Defending
Cuba and Revolutionary Democracy:
Approaching a Deepening Debate
by Paul Le Blanc
It is difficult to convey to those who were not alive and politically conscious in 1959 how profoundly we were all affected by that crazy, heroic, joyous reality of the Cuban Revolution — scruffy, dedicated, young guerrilla fighters with a buoyant sense of humor surging into their country’s cities, their numbers swelled by exultant crowds, as the army and police and torturers and hangers-on of the vicious pro-U.S. dictator Fulgencio Batista melted away. Led by the rich and the gangsters, those who hated the Revolution streamed to Miami. The suits of the “respectable” politicians were briefly on the scene, then were crowded out by the military fatigues of the guerrilla fighters who were not willing to compromise away the struggle for social and economic justice for the oppressed and exploited classes that they had initiated in the mountains. Leading the revolution onto an increasingly radical course was a bearded and eloquent militant (amazing to us coming out of the clean-shaven conformist 1950s of the United States) named Fidel Castro, who in the inevitable collision with U.S. imperialism refused to back down and led enthusiastic masses of the Cuban people into a successful confrontation with U.S. power and became a powerful symbol of anti-imperialism and successful liberation struggle.
(Useful
accounts can be found in: Robert Taber, M-26 — The
Biography of a Revolution (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1961); Herbert L.
Matthews, Revolution in Cuba [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975];
Marta Harnecker, Fidel Castro’s Political Strategy: From Moncada to Victory
[New York: Pathfinder Press, 1987]; K.S. Karol, Guerrillas in Power: The
Course of the Cuban Revolution [New York: Hill and Wang, 1970]; Philip
Brenner, William LeoGrande, Donna Rich and Daniel Siegel, eds., The Cuba
Reader: The Making of a Revolutionary Society [New York: Grove Press,
1989].)
Of
course, from the very beginning there were also troubling realities. There was
a verticalist leadership style and the absence of formal democratic structures.
There was an alignment (in order to ensure survival, to be sure) with the
Stalinist dictatorships of Eastern Europe, first and foremost the USSR, which
affected the political life of this revolutionary island in negative ways even
as it provided a military shield and economic lifeline that helped make
possible remarkable gains for the Cuban people. There were fluctuations in
bureaucracy and the battle against it, in human rights and the curtailment of
them, in cultural freedom and the restriction of it, in lower-level democratic
structures and the limitations of them. With the failure of the promising
revolutions that had welled up in Central America and the Caribbean in the
1970s and 1980s, with the decline and collapse of the Communist bloc, with the
growing incursions of “globalization” and the new and increasingly aggressive
triumphalism of U.S. power, what remains of revolutionary Cuba is in danger of
being eroded, strangled, swept away. Some of the early and persistent problems
remain and sometimes seem to affect the government’s policies and decisions.
This is grabbed and magnified by its enemies.
It
is not clear what can best be done to defend Cuba from imperialism. There are
protests against and challenges to the U.S. economic blockade and there is the
promotion of visits and cultural exchanges. There are enormous quantities of
material circulated in the virtual reality of cyberspace, and relatively small
protests and forums in the actual reality. Of course, there are articles that
can be written, statements that can be made, and petitions that can be signed —
but what should the articles and statements and petitions say? How can we make
a difference?
Given
this reality, it is not surprising that there has been an amazing flare-up of
incredibly sharp disagreements around Cuba in relatively small political
milieux with which I identify, which include the Fourth International, the U.S.
socialist group Solidarity, and the U.S. magazine Labor Standard.
Critics of the Cuban regime are angrily confronted, and often those criticizing
these anti-critics seem just as angry, with some things being said on both
sides that should not be said. I have been concerned that this flare-up may
weaken an already-weak revolutionary left. Of course, to the extent that there
is political clarity (which sometimes can only come through the frank
expression of differences), we will be strengthened.
On
the other hand, sometimes when we are weak, we are inclined to engage in fierce
polemical slugfests to demonstrate how we are so much superior to those we are
hammering. It is so much easier and more satisfying to do that than to try to
do something real to advance the class struggle. It can help us forget about
our devastating weakness in the face of imperialism — but it can also divert
our attention from the difficult work of organizing real struggles through
which our weakness will be replaced by growing strength. This is a danger, and
yet when such a dispute as this erupts, it is necessary to engage. But I would
encourage my divided comrades to advance the debate in a manner that will help
to strengthen, not splinter, our forces.
I
approach the debate from a particular political standpoint. I consider myself
to be a revolutionary Marxist and a partisan of the Fourth International. I
identify as a Leninist, as a Trotskyist, and in particular with the tradition
of American Trotskyism associated with such people as James P. Cannon, George
Breitman, Joseph Hansen, and Frank Lovell. There are some people who don’t like
to hear that, who are greatly annoyed that I would say things like that, etc. —
but it can’t be helped. I make no demands that others accept this framework,
but it happens to be my political framework and contextualizes much of what
follows.
Criticisms of Cuba
and of the Fourth International
The
statement of the executive committee of the Fourth International, if I read it
correctly, makes three fundamental points: (1) it is necessary to defend the
Cuba from U.S. imperialism; (2) Cuba represents a revolutionary regime
associated with positive policies — but also one with serious limitations in
regard to democracy which undermines it in the face of imperialism; and (3)
recent examples of such limitations include (a) execution of three people who
hijacked a ferryboat, and (b) the recent trial and jailing of Cuban dissidents.
Opposition
to capital punishment and defense of civil liberties are positions
traditionally held by the socialist movement. Some comrades have argued that
this does not apply here — that the Cuban regime has the right to execute those
who utilized violence against Cuban citizens (especially given the rising
threat of U.S. aggression), and that the jailed dissidents were shown, at a
fair trial, to have had contact and connections with the United States
government, which is dedicated to destabilizing and overturning revolutionary
Cuba.
Some
Marxist texts have been utilized to lambaste the Fourth International
leadership for being un-Marxist: an anti-anarchist polemic by Frederick Engels
that supported (after the fact) utilizing authoritarian measures to defend the
short-lived Paris Commune of 1871, and the defense of dictatorial measures by
Lenin and Trotsky during the brutalizing Russian Civil War of 1918–1921. Of
course, the Paris Commune was drowned in blood after three months, and
revolutionary Russia — at the time of the Lenin/Trotsky writings — had existed
for no more three years. While there may be some similarities between these
situations and the current situation of Cuba, there are also dramatic
differences. For example, the Cuban regime is more than forty years old. It is
certainly fighting for its life — but in a qualitatively different manner than
the Paris Commune of 1871 or Bolshevik Russia of 1920.
In
reflecting on whether I agree with the two criticized actions of the Cuban
government, I find that I do not. I am not inclined to “lecture” the Cuban
government on this, but neither am I inclined to avoid forming (or expressing)
an opinion. I find I have an opinion, even if this opinion will cause some to
consider me to be a bad person or a bad revolutionary or — simply — someone who
has come to a wrong conclusion. We can discuss our differences as revolutionary
comrades, and learn from those differences.
I
oppose capital punishment, including when used against those who take up the
gun against their governments. I remember that capital punishment was not used
against Fidel Castro by the Batista dictatorship when he was on trial for
leading the armed assault on the Moncada barracks. (Batista was certainly
murderous enough, but fortunately was limited by the fact that the death
penalty did not exist in Cuba during the 1950s.) Nor do I believe that these
executions were necessary to preserve revolutionary Cuba today.
I
oppose arresting dissidents unless they are carrying out violent activity. If a
dissident organization is accepting material support from and meeting with
representatives of a government hostile to the Cuban economic and political
system, I am not persuaded that this represents sufficient grounds for their
imprisonment. In the United States the Communist Party received material aid
from and consulted with representatives of the USSR. I don’t believe that represented
sufficient grounds for the imprisonment of U.S. Communists. Nor do I believe
these arrests were necessary to preserve revolutionary Cuba. As in the case of
the executions, this actually gave propaganda openings to its enemies. Nor do I
think left-wing critics should be expected to bite their tongues or should be
attacked as “imperialists” (or as giving aid to imperialism) if they express
their views.
Some
participants in the debates disagree with what I say here. Others may agree —
but are opposed to publicly expressing such opinions because they will give aid
and comfort to Cuba’s enemies, particularly to anti-Castro elements in Miami
and Washington, DC, that are even more murderous than Batista. There are also
questions regarding how best to defend revolutionary Cuba (including who is
actually doing work, or failing to do work, for an effective defense). These
are all important questions to discuss and debate, which is what we are doing
now.
But
for some who are engaged in these debates there are even more fundamental
differences — whether one can actually speak of a “revolutionary Cuba,” whether
the Castro regime should be defended in any way at all, what is the nature of
Cuban society, what are the achievements and/or failures of the Cuban revolution,
etc. These are questions that will be discussed inside of Solidarity in the
coming period — but it will be important for all revolutionary socialists,
regardless of their particular organization, to give attention to clarifying
these issues.
What
follows in this contribution is in some ways preliminary to a critical analysis
of present-day Cuban realities. There will be an examination of some relevant
ideas of Cannon, Lovell, Breitman and Hansen, which for me help to frame a
useful approach. This will be followed by the identification problems of
democracy in Cuba — up to the early 1990s — by a number of informed analysts
sympathetic to revolutionary Cuba.
Workers’ Democracy
and Revolutionary Socialism
Central
to my approach is something that was articulated by James P. Cannon in 1957, in
the wake of the Khrushchev revelations of Stalin’s crimes and of the 1956
worker-student uprising in Hungary that was drowned in blood by Soviet tanks.
(See James P. Cannon, “Socialism and Democracy,” Speeches for Socialism
[New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971], pp. 345–361.) Cannon was the “grand old man
of American Trotskyism,” and as a leader of the Socialist Workers Party he
emphasized certain points which — when I read them in the 1960s — were absorbed
deep into my being as a young “new left” activist:
We cannot
build a strong socialist movement in this country until we overcome this
confusion in the minds of the American workers about the real meaning of
socialism…
There is no
doubt that this drumfire of bourgeois propaganda, supplemented by the universal
revulsion against Stalinism, has profoundly affected the sentiments of the
American working class, including the bulk of its most progressive and militant
and potentially revolutionary sectors…
To the extent
that the Stalinist dictatorship in Russia has been identified with the name of
socialism,…the American workers have been prejudiced against socialism…
This barrier
to the expansion and development of the American socialist movement will not be
overcome, and even a regroupment of the woefully limited forces of those who at
present consider themselves socialists will yield but little fruit, unless and
until we find a way to break down this misunderstanding and prejudice against
socialism, and convince at least the more advanced American workers that we
socialists are the most aggressive and consistent advocates of democracy in all
fields and that, in fact, we are completely devoted to the idea that socialism
cannot be realized otherwise than by democracy.
He
focused attention, at the very same time, on the class struggle in the United
States. “In practice, the American labor bureaucrats, who piously demand
democracy in the one-party totalitarian domain of Stalinism, come as close as
they can to maintaining a one-party rule in their own domain….They are
essentially of the same breed, a privileged caste dominated above all by
motives of self-benefit and self-preservation at the expense of the workers and
against the workers.” He emphasized: “The privileged bureaucratic caste
everywhere is the most formidable obstacle to democracy and socialism.” In the
USSR it was necessary to “struggle to restore the genuine workers’ democracy
established by the revolution of 1917,” and in the United States “the struggle
for workers’ democracy is preeminently a struggle of the rank and file to gain
democratic control of their own organizations.” He concluded: “So the fight for
workers’ democracy is inseparable from the fight for socialism, and is the
condition for its victory. Workers’ democracy is the only road to socialism,
here in the United States and everywhere else, all the way from Moscow to Los
Angeles, and from here to Budapest.”
Several
years later, in evaluating his experience as a founder and leader of the
American Communist Party, Cannon made another key point that has influenced my
thinking ever since I read it:
The
degeneration of the Communist Party began when it abandoned the perspective of
revolution in this country, and converted itself into a pressure group and cheering
squad for the Stalinist bureaucracy in Russia — which it mistakenly took to be
the custodian of a revolution “in another country.” …
What happened
to the Communist Party would happen without fail to any other party, including
our own, if it should abandon its struggle for a social revolution in this
country, as the realistic perspective of our epoch, and degrade itself to the
role of sympathizer of revolutions in other countries.
I firmly
believe that American revolutionists should indeed sympathize with revolutions
in other lands, and try to help them in every way they can. But the best way to
do that is to build a party with a confident perspective of a revolution in
this country.
Without that
perspective, a Communist or Socialist party belies its name. It ceases to be a
help and becomes a hindrance to the revolutionary workers’ cause in its own
country. And its sympathy for other revolutions isn’t worth much either. [James
P, Cannon, The First Ten Years of American Communism, Report of a
Participant (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1961), pp . 37–38.]
A
few years after Cannon’s 1974 death, a new and inexperienced ex-student
leadership of the SWP threw the organization into a “turn to the working class”
and found — as Frank Lovell (part of the dwindling working-class layer from the
1930s) would later recount — that the experience “was nothing like what it
imagined it [would] be.” Lovell added: “There was an increasingly extreme
stress on ‘proletarianizing’ the party, and yet the pace and quality of life of
SWP members became increasingly alien to most members of the working class.”
The result mirrored Cannon’s warning: “The disappointment of the SWP leadership
with what it discovered after its turn to the working class conditioned its
euphoric embrace in 1979 of the unexpected revolutionary events in Iran and in
Nicaragua and Grenada.” From here it was a short step to the next stage:
Despite
superficial educationals on the fundamentals of Marxism and the treachery of
Stalinism, the pervasive influence of Stalinist conceptions in the larger
radical milieu conditioned the party membership to ignore the fact that Castro
and other “revolutionists of action” shared many of these Stalinist-inspired
misconceptions and to accept the sweeping characterization of them as modern-day
Bolsheviks, continuators of Leninism, an harbingers of the new Marxist
international…. The discovery that Cuba is a “socialist society” appeared in
the pages of the Militant. It became the inspirational model for
“worker-Bolsheviks” in the U.S. [Frank Lovell, “The Meaning of the Struggle
Inside the Socialist Workers Party,” in Sarah Lovell, ed. The Struggle
Inside the Socialist Workers Party, 1979–1983 (New York: Fourth
Internationalist Tendency, 1992), pp. 33, 35.]
Lovell was not the only Trotskyist to resist
this development. One of the key oppositionists, advancing a perceptive
critique of the new SWP leaders’ increasingly uncritical approach toward
revolutionary Cuba, was George Breitman.
A Basic Analytical
Approach to Cuba
I first became an oppositionist in the Socialist Workers Party (leading
to my eventual expulsion) when I identified in 1979 with a position put forward
by Breitman in an internal discussion article entitled “Castroism:
Revolutionary or Centrist?” (which can be found in Sarah Lovell, ed. The
Struggle Inside the Socialist Workers Party, pp. 44–49). Breitman’s
basic approach toward Cuba consisted of several key points:
·
Defend Cuba
against imperialism;
·
Classify Cuba
as a workers’ state with bureaucratic deformations;
·
Favor the reform
of the Cuban workers’ state, instead of political revolution;
·
Understand that
Castroism, as a political tendency, veers between revolutionary Marxism and
counterrevolutionary Stalinism;
·
Educate
ourselves about actual developments in Cuba.
In expressing his differences with the majority leadership of the
Socialist Workers Party in 1979 (just before its switch from Trotskyism to it’s
own stilted variety of Castroism), Breitman made a number of important comments
that I think are still relevant:
Castroism,
we agree, is not a “hardened” bureaucratic caste of the type that rules in the
USSR and can be removed only through a political revolution. But Castroism does
rest on a privileged bureaucratic stratum that maintains a monopoly of
political power in Cuba. Is this stratum more privileged than it was ten or
twenty year ago? Is it bigger or smaller than it was then? These are the kinds
of questions we should be examining ….
Twenty
years ago the Castroists were against soviets and workers’ democracy; today they
are still against them. Can we conclude then that nothing has changed? No,
because in the last five years the Castroists have introduced new institutions,
assemblies, constitution, etc., whose main purpose is to prevent the
introduction of workers’ democracy. So something definitely has changed….
The majority report should be commended for criticizing certain political defects and errors of Castroism (for the first time in years), but its analysis would be improved if it would stop trying to convince us at every possible opportunity, appropriate or not, that Castroism is and always has been revolutionary. These explanations sometimes take us to the border of apologetics….
When the Castroists do something progressive or
revolutionary, let’s be the first to point it out. When they do something
nonrevolutionary or antirevolutionary, let’s point that out too. And at all
times let’s educate ourselves and others to understand that Castroism is
capable of both….
This approach became increasingly incompatible with the course being
steered by the new SWP leadership. But Breitman’s resistance to that was
grounded in certain fundamental conceptions that he shared with another veteran
Trotskyist who had over the years helped shape the SWP’s understanding and
analysis of Cuban realities, Joseph Hansen.
Analyzing Cuban Complexities
In May 1978, not long before his death at the beginning of 1979, Hansen
offered a balance-sheet on the Cuban revolution. It is worth considering key
aspects of the analysis he laid out twenty-five years ago. (In the posthumously
published volume, Joseph Hansen, Dynamics of the Cuban Revolution, The
Trotskyist View [New York: Pathfinder Press, 1979], pp. 5–17.) The positive
aspects of Cuban reality that reflected the existence of a “revolutionary
regime,” in Hansen’s opinion, demonstrated “what can be done under a planned
economy to improve the standard of living of the poor.” He elaborated:
The achievements made possible by toppling capitalism
are impressive. The list includes the elimination of unemployment, once the
scourge of the Cuban working class; the banning of racism; the promulgation of
equal rights for women; the setting up of child-care centers on a national
scale; the construction of a free educational system that provides not only books
but food and clothing to students; the establishment of a model social-security
system, including health care; the slashing of rents and initiation of an
ambitious program to end the acute shortage of housing, inherited from the
past; and an agrarian reform that was decisive in establishing the firm
worker-peasant alliance on which the first workers’ state in the Western
Hemisphere depends.
But Hansen also felt compelled to examine less positive developments,
“particularly in the last decade” (i.e., 1968–1978), although he indicated that
problems had existed in the earlier decade as well. “The Cuban revolution faced
extreme difficulties from the beginning,” he wrote. “Inadequacies of leadership
counted among them, the prime one being … reliance on guerrilla war to extend
the revolution. Another was the failure to proceed immediately to establishment
of forms of proletarian democracy.” Not content to leave his critique at the
level of perfunctory one-liners, he spent some time laying out the specifics of
this last point.
Hansen stressed that “the main source of difficulties was American
imperialism. The mightiest military power on earth, located only ninety miles
away, decided to strangle the Cuban revolution.” There were two aspects to the
Cuban revolutionaries’ response to this. (1) “In defense of the revolution, the
Castro team placed Cuba under wartime regulations.” (2) “Without help from the
Soviet Union, the Cuban revolution would certainly have been smashed by either
Eisenhower or Kennedy. The Cubans were completely correct in seeking that aid.”
But “while they were able to get the required material aid in time to save the
revolution, the cost was heavy in terms of their political independence.”
Hansen’s examination of some of the negative results is worth quoting at
length:
Both the American campaign to crush the revolution and
the strings attached to Soviet aid must be taken into consideration in dealing
with the problem of bureaucratism in Cuba. By isolating and further
impoverishing the country, the blockade helped increase the social importance
of the layers charged with defense. … One of the consequences was an army now
recognized as one of the best in Latin America. Another consequence, however,
was the introduction of ranks, a sign of bureaucratization. The Kremlin’s
influence was shown in the growth of bureaucratic tendencies under the auspices
of figures who were prominent in the Stalinist apparatus in Batista’s time.
These case-hardened bureaucrats were met head-on by Castro. A more difficult
problem is the example set by the Soviet ruling caste, which liquidated the
proletarian democracy fostered under Lenin and Trotsky.…
It
would be untrue to say that the battle against bureaucratism has been won in
Cuba. The indications are that this insidious social disease has gained, as the
introduction of ranks in the armed forces would indicate. Similar signs include
the continuation of the ban on formation of tendencies and factions in the
Communist Party and the jailing of the independent-minded poet Herberto Padilla
on March 20, 1971; the brush-off given to protests against the jailing by
leftist intellectuals like Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Octavio Paz,
Jean-Paul Sartre, and Mario Vargas Llosa; the show trial of Padilla, which
included a Moscow style “ confession” by the poet; and the accompanying
clampdown in the cultural field, where the Cubans had previously shown their
intent to make the revolution a “school of unfettered thought” in opposition to
bureaucratic practices. Another bad indication has been the pillorying of
homosexuals.
Hansen stressed that “the headway made by bureaucratism has not reached
such a degree that one must conclude that a hardened bureaucratic caste has
been formed, exercises dictatorial power, and cannot be dislodged save through
a political revolution.” Instead, Hansen advanced three basic points:
1.
For defense of
the Cuban revolution against all its enemies. As a party within the United
States, the SWP considers it to be its special duty to foster the strongest
possible political opposition to the main enemy of the revolution, American
imperialism. This defense is unconditional — it does not hinge on the attitudes
or policies of the Cuban government.
2.
For the
development of proletarian forms of democracy in Cuba. The purpose of this is
to bring the masses into the decision-making process in the most effective way,
thereby strengthening the struggle against bureaucratism. The initiation of
workers’ councils would add fresh power to the Cuban revolution as living proof
that socialism does not entail totalitarianism but on the contrary signifies
the extension of democracy to the oppressed in a way that will lead eventually
to the withering away of the state.
3.
For the
formation of a Leninist-type party that guarantees internal democracy, that is,
the right of critical opinion to be heard. The power of a party that safeguards
the right to form tendencies or factions was demonstrated by the Bolsheviks. A
replica shaped in accordance with Cuban peculiarities could do much to induce
the formation of similar parties in the rest of the world. This would greatly
facilitate resolving the crisis in leadership faced by the proletariat
internationally, thereby assuring a new series of revolutionary victories.
Problems of Democracy Over the Decades
Ten years after the revolutionary victory, two of its staunchest
supporters — Monthly Review editors Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy —
attempted a critical-minded Marxist evaluation of Cuban realities. The points
they made captured the contradictory developments that were still identified a
decade later by Breitman and Hansen:
It would be a mistake to assume that material gains were the only factor shaping the people’s response to the revolutionary government. There was the exhilaration which came from overthrowing the domination of foreign and domestic bosses, the national pride in standing up to the United States, the gratification stemming from the fact that little Cuba had suddenly become the object of worldwide interest and attention. All these factors interacted with the upsurge of mass living standards to create a quantity and quality of popular support for the revolutionary government, which has few if any historical parallels.
The
revolutionary leadership might have seen in this situation an opportunity to
attempt the difficult feat of bringing the people more directly into the
governing process, forging institutions of popular participation and control
and encouraging the masses to use them, to assume increasing responsibility, to
share in the making of the great decisions which shape their lives. In
practice, however, the relationship between government and people continued to
be a paternalistic one, with Fidel Castro increasingly playing the crucial role
of interpreting the people’s needs and wants, translating them into government
policy, and continuously explaining what had to be done, and what obstacles
remained to be overcome. [Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy, Socialism in Cuba
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 204.]
And more than a decade after the Hansen and Breitman analyses, Janette
Habel commented:
In his relations with the masses, Castro displays a
didactic charisma and sees the education of the masses like a teacher who
exercises his authority and spreads the good word. In the early years of the
revolution this style of leadership was accepted by the semi-literate masses
who received their political education at huge meetings in Revolution Square.
But today this “government by the word” is increasingly unable to offset the sluggishness
of a stratified apparatus; it irritates the intellectuals and leaves many
sectors of the population indifferent. [Janette Habel, Cuba: The Revolution
in Peril (London: Verso, 1991), 93.]
Fidel has described his constant personal interventions to battle
against such “sluggishness” and problems, explaining (in 1985) that he and his
staff of “twenty compañeros…constantly
travel, visiting factories, hospitals, schools, coordinating, helping
everybody, and they are not inspectors but people who go around assessing
the situation and coordinating one organ with another.” A sympathetic
but critical analyst, Frank Fitzgerald, has commented: “The attempt to
coordinate everybody from the pinnacle in an ad hoc way is a
bureaucratic centralist mode of operation par excellence.” He cites the
reflections of a former manager regarding Castro’s interventions:
After he visits a production unit, conditions and results improve for a while. He puts his finger on the sore spot. It is Fidel’s command, and the party cell means nothing, the organizational structure means nothing. Whatever Fidel says must be done.…Within a week of his visit to the Antillana steel mill, 1,200 bicycles and twenty buses were allocated to the plant. Who could do this but Fidel?…Fidel erodes all economic plans, he destroys them. He flouts any plan in order to resolve a given problem in the place he is visiting. The problem is fixed in a few days but it will crop up again within three or for months.
Fitzgerald notes that this “bureaucratic centralism” is not limited to
Fidel’s excursions. “It was also evident throughout the Cuban economy,
especially in the relationship between the higher state organs, most
particularly the ministries, and the enterprises subordinated to them.” [Frank
T. Fitzgerald, The Cuban Revolution in Crisis: From Managing Socialism to
Managing Survival (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1994), 127–128.]
In 1969, Huberman and Sweezy had defined bureaucratic rule as
“the monopolization of power by officials appointed by and answerable to those
above them in the chain of command,” asserting:
In this sense Cuba’s governing system is clearly one
of bureaucratic rule. Power is concentrated in the Communist Party, within the
Party in the Central Committee, and within the Central Committee in the Maximum
Leader. The structure was built from the top down: first came the leader, then
the Central Committee, then the regional and local organizers, and finally the
membership. Cubans sometimes argue that the method of selecting the members gives
the system a democratic character. In effect, assemblies of workers in
factories, offices, and farms select the hardest working, politically purest,
and best behaved of their number for membership in the enterprise’s Party
branch. This, it is argued, ensures that the Party directly represents the
people and wields power in their behalf. Actually, it doesn’t work out that
way. Candidates for membership proposed by the worker assemblies can be vetoed
by higher Party authorities who retain all levers of power in their hands.
Under these circumstances, what the worker assemblies choose is not who shall
represent them but who shall join the governing apparatus and become the
bearers of its policies and directives in the local situation. There is much to
be said for this system: it ensures a Party membership which is young and able,
close to the workers and respected by them. But what cannot be said for it is
that it constitutes an alternative to bureaucratic rule. [Huberman and Sweezy,
219–220.]
More than twenty years later, summarizing the assessment of a number of
left-wing scholars sympathetic to the Cuban Revolution, James Harris noted “the
verticalism, bureaucratism, and vanguardism that characterize Cuba’s
single-party-dominated political system pose serious problems to the
democratization of the country’s centralized state apparatus and the efficient
performance of its centrally planned economy.” In Harris’s opinion, “the
development of effective forms of democratic organization and participation
have been blocked by over three decades of reliance on a top-down approach to
decision-making and personnel selection, the substitution of bureaucratic
methods and procedures in place of democratic processes, and the continued use
of authoritarian capitalist forms of organization in state enterprises.”
Commenting on popular campaigns initiated by the Castro leadership against
corruption and bureaucracy, James Petras and Morris Morley wrote: “Mass popular
mobilization to attack middle levels of power became the basis for
re-legitimizing the leadership. This policy weakened the intermediary sectors,
strengthened the political elite, and defused popular discontent.” [James L. Harris, “Introduction,” and James
F. Petras and Morris H. Morley, “Cuban Socialism: Rectification and the New
Model of Accumulation,” in Sandor Halebsky and John M Kirk, et al, eds., Cuba
in Transition: Crisis and Transformation (Boulder, CO: Westview Press,
1992), 13–14, 17.]
In the same period, pro-regime academics from Cuba were offering a different
perspective. Julio Carranza Valdes explained that “there have, of course, been
restrictions of certain democratic liberties arising from the logic of a
process that affected powerful interests in a country that had been dominated
by the United States. To have made room, in the first years after the
revolution, for interests that were in Miami and meant very little to the
people would have reduced the rhythm of the revolution.” He acknowledged that
“although the institutional apparatus that ought to guarantee broad popular
participation has been created and is functioning, it is far from operating as
it should.” At the same time, he insisted, “calls for the creation of other
institutions or parties are heard only in Miami or in tiny, marginal sectors of
Cuban society.” In the words of Georgina Suárez Hernández, “people not fully
familiar with the Cuban experience often argue that democracy is impossible
with a single party, but this argument hinges upon the presumed paradigms of a
multiparty system. The existence of a single party in Cuba has juridical and
political justification, and it is based on the particular historical
trajectory of its struggle for independence.” She asserted: “The unity factor,
which has deep roots in Marti and Lenin, is identified with Cuban society’s new
goals and values and, above all, with its plural subject — an enriched
synthesis of individuals who have come together consciously and freely to pool
their talents and energies, adopting as their own the highest project for social
well-being, socialism.” Of Cubans who see things differently, she comments:
“The isolated groups that in Cuba demand the right to function as a political
opposition have their social base in the United States….This opposition is
synonymous with counter-revolution, and it has always been and will remain
pro-imperialist and anti-patriotic.” [Julio Carranza Valdes, “Reform and the
Future of Cuban Socialism,” and Georgina Suárez Hernández, “Political
Leadership in Cuba,” in Centro de Estudios Sobre America, ed., The Cuban
Revolution into the 1990s (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), 15, 54, 55,
56.]
But surely Comrade Suárez over-generalizes. One is reminded of the
young revolutionary militant who complained to Ernesto Cardenal: “If you
criticize anything anywhere, it is taken very badly: you’re a destructive
critic.” He added: “Suddenly Fidel comes along and sees these defects and
criticizes them, and everyone admits that they were bad, and they praise Fidel
who corrected them. But they give no credit to the fellow who said the same
thing beforehand, that one was a destructive critic.” He concluded: “Why is
Fidel the only one who can criticize? Shouldn’t every critic be another Fidel?
Get ahead of Fidel so that Fidel won’t have to be always coming along to correct
everything?…It seems to me that there’s a great deal of thought control.”
[Ernesto Cardenal, In Cuba (New York: New Directions, 1974), p. 50.]
In an important study The Cuban Revolution in Crisis, Frank
Fitzgerald commented that “after 1970 the leadership indicated its genuine
desire to move in a democratic centralist direction — although without giving
up ultimate control through the system of interlocking positions in the
Communist Party and other organizations. But in the immediate situation, when problems
emerged, the leadership often responded, out of habit, in a bureaucratic
centralist way.” In addition to bureaucratic habits “of revolutionary leaders
and old cadres,” there were “elitist pretensions of new professionals” and —
perhaps most serious — “the general absence among workers of a developed sense
of their collective rights and collective responsibilities” (pp. 143–144, 145).
At the same time, Fitzgerald perceived significant reforms and the development
of new institutions that seemed to address some of the long-standing problems.
This brought him to a mixed conclusion:
Cuba’s political system is neither a bourgeois
democracy systematically subject to the undemocratic sway of unequally
distributed economic resources nor an ideal socialist democracy with unimpeded
public rights and empowerment. Political restrictions remain in revolutionary
Cuba, which, while intended to shield against the machinations of the United
States and of other counterrevolutionary enemies, sometimes stifle loyal critics.
Overemphasizing such restrictions, however, would obscure the central thrust of
recent political reforms in Cuba. Overall, these reforms have further opened
the channels for democratic participation and debate within the revolution [p.
193].
One task of our developing collective discussion will be to clarify
what these democratic political reforms consist of, what they have
accomplished, and to what extent they have (or have not) overcome longstanding
patterns identified by so many sympathetic but shrewd observers, and to what
extent the Cuban people have gained control over the decisions that affect
their lives.
One of the most central democratic reforms was the creation in the
1970s of Organs of Popular Power, a hierarchy of elected councils or assemblies
on the municipal, provincial, and national level. This was first examined in a
substantial and very sympathetic way by Marta.Harnecker
in her widely-read study Cuba: Dictatorship or Democracy? (Lawrence
Hill, 1979 — 5th edition, revised and expanded). A preliminary look at
more recent literature indicates several key facts. The nomination process is
relatively open, but candidates are not permitted to present any kind of
political platform or to campaign around any ideas (or to campaign at all —
this would be grounds for immediate disqualification). Nonetheless, in 1989
about 70 percent of the deputies of the National Assembly (elected for
five-year terms) were members of the Cuban Communist Party or the Union of
Young Communists. At least in the late 1980s, the National Assembly was meeting
for two-day sessions twice a year. It elects the 31-person Council of State
(headed by Fidel) which runs the government on a day-to-day basis, and which –
one would guess — must frame the various proposals that the National Assembly
votes on during its twice-yearly two-day sessions, regarding a national budget
to adopt, legislation to adopt, and appointments of heads to governmental
ministries and of justices to the Supreme Court. The regional assemblies
allocate the budget received from the national to the municipalities, oversee
projects and activities having to do with such things as housing and hospitals,
and oversee economic activity in the province’s agricultural and industrial
sectors. According to Sheryl Lutjens, the main duty of the municipal assembly
“is to represent the interests of the constituents. Community suggestions,
demands, and complaints — planteamientos — are crucial in the
representative process.” The issues taken up include: garbage collection, water
supply, ice cream flavors, different prices of hair cuts, communal services
(street repair, construction, sidewalks), commercial dining services,
maintenance of grocery stores, milk distribution, electrification, the quality
of bread. [Wilber A. Chaffee, Jr., “Poder Popular and the Buro
Político: Political Control in Cuba,” in Wilber A. Chaffee, Jr., and Gary
Prevost, eds., Cuba, A Different America (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and
Littlefield, 1989), pp. 22–23; Sheryl L. Lutjens, “Democracy and Socialist
Cuba,” in Halebsky and Kirk, et al, eds., Cuba in Transition, pp.
63–65.]
There is a need, in our discussions of Cuban
political realities today, to give attention to economic developments that help
to shape those realities. University of Havana economist Pedro Monreal has
recently noted that while “a sector of the Cuban population has not abandoned
the dream of building a better world, inspired by socialist ideals, knowing
that they will have to find the resources, the incentives, and the legitimacy
for that dream,” the fact remains that “since the early 1990s Cubans have been
entangled in arguments regarding the viability of socialism in a small island
amidst a vast sea of globalization, a process made particularly difficult by
the open hostility of the most powerful nation on earth towards the island.”
Cuban sociologist Marta Nuñez Sarmiento, observes that “the process of women’s
incorporation and retention in Cuba did not stop during the crisis years of the
[1990s], nor did all the changes in gender ideology that women’s employment has
promoted during the last forty years come to an end.” On the other hand, some
of the gains made in overcoming racism have been eroded by the economic crisis.
“Not only has racial inequality increased along with other forms of social
inequality, but racist ideologies and prejudices seem to be operating with
greater freedom than before the crisis started,” notes Alejandro de la Fuente.
“Declining government control over the economy and lack of government action to
enforce color-blind hiring and promotion practices have opened new spaces — and
expanded old ones — for racist ideas to result in discriminatory practices.”
There is a concern that crosses the color line: “Older Cubans, regardless of
race, are more concerned about a political change that might destroy what is
left of the safety net created by the government to protect the elderly.”
[Pedro Monreal, “Cuba: The Challenges of Being Global and Socialist…at the Same
Time,” Socialism and Democracy (special issue on “Cuba in the 1990s:
Economy, Politics, and Society”), Spring-Summer, 2001, 7; Marta Nuñez
Sarmiento, “Cuban Strategies for Women’s Employment in the 1990s,” in ibid.,
41; Alejandro de la Fuente, “Recreating Racism: Race and Discrimination in
Cuba’s ‘Special Period,’” in ibid., 98–90.]
To what extent, as push comes to shove, will
Cubans across generational lines struggle to preserve policies (identified as
“socialist”) that guarantee such a safety net for all Cubans? To what extent
will the economic isolation of Cuba eat away at the possibility of such a
safety net? This safety net — social and economic policies designed to preserve
the basic well-being and dignity of all people in Cuba — has to be seen as an
essential element of any genuine democracy. So has the equitable inclusion of
all people in the country’s political, social, and economic life. Just as in
real-life struggles, so in a serious political analysis, we must give attention
to the interpenetration of race, class and gender, their connections to the
interplay of political structures and economic dynamics, and be alert to how
professed ideologies can both reflect and mask real human relations. Human
reality is always contradictory and fluid, containing multiple possibilities.
Things are often more complex than we assume or want them to be. Yet the
temptation to approach the Cuban reality in an overly simple manner — either
with uncritical embrace or hyper-critical recoil — will blind us to aspects of
the reality that we may need to see.
Conclusions
Nothing that has been written above resolves
anything. Factual summaries and theoretical points written ten, twenty or
thirty years ago do not answer essential questions about Cuba today, nor do
snippets from a few more recent articles.
George Breitman’s summary of his position
ends with the injunction that we must educate ourselves about actual
developments taking place more recently than a decade ago in Cuba. This is a
responsibility that we must carry out in our upcoming discussions and debates
on Cuba. At the same time, efforts to educate one’s self can result in simply
an impressionistic patchwork if one doesn’t have some way to structure the
accumulating information. The basic methodological approach summarized in this
contribution will influence my own efforts to comprehend Cuban realities,
particularly in the discussion that is opening up in Solidarity.
I don’t think we can legitimately ask people or organizations that have
criticisms of policies or problems in Cuba to shut up. We have a responsibility
to “say what is.” But we can legitimately ask people or organizations
claiming to be revolutionary (and even many who make no such claim) to
participate in efforts to defend Cuba from imperialism.
It is to be hoped that comrades with divergent analyses of the nature of
the Cuban regime and Cuban society can join together in developing increasingly
creative and effective ways to help defend the people of Cuba from the threats
and assaults of the imperialist Goliath. It is to be hoped that these comrades
will also join together in learning from what is best in the Cuban
revolutionary experience as well as in learning from its limitations and
mistakes. The main point of such education is not to extol or criticize other
people’s revolutions, but rather to help us as we work to advance the global
revolutionary struggle, particularly in our own country.
June 1, 2003