Chomsky:

Cuba Controversy
<http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=41&ItemID=3534>

by Michael Albert; April 28, 2003

A controversy has arisen on the left in the U.S. about recent events in
Cuba. The Cuban government has enacted draconian legal measures against
opponents. The U.S. government, having provoked the situation by decades
of machinations including recent acts, will very likely use the events to
justify further intervention against the island's people.

Some leftists say that given this dangerous reality, one should only
support the Cuban decisions, or at most be silent about them.

Other leftists (myself included) have openly criticized the decisions,
though this has taken the form of two different petitions (one that I
signed because I felt it placed the criticisms of Cuba in the proper
context, criticizing also U.S. imperialism, and the other that I did not
sign, feeling that it offered inadequate context and balance).

Regarding the recent events, in my view to have better health care,
housing, education, and general social relations than virtually all other
comparably developed countries does not justify dictatorship in Cuba, much
less draconian repressive behavior by that dictatorship. For any state to
execute people is bad enough. For a state to catch, try, sentence, and
execute people in a week is beyond legal, moral, or social comprehension.
To fear external intervention by a massive power that has intervened
continually for decades and now threatens to do much more, is very
prudent. But to crack down on internal dissent and violate proper
jurisprudence is not only contrary to what the warranted fear justifies,
it actually fuels interventionist rationales.

But the above assessment doesn't address what people are actually
currently conflicted about, which is not the validity of criticisms, but
instead whether criticisms should be put to print at all, given the
current context.

To understand the U.S. role in Cuba is trivially easy. The hypocrisy and
cynicism of U.S. policy are brutally evident in the historical record.
Activist opposition to U.S. Cuba policy should be unrelenting. Thankfully,
there is no left controversy about this.

An issue which gets considerably less attention, however, and about which
controversy does rage, is understanding more about Cuba itself, and about
the efficacy of leftists criticizing the Cuban government's choices and
Cuba's institutional structures.

In a 1962 speech titled "The Duty of the Revolutionary." Fidel Castro
said,

"The summary of the nightmare which torments America from one end to the
other is that on this continent ... about four persons per minute die of
hunger, of curable illness, or premature old age. Fifty-five hundred per
day, two million per year, ten million each five years. These deaths could
easily be avoided, but nevertheless they take place. Two-thirds of the
Latin American population lives briefly and lives under constant threat of
death. A holocaust of lives, which in 15 years has caused twice the number
of deaths as World War I. Meanwhile, from Latin America a continuous
torrent of money flows to the United States: some $4,000 a minute, $5
million a day, $2 billion a year, $10 billion every five years. For each
thousand dollars that leaves us there remains one corpse. A thousand
dollars per corpse: That is the price of what is called imperialism. A
thousand dollars per death ... four deaths every minute."

In the four decades since Castro's assessment, for most of Latin America
except Cuba, the above statistics have improved little, or in some cases
even worsened. In the 1980s, for example, income in Latin America,
excluding Cuba, declined by 8 percent, according to the Inter-American
Development Bank. Castro's injunction in the same speech is therefore as
apropos today as it was then:

"The duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution. It is known
that the revolution will triumph in America and throughout the world, but
it is not for revolutionaries to sit in the doorways of their houses
waiting for the corpse of imperialism to pass by. The role of Job doesn't
suit a revolutionary. Each year that the liberation of America is speeded
up will mean the lives of millions of children saved, millions of
intelligences saved for culture, an infinite quantity of pain spared the
people."

Little has changed, as well, regarding who and what is the principle enemy
of the people of Latin America or regarding the magnitude of the crimes
that need rectification. And therefore little has changed regarding the
urgency of transcending U.S. imperial and neo-colonial domination.

But what about "liberation?" Have the positive goals that a revolution
against capitalism, sexism, and racism should strive for changed? What
does Cuba's experience teach us in these respects?

Despite decades of CIA-supported terror and U.S.-imposed economic boycott,
Cuba greatly exceeds most of its Latin American neighbors in intellectual,
cultural, health, educational, and political accomplishments. This
deserves effusive praise and support.

At the same time, no matter how you look at it, one-person-rule through a
bureaucratic hierarchical party is dictatorship, even when, as in Cuba,
the leader is in many respects benevolent. Castro is the hub; the Cuban
Communist Party radiates the spokes. Parallel grassroots institutions
including what is called poder popular represent a participatory political
trend that has, however, failed to transcend Party manipulation.

To inaugurate the 1970s, Castro proclaimed:

"The formulas of revolutionary process can never be administrative
formulas.... Sending a man down from the top to solve a problem involving
15 or 20 thousand people is not the same thing as the problems of these 15
or 20 thousand people-problems having to do with their community-being
solved by virtue of the decisions of the people, of the community, who are
close to the source of the problems.... We must do away with all
administrative methods and use mass methods everywhere."

Cuba had the Leninist, hierarchical Party and also the popular democratic
"poder popular." But, Castro's words notwithstanding, the former
consistently dominated the latter. Oversimplifying a complex and
variegated political history, it follows that three main impediments have
obstructed and continue to obstruct Castro's stated hope to substitute
political participation for political administration:

1. The Cuban Communist Party monopolizes all legitimate means of wielding
political power and thereby ensures that there is only one Cuban political
line, that of the Party and its leadership. The first problem is political
Leninism.

2. The omnipresence of Fidel Castro leaves little room for any popular
vehicles to attain true decentralized grassroots power. The second problem
is Fidelismo.

3. The willingness of the U.S. to manipulate political differences and use
force to destroy Third World revolutions provokes and is used to justify
regimentation. The third problem facing Cuba is the not-so-benevolent
Uncle Sam.

As Castro and Cuba face the problem of succession, as U.S. boycott and
aggression immorally diminish the life options of Cubans, and as the
corruption of the Cuban political bureaucracy increasingly alienates the
Cuban populace, two possible political paths beckon the island. Cuba can
return to its early aspirations and move from Leninist party structures
and dictatorship to participatory democracy premised on mass
participation, or, instead, Cuba can defend authoritarianism and preserve
elite privileges under the guise of "Defending the Revolution."

In the political realm, in practice, it follows that choices that move
Cuba toward greater regimentation are choices for a repressive path and
not a liberatory one. When the Cuban government decides to utilize the
death penalty, to speed prosecutions, and to engage in other repressive
acts ostensibly to protect its survival (but having the opposite
implication, at least regarding opinions abroad) it is bad enough - but
when the Cuban government speaks as though doing these things is some kind
of positive and worthy pursuit in and of itself - rather than indicating
that such actions are at the very best a hated necessity imposed from
without - it communicates that regimentation and centralization are seen
as virtues and not as horrible deviations from preferred aspirations.

What about the economic dimension? Is the story mixed there too?

For all its worthy accomplishments, the Cuban economy is far from
liberated. Planners, state bureaucrats, local managers, and technocrats
monopolize decisions while workers carry out orders. In the resulting
economy, a ruling coordinator class plans the efforts of workers and
appropriates inflated pay, perks, and status.

Cuba's coordinator economy has given the Cuban people pride in national
accomplishments, and major material gains in health care, housing,
literacy, security, and certainly at least until the boycott, in overall
standards of living. For these reasons the Cuban revolution is deservedly
popular. But however admirable these achievements are when compared to
conditions in Guatemala, El Salvador, or even Watts or the South Bronx,
and however Herculean they are when considering the U.S.-imposed
conditions under which the gains had to be attained, this does not justify
applying the label "liberated." For that, there would have to be no ruling
class, and workers would have to collectively administer their own
efforts, with solidarity and equity.

However, as with politics, Cuban economic history has not followed a
simple trajectory. The coordinator model has been dominant, but there has
always been an alternative spirit manifested, sometimes in hope, sometimes
in actual experiments, but regrettably never leading to liberated economic
relations.

In 1962 and 1963, impressed with what they saw when visiting the Soviet
Union, and seeing no other options, Cuba installed economic forms
mimicking the traditional Soviet model. By 1964, disenchantment set in and
a great debate ensued. In a letter written from Africa in 1965,
summarizing the spirit of the recommendations he championed in that
debate, Che Guevara wrote:

"The new society in process of formation has to compete very hard with the
past. This makes itself felt not only in the individual consciousness,
weighted down by the residues of an education and an upbringing
systematically oriented toward the isolation of the individual, but also
by the very nature of this transition period, with the persistence of
commodity relations. The commodity is the economic cell of capitalist
society: as long as it exists its effects will make themselves felt in the
organization of production and therefore in consciousness."

In the debate, Che disdained the use of "profitability," "material
interest," and a "commodity mentality," arguing instead for emphasizing
morality, collectivity, solidarity, and the criterion of use value in
meeting human needs. He did not, however, champion nor even raise the
issue of direct control by workers over their own workplaces or over
economic decision-making in general.

Castro adopted a similarly humane but incomplete stance saying that:

"We will never create a socialist consciousness ... with a 'dollar sign'
in the minds and hearts of our men and women ... those who wish to solve
problems by appealing to personal selfishness, by appealing to
individualistic effort, forgetful of society, are acting in a reactionary
manner, conspiring, although inspired by the best intentions in the world,
against the possibilities of creating a truly socialist spirit."

Castro acknowledged that his desires to equalize incomes and forgo
competition and individual incentives would be incomprehensible to some.
He knew that to "learned," "experienced" economists "this would seem to go
against the laws of economics."

"To these economists an assertion of this type sounds like heresy, and
they say that the revolution is headed for defeat. But it so happens that
in this field there are two special branches. One is the branch of the
'pure' economist. But there is another science, a deeper science which is
truly revolutionary science. It is the science of ... confidence in human
beings. If we agreed that people are incorrigible, that people are
incapable of learning; if we agreed that people are incapable of
developing their conscience-then we would have to say that the 'brainy'
economists were right, that the Revolution would be headed for defeat and
that it would be fighting the laws of economics..."

Over the years the economic debate in Cuba has vacillated between two
poles: competition versus solidarity, profit-maximizing versus meeting
human needs, markets versus central planning, and individual incentives
and inequality versus collective incentives and equality, with many swings
back and forth. Consider the following comments from Castro when the left
pole was in ascendancy:

"A financier, a pure economist, a metaphysician of revolutions would have
said, 'Careful, rents shouldn't be lowered one cent. Think of it from a
financial standpoint, from an economic standpoint, think of the pesos
involved!' Such persons have 'dollar signs' in their heads and they want
the people, also, to have 'dollar signs' in their hearts and heads! Such
people would not have made even one revolutionary law. In the name of
those principles they would have continued to charge the farmers interest
on loans; they would have charged for medical and hospital care; they
would have charged school fees; they would have charged for the boarding
schools that are completely free, all in the name of a metaphysical
approach to life. They would never have had the people's enthusiasm, the
masses' enthusiasm which is the prime factor, the basic factor, for a
people to advance, for a people to build, for a people to be able to
develop. And that enthusiasm on the part of the people, that support for
the revolution is something that can be measured in terms incomparably
superior to the adding and subtracting of the metaphysicians."

The problem has been that the left pole, which has admirably argued for
egalitarianism, solidarity, meeting needs, and collective incentives, has
also wrongly argued for extreme central planning rather than
decentralized, participatory planning with direct workplace democracy. And
the difficulty here is not only that something valuable wasn't included on
the left side of the debate, but that the positive goals the left
championed-solidarity, equity, collectivity-were subverted by the
enactment and experience of coordinator decision-making and central
planning, plus the absence of free speech, and political liberty. When the
left policy pole gained ascendancy the continuing lack of real
institutional participation and power on the part of workers meant that
their enthusiasm and talent were not unleashed in the hoped for manner.
Thus, after a few years of left influence over economic policy, the
economy would eventually falter, and the turn back to the right-always
urged by the Soviet advisers empowered by virtue of Cuba's dependence on
Russian aid-would be legitimated.

In the face of the fall of the Soviet model, Cuba has not jumped on the
free-market bandwagon preferring any alternative to resurgent commodity
economics and a sellout to the West. But, as the years push on, what can
they do instead?

One depressing and regrettably the most likely possibility is that they
will stay the current course, as they have over the past decade, defending
coordinatorism while trying to rectify its worst abuses, all in the name
of "defending the revolution."

About a decade ago, as the Soviet system was unraveling but before it was
no more, when an earlier version of this essay appeared, I wrote that the
above option "has three major problems. First, in the long run, it would
not permit workers and consumers to collectively manage their own affairs.
It would instead perpetuate coordinator rule no matter how successful the
battle to limit coordinators' appropriation of material privileges.
Second, in the short and medium term it would do little to elicit
increased productivity and allegiance from the Cuban populace in an effort
to ward off the hardships that further economic isolation will impose. And
third, again in the short and medium term, it would do little to gain
grassroots international support, which is the only possibility to
mitigate reductions in Soviet bloc aid. The virtue, from the perspective
of Cuba's elites, is that the approach would continue to defend elite
privileges and would not risk introducing short-run turmoil."

I suggested that a second and preferable option was "for Cuba to take the
current opportunity to return to the ideals of Che Guevara and an earlier
Fidel Castro, coupled with new awareness of the importance of economic
participation. This would mean installing a new economic system
emphasizing workplace democracy, consumer councils, an end to the division
between mental and manual labor, and a decentralized planning procedure in
which consumer and worker councils participate directly in formulating,
revising, and deciding their own activities. The problem with this option
is that it risks introducing disruption and would further alienate [elites
worldwide], and, from the perspective of domestic Cuban elites, it would
certainly challenge, and eventually eliminate their privileges. On the
other hand, besides being the only road to real [liberation], the left
approach has the virtue of elevating Cuba back into the role of the
leading experiment in liberation, thereby eliciting greater allegiance,
energy, and spirit at home, and substantial internationalist and leftist
grassroots support throughout the world."

It seems to me that a decade has been squandered on the wrong path, and
yes, I most certainly know that a considerable part of the culpability
lies with U.S. policy isolating the island, but that the second option
still exists. And it seems to me that leftists around the world, of course
committed to obstructing U.S. imperial designs, ought to make clear what
we think is a preferred way forward, and what we regard as a morally
wrong, socially flawed, and self-defeating approach that can lead only to
ultimate disaster.

Every so often movements and countries face critical choices with historic
implications. When the grassroots movement named Solidarity began to
succeed in Poland, it had the possibility of retaining its working-class
composition and its emphasis on elevating workers to decision-making power
via new economic institutions, or of jettisoning all that in favor of
elevating intellectuals and adopting markets, competition, and
profit-seeking despite their obvious inadequacies. The liberating choice
lost because the young movement put no structural, institutional supports
for its enactment into place.

When Jesse Jackson galvanized new energies across the United States, he
and the Rainbow Coalition had the opportunity to develop lasting
grassroots organization and democratic movement, or to subordinate
everything to narrow electoral priorities. The liberating choice lost
because, again, new participatory institutions were not created.

Later, when Ralph Nader ran a powerful and popular presidential campaign,
again there was the possibility to solidify the gains, create perhaps a
shadow government or in any event some massive continuing democratic and
participatory institutional opposition, but the liberating choice was
again lost.

The recent unprecedented international upsurge of first anti-globalization
and then anti-war activism around the world has created a potential for
establishing new levels of lasting organizational presence. Many efforts
are trying to preserve the momentum. We will have to see what the results
will be, whether new structures will solidify the gains or not.

Likewise, Cuba can either continue its siege mentality and defend not only
its virtuous accomplishments but also bureaucracy, dictatorship, central
planning, and workplace hierarchy, or it can develop participatory
democracy politically and truly liberated economics consistent with
revolutionary Cuba's past aspirations. With their Eastern bloc bridges
burnt, facing continued and perhaps even escalated U.S. opposition, I can
only hope that Cuba will once again opt for "a revolution within the
revolution," and there is no compromise with oppressive power and
unbridled greed in saying so.

Others will see the situation differently. Fair enough. But those who
think that criticizing dictatorship, the death penalty, and draconian
violations of political liberty equals casting aside radical commitment
and tying up with imperialism, ought to think twice.


--
Michael Pugliese

"Without knowing that we knew nothing, we went on talking without
listening to each other. Sometimes we flattered and praised each other,
understanding that we would be flattered and praised in return. Other
times we abused and shouted at each other, as if we were in a madhouse."
-Tolstoy


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