Cuba: Transitions without End
by Dr. Frederic Clairmont
(Global Research)
The victory of the
Revolution is a rampart that ensures that never again will Cuba become
the most sordid brothel our planet has ever known linked to a criminal
gambling and drug infested inferno of the colonial occupiers. Comandante Ernesto Che Guevara, 1 May 1959.
Invariably, after every
speaking engagement on Latin America. the question was raised about
Cuba fate after the exit of the Comandante from the political stage.
The question was not malicious although among my listeners there were
those who believed , or prayed for, that the departure of Fidel
Alejandro Castro Rua, born (1926) in the former province of Oriente on
his father farm (Manacas) ,marks the terminal point of the socialist
revolution. Throughout the ages and by the very nature of our existence
it is part of our normal being to ask that basic question: from whence
have we come and whither are we are going? There are many that have
personalized one of the most momentous historical metamorphoses of all
times.
Fidel Castro and the Revolution
that he incubated and flung into battle with such resounding surprises
and successes for more than a half a century cannot be abstracted from
the role of the masses as the energizing dynamic of change.
The personalization of leaders
as the drive wheel of change is erroneous as it assumes that the makers
of history are exclusively the leaders of social and political
movements. Such a muddled perception is the incarnation of the
Fuhrerprinzip of Nazism that sweeps aside the seminal role of ordinary
peoples that battle to defend the Revolution and build on it. It
deliberately eviscerates the world of labour: workers, farmers,
professionals, the men and women that comprise the armed forces. In
short, it ignores the creators of wealth as the engine of change.
History is about numbers and
very big numbers that dramatically erupt onto the political stage at
certain nodal points in response to the contradictions of our time
stemming from irrepressible convulsions . The revolutionary that is
Fidel Castro is thus inseparable from the masses that catapulted him
into the fires of national struggle from the Moncada Barracks to the
liberation of Havana, in much the same way as Gandhi and Mandela in
their freedom struggles; and no less so Lenin and the October
Revolution.
Thomas Carlyle enriched our understanding of this duality when he wrote in his classic depiction of the French Revolution:
Hunger and nakedness and
nightmare oppression lying heavy on twenty-five million: this, not the
wounded vanities or contradicted philosophies of philosophical
advocates, rich shopkeepers, rural nobles, was the prime mover in the
French Revolution; as the like will be in all such revolutions, in all
countries.
The penetrating insight of Marx
with its sublime message of hope and struggle as humanity faces up to
the exigencies of smashing the inherited mould of capitalism, a system
of class power, privilege, profit and exploitation, illumines the
compulsive sweep of revolutionary change.
History does nothing; it
possesses no immense wealth, fights no battles. It is rather man, real
living man who does everything, who grapples with everything and who
fights.
As a teacher and writer (and
Spanish speaker) I tracked the Revolution trajectory spanning more
than half a century. I was never a member of any political body nor was
I ever enamored by the phony cult of objectivity. In those decades, I
talked to its peoples from all walks of life. I met its leadership. I
participated in its seminars and conferences. It was in those years of
agony and ecstasy that I witnessed the unending twists and turns of its
ascendancy. In those years, I also encountered the hate-filled é–™igré–Ÿ,
who had chosen the path of counter-revolution, dishonor and mendacity,
ensconced in Miami and elsewhere.
To grasp the nature of the
transition ?and that is the crucial word of this lecture - that has
reshaped the nation psyche it is well to recall that the Revolution
was generated as a reaction against the exploitation and sheer cruelty
perpetrated by the US occupation and its domesticated political
Quislings that reigned through the instrumentalities of unadulterated
state terrorism since the consummation of the conquest in 1898. Listen
well to the Comandante words framed on the eve of the freedom upsurge
. Its relevance to the new transition is all too obvious.
Some have insisted that the
only way out for Cuba was to guarantee private investments. That , we
are told, would solve the whole problem. But foreign capitalists had
these guarantees in Cuba for fifty years , and similar guarantees in
practically every other country of the American continent. Did these
guarantees solve the pressing problems confronting its peoples? Did
they solve the problem of mass unemployment, education, public health?
Indeed, what did they solve in all these fifty years? Joblessness
straddling more than one third of the labour force, poverty, hunger and
chronic malnutrition?quot;
I recall on one of our walks on
the Malecon with my friend the late Renato Constantino, a celebrated
Philipino resistance fighter, philosopher and writer pointing his hand
to the waters of the bay in the direction of Florida and saying: Over
there, just a couple of kilometers away. I believe it around 90 kms.
There is the super-colonial Goliath , that has flung everything against
this bastion of a socialist David and what we抳e seen is that the power
of the imperio has been clubbed. Why? You know the answer. What
Voltaire said about God applies no less so to Cuba: If Cuba did not
exist we would have had to invent it. What Renato was saying was that
the White Man world of the imperio cannot coexist with Cuba; and hence, in their view, it must be destroyed. It is toxic and contagious.
Its sheer capacity to survive
and strike back owed nothing to a world of miracles and Shamans. What
Bush, his acolytes and predecessors mean by transition is something
quite different from the meaning emblazoned in the theory and praxis of
the Revolution? It reminds me of the words of Ho Chi Minh formulated
after the breakdown of the Fountainbleau negotiations in 1946. Words
have different meaning for different people. If you spit in the face of
the colonialists they will always call it rain.
We cannot speak of the
multi-faceted transitions in Cuba without studying the grim transition
of imperialism. They are inter-related. American capitalism has leapt
into the big transition, that of recession, galloping fast towards the
Big Depression. The credit seizures and foreclosures are gobbling up
jobs and earnings at an alarming tempo. Panic stricken stock markets
are plummeting with many major financial institutions going bust. The
industrial capacity of US capitalism has withered. What remains of its
colossal industrial heritage, a legacy mainly of the decades 1865-1914,
is being swiftly offshored. Detroit, the once proud citadel of
industrial might is now a wasteland. Its financial structures are
wobbly, shackled with uncontrollable debt: household, corporate and
government that continues to burgeon exponentially. Americans and
foreigners have lost confidence in the greenback that is swiftly
ceasing to be a store of value.
Iran’s president Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad hammered the point when he said: the dollar is nothing but
a worthless piece of paper. A contention that few will contest. Its
claim to be the world reserve currency is a fairy tale. Credit flows
are drying up . Banks are dumping their assets into collapsing markets.
Defaults and bankruptcies are soaring. In sum, US financial capitalism
is in the throes of an implosion. Uncle Sam is an enfeebled mendicant
living off borrowed time and borrowed money. But not for long can this
game continue.
The empire has over 700
military overseas bases in over 130 countries but its effective power
is shrinking day by day. This then is the big contrast with Cuba
transition. Its growth in real terms has steadily topped 6%over the
last six years. The brutalizing years of the Special Period have
largely been vanquished. The economic and spiritual revolutions in Cuba
are nothing short of mind-boggling that bear no comparison with any
Latin American countries. Let there be no illusion. Cuba is a Third
World nation. It still is a poor country. The wages of its labour force
are still abysmally low. The exploitation of man by man has vanished.
Of pivotal importance, however, is that it has now achieved full
employment, a reality once regarded as the unattainable Nirvana.
Illiteracy, malnutrition and mendicancy have ceased to exist. Its life
expectancy is almost on a par with Japan and Sweden, as against 56 in
Batista neo-colony. Its infant mortality rate is on a par with Canada
and has already outstripped that of the United States. These are the
transitions that the media masters of the corporate gulag chose to
eliminate from their specious references on transitions.
I well remember the
Revolution formative years when the white-skinned medical personnel
bolted the country boasting that medicine is dead and the only thing
that will take its place is Voodoo. In their imbecilic gasp of triumph
they had forgotten to say that their political cronies had plundered
the nation Treasury and dispatched its pickings to the land of the
ex-colonial master. Cuba now has around 90,000 students spanning the
entire range of medical care. This nation which, according to its
unbending liquidators, has abolished æ…¼uman rights?has set its goal of
becoming the paramount medical science citadel in the world.
There are now over 12,000 students in ELAM: La Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina,
one of the world top educational establishments. Over the next decade
it will be graduating with Venezuela more than 100,000 Latin American
and Caribbean doctors within the integration framework of ALBA:
Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas. Together with Venezuela,
Operation Miracle was launched designed to restore vision to no fewer
than 6 million in all of Latin America and the Caribbean.
These astounding numbers would
have been inconceivable without a socialist order and the discipline
and sacrifices that moved in tandem with it. Tens of thousands of Cuban
medical and non-medical personnel are working in 27 countries under
difficult physical conditions. In his visit to Cuba in 2007, in which
he decorated the 140 medical personnel, General Pervez Musharaf ( a
fervent ally of the empire) was not indulging in hyperbole when he
noted:
Yours was one of the greatest
acts of solidarity that humanity has ever known. We thank President
Castro and the Cuban people. You came thousands of miles away, in the
depth of one of the most severest winters, to heal and save the lives
of thousands of our people stricken by that appalling natural disaster.
You even brought your own medical equipment and medicines. There is not
a single village in our country that has not heard of your heroic deeds
and sacrifices. These awards are a modest token to express our
gratitude. You gave everything but took nothing in exchange except our
love. The word thanks , you will understand, is too small a tribute to
convey the immensity of our debt and feeling towards you.
The systematic state terrorist
onslaughts against Cuba pre-date 1962 that marked the start of the
official embargo that has endured with no respite for almost half a
century .Attempts to quarantine Cuba have failed. Year after year in
the UN General Assembly just two countries, the United States ( plus
its two Pacific island protectorates) and Israel voted for the
embargo perpetuation. Its cumulative cost according to foreign
minister Roque approaches $100bn. And yet, notwithstanding the
permanent war including several aborted attempts at assassination of
the president, Cuba has lurched forward prodigiously , not only in its
dispensation of education and medical aid to countries on many
continents, but as a fraternal catalyst in the liberation struggle. No
country in the world has given as much to Africa as Cuba has done and
continues to do. A gift sealed with the blood of its peoples.
Nelson Mandela touched on one
of the energizing roles of Cuba when he spelt out in his homage to the
Comandante during his visit to South Africa following the liquidation
of the Apartheid regime.
We and all the peoples of the
Free World are honored to have you here. And by the Free World we refer
to the peoples whose blood has been shed profusely to liquidate
imperialism. Consider South Africa as your land. We shall not forget
the decisive role you played militarily in destroying the South African
army. You came thousands of miles to participate in the freedom
struggle with us. You fought nobly, unstintingly and shed your blood to
ensure our freedom. Without you our freedom would not have been
consummated.
Obviously such views were in
contrast to the architects of Cuba annihilation. These avalanches of
death-dealing hatred had nothing to do with the familiar claptrap that
the island of socialism had repudiated all the vestiges of human rights
and democracy. The heights of vulgarity scaled by the practitioners of
exterminism were exhibited by General Alexander Haig, one of
President Reagan henchmen, when he fulminated in a meeting of the
National Security Council : You just give me the word and I抣l turn
that fucking little island into a parking lot. If this is not an
exhortation to the Holocaust then words have no meaning. The mass
exterminism propounded by Haig was not galvanized because of the
apprehensions of the upshot of another Bay of Pigs.
It was because even at that
time Cuba had made yet another dramatic transition: it had become
militarily invulnerable. This was matched by the decline of the imperio
and its military over-reach that exposed its soft underbelly. To this
was added an event of the greatest importance , the alliance with
Venezuela concretized in the words of Chavez:
An attack against Cuba will be
countered by an immediate cut-off of oil. More important is that it
will lead to a flow of blood including the blood of Bolivarian patriots
since revolutionary Cuba and Venezuela are blended in the war against
imperialism. It will be an horrendous war if the imbeciles that rule
the imperio are so dumb as to unleash it. And I need hardly say that it
will be a devastating counterpunch that overspills the confines of
Cuba. For the first time in the history of the Americas a black man
was calling the shots.
In yet another of his
preachments on Cuba transition, Bush excoriated Barack Obama for
declaring that if he elected he would talk to everyone. In a regime
in which the very mention of dialogue is anathema Bush flatly
pontificated that there can be no dialogue with the Castro tyrant that
has brought nothing but disaster and poverty to his people and
eliminating all traces of human dignity and freedom. This is quite a
mouthful from a man that continues to prattle endlessly about human
dignity when in his own backyard the American prison population stands
at 2.3 million with no signs of tapering off. According to the Pew
Report it now has 750 prisoners per 100,000 as against 79 per 100,000
in Switzerland. One in 15 African Americans are behind bars, as against
I in 75 for Hispanics and 1 in 106 for whites.
Is Bush oblivious to the crimes
against humanity in the war that he has waged against Iraq in which
more than one million Iraqis have been killed and wounded? In addition,
their factories, farms, homes and infrastructure have been smashed. The
cost of that war has moved from billions to trillions of dollars seen
from the American side of the balance sheet. The numbers are misleading
in that they do not include the costs to the people of Iraq. Indeed,
the policies of US exterminism was neatly encapsulated in the pithy
comment of the British dramatist and Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter
You either do as I say or I抣l kick your ass in. Because of its
refusal to have its ass kicked in Cuba has been condemned to the
chopping block. To be sure there are no presidents since 1945 that are
not indictable on war crimes charges.
Bush launched one more of his
transitions when his administration created a Cuba Transition
Coordinator bossed by Cleb McCarry, former ambassador to Afghanistan.
On 10 July 2006, a report of the Commission for Assistance to a Free
Cuba demanded immediate action to ensure the failure of the Castro
regime succession strategy.
There was nothing new in this
verbose report. It was framed as an ultimatum that bluntly stated that
the land and industrial and financial sectors must be denationalized.
The Roman Church and its prerogatives must be fully restored including
its extensive land holdings and the end of the separation of Church and
State.. It was a blueprint for the return of the neo-colonial
occupation from 1898-1959. Noteworthy is that its goals could be
succinctly summarized in an utterance made more than 50 years ago by an
American oilman at the peak of the oil bonanza in Venezuela.
Here in Venezuela you have the
right to do what you like with your capital. This right is dearer to me
than all the political rights in the world.
The Economist, that
militant mouthpiece of Big Capital (it owned by the Pearson Trust)
hollers for US intervention to halt the nationalist and socialist
offensives gathering speed in Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua.
To put it bluntly , Latin America needs more Lula da Silvas [and his
version of neo-liberalism] and fewer Chavez and Morales. This is
where the United States could help. The imperial masters , however,do
not require such morsels of advice because it is central to the applied
logic of state terrorism.
As we have seen, institutional
changes have been a permanent trait of the Revolution and the current
debates and their implementation do not mark a qualitative change in
their direction. It is but yet another phase of the greatest importance
given the immense strides and complexity of the national economy. Cuba
today is a power house of modern science and technology embracing
bio-technology, electronics, engineering, information technology, the
chemical and petrochemical industries, mining, the iron and steel
industry, etc. To that inventory we should simply say that Cuba stands
at the summit of world educational attainment.
The debate on the new
transition In Cuba has reached a frenzied pace and straddles the
problem of optimizing capital and labour resources. No holes are barred
in these debates on the extent of administrative incompetence and
corruption, and the theft of national assets. The current projects call
for a massive overhaul of the bureaucracy whose swollen numbers are a
deterrent to the nation productive advance.
These changes now underway
demand a decentralization of economic decision making slated to boost
productivity. The changes will require an overhaul of wholesale and
retail price structures, wage payments and incentive payments,
subsidies and the prevailing rationing system The latter was never
designed to be a permanent fixture of a socialist order. These changes
call for, as President Raul Castro stated in his 26 July 2007 policy
statement, for the elimination of a host of prohibitions and red tape.
Illustrative is the case of the dairy industry and specifically milk
distribution. There are no overall directives engulfing the entire
economy. Experimentation is proceeding on a piecemeal basis in various
municipalities and then gradually extended. In the case of milk
distribution this has resulted in savings of over $40 million and in
addition huge savings in fuel costs.
This is how Fidel puts it in his Reflections
of 16 January. We do not intend to give anything to those who could be
producing but do not produce, or who produce very little. We shall
reward the merits of those who work with their hands and their minds.
The question is obviously open: to what extent will these transitions,
that cut deeply into the flesh of Cuba socialism, engender enhanced
inequalities in a society whose egalitarianism is legendary.? Our query
will soon be answered by unfolding events.
There are well-intentioned
critics who propagate that Cuba should embrace the free market magic
and its propertied social relations from whence it follows that the
Chinese model is appropriate. One recalls Deng Xiaoping epic
outburst. To be rich is glorious Deng ideas and their
reverberations have been discussed in depth for several years in Cuba.
But let us be realistic. What is Deng rallying cry other than a
resounding clamour for the restoration of capitalism? A visit to
China cities and countryside and the monstrous inequalities between
them and within them is amply confirmatory of the workings of the
system. Its millionaires have become billionaires. China and Cuba
belong to two opposed universes. China level of inequality, measured
by the Gini coefficient, is similar to that of American capitalism.
The capitalist reality of the
islands of Hong Kong and Macao owned and dominated politically by a
cabal of at most a dozen mega capitalist families that are entrenched
through marriage, extended family connections and their daily economic
wheelings and dealings would suggest that the Cuban leadership and its
people will not be following this road. Thus the relevance of the
Chinese capitalist model to Cuba smacks of total irrealism.
Our lectures on transitions
both within imperialism and Cuba are taking place not in an abstract
world but in a world where capitalism - and American capitalism in
particular ?is traversing one of the most cataclysmic
upheavals since the Great Depression of the l930s. The resultant of
this tragedy is beyond the scope of these lectures.
But what I believe will be the
most important conditioner of the future direction of socialism in Cuba
are the ethical foundations on which it reposes. This is enshrined in
what I conceive to be one of the most penetrating manifestos in Cuban
history. It is the definition of the Revolution so masterly articulated
on 1 May 2000 by the Comandante that merits quotation at length.
The
Revolution is the sense of the historic moment; it is to change all
that must changed; it is equality and freedom in their plenitude; it
means that we must be treated, and to treat others, as human beings; it
is to emancipate ourselves by our own powers; it is to challenge the
powerful dominant forces within the nation and abroad; it is to defend
our values at whatever price and sacrifice; it is modesty,
disinterestedness , altruism, solidarity and heroism; it means not
having recourse to lies or thrashing ethical principles; it is the deep
conviction that there is no force in the world capable of crushing the
power of truth and ideas. Revolution is unity; it is independence; it
is to fight for the materialization of our dreams for Cuba and the
world; it is the foundation of our patriotism, our socialism and our
internationalism.Frederic
F. Clairmont is a prominent Canadian academic whofor many years was a
permanent senior economics affairs officer at the United Nations
Economics Commission for Africa and the United Nations Conference for
Trade and Development (UNCTAD). He taught at the University of
Kings College and Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia. His classic work
is The Rise and Fall of Economic Liberalism and his latest book is:
Cuba and Venezuela: The Nemeses of Imperialism published by Citizens
International in Penang, Malaysia. He is a a frequent contributor to
Le Monde Diplomatique and The Economic and Political Weekly.
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