and culturally homogeneous society (even making allowances for the heritage of slavery), making it possible to unite ninety percent of the population in a liberation movement against Yanqui imperialism and a small Miami-oriented oligarchy. The strategic and tactical genius of Fidel Castro, a quite remarkable charismatic leader who came to incarnate the sentiments of the Cuban people, opened the way to a revolutionary project of unprecedented clarity and generosity.

Many Western socialists and progressive activists argue that Cuba needs to democratise, but they fail to appreciate both the realities of the US blockade and the characteristics of Cuba’s own socialist democracy. Unlike in the Soviet Union or China, in Cuba local delegates of popular power are elected in multi-candidate polls in which the Communist Party is legally prohibited from intervening, and have to report back every six months to open meetings of their electors who have the power of recall. Municipal assemblies and People’s Councils function as real instances of direct democracy in which local people intervene actively in running their own affairs. Certainly at national level there are limitations on freedom of organisation and expression, but here too major issues are often put to the people for debate in workers’ parliaments’ and other discussion forums. It is this which gives the Cuban system legitimacy, and those who deny this will never understand why after 50 years the revolution is still an ongoing reality.

Yes, there will be and need to be reforms in Cuba, but not the liberal capitalist reforms advocated by Western governments and media. With all its defects, Cuba – along with Venezuela and other countries of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) – is living proof that another world really is possible.

Dr Diana Raby, author of Democracy and Revolution: Latin America and Socialism Today. Click here to read the book’s first chapter

Caribbean Cold War

admin — Wed, 01 May 1996 00:05:00 +0000

So Clinton has signed the Helms/Burton bill, citing Cuba’s ‘scorn for international law’. What a joke. In the course of its endeavours to keep the world safe for democracy the US has broken international law more times than I’ve had hot dinners and done it with impunity.

When the International Court of Justice in the Hague in 1986 found the US guilty on eight separate counts of gross intervention in the affairs of a sovereign state (Nicaragua) and asked it to make reparation for all injury caused, the US simply told it to bugger off, asserting that its actions were outside the province of any international court.

Even the poor old United Nations has condemned the US trade embargo of Cuba by an overwhelming majority for three years running (1993-5: 88-4, 101-2 and 117-3) and been totally ignored by the convicted party. This is perhaps why the British, Canadian and Mexican governments don’t propose a motion to the Security Council condemning this further legislation which sets out to prevent free trade between Cuba and the rest of the world in terms which are in blatant breach of the UN Charter and the aforesaid International Law. They’ve probably worked out that it would be like farting ‘Annie Laurie’ down a keyhole, as we used to say in the good old days. Be that as it may, the truth is plain: this is an exercise of arrogant power which stinks.

The most astonishing thing about Cuba is quite simply that it has survived. After over 35 years of the most ruthless economic violence, 35 years of unremitting and virulent hostility from the US, Cuba remains an independent sovereign state. This is a quite remarkable achievement. Not many states have remained independent or ‘sovereign’ for long in the US ‘backyard’. Here are three short extracts from Duncan Green’s book Silent Revolution. This is the first:

’10,000 delegates of the World Bank sat down to dinner. The dinner was catered by Ridgewells at $200 per person. Guests began with crab cakes, caviar, creme fraiche, smoked salmon and mini beef wellingtons. The fish course was lobster with corn rounds followed by citrus sorbet. The entree was duck with lime sauce served with artichoke bottoms filled with baby carrots. A hearts of palm salad was offered accompanied by sage cheese souffles with a port wine dressing. Dessert was a German chocolate turnip sauced with raspberry coulis, ice cream bon bons and flaming coffee royale.’The wine list isn’t mentioned.

Here is the second extract:

‘The tiny adobe house is crammed with gnarled Bolivian mining women in patched shawls and battered felt hats, whose calloused hands work breaking up rocks on the surface in search of scraps of tin ore. The paths between the miners’ huts are strewn with plastic bags and human excrement, dried black in the sun.’

This is a Bolivian woman speaking:

‘In the old days women used to stay at home because the men had work. Now we have to work. Many of our children have been abandoned. Their fathers have left and there’s no love left in us when we get home late from work. We leave food for them. They play in the streets. There are always accidents and no doctors. 1 feel like a slave in my own country. We get up at 4am and at 11 at night we are still working. I have vomited blood for weeks at a time and still had to keep working.’

No doubt after dinner the World Bank delegates discussed the Bolivian economy and made their recommendations.

This monstrous inequality is precisely what inspired the Cuban revolution. The revolution set out to correct such grotesque polarisation and was determined to ensure that the Cuban people never have to endure such degradation again.

It understood that recognition of and respect for human dignity were crucial obligations which devolved upon a civilised society. Its achievements are remarkable. It constructed a health service which can hardly be rivalled and established an extraordinary level of literacy. All this the US found to be abominable Marxist-Leninist subversion and naturally set out to destroy it. It has failed. And it must be true to say that Cuba could never have survived unless it possessed a formidable centre of pride, faith and solidarity.

There is the question of human rights. I myself don’t believe in the relativity of human rights. I don’t believe that ‘local conditions’, as it were, or a specific cultural disposition can justify suppression of dissent or the individual conscience. In Cuba I have always understood harsh treatment of dissenting voices as stemming from a ‘siege situation’ imposed upon it from outside. And I believe that to a certain extent that is true. But equally, apologists for Israeli actions have also stressed a siege situation brought about by external threat. Mordechai Vanunu is a dissent ing voice in Israel and was sentenced to 18 years solitary confinement for disclosing Israel’s nuclear capacity to the world.

I am a trustee of the Vanunu estate and a defender of his right to speak. I must therefore logically defend, for example, Maria Elena Cruz Vareia’s right to speak also. Socialism must be about active and participatory debate.

However, the wrinkled moral frown of the US has always been good for a laugh. ‘We deplore etc, etc the violations of human rights in such and such a country.’ In their own country one and a half million people are in jail, 3,000 are on Death Row, nearly 50 million live under the poverty line, effectively disenfranchised, there is a huge black underclass, abused and condemned, 38 states practise the death penalty, corruption is vibrant and active at all levels of the hierarchy, police brutality is systematic, heavily racist, lethal. Human rights, where are you?

There exists today widespread propaganda which asserts that socialism is dead. But if to be a socialist is to be a person convinced that the words ‘the common good’ and ‘social justice’ actually mean something; if to be a socialist is to be outraged at the contempt in which millions and millions of people are held by those in power, by ‘market forces’, by international financial institutions; if to be a socialist is to be a person determined to do everything in his or her power to alleviate these unforgivably degraded lives, then socialism can never be dead because these aspirations will never die.