Cuba: Fidel Castros legacy

The question is how far Trump will want to roll back relations with
Cuba. Nobody knows.
Samuel Farber interviewed by Paul DAmato-
Courtesy: International Socialist Review

( March 8, 2017, Boston, Sri Lanka Guardian) Samuel Farber

was born and raised in Cuba and has written extensively on that
country. His newest book, The Politics of Che Guevara: Theory and
Practice, is available from Haymarket Books. International
Socialist Review editor Paul DAmato interviewed him in early
December 2016.
Did the US embargo against Cuba that began in 1960, and
continues to this day, drive Cuba into the arms of the
Soviet Union, as many liberals contend, or was it part of
the original plan of the Cuban revolutionaries to move in
that direction?
Liberals and many radicals, such as Robert Scheer and Maurice
Zeitlin in their 1963 book Cuba: Tragedy in Our Hemisphere,
thought that Fidel Castros adoption of Communism with a capital
C was a mere reaction to the foreign policies of the United
States. That seemed to assume that the minds of the
revolutionary leaders were blank slates without any politics and
ideology prior to the victory of the revolution on January 1, 1959.
Che Guevara was far closer to the truth when in a 1963 interview
with the French weekly LExpress, he affirmed that Cubas
adoption of Communism was half the result of constraint,
meaning from US imperialism, and half the result of choice,
meaning the politics and ideology of the revolutions leaders.
During the Cold War, the US contended that Castro and
Cuba were fomenting revolution around Latin America and
the rest of the world. Was that true?
Yes, it is true that Cuban revolutionary leaders were fomenting
revolution, primarily in Latin America, through their organization
and support of guerrilla warfare. But they were not doing so in
Mexico, where guerrilla groups developed at various points in
states such as Guerrero. Nor did the Cuban government support
in any meaningful way the struggle against the dictatorship of
Francisco Franco in Spain, one of the main enemies of all wings of
the Cuban left in the 1940s and 1950s. The reason Mexico and
Spain were excluded was because in the1960s Mexico was the
only country in the western hemisphere that maintained
diplomatic relations with the Cuban government. In the case of
Spain, after an initial rough patch Franco established a friendly
political and economic relationship with the islands leaders. The
Cuban government, as a general rule, did not encourage
opposition movements or guerrilla movements against
governments that maintained friendly relations with them. This is
still the case. In the Middle East today, for example, the Cuban
government supports the bloody Syrian dictatorship of Assad and
the official Fatah leadership of the Palestinian Authority.
I think its also important, returning to the issue of guerrilla
warfare, to keep in mind two additional factors. Namely, that
under the pressure of the Soviet Union, Cuba reducednot
completely eliminated but reducedsupport to the guerrilla
movements in Latin America, because the Soviet Union pressured
them. It was violating the spheres of interest that they had
developed with the United States, whereby the Soviet Union
would not interfere in the western hemisphere and the United
States would not militarily interfere in Hungary, Poland, and the
East European countries under the control of the Soviet Union.
It is also important to keep in mind that revolutionary movements
led by Latin American guerrilla armies did not generally
encourage the self-organization of the peasants they recruited
into guerrilla armies. These were military outfits with a completely
top-down structure, not only in military but also in political terms.
Had they been successful, there is good reason to think that the
states they founded would have been structurally and politically
similar to the Cuban state.
What explains the fact that Castro sent Che and Cuban
troops to Africa?
This is a complicated story, but I think it can be understood. The
Cuban government had a relatively limited involvement in Africa
in the early 1960s before the USSR greatly increased the pressure
on the Cuban government to reduce its Latin-American presence,
in the mid- and late-1960s. In 1967, for example, the Soviet Union
sharply reduced oil shipments to Cuba. That was a massive way
of creating pressure. Guevara had been in the Congo in 1964, and
the Cuban government provided substantial support to the regime
of Ben Bella in Algeria when it entered into a war with Morocco.
So it is not true to say that Cuba had not made its presence
known in Africa before. What is true, and this is evidently very
different, is that Cuba intervened in Africa in a very massive way
after the Soviet Union put the heat on Cuba to reduce guerrilla
warfare in Latin America, because their mutual strategic interests
were much more compatible in Africa than they were in Latin
America, although there were still tactical differences that
developed between the Soviet Union and Cuba in the African
continent.
But the Cuba intervention in Angola involved tens of thousands of
troops in conventional warfare. Were not talking here about
guerrilla warfare, but about tanks, airplanes, infantry, and
mortars. Cuba also sentand this is something the apologists for
the Cuban government do not want to talk about17,000 troops
to support Ethiopia in the Ogaden against Somalia. This certainly
was not a war for self-determination; nor was it a war of necessity
for Cuba. It was a war of choice; a war they chose to conduct
primarily because of the fact that the Ethiopian government took
the side of the Soviets in the Cold War.
Cuba also supported Ethiopia indirectly in its struggle against the
Eritrean independence movement. At the time, Fidel Castro
argued that the Eritrean struggle for independence was the same
as the struggle of the South against the North in the US Civil War,
an absurd comparison because Eritrea was a different nation from
Ethiopia, and that was not the case in the American South. Of
course, there was also the major issue of slavery in that part of
the US.
There are many uncritical supporters of the Castro
government who may concede that the Cuban government
under Castro, and to this day, has been repressive, but
that Cubas stand against US imperialism and its internal
reforms carried out after 1959, such as health care and
increased literacy, outweigh any repression. How would
you respond to that outlook?
At the heart of the question you are raising is the notion of a
trade-off, or exchange: given the good the government does, you
have to put up with the governments repression. I for one am
not, in principle and as an abstract proposition, against the idea of
trade-offs. My objection is to a very specific situation and the
trade-off that is proposed. The principled socialist position, as I
understand it, is that there are certain things that cannot be
traded off. I would say that as a minimum, before we can consider
any trade-offs, we have to expect that the government we are
politically supporting allows for the independent organization of
the working class and other groups and classes that are allied
with the working class, and that allows them to defend their
interests and to agitate on behalf of their interests; and, last but
not least, the ability to communicate their activities and views to
the population at large. This assumes that were not talking about
one-party state monolithic mass media, as in Cuba, where no
expression of open political criticism or opposition is allowed.
That, I would say, is the minimum. It is not just a position that
socialists should adopt, but also principled small d democrats,
who should also expect as a minimum the independent
organization of people and their ability to communicate their view
through a mass media that is not monolithic. That issue is for us,
as I see it, very relevant not only in terms of whether or not we
politically support self-proclaimed socialist governments, but also
non-socialist progressive governments.
The issue would come up, for example, in Venezuela; that is,
those movements and governments that at one point or another
we may have regarded as progressive. One practical way to
translate the position I am suggesting is this: put yourself in the
position of a comrade in a country in which we are considering
politically supporting the leadership. Our position, it seems to me,
should be one that can also be adopted by our comrade within
that country without committing political suicide. In other words,
could we ask the comrade in Cuba, or in Venezuela, or anywhere
else for that matter, to openly support a government that would
put them in jail?
That, by the way, is what happened to a small group of Cuban
Trotskyists in the 1960s. They were put in prison for publishing
their paper and they spent several years in prison. Eventually,
the government said, OK, we know that you are not pro-Miami
counterrevolutionaries. Were going to let you go free, provided
that you do not organize for your views. And that was the key.
They were released when they agreed not to set up a table
somewhere in Havana to sell their literature or try to propagate
their views through meetings.
This point doesnt just apply to people who accept our particular
views; we should favor all the people being able to organize
independently and communicate their views in a peaceful
manner. That is, as a minimum Im not saying that there arent
other issues to be concerned about but a trade-off that would
give up on those minimal conditions would not be acceptable.
It seems like it shouldnt be difficult to draw a distinction
between opposing any attempt by the United States to
impose itself on other countries, like Cuba, and our
attitude politically to the particular type of regime or
government that the United States is trying to impose
itself on.
I completely agree. When it comes to the issue of opposing
imperialist aggression, thats totally different than politically
supporting the leadership of the opposing country victimized by
imperialism. After all, the Left internationally, socialists, and other
people who were not socialists supported Haile Selassie against
the Italian Invasion of Ethiopia in the 1930s. There couldnt have
been a more reactionary system than Haile Selassies, and yet
that was not the pertinent issue there. The pertinent issue was
the self-determination of the Ethiopian people against Italian
imperialism. On that there can be absolutely no question or
doubt.
In your recent political biography of Che Guevara, you
contrast the political and strategic stances of Guevara and
Ral Castro to those of Fidel Castro. What were they, and
what was the root of those differences?
On January 1, 1959thats the date in which Batista was
overthrown and the revolutionaries came to powerRal Castro
and Che Guevara had different politics than Fidel Castro. Ral had
been a member of the youth wing of the Cuban Communist
Party the Partido Socialista Popular (PSP) which was the pro-
Moscow party in Cuba. He had a Communist political past. In spite
of the fact that he had strategic and tactical differences with the
PSPfor example, his support for the insurrectionary struggle,
which the Communist Party didnt approve of until much laterhe
continued to be pro-Soviet in his political views.
Something similar was the case with Che Guevara. Guevara was
an admirer of Joseph Stalin. When the Cuban revolution came to
power in January 1959, he was very pro-Soviet. It was later, after
1961and by the way, by 1961 all the basic changes in Cuba had
already been madethat Guevara became increasingly critical of
the Soviet Union, including beginning to be critical of Stalin
himself.
That was not the case for Fidel Castro. Fidel, in the years leading
up to the seizure of power and some time after was a radical
nationalist and a secret anti-imperialist. What do I mean by a
secret anti-imperialist? Until January 1, 1959, anti-imperialism was
not part of the movement and I want to emphasize that. The
Cuban revolution before Batistas overthrow was not an anti-
imperialist revolution. Castro and others were of course critical of
United States policy in Cuba; but being critical of US policy in
Cuba doesnt make you an anti-imperialist. Only the Communist
Party was at that time anti-imperialist.
After the revolution, there was a process of radicalization, which
became more pronounced, with the tremendously hostile reaction
of the United States to the agrarian reform law of May 1959. Fidel
Castros private anti-imperialism that had begun to become public
immediately after the victory of January 1, 1959, became more
pronounced, and gradually came closer to the more radical line
advocated by the alliance of the old Cuban pro-Moscow
Communists of Ral Castro and Che Guevara.
While Castro was not a particularly great strategist, he was a
brilliant tactician. What I mean by that is he was usually able to
see what was going on and to figure out how the wind was
blowing. You could say it was a historical coincidence that at that
particular time the USSR was at the peak of its power. Sputnik,
the first satellite, was launched by the Soviet Union in 1957. Pro-
Soviet parties were winning elections, for example, in Kerala,
India, at that time. The rate of economic growth of the Soviet
Union though its hard to believe in light of how the USSR failed
to develop subsequently, was actually higher than in the United
States then. That led Nikita Khrushchev, then leader of the Soviet
Union, to say to the United States, We will bury you. He didnt
mean it in military terms; he meant in economic terms. Of course,
later we learned how the economic crisis developed in the Soviet
Union, but thats a different story.
At this point a pact with the Soviet Union was attractive to Fidel
Castro, and by late 1959 he had begun to develop a pact and
was swayed in that direction. Not, I believe, on a principled basis,
but certainly, approaching the Soviet Union was compatible with
his top-down perspective. You can see in his speeches and
political conduct at the time, and see that whether or not he was
procapitalist or Communist, he always had a from the top
perspective of how to control a revolutionary movement. There
was already an element of elective affinity between his politics
and those of the Soviet Union. Had Fidel Castro chosen another
coursewhich, in my opinion, was not a matter of fateRal
Castro would have gone into opposition against Fidel. Soviet
archives have revealed that Ral in early 1959 briefly considered
breaking with Fidel and going into opposition. And Che Guevara
would almost certainly have left Cuba.
Ive been rereading the biography of Castro published in
1986 by Tad Szulc, Fidel: A Critical Portrait, and the 1971
book Is Cuba Socialist by the French agronomist Rene
Dumont. What comes out clearly in both is that Castro to a
large degree could do whatever he wanted in Cuba
whenever he felt like it.
As Marxists, we always have a well-founded reason to be leery of
individualistic explanations of historical development, and with
good reason. However, there are certain social situations (as with
Louis Bonaparte in France in the mid-nineteenth century, which
Marx so brilliantly analyzed) which allow for such an individual
power. Analogous conditions existed in the islandI discussed
them in my first book on Cubathat facilitated this kind of
individual power. Thats exactly what was happening in Cuba
before the victory of the revolutionthe weakness of political
parties; the existence of a mercenary army that had weak or non-
existent organic connections with the Cuban upper classes; and
other factors that facilitated, then and later, that kind of individual
power.
If, as you argue, Cuba is not a socialist country, are there
nevertheless elements of what the revolution
accomplished that are worthy of support?
Definitely. Here were talking about the very comprehensive
welfare state that was developed in Cuba, particularly in the areas
of education and health care from 1960 to 1990a thirty-year
period. We are close to being as many years from the end of that
period until today; that is, in 2020 it will be thirty years since the
collapse of the Soviet Union. A very comprehensive welfare state
was developed that obviously, any socialist, any human being,
any progressive person would favor. Theres no question that
those were positive achievements. The problem is that the
system was very heavily subsidized by the Soviet Union and
Eastern bloc countries. The moment the Soviet Union collapsed in
1990, there was a very big deterioration in the Cuban welfare
system.
People who support the Cuban government write about the island
as if it was the same before 1990 as it was after 1990. Thats a
very critical dividing point insofar as the Cuban welfare state is
concerned. Ill give you an example: At the beginning of the
current school year, 350 schools were closed in Cuba because
they were a threat to health and safety. Theres a tremendous
deterioration in the system, combined with the fact that the
Cuban economy does not have sufficient capital savings to renew
its physical plant whether in the social welfare or the productive
spheres to maintain that system in the way it was working before
1990. The system has deteriorated quite significantly, and that
raises the question of the material base that must exist to
maintain such a progressive system.
The problem with the Cuban economy is that there is tremendous
waste and inefficiency, where the attitude of workers is the same
as in Eastern Europe before the fall of Communism: They pay us
little and we produce little; or, they pay us nothing and we
produce nothing. Theres no feedback in a system that lacks any
kind of independent unions or workers control; there is no
autonomous feedback that would motivate workers to work
efficiently. There is an unverified claim that Fidel Castro once
said Were good at fighting but were not good at producing.
That is true.
Not only is Cuba an economy of great waste and inefficiency, but
also one where the unchecked power of Fidel Castro has
produced, over and over again, economic disaster. In 1970, there
was the absolutely insane notion of producing ten million tons of
sugar. They not only failed to produce that amount, but in
attempting it disrupted the transportation system; in fact, whole
other areas of the Cuban economy were highly disrupted by this
hare-brained scheme. Shortly before Castro had to leave politics
in 2006 because of poor health, the so-called battle of ideas had
involved a lot of economic plans that produced very incoherent
economic interventions and poor results, with the great deal of
the micromanagement that Fidel Castro was so fond of.
Ral, by the way, is very different in that regard. He is for
delegating and holding lower bureaucrats responsible; he has a
very different approach to economic issues than his brother Fidel.
Here are some examples of Fidels schemes: The Havana belt plan
to grow small crops in the late 1960s that collapsed. There was
the infamous attempt to develop the F-1 hybrid cowagainst the
advice of British experts he brought to Cubathat failed to
increase production despite the investment of major resources.
These schemes were a serious flaw, and particularly characteristic
of Fidels reign.
When we talk about inefficiency and waste, were so used to the
capitalists talking about inefficiency and waste that we think its
only a capitalist problem. In a country that no longer has private
capitalists, however, its a problem directly affecting the working
class and other laboring classes, because you are wasting
peoples labor; people are working hard, and because of these
hare-brained schemes, their work is being wasted. That is a
precious asset that the regime essentially doesnt care about.
Its also true that there has been a criminal economic blockade of
Cuba by the United States, and that of course has played an
important role. I would, however, point out that the impact of the
blockade was much greater at the beginning, when the whole
economy was based on machinery from the United States, and it
was impossible to get spare parts and new machinery to replace
the old ones. So clearly, it had a much greater impact in the early
1960s than in the later years, when the economy had been
reoriented to machinery produced in East Germany, the Soviet
Union, and places.
The impact of the blockade is important to this very day, but it is
also important to understand that the US was the only capitalist
country to engage in the blockade. Canada, Spain, and the
European Union continued to be involved in trade with Cuba.
In fact, a very revealing situation occurred in the 1970s when the
price of sugar went sky high, to seventy cents a pound at one
point. It hasnt happened before or since. Under this
circumstance, where Cuba had real assets because of the high
price of sugar, its pattern of trade changed dramatically.
Practically half of its trade was with Canada and Western Europe
rather than the Soviet bloc.
In other words, when Cuba had something to offer from its own
economy, it was much less dependent on the Soviet Union
economically as it had been before, and was after. The Western
European countries, the so-called Paris club, extended
considerable credits to the Cuban government. Its telling that in
1986, four years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba
cancelled its interest payments to the Paris Club because they
could not afford to repay them. This debt was just settled very
recently in negotiations with the European Union.
Its important to keep that in mind when talking about the
blockade, and to support the complete elimination of the
blockade. Obama tried to limit its effects, but the blockade
continues. There cannot be US investment in Cuba. Agricultural
exports from the US to Cuba were allowed by special exception in
2001; but they have to be paid for in cash. Obama might have
softened the blockade somewhat, but the Helms-Burton Act of
1996 prohibits a lot of things that Obama, even if he wanted to,
could not get around. For example, the Starwood chain of hotels,
which includes the Sheraton chain is in Cuba, but its owned by
the Cuban state. Under the current legislation, Hilton or any other
chain could not invest money to build a hotel. So there are clearly
limits, just not with the same impact as the earlier period. In my
judgment, the impact of the blockade is not of the same
importance as the internal problems of the Cuban economy itself.
But there is no question that the criminal blockade that the US
imposed in the early 1960s must be abolished. It would
undoubtedly improve economic conditions in Cuba.
In Rosa Luxemburgs Reform or Revolution she talks about
worker-owned cooperatives, and points out that since
they operate in a capitalist market, whatever their
intentions, they must operate in ways that are dictated by
the pressures of the market. And when I think of Cuba, its
not just a question of the impact of the embargo, but the
impact of the world economy on Cuba a small island
economy dependent on the world around it which exert
pressure with or without the embargo.
Absolutely. Cuba is a particularly open economy. If you look at
Cuba, look at nickel. Nickel is doing badly now because of the
collapse of commodity prices, but Cuba is a major producer of
nickel; it is produced by the Cuban state in association with a
Canadian corporation. Biotechnology is also important and it can
only succeed with the expert and international licensing of
pharmaceutical products. Sugar has declined dramatically, so it
really doesnt count for much; but tourism, which is very
important to the economy, is completely dependent on the
outside world.
Youve noted that in the last decade, under the leadership
of Ral Castro, Cuba is moving in the direction of whats
been called market Stalinism, or the Chinese-
Vietnamese model that is, a one-party state but with
allowances for much greater leeway in developing private
capitalism and opening up to the world market. What did
Fidel Castro think about this trajectory?
Definitely they are moving in that direction, but in a contradictory
fashion; I mean allowing some things but attempting to curtail
them at the same time. That reflects pressures in the Cuban
bureaucracy not wanting to sacrifice their jobs and their positions
in the economy if it opens up. Ral Castro is trying to balance
between those pressures. So for example, there are only
somewhat over 200 occupations where the Cuban government
has allowed people in the urban areas to be self-employed. The
presence of private enterprises in Cuba is evident but limited to
tiny enterprises like restaurants, taxis, renting apartments to
tourists, computer repair services, and that kind of thing. Its
really relatively marginal to the economy, but half a million
people are employed that way, out of a labor force of five million.
So its significantnot predominant, but significant. Counting the
countryside and the urban areas, about 25-30 percent of the labor
force is now self-employed; but state employment still accounts
for two-thirds or 70 percent of employment.
What Fidel Castro was willing to allow was much less than what
Ral Castro has allowed by way of reforms imitating China and
Vietnam. Ral has given a lot more room for reforms to develop
than had been the case under Fidel. Fidel allowed some of it, but
nothing compared to what happened later. For example, under
Ral, houses can be bought and sold. People are still not allowed
to have more than one house in the city and one at the beach.
Foreigners are generally not allowed to buy houses or apartments
in Cuba, but relatives from Miami can bring money and find family
members whose names they can use to buy a house; so there are
a lot of ways of getting around the legal limitations still in force.
But a lot more of this has happened under Ral than under Fidel.
Did Fidel approve of these changes? He probably disapproved, or
was not very hot about it. There must have been either and
implicit or and explicit agreement between Fidel and Ral, where
Fidel would not give opinions about domestic issues. After Fidel
got sick in 2006, he published several dozen reflections in the
Communist Party press, and not once did he discuss issues of the
domestic economy or domestic policy. All of his columns were
about foreign policy or general issues like the environment, and
by the way, also some conspiratorial views and speculations
about world politics. But what is remarkable is that not one
column of his was about the domestic economy or politics. That
makes me suspect that though he wasnt very enthusiastic about
the economic reforms, his agreement with his brother, implicitly
or explicitly, was that he would not interfere with his brother.
It would seem to me that theres the question of a
controlled opening from above along the lines of a Chinese
model, which doesnt necessarily bode well for workers
and people at the bottom of society, and raises the
question as to what degree any sort of opening can create
a space from below to move in a different direction.
I wrote a recent article for Jacobin about the possible socialisms
in Cuba, but there is one huge obstacle. Of course, there are
many obstacles for example government repression. But a big
one is the question of massive emigration from the island. The
fact of the matter is that young people, particularly, in Cuba are
dissatisfied. They are not thinking of big political change; theyre
thinking about how the hell to get out of there.
In recent years there has been a massive exodus that is going to
accelerate in light of the possibility that Trump, for his own
reasons, may repeal the Cuba Adjustment Act that grants Cubans
much greater rights than other Latin Americans once they touch
American soil. In anticipation of that there might be a big exodus.
There was already a big surge after Obama resumed relations,
which led people to think that the Cuban Adjustment Act is going
to change, so lets get out of here now. Since people could not
come directly to the US, there were lots of people moving through
Latin America on their way to the American border. Most people
now enter through Ciudad Juarez and El Paso, and not through the
Gulf of Mexico to reach Florida, which is a very dangerous journey.
Moreover, if the US Coast Guard captures a Cuban on the high
seas that person will be returned to the island, as has already
happened in thousands of cases.
Its common to view Cuba as still being involved in a
revolution as if it were an ongoing process that
continues to this day. What do you make of that idea?
Regardless of what you call the Cuban system, the revolution did
confiscate almost all private capital, big and small, as well as
domestic and foreign productive property. So, at one point, in the
mid-to-late 1980s, Cuba had a larger proportion of the economy
nationalized than the Soviet Union itself. It was almost an entirely
( 90 percent range) nationalized economy.
Keep in mind that this state of affairs was brought about in a
country that was relatively advanced in Latin American terms.
That is, in 1959 Cuba was number four in economic development,
measured not just by gross domestic product, but also by other
criteria: electrification, literacy, and in many others areas. Cuba
was usually ranked number four behind Argentina, Uruguay, and
Venezuela. In a country like that, to bring about a state of affairs
where the whole economy was nationalizedthere was a social
revolution in Cuba. Not your social revolution or mine, but there
was a social revolution in which the ruling classes were exileda
good part of the middle classes as welland they established a
new social system call it what you will.
So, there was a social revolution on behalf of what became a new
bureaucratic ruling class that ran the economy through the
Communist Party and the so-called mass organizations that
functioned as transmission belts for the new ruling Communist
Party. And that revolution, although very decayed, as I indicated
above, is still quite different from the private capitalist model that
exists in Latin American countries, including the so-called center-
left countries, and even Venezuela itself, which is the most left-
wing of the center-left countries.
Now, as long as that continues to exist, then that social revolution
is still in power. What will happen in the future? It is possible that
the next generation will take the final steps and go on toward
becoming fully capitalist, particularly in the Russian way. We have
talked about the Sino-Vietnamese model, but there is a reason
why in Cuba they might go in the direction of the Russian model
the existence of a cosmetic democracy. In Russia there are
elections, but they are not meaningful. The reason Cuba may
have to do that is to provide a cover for the US Congress to get
rid of Helms-Burton and abolish the blockade. Once they get to a
full Chinese-Vietnamese road or a Russian road, and they
dismantle state control of the economy, then the revolution that
happened in the 1960s will no longer exist. Until then the
revolution is still in power in Cuba.
The 1976 constitution created formal mechanisms of
voting, like peoples power, the assemblies, and the
mass organizations. Che and others, in response to the
argument that Cuba wasnt democratic claimed that
through his mass rallies Fidel established a direct rapport
with the masses, and that this, along with the assemblies
and the mass organizations, is superior to western
democracy. The counter argument is that these
organizations act as transmission belts of directives
from above, rather than organs of control by the masses.
What do you make of that?
I think quite honestly that it is farcical. The reason I use such a
harsh word, is that when you have a mass rally where people
applaud and say right on, thats not what democracy is about.
Its not even plebiscitary democracy. We are very critical, at least
socialists of our kind, of plebiscites. In a plebiscite, you submit a
position to the population to say yes or no. But even then
there are elections; and even then there is a real debate about
what to vote forfor example, in the case of Brexit. That was a
plebescite, and it was a huge fight, including within the left in
Great Britain, about whether or not you should support it. In Cuba,
there is not even that. I think that plebiscites are a very defective
form of democracy, but be that as it may, there are not even
plebiscites in Cuba. The masses cannot even propose
amendments to what Fidel Castro and the Cuban leadership
propose. To call that democracy is a farce.
The same argument has been made in terms of popular power
in Cuba. Popular power are local assemblies where, in effect, you
cannot vote for people on the basis of policies. At the lowest level
there is more than one candidate, but the candidates cannot say,
for example, I want you to elect me because I think we should
change the traffic patterns in this town because we have
tremendous pollution. You know, it doesnt even have to be a
revolutionary issue, but a substantive question. All they are
allowed to do is present their biographies, and their revolutionary
merit: My name is Liborio Garcia, and I fought in the Sierra
Maestra, and then I was sent to Angola. I was injured in Angola,
and since then Ive been in the local leadership of the Communist
Party. And thats all a candidate can do. That candidate cannot
even say, Elect me, because unlike my opponent I believe this is
the way to go in this town with the water problems, or whatever
problems we have. To claim that this process is democratic, I
think is quite farcical.
And of course, the press in Cuba is a completly monolithic
apparatus that follows the partys ideological department. This is
not a secret; its not an accusation of conspiracy. They would be
the first to admit: the ideological department of the Cuban
Communist Party gives so-called orientations to the press about
what they should and should not publish, and thats why on
controversial matters they dont immediately transmit the news,
because they have to decide how they are going to approach it.
And then theres the question of repression of dissent. For
example, the visual artist Danilo Maldonado, known as El
Sexto, has been jailed for writing Se Fue (Hes Gone),
referring to Castro, on the wall of the old Havana Hilton.
I get a lot of messages on Facebook; its not an easy task for
people in Cuba to get on Facebook but some people are able to.
From these postings I found, for example, that there was a firing
of a university professor, Julio Antonio Fernndez Estrada, from
the law school in Havana. He was a critic of the system, and they
just fired him. They also fired an economist, Omar Everleny Perez.
He is a guy who is very much for a kind of capitalist development
in Cuba; he spoke too much so they fired him from his position in
the Center for the Study of the Cuban Economy.
There is a certain degree of unrest I dont want to exaggerate it,
but Im paying attention to it in the Union of Journalists in Cuba
(UPEC). There have been several examples of people who, in
order to survive, write for outside outlets; not necessarily
for opposition outlets, but just to earn hard currency to be able to
survive in Cuba. They have been punished because they are not
supposed to write for outside outlets. So there is a certain degree
of unrest among journalists in Cuba. Whether anything will come
out of it, I dont know. Its something Ive been paying attention
to.
What was Fidel Castros attitude to the Obama
administrations 2014 opening to Cuba?
He was at least skeptical, or maybe even opposed to the whole
thing. It was very strange. It took a while before he wrote
something about it in the Cuban Communist Party press. He
issued a declaration that the president of the republiche didnt
say Ral Castrohad the legal and constitutional power to sign
the agreement with Obama, and reminded Cuba that the US was
not to be trusted. That sort of declaration, to me, sounds like a
bucket of cold water. But thats what he said. It was a short
declaration, but that was the essence of what he said in his
declaration. It was not a real endorsement.
Why do you think Obama opened things up, and what do
you think the future of this agreement is and where it
might be heading given the election of Donald Trump?
It was clear for quite some time before Obama did what he did in
2014, that the ruling class in the United States was not at all
interested in the blockade of Cuba and even opposed it. It was
quite some time ago that the US Chamber of Commercenot
exactly a liberal organizationhad come out quite openly for full
trade and economic relations with Cuba. The head of the
Chamber visited Cuba several times. The business press,
including the Wall Street Journaland you couldnt be more right
wing than the editorial page of that paperwere for resuming
economic relations with Cuba. Its interesting because their
argument for doing that, while full of wish fulfillment, had an
element of truth to it. They said: when we embrace Cuba with
investment, then things will change. Of course, there was a
certain automatic thinking involved, but there was an element of
truth to their strategy. That is, instead of trying to ruin Cuba
economically, we should embrace it and fill it with investment,
and then well see how that moves things in Cuba. Obama was
reflecting that. The billionaire Penny Pritzker, for example, was in
Cuba both before and after she became secretary of commerce
for Obama. There was clearly a changing mood.
Also, and this is important for the future, there are a series of
states in this country who have benefited from trade with Cuba
Alabama, for example. The port of Mobile, Alabama, is very
important in the export of agricultural commodities to Cuba. You
can find any number of right-wing Republican politicians in
Alabama, and in the Midwest, and the Mountain states who want
more trade. Jeff Flake, the GOP Senator from Arizona, who is no
friend of Trump, has been at the head of efforts to restore
economic relations with Cuba for many years. There is a
significant element inside the Republican Party that is for
resumption of relations with Cuba.
How things will fair under Trump is tricky. Trump himself, in 1998,
and once again on a couple of occasions after that, sent
emissaries to Cuba to explore investment opportunities. However,
during the campaign he was awful. He made some very extreme
right wing pronouncements to people while campaigning in
Florida. He has appointed a number of Cuban Americans to the
transition team, but one in particular Mauricio Claver-Carone was
a major lobbyist opposing Obamas policy toward Cuba. Hes been
appointed to the transition team for the US treasury department
that handles a lot of economic policy through the office of Foreign
Assets Control OFAC. This appointment is very, very ominous.
The question is how far Trump will want to roll back relations with
Cuba. Nobody knows. I sort of doubthopefully its an intelligent
guessthat he will break all diplomatic relations with Cuba. But
he may very well cancel Obamas executive order that allows
airlines to travel to Cuba. Jet Blue is already doing that; American
Airlines is doing that. Delta and United are about to start
commercial flights to Cuba. On the other hand, those airlines are
going to fight any efforts to curtail flights because theyve already
sunk money into it.
How would you evaluate Castros career and place in
history?
Lets go back given our common tradition to the late British
Marxist Tony Cliffs theory of deflected permanent revolution, an
important article he wrote in 1963. What Cliff wrote in that article
was about a series of factors: First, the absence of a successful
workers revolution, or its inability to survive successfully in
Russia; second, the bankruptcy of social democracy; and third are
the specific characteristics of third world countries, such as the
weakness of the working class. Given these conditions, the
permanent revolution Trotsky had talked about, that is, the
bourgeois revolution (or against dictatorship in the case of Cuba)
leading in a socialist direction under the leadership of the working
class, failed to take place. Things went in a very different
direction.
So far, so good. We can go a little farther, perhaps, than Cliff went
and say that these revolutions created a model a social,
economic, and political model that was attractive to the most
radical wing of the third-world liberation movements after World
War II through the 1970s. I say the most radical, because the
majority of them, like Nasser in Egypt, Ben Bella in Algeria,
Nkrumah in Ghana, Sukarno in Indonesia, adopted mixed systems
of state intervention and capitalism. But some did go further for
example in Vietnam and China.
But there was a model of a state bureaucratic economy as a
means to achieve economic development that was different from
both socialism and from private capitalism. It was attractive for
many years. Whether or not they delivered economic
development, it still remains a model. It must be said, by the way,
for a wide variety of reasons that I cannot possibly go into here,
that this model was also attractive in varying degrees to the Left
in the developed countries. One piece of evidence for that is, in
the reactions to the death of Fidel Castro in the left-wing press in
the United States, most have gone on record on thisand it is not
a pretty picturebut we have to acknowledge that there is even
at this late point a lot of sympathy for Fidel Castro in the US left.
Again, that model attracted support. In the last analysis the
question is how much is going to be left after this generation of
Cuban leaders is gone. Ral Castro is eighty-five-years old.
Historically speaking, not much may be left of that model. If not
much is left of that, then historicallyand thats the question that
has been posedwhat was the point of this state-bureaucratic
system from above? That is, what legacy did it leave?
What do you mean when you described the reaction of the
US left press to Fidels death as not a pretty picture?
Ive been dismayed because Ive been looking at the articles that
appeared all the way from left of center magazines like
the Nation to more radical outfitswith the exception of places
like Jacobin, where Mike Gonzalez wrote a pretty good piecebut
the majority were pieces that to one degree or another were
positive about Fidel Castro. Not to the same degree. Clearly, what
Greg Grandin wrote for the Nation, for example, was definitely
less enthusiastic than what Monthly Review published. They are
planning to have Fidel Castros picture on the cover. As a sideline:
on my Facebook friends list and of course many of those people
are not friends, you know yesterday I ran into four or five of them
who had pictures of Fidel Castro instead of their picture on their
home page. Its remarkable.
I think theres a great deal of confusionto come back to
the beginning of our discussionin assessing Fidel Castro
in the same way you would assess any leader of a national
liberation movement and that he should be praised for
standing up to imperialism; but then on that basis,
downplaying or ignoring the fact that he ruled as a
dictator for almost half a century, and then passed his rule
to his brother in dynastic fashion. That seems to get lost.
Its almost as though hes Jose Marti who got shot off a
horse in 1895, and we can simply admire what a great
revolutionary he was, without taking the rest into
account.
What is striking to me is that practically nobody in their
assessments of Fidel Castro talked about democracy, and the one-
party state and its consequences. Perhaps its the notion that
while we would not put up with Castros system if it were tried
here in the US, its okay if its established in a third world country.
That is, in my view, a politically and morally bankrupt position.
Like the article on Fidel by Van Gosse, which says: Yes,
he was a tyrant, a dictator. But he got things done and he
stood up to the US, so thats OK.
If anyone were to propose that we try that kind of system here,
they would reject it.
Youre a long-time proponent of what the late socialist Hal
Draper called socialism from below. How would you
evaluate the Cuban Revolution in that light?
I would not characterize Castro as a socialist from below. As
Miguel Angel Gonzales pointed out in a very good recent article
in Socialist Worker, he is the classic example of a socialist from
above.
How do I evaluate the Cuban Revolution in that light? At this stage
of the degeneration of the Cuban Revolution, the only gain that is
still solid in Cuba is national sovereignty. What I mean by that is
that Cuba is still a far more sovereign country than it was back in
1958. That is perhaps the most solid gain of the Cuban Revolution
considering, as I mentioned before, that the gains in education,
health, and so on are in crisis; they are declining and face lots of
problems; not necessarily because of the subjective will of the
leaders, but primarily because the objective conditions dont allow
maintaining them the way they were.
The possible turn of the second generation of leaders to a full
Chinese or Russian model, or a Russian-style turn toward pseudo-
democracy in order to abolish the blockade or what Trump may
do, all have unknown effects. All of that combined make the
prospects for Cuban sovereignty uncertain.
Posted by Thavam