Showing posts with label Cuba. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Cuba. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 11, 2019

Cuba the latest victim of Ottawa’s campaign against Venezuela

On June 2, the Trudeau government took a further step in its campaign to support “regime change” in Venezuela when it officially suspended operations at its embassy in Caracas. Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland said she is now “evaluating the status of Venezuelan diplomats appointed by the Maduro regime to Canada.”

Canada has effectively broken its diplomatic relations with Venezuela, echoing the Trump administration’s baseless allegations that its government is “illegitimate” and “dictatorial.”  Ottawa has backed Juan Guaidó, the self-appointed leader of an ongoing coup attempt that has been notably unsuccessful in winning popular or military support within Venezuela.

Canada is a leading participant in the Lima Group, a rightist bloc of mainly Latin American governments seeking the overthrow of the Maduro government. The bloc operates in close alignment with the U.S. government and the U.S.-led Organization of American States (OAS).

Venezuela is not the only target of this campaign, which is aimed at those governments in Latin America most prominently known for their opposition to imperialism, support of national sovereignty, and efforts to surmount the ravages of neoliberal capitalism through decreasing inequality within their populations.

Among the victims is Cuba, a steadfast supporter of Venezuela’s sovereignty. The Canadian government recently and abruptly closed its immigration and visa section in its embassy in Havana, after reducing embassy staff by almost half. Cubans wishing to visit Canada now have to travel to a third country (the nearest being Mexico) to apply for a visa.

The following article by Yves Engler canvasses the issues involved in these moves. It was published first on Engler’s web site, https://yvesengler.com/. It is followed by statements issued by the Canadian network of solidarity with Cuba and by the leading association of Canadian scholars of Latin America studies.

* * *

Trudeau government squeezes Cuba

By Yves Engler, June 3, 2019

Ottawa faces a dilemma. How far are Trudeau’s Liberals prepared to go in squeezing Cuba? Can Canadian corporations with interests on the island restrain the most pro-US, anti-socialist, elements of the ruling class?

Recently, the Canadian Embassy in Havana closed its Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship section. Now most Cubans wanting to visit Canada or get work/study permits will have to travel to a Canadian embassy in another country to submit their documents. In some cases Cubans will have to travel to another country at least twice to submit information to enter Canada. The draconian measure has already undercut cultural exchange and family visits, as described in a Toronto Star op-ed titled “Canada closes a door on Cuban culture”.

It’s rare for an embassy to simply eliminate visa processing, but what’s prompted this measure is the stuff of science fiction. Canada’s embassy staff was cut in half in January after diplomats became ill following a mysterious ailment that felled US diplomats sent to Cuba after Donald Trump’s election. Four months after the first US diplomats (apparently) became ill US ambassador Jeffrey DeLaurentis met his Canadian, British and French counterparts to ask if any of their staff were sick. According to a recent New York Times Magazine story, “none knew of any similar experiences afflicting their officials in Cuba. But after the Canadian ambassador notified his staff, 27 officials and family members there asked to be tested. Twelve were found to be suffering from a variety of symptoms, similar to those experienced by the Americans.”

With theories ranging from “mass hysteria” to the sounds of “Indies short-tailed crickets” to an “outbreak of functional disorders”, the medical questions remains largely unresolved. The politics of the affair are far clearer. In response, the Trump Administration withdrew most of its embassy staff in Havana and expelled Cuban diplomats from Washington. They’ve rolled back measures the Obama Administration instituted to re-engage with Cuba and recently implemented an extreme measure even the George W. Bush administration shied away from.

Ottawa has followed along partly because it’s committed to overthrowing Venezuela’s government and an important talking point of the anti-Nicolás Maduro coalition is that Havana is propping him up. On May 3 Justin Trudeau called Cuban president Miguel Díaz-Canel to pressure him to join Ottawa’s effort to oust President Maduro. The release noted, “the Prime Minister, on behalf of the Lima Group [of countries hostile to Maduro], underscored the desire to see free and fair elections and the constitution upheld in Venezuela.” Four days later Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland added to the diplomatic pressure on Havana. She told reporters, “Cuba needs to not be part of the problem in Venezuela, but become part of the solution.” A week later Freeland visited Cuba to discuss Venezuela.

On Tuesday Freeland talked with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about Venezuela and Cuba. Afterwards the State Department tweeted, “Secretary Pompeo spoke with Canada’s Foreign Minister Freeland to discuss ongoing efforts to restore democracy in Venezuela. The Secretary and Foreign Minister agreed to continue working together to press the Cuban regime to provide for a democratic and prosperous future for the people of Cuba.”

Ottawa supports putting pressure on Cuba in the hopes of further isolating/demonizing the Maduro government. But, the Trudeau government is simultaneously uncomfortable with how the US campaign against Cuba threatens the interests of some Canadian-owned businesses.

The other subject atop the agenda when Freeland traveled to Havana was Washington’s decision to allow lawsuits for property confiscated after the 1959 Cuban revolution. The Trump Administration recently activated a section of the Helms-Burton Act that permits Cubans and US citizens to sue foreign companies doing business in Cuba over property nationalized decades ago. The move could trigger billions of dollars in legal claims in US courts against Canadian and European businesses operating on the island.

Obviously, Canadian firms that extract Cuban minerals and deliver over a million vacationers to the Caribbean country each year don’t want to be sued in US courts. They want Ottawa’s backing, but the Trudeau government’s response to Washington’s move has been relatively muted. This speaks to Trudeau/Freeland’s commitment to overthrowing Venezuela’s government.

But, it also reflects the broader history of Canada-Cuba ties. Despite the hullabaloo around Ottawa’s seemingly cordial relations with Havana, the reality is more complicated than often presented. Similar to Venezuela today, Ottawa has previously aligned with US fear-mongering about the “Cuban menace” in Latin America and elsewhere. Even Prime minister Pierre Trudeau, who famously declared “viva Castro” during a trip to that country in 1976, denounced (highly altruistic) Cuban efforts to defend newly independent Angola from apartheid South Africa’s invasion. In response, Trudeau stated, “Canada disapproves with horror [of] participation of Cuban troops in Africa” and later terminated the Canadian International Development Agency’s small aid program in Cuba as a result.

After the 1959 Cuban revolution Ottawa never broke off diplomatic relations, even though most other countries in the hemisphere did. Three Nights in Havana[1]explains part of why Ottawa maintained diplomatic and economic relations with Cuba: “Recently declassified State Department documents have revealed that, far from encouraging Canada to support the embargo, the United States secretly urged Diefenbaker to maintain normal relations because it was thought that Canada would be well positioned to gather intelligence on the island.” Washington was okay with Canada’s continued relations with the island. It simply wanted assurances, which were promptly given, that Canada wouldn’t take over the trade the US lost. For their part, Canadian business interests in the country, which were sizable, were generally less hostile to the revolution since they were mostly compensated when their operations were nationalized. Still, the more ideological elements of corporate Canada have always preferred the Cuban model didn’t exist.

If a Canadian company is sued in the US for operating in Cuba Ottawa will face greater pressure to push back on Washington. If simultaneously the Venezuelan government remains, Ottawa’s ability to sustain its position against Cuba and Venezuela is likely to become even more difficult.


Canadian Network On Cuba Calls on Ottawa to Reopen Visa Office in Cuba

The following statement was issued May 10, 2019 by Isaac Saney, Spokesperson of the Network.

The Canadian Network on Cuba (CNC) is deeply concerned by Ottawa’s abrupt decision to shut down the section of its Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship (IRCC) Office in Havana through which visas were processed for Cuban citizens wishing to visit Canada and those seeking work or study permits. This measure follows the 50 per cent reduction of the staff of Canada’s embassy in Cuba which took place in January of this year. Cubans now have to make their applications through a visa application centre in a third country (the nearest being Mexico). Those having to submit their biometrics (photo and fingerprints), a requirement instituted in 2018 that will apply to most, will have to travel to a centre outside of Cuba to record this information.

These decisions have introduced unreasonable delays and significant financial obstacles for those Cubans seeking to travel to Canada, and will, amongst other things, cause significant damage to business, cultural, scientific and sporting relations. Indeed, they have already had a drastic impact on academic exchanges between Canada and Cuba with some of the Cuban academics scheduled to attend the annual conference of the Canadian Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies on May 10-12 not able to procure visas.

Canada and Cuba have enjoyed uninterrupted diplomatic relations since 1945. This development represents a serious departure from the relations which have existed all those years. Canada, along with Mexico, refused to break diplomatic relations with Cuba in the 1960s when the United States established the all-sided blockade it has maintained since then. At that time the U.S. demanded that all members of the Organization of American States (OAS) sever any connection with Cuba and, even though Canada was not a member of the OAS at that time, it still did not follow suit.

One wonders what crime Cuba has committed against Canada to make Canada take what can only amount to hostile actions against Cuba? Why now, at a time the U.S. has reversed the Obama government’s attempts to bring an end to the failed policy that Washington has maintained against Cuba for 60 years?

In 2014, the world rejoiced to see the restoration of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Cuba and held out great hopes that relations between the two countries would be normalized. Canada helped by providing a venue for the talks which led to the improvement of those relations.

Everyone knows that sanctions target the people and deprive them of food, medicines and normalcy in the conduct of elemental commercial, financial and other relations. For 27 years, the vast majority of countries of the world have overwhelmingly rejected the U.S. all-sided economic war against Cuba. In 2018 alone, 189 countries voted with Cuba to end the blockade and only 2 voted against, of which one was the U.S. itself.

And now this! Is Canada so attracted to the Trump administration’s anti-democratic counter-revolutionary attacks against Venezuela’s right to self-determination as to take its revenge on Cuba? Or it is poised to admit that the United States dictates Canadian policy? Shame on Canada either way.

Who will benefit from the closing of the Havana visa service? Not Cubans trying to have normal relations with Canada and Canadians. What wrong has Cuba ever done to Canada?

The CNC calls on the Canadian government to reinstate the discontinued services at the IRCC Office in Havana, so that visa processing may proceed in a reasonable manner. If the abrupt shutdown is simply the result of the lack of necessary staff, as the Ministry of Global Affairs asserts, then Ottawa should issue a clear statement that visa and other related operations will resume once staffing issues are resolved.

Canadians, thousands upon thousands of whom visit Cuba for many reasons including tourism, business, academic, political and cultural exchanges of all kinds, want Ottawa to pursue a foreign policy based on mutual respect and equality. The CNC is confident that Canadians will reject any course of action taken by Ottawa which undermines the long-standing diplomatic relations based on norms recognized by the international rule of law and the ties of friendship and solidarity that exist between the peoples of our two countries.


CALACS public statement on visas for Latin American scholars

Dear Prime Minister Justin Trudeau,

On behalf of the Canadian Association of Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CALACS), we write to express our concern with the Canadian visa application process for Latin American and Caribbean scholars who wish to visit Canada for academic meetings and conferences. Our Association held its 50th annual conference at York University in Toronto on May 10-12 — a milestone for Latin American and Caribbean studies in Canada — and, unfortunately, four distinguished Latin American scholars, three Cuban and one Brazilian, never received their visas allowing them to travel to Canada, despite having undertaken the process more than three months in advance and having paid for all their travel and lodging expenses.

In the case of the Cuban scholars, the treatment they received from the Visa Section at the Canadian embassy in Havana was cavalier and disrespectful. The Canadian government only informed them that their visas were not going to be processed and that they would have to reapply outside of Cuba on May 8, just two days before the start of the conference. This conduct does not meet the standards we expect and demand from the Canadian public service.

We acutely felt the absence of these Latin American scholars and strongly debated the issue at our conference. At CALACS, we feel that Canada’s failure to deliver their visas interferes with our mission to foster the ongoing development of a dynamic Canadian-based, international intellectual community, to support research and teaching and to provide the infrastructure and capacity to facilitate knowledge mobilization and engagement strategies in Canada and abroad.

CALACS reaches out to and establishes partnerships with Latin American and Caribbean communities, NGOs, research institutions, and international academics. In addition, our Association works to inform policy makers, and public and private sector organizations through its events, publications, communications media and virtual resources. In so doing, we contribute to developing strong and long-lasting Canadian networks in Latin America and in the Caribbean and we promote Canada’s image and influence in the region. In this sense, Canada’s failure to provide visas for Latin American and Caribbean scholars in timely and respectful fashion can only be understood as a failure.

We appeal to you to make sure that Canadian visa processes never again stand in the way of scholarly activities, of free thought and of critical debate. Academic freedom can only promote and develop Canadian interests at home and abroad and is critically important for maintaining excellent political, economic and cultural relations with Latin American and Caribbean countries.

Respectfully,

The Board of Directors of the Canadian Association for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.


[1] This is presumably a reference to the book by Robert A. Wright, Three Nights In Havana: Pierre Trudeau, Fidel Castro and the Cold War World. – R.F.

Friday, March 22, 2019

A socialist approach to climate crisis

Introduction

I ended my previous post with the call for “a different kind of government with the political will to lead, coordinate and consolidate the transition, a government based on the support and protagonism of the victims of climate change, not its perpetrators.”

In that post I canvassed some of the major tasks that must be undertaken starting now and continuing throughout the transition to a non-capitalist, ecosocialist future. These tasks, already identified and pursued by the movement seeking “system change, not climate change,” are best understood and combined through a strategy that aims to put state power in the hands of the popular classes, through a government of the workers and farmers — those who, through their labour, transform Earth’s natural resources into our means of subsistence and fulfilment.

The Communist Manifesto succinctly described this transition as a revolution that would “raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class” and “use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie” through “despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production.”

What would a revolutionary government look like, and how would it differ from the ostensibly “socialist” governments of the 20th century such as the Soviet Union and its closest allies? These questions — long debated in the left — are addressed with considerable adroitness and foresight in a pamphlet published a full 20 years ago by what was then the Democratic Socialist Party of Australia. The Green Tax Fraud, by Dick Nichols, expressed the position of the DSP (now the Socialist Alliance) on some responses to the environmental crisis by “mainstream environmentalism.” It focussed on exposing the ineffectiveness of carbon taxes and similar policies that inherently fail to address and overcome the dynamics of capitalist profit and infinite growth that are leading us to climate catastrophe.

I excerpt below a chapter of this pamphlet that not only critiques the environmental record of the “state socialism” of the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China, but also provides some valuable insights into alternative approaches taken by revolutionary Cuba in the 1990s and by Sandinista Nicaragua in the 1980s in very difficult circumstances: in Cuba’s case, a deep economic crisis resulting from the fall of its Soviet trade partner; in Nicaragua’s case, a debilitating counter-revolutionary war that was undermining its efforts to overcome capitalist underdevelopment and inequality.

The author, Dick Nichols, in recent years has been the Barcelona-based correspondent of Green Left Weekly, covering major developments in the European left and, most recently, the Catalan independence struggle. In the excerpt below, I have omitted a few paragraphs (mainly outdated material) and renumbered the footnotes. A box on Nicaragua is included here as an appendix to the main text.

Richard Fidler

* * *

Socialist Solutions

By Dick Nichols

Our argument so far confirms that capitalism will continue to have a very difficult time proving that it has the answers to our environment crisis. But is the socialist case any more credible? Why isn’t the deadly environmental record of the departed and departing “state socialism” of the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China proof that socialism’s environmental crisis is just as systemic and inevitable as capitalism’s? Why should we give any credence to the socialist claim that only economic planning resting on socialist democracy can hope to resolve the crisis?

The most environmentally damning feature of bureaucratically planned economies was their general inefficiency compared to the advanced capitalist West. As a result their products carried an “ecological rucksack” many times heavier that of their Western equivalents. The fact, too, that these economies were “resource-constrained”—that is, produced to capacity and piled up huge stocks of inputs and final products “just in case”—has led many economists to theorise that planned economy must sooner or later become an obstacle to further productivity growth. Therefore, planned economy must necessarily block any possibility of sustainable development.

This theorem overlooks the fact that the wellsprings of productivity growth are a combination of three elements: the stage of development of science and technology, the extent to which these are applied to production and the degree to which the mass of working people are engaged and interested in making this evolving economic apparatus work to its potential.

In addition, Marxists like Harry Braverman and environmentalists like Barry Commoner long ago pointed out that the nature and pace of technology development is no class-neutral datum—something automatically brought into being by the state of scientific knowledge. It is constrained by the basic imperatives of the prevailing economic system, under capitalism being typically moulded by the need to control the labour process and produce the class of output that will yield highest unit profit.

Technological development is also determined by how much is spent on it. For example, capitalist technology development is greatly shaped by the fact that state research and development budgets for environmentally benign technology are either stagnant or falling while two-thirds of the world’s scientists are doing work for the military. The internal research of the corporations is driven by the need to find products that will produce monopoly superprofits (like grains that last one season or crops that depend on being drenched in one particular company’s pesticide).

Nor does “planning” exist in a social vacuum. Only through the participation and full empowerment of an environmentally aware people can a planned economy realise its potential as a healer of past environmental wounds and provide a framework for sustainability. Remove the vital ingredient of democracy and decisions on all the vital issues of technology and development become the domain of an unaccountable bureaucracy and mass alienation rapidly takes root. Such was the socio-economic lesson of the Soviet “stagnation period” (1969-89). By contrast—and this has been the formative experience for many environmentalists over the past decade—the methods of capitalist ecoreformism can bring better results.

The failure of the planned economies of Eastern Europe to go over from the “extensive” development model of the early Five Year Plans to an efficient “intensive” economy—the precondition for attacking the burgeoning environmental crisis—was due to the alienation of the workers, the conservatism of economic managers, the excessively low wage (which encouraged the flogging of old polluting machinery instead of investment in new) and the non-application of developments in science and technology, in turn mostly due to bureaucratic fear of failure.

It was also due to the triumph under Stalinism of the following view of socialist construction, which trampled Soviet ecological thinking (the most advanced in the world during the 1920s) under foot:

Let the fragile green breast of Siberia be dressed in the cement armour of cities, armed with the stone muzzles of factory chimneys, and girded with iron belts of railroads. Let the taiga be burned and felled, let the steppes be trampled…. Only in cement and iron can the fraternal union of all peoples, the iron brotherhood of all mankind, be forged.”[1]

That is to say, the environmental crisis in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was not due to the intrinsic features of a society in transition to socialism—social ownership of the major means of production and economic planning.

Indeed, the Stalinist counterrevolution that began in the late 1920s meant that planned, socialised economy was blocked from working to anything like its full potential. The socialist revolution equips society with the key weapons for the war against resource depletion and pollution by removing the vested interests of the private capitalists. How does this work?

Firstly, social ownership of major industry and the finance sector enables the implementation of emergency plans of large-scale environmental repair. By eliminating all the contradictory interests of competing capitalists—which make environmentally effective green taxation such a rarity—it enables policy to be directed straight at the sources of resource depletion and pollution.

Secondly, resources presently squandered in the luxury consumption of the rich can be redirected, helping fund the vast increase needed in spending on environmental repair and conversion.

Thirdly, the elimination of such a critical underpinning of capitalism as the business secret and patent rights allows the most environmentally benign technology to be applied across the board, instead of being jealously guarded as one or two companies’ fount of super profits.

Fourthly, it empowers the environmental movement, presently dispersed and fragmented, to concentrate its energies in a permanent and organised crusade against environmental degradation.

Lastly, in the underdeveloped countries, it opens the way to large-scale land reform, which is the precondition for relieving the environmental pressure superficially due to “rural overpopulation.”

In the short run the most important element is the explosion of popular energy that a revolution brings. Indeed, even working life in the advanced capitalist economies provides glimpses of the potential for harnessing people’s latent commitment to the environment. […]

Probably the most advanced attempt to harness workers’creativity to the cause of environmentally and socially useful production was the Lucas Aerospace Combine Shop Stewards Committee plan. Instead of the “defence” hardware which was the firm’s staple, the Lucas shop stewards developed such projects as solar power and wind generators, heat exchangers, a road-rail vehicle, a hybrid petrol-electric car and an airship using jump jets to avoid helium waste. The production processes developed did not waste raw materials, were labour-intensive, were non-hierarchical and non-alienating, required discussions with the final consumers, and were designed to break down the divisions between skilled and unskilled jobs.[2] From a global perspective the potential gains in energy efficiency and resource usage in an economy where the collective intelligence and interest of the real producers is engaged and harnessed is immense. For example, Amory Lovins, in a classic 1981 study, calculated that a world populated by eight billion people could, with “best practice” energy use, be industrialised to the West German level while cutting total energy use to a third.

[…] there is an enormous unused human potential waiting to be drawn into the job of saving the ecosphere. The question is: how best to summon it into life?

The 1979 Nicaraguan Revolution, led by the Sandinistas but crushed through the US-backed war of the contras 10 years later, is the best recent illustration of how this is to be done. The appended text below, based on a recent article of Daniel Faber, [3] provides a short summary of its achievements in the environmental field, which were partially based on a critical analysis of Soviet shortcomings. In Faber’s words:

One of the lessons provided by the legacy of the former Soviet Union and other Eastern European countries is that any socialist society which institutes social ownership of the means of production without establishing systems of genuine democratic social control by the people is doomed to be a political and ecological failure. Characterised by top-down systems of party/bureaucratic rules which sever links with both people and nature, really existing state socialist societies resorted to what was in effect a rightist politics of commandism.... [T]he Nicaraguan revolution would have to promote new forms of democratic state planning and administration which increased the power of the people themselves to exercise control over the major political, social and economic institutions in society.[4]

In the longer run, social control of technological development allows planned conversion to the foundations of sustainability. It would permit, to take one very insidious example, the elimination of chlorine-based production, which does not occur in nature, is poisoning our ecosphere and which grew “not so much by creating new industries as by taking over existing forms of production…. It grew through a virulent form of industrial imperialism.”[5]

If Cuba, even under the pressure of the criminal US economic blockade, can become a world leader in bio-technology and “green medicine,” then the application of even half the research and development effort that is producing the latest in lethal weaponry would rapidly open up “soft technology paths” in all industrial and agricultural sectors.

In the Cuban case the collapse of the old “socialist bloc” threw into crisis the “classical model” of conventional modern agriculture—based on extensive monocultures and a high degree of mechanisation and fertiliser and pesticide use—because all these inputs were obtained at subsidised prices from former Comintern economies. However, because Cuba had built up a stock of scientific knowledge and a well-developed agricultural research infrastructure, it was able, in desperate circumstances, to undertake what is essentially the largest conversion from conventional agriculture to organic or semi-organic farming that the world has ever seen.

This was made possible by the investment of an estimated $12 billion in the 1980s in developing “human capital” and infrastructure in biotechnology, health sciences, computer hardware and software and robotics, an investment partially driven by a developing disillusionment with a model of agriculture that was generating growing pesticide resistance and soil erosion.[6]

Cuba gives a glimpse of the enormous potential of socialist methods.

In 1987 the Institutes of Botany and Zoology merged to form the Institute of Ecology and Systematics of the Cuban Academy of Sciences, and the first international symposium on these topics was held in Havana in 1988. Ecology was now a respected and legitimate branch of biology with public visibility.

Ecologists are able to promote their programme through several channels. In the laboratories and institutions charged with pest control they adopt their own research plans in assemblies of the collective. Ecologists also address themselves through the mass organisations (the union, women’s federation,[7] student organisations) and the Communist Youth and Communist Party.[8] They write for the popular press, work with amateur innovators’ groups, and are increasingly seeking a role in the training of agricultural technicians. As individuals, some ecologists have been elected to the Assemblies of People’s Power, the legislative bodies at the municipal, provincial and national levels.

There is thus a growing ecological movement in Cuba. But it is not an ecological movement in the sense of those in Europe or North America. It is not a distinct political movement such as the Greens, nor is it an opposition movement confronting a resistant government and corporations, nor is it yet an “official” movement of the sort set up by governments to say yes. Cuban ecology activists are political, committed revolutionaries who see their struggles for ecologically sound policies as part of the duty of communists in building a new society with its own relation to nature.[9] The working method of the Cuban ecologists is educational, at the levels of society as a whole, government, and the party. In their view, ignorance, developmentalism, and economic urgency are their main adversaries. But the problem is not the lack of channels for expression but the resistance of opposing ideas. In the absence of greed as a major interest to overcome, discussions are not confrontational.[10]

This is the social essence of alternative to the false dilemma of end-of-the-pipe regulation or green taxes that supposedly drive “entrepreneurial creativity.” Public ownership of the key means of production combined with class power in the hands of an environmentally aware working people, offers the possibility of drawing on the stifled creativity, not of a handful of entrepreneurs, but of the vast mass of population.

How then, more specifically, can the instruments of democratic socialist planning tackle the tasks of meeting sustainability?

First, in a democratic, post-revolutionary state the struggle to harmonise the still conflicting demands of growth and the environment is conducted on a social playing field—the institutions of working-class democracy with its parties, workers’ collectives, scientific institutions, media and governing organs. Through the politics of their debates and struggles (which of course will always rely on some element of economic valuation) a more accurate measure of the social value of the environment can be established and an overall development plan implemented that is compatible with environmental restoration and preservation.

The establishment of full social control over production decisions also sets the right context for decision-making on the issues that almost totally exhaust mainstream environmental discussion, namely the relative virtues of market-based and regulatory instruments. A post-revolutionary society that leaves a space for the market will, for example, be free to decide the extent to which it should use environmental taxes and charges.

It also allows the best use of techniques like full cost accounting, cost-benefit analysis, cradle-to-grave accounting and input-output analysis, often so open to abuse and so sensitive. to initial assumptions (or too revealing about the full range of costs involved with capitalist production). Under planned economy there is also greater latitude for choosing a discount rate that will induce the producing units to switch over to renewable energy more rapidly than might otherwise have been the case

(Given the present embattled position of post-capitalist societies—and the tenuous position of countries like Cuba and Vietnam which retain some degree of revolutionary democracy—the value of such resources as tropical rainforest as an ecosystem compared to its value as timber for export will continue to present difficult, inescapable choices with which many environmentalists will disagree. Cuba’s flirtation with nuclear power is a case in point.)

Secondly, one of the powerful anti-environmental pressures operating in “state socialism” was the need of the bureaucracy, which had no intention of setting an example of austere living itself, to provide the population with distracting “bread and circuses”—a “socialist” consumerism that sadly mimicked the West’s. However, the greater people’s real control of economic and environmental decision-making—the lower the degree of social alienation—the less will be the pressure for consumerism, especially in those economies which can already readily meet basic human needs.

Thirdly, a post-revolutionary society will also be able to apply the precautionary principle. Our knowledge of how ecosystems work is still limited, and the possibility of unwitting environmental damage and loss is great. At the same time, because any effective programme of environmental conversion will involve a radical change in the scale and nature of consumption as well as the closing down of environmentally unsustainable industry and agriculture, the transition phase to sustainability will require conscious restraint from an environmentally aware population.

Such restraint is impossible to achieve in capitalist society— where the rule of profit-making creates extremes of wealth and poverty on an expanding scale—without coercion by the capitalist state. Its ethic of individualism and consumerism clashes directly with any sense of environmental responsibility, as shown in the reaction to price rises introduced by Britain’s newly privatised water companies.

A substantial proportion of customers associate these price rises with privatisation, the enhanced profitability of the water companies, dividend payment to shareholders’ and directors’ salaries. The capital investments undertaken by the companies and improvements in some aspects of customer service are at best imperfectly perceived. Customer attitudes towards the water industry have undoubtedly changed; they are less willing to accept what they see as system failures, are less prepared to cooperate with the companies in reducing consumption during drought periods, and are increasingly resistant to the notion that the companies should be able to restrict their usage by imposing hosepipe bans. Such attitude changes were clearly seen over the dry, hot summer of 1995; many customers reacted with hostility to the idea that their increased demands were to blame for shortages and they saw it as the function of commercial companies to meet all legitimate supply requirements (including garden watering).[11]

Fourth, a society ruled by democratic socialist planning will be able to establish an “economic Plimsoll line” marking the sustainable scale of production. Once people, through their elected representatives, can compare the costs of different scales of production, the best scale possible can be decided and the disastrous “giantism” of typical Soviet production units avoided. It will also be possible to pay full attention to the demands of bioregionalism and local production. Decentralisation and the gradual overcoming of the difference between the city and countryside will likewise become increasingly feasible.

Richard Levins draws out the link between right-scale technology and social regime in the case of Cuban agriculture:

The gentler the technology, the more site specific it has to be. The adaptation of a technology suited to every microsite is beyond the capacity of even the most affluent extension service. Rather, the technology has to be developed on the farm through a collaboration of the farmers who have a detailed, intimate, local knowledge of their own circumstances and the off-farm scientists who can provide the general, theoretically based and abstract knowledge that requires some distancing from the particular. This interaction is only possible when the parties meet on terms of equality and mutual respect. In class-divided societies this is extremely difficult to achieve. In Cuba, the fact that many of the agricultural scientists come from peasant backgrounds makes it easier.[12]

In such a context of post-revolutionary democracy the “Ecology of the Poor,” symbolised by such figures as the Amazon’s Chico Mendes and Mexico’s Zapatistas, can attain its fullest influence, as a tradition imparting precious environmental knowledge and skills.

All this goes to underline one reality: that social ownership of the major means of production and democratic social ownership of decision-making is the only way of running society that is compatible with an environment which is itself ever increasingly social. It is the only road to a “steady state,” sustainable economy.

Levins sums up his experience:

[…] of a socialist economy in which there is no profit-oriented chemical industry pushing pesticides, and in which the conscious goal of planning is a better, more abundant and healthier life. Difficulties arise when intermediate goals toward these ends take on a life of their own, become the measure of an enterprise’s contribution to society, and seem to conflict with the long-term goals. Although socialism is all too obviously no guarantee that intermediate goals will not obstruct ecological wisdom, it does practically eliminate vested economic interest in perpetuating harmful practices. Therefore, a debate over technological directions is only an argument, a confrontation of opposing beliefs, but not a confrontation of opposing interests.

This gives a different feel to argument even against stubborn ignorance. It makes strong argument effective and makes convincing the other party more important than the simple exercise of power. It also affects the style of struggle, which starts from the premise of comrades struggling with each other for a shared goal and is more educational than oppositional…. The debate also takes place within a theoretical commitment to Marxism with its emphasis on the historical contingency of science and technology, the importance of looking at the whole, the recognition of complexity, process and contradiction. This provides the tools for challenging technocratic developmentalist assumptions.

At a time when ecological issues are becoming major political concerns throughout the world, the Cuban struggle should be watched closely and actively supported. The different texture of the struggle in Cuba from that in capitalist countries reveals the intensely political character of human ecology. Its victories under difficult circumstances show just a little of the potential of socialism and of Marxism in negotiating a new relation with nature. If allowed to continue its socialist development, Cuba may yet become a world ecological power as well as a medical one.[13]

In short, the only possible “sustainability transition” is that which can be carried out by an environmentally aware people in control of their own destiny.

Environmental achievements of the Nicaraguan revolution

Agrarian Reform: On the basis of its 1984 Agrarian Reform, which gave poor peasants more than 10 times the land they had owned before the revolution, IRENA (the Nicaraguan Institute for Natural Resources and the Environment) began a series of campaigns to address problems of deforestation, erosion and fertility loss in the country’s major watersheds. These included the building of 4220 torrent-regulating dykes and the restoration of 500,000 acres of tropical dry forest and farmland in the degraded Pacific highlands.

Under this programme the Western Erosion Control Project planted some 3000 trees daily over a two-year period, creating 745 miles of windbreaks in the region’s cotton-growing areas. At the same time the rate of deforestation was cut from 1009 square kilometres a year in the late 1970s (the highest in the Central American region) to 500 square kilometres by 1985 (among the region’s lowest): This was because the agrarian reform lifted the pressure on tropical rainforests from landless peasants in search of subsistence farming plots.

Wildlife Protection: Before 1979 Nicaragua was a Central American leader in the hunting and export of rare and endangered species. After the revolution, because the Sandinistas nationalised the country’s import/export banks, IRENA was able to implement an effective ban on the export of endangered species. Most exemplary was the Sea Turtle Conservation Campaign, in which local communities participated in the sustainable management of their own marine resources.

Energy and Appropriate Technology: One of the chief causes of habitat destruction and deforestation was the peasantry’s lack of access to alternative energy sources to wood, which accounted for over half the country’s energy output. In response CITA (the Centre for Appropriate Technology Research) launched a series of renewable energy projects, covering windmills, hand-pumps, biogas and more efficient wood stoves.

On a larger scale, as part of a project to reduce the country’s dependence on oil imports INE (the Nicaraguan Energy Institute) initiated geothermal projects (based on the country’s volcanoes) as well as a series of hydroelectrical and biomass projects based on sugar cane waste.

Pest management: Nicaragua before the revolution was drenched in DDT, with hundreds of workers dying each year from pesticide poisoning and mother’s milk showing up to 45 times the World Health Organisation’s “safe” limit. Between 1979 and 1982 the Sandinistas banned the use of eight of the world’s 12 most dangerous pesticides and generalised a UN programme in non-chemical Integrated Pest Management. As a result by 1982 pesticide imports by volume had fallen by 45 per cent and by 1985 the IPM programme had expanded to cover 45 per cent of the cotton crop, the largest such programme in Central, and possibly Latin, America. Daniel Faber comments:

Nicaragua’s IPM programme became exemplary of the integral role performed by revolutionary ecology in the process of social transformation. First, IPM promoted greater national independence. Since the science was “home grown”, the IPM programme dramatically lessened the country’s dependence on millions of dollars in expensive chemical imports from multinational corporations, thereby freeing up scarce foreign exchange for the building of schools, health clinics, environmental restoration, and other programmes designed to improve the lives of the popular classes. Secondly, IPM promoted social and environmental justice by improving environmental quality and worker/public health. Thirdly, IPM contributed to a new sustainable development model. By overcoming the dynamics of the pesticide treadmill the IPM programme better enabled Nicaragua to overcome many of the major ecological and economic contradictions which . periodically plague export agriculture in the Third World. Finally, IPM technology promoted greater ecological democracy in that the successful application of the science required democratic state planning, including the close cooperation of coalitions within the Labour Ministry, workers’ associations and unions, the Health Ministry, environmentalists, national and international scientists and doctors, the Agricultural Ministry and growers’ associations, and other non-governmental organisations. As such, these efforts to safeguard environmental and human health while increasing economic productivity made the Sandinista government’s pesticide policy a model for “productive conservation” for the entire Third World. (Op. cit., p. 68)


[1] Address of V. Zazunbrin to the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1926, cited in Martin Cock and Bill Hopwood, Global Warming: Socialism and the Environment, Militant Publications, Guildford, 1996, p. 150.

[2] “The Lucas plan was rejected by all elements of the British establishment, including management, conservative trade unionists (one complaining that it would change British society!), academic ‘leaders’ and most of the Labour Government, whose initial encouragement was sustained by only a few, like Tony Benn. This is unsurprising since it was revolutionary, proposing industrial restructuring in the interests of labour; redefining wealth by rediscovering William Morris’ definition (‘working cheerfully at producing the things we all genuinely want’); redefining, therefore, economic rationality; challenging labour vanguardist views that average workers can do little more than to describe their grievances; reasserting working people’s right to associate (across unions); exposing the hidden values behind seemingly neutral, technical, ‘rational’ management and challenging its right to manage, at least without accountability to workers: as Lucas workers at Shipley are reported to have said: ‘In our experience management is not a skill or craft. It is a command relationship, a habit picked up at public school, in the church or from the army. And we can well do without it.’”—David Pepper, Eco-socialism, Routledge, London and New York, 1993, page 239.

[3] Daniel Faber, “La Liberacion del Medio Ambiente: The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary Ecology in Nicaragua, 1979-1999,” in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, Issue 37, (Volume 10, Number 1), pp. 45-80.

[4] Daniel Faber, op. cit., p. 58.

[5] Barry Commoner, quoted in Peter Montague, Rachel’s Hazardous Waste News, Number 390, 1994.

[6] For a detailed account see Peter Rosset and Medea Benjamin, The Greening of the Revolution, Ocean Press, Australia, 1994.

[7] Women are prominent in the leadership of Cuban science and have played an active role in the development of agroecology. The president of the Academy of Sciences, the director of the Institute of Ecology and Systematics, half the department heads in the institute, the director of the citrus experiment station and several of its leaders are women (author’s note).

[8] I once attended a meeting of biologists called by a local party group to discuss what to present at a national meeting on ecology and development. They were concerned about prejudices among economists who tend to dismiss ecological arguments as “idealistic,” and were developing the counter-argument that it is the height of idealism to imagine that we can make a plan and nature will have to obey (author’s note).

[9] Some struggles will be more difficult than others. For example, the desire of government to promote tourism for foreign exchange is encouraging development plans along the coast which could ruin the offshore cays. The dependence on imported oil makes arguments about nuclear energy more difficult. The economic role of sugar and its institutionalisation in a separate ministry will make the shift to multipurpose farming more traumatic (author’s note).

[10] Richard Levins, “The Struggle for Ecological Agriculture in Cuba,” Capitalism, Nature, Socialism Number Five (October 1990), pages 125-126.

[11] Judith Rees, “Toward Implementation Realities,” in Timothy O’Riordan (ed.), Ecotaxation, Earthscan, London, 1997, p. 289.

[12] Richard Levins, op. cit., p. 138.

[13] Richard Levins, op. cit., page 140 (italics added).

Monday, June 19, 2017

Cuba responds to Trump’s roll-back of its bilateral relations with United States

The following statement was issued June 16 by the Revolutionary Government of Cuba. Here is the official English translation, modified very slightly for punctuation and syntax. The original text, in Spanish, is here.

Declaración del gobierno revolucionario

On June 16, 2017, in a Miami theater, US President Donald Trump delivered a speech full of hostile anti-Cuban rhetoric reminiscent of the times of open confrontation with our country. He announced his government’s Cuba policy, which rolls back the progress achieved over the last two years since December 17, 2014, when Presidents Raúl Castro and Barack Obama announced the decision to re-establish diplomatic relations and engage in a process towards the normalization of bilateral relations.

In what constitutes a setback in the relations between both countries, President Trump gave a speech and signed a policy directive titled “National Security Presidential Memorandum,” which provides for the elimination of private educational “people-to-people” exchanges and for greater control over all travelers to Cuba, as well as the prohibition of business, trade and financial transactions between US companies and certain Cuban companies linked to the Revolutionary Armed Forces and the intelligence and security services, under the alleged objective of depriving us of revenue. The US president justified this policy using alleged concerns over the human rights situation in Cuba and the need to rigorously enforce the US blockade laws, conditioning their lifting, as well as any improvements in US-Cuba bilateral relations, to our country’s making changes inherent to its constitutional order.

Trump also abrogated Presidential Policy Directive “Normalization of Relations between the United States and Cuba,” issued by President Obama on October 14, 2016. Although said Directive did not conceal the interventionist character of the US policy nor the fact that its main purpose was to advance US interests in order to bring about changes in the economic, political and social systems of our country, it did recognize Cuba’s independence, sovereignty and self-determination and the Cuban government as a legitimate and equal interlocutor, as well as the benefits that a civilized coexistence would have for both countries and peoples despite the great differences that exist between both governments. The Directive also conceded that the blockade is an obsolete policy and that it should be lifted.

Once again, the US Government resorts to coercive methods of the past when it adopts measures aimed at stepping up the blockade, effective since February 1962, which not only causes harm and deprivations to the Cuban people and is the main obstacle to our economic development, but also affects the sovereignty and interests of other countries, which arouses international rejection.

The measures announced impose additional obstacles to the already very limited opportunities that the US business sector had in order to trade with and invest in Cuba.

Likewise, those measures restrict even more the right of US citizens to visit our country, which was already limited due to the obligation of using discriminatory licenses, at a moment when the US Congress, echoing the feelings of broad sectors of that society, calls not only for an end to the travel ban, but also for the elimination of the restrictions on trade with Cuba.

The measures announced by President Trump run counter to the majority support of US public opinion, including the Cuban emigration in that country, to the total lifting of the blockade and the establishment of normal relations between Cuba and the United States.

Instead, the US President, who has been once again ill-advised, is taking decisions that favor the political interests of an irrational minority of Cuban origin in the state of Florida which, out of petty motivations, does not give up its intent to punish Cuba and its people for exercising the legitimate and sovereign right of being free and having taken the reins of their own destiny.

Later on, we shall make a deeper analysis of the scope and implications of the announcement.

The Government of Cuba condemns the new measures to tighten the blockade, which are doomed to failure, as has been repeatedly evidenced in the past, for they will not succeed in their purpose to weaken the Revolution or bend the Cuban people, whose resistance against aggressions of all sorts and origins has been put to the test throughout almost six decades.

The Government of Cuba rejects political manipulation and double standards in human rights. The Cuban people enjoy fundamental rights and freedoms and can proudly show some achievements that are still a chimera for many countries of the world, including the United States, such as the right to health, education and social security; equal pay for equal work, children’s rights as well as the rights to food, peace and development. Cuba, with its modest resources, has also contributed to the improvement of the human rights situation in many countries of the world, despite the limitations inherent to its condition as a blockaded country.

The United States are not in the position to teach us lessons. We have serious concerns about the respect for and guarantees of human rights in that country, where there are numerous cases of murders, brutality and abuses by the police, particularly against the African-American population; the right to life is violated as a result of the deaths caused by fire arms; child labor is exploited and there are serious manifestations of racial discrimination; there is a threat to impose more restrictions on medical services, which will leave 23 million persons without health insurance; there is unequal pay between men and women; migrants and refugees, particularly those who come from Islamic countries, are marginalized; there is an attempt to put up walls that discriminate against and denigrate neighbor countries; and international commitments to preserve the environment and address climate change are abandoned.

Also a source of concern are the human rights violations by the United States in other countries, such as the arbitrary detention of tens of prisoners in the territory illegally occupied by the US Naval Base in Guantánamo, Cuba, where even torture has been applied; extrajudicial executions and the death of civilians caused by drones; as well as the wars unleashed against countries like Iraq, under false pretenses like the possession of weapons of mass destruction, with disastrous consequences for the peace, security and stability in the Middle East.

It should be recalled that Cuba is a State Party to 44 international human rights instruments, while the US is only a State Party to 18. Therefore, we have much to show, say and defend.

Upon confirming the decision to re-establish diplomatic relations, Cuba and the United States ratified their intention to develop respectful and cooperative relations between both peoples and governments, based on the principles and purposes enshrined in the UN Charter. In its Declaration issued on July 1, 2015, the Revolutionary Government of Cuba reaffirmed that “these relations must be founded on absolute respect for our independence and sovereignty; the inalienable right of every State to choose its political, economic, social and cultural system, without interference in any form; and sovereign equality and reciprocity, which constitute inalienable principles of International Law”, as was established in the Proclamation of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Zone of Peace, signed by the Heads of State and Government of the Community of Latin America and Caribbean States (CELAC), at its second summit held in Havana. Cuba has not renounced these principles, nor will it ever do so.

The Government of Cuba reiterates its will to continue a respectful and cooperative dialogue on topics of mutual interest, as well as the negotiation of outstanding issues with the US Government. During the last two years it has been evidenced that both countries, as was repeatedly expressed by the President of the Councils of State and of Ministers, Army General Raúl Castro Ruz, can cooperate and coexist in a civilized manner, respecting the differences and promoting everything that benefits both nations and peoples, but it should not be expected that, in order to achieve that, Cuba would make concessions inherent to its sovereignty and independence, or accept preconditions of any sort.

Any strategy aimed at changing the political, economic and social system in Cuba, either through pressures and impositions or by using more subtle methods, shall be doomed to failure.

The changes that need to be made in Cuba, as those that have been made since 1959 and the ones that we are introducing now as part of the process to update our economic and social system, will continue to be sovereignly determined by the Cuban people.

Just as we have been doing since the triumph of the Revolution on January 1st, 1959, we will take on every risk and shall continue to advance steadfastly and confidently in the construction of a sovereign, independent, socialist, democratic, prosperous and sustainable nation.

Monday, December 5, 2016

Fidel Castro, 1926-2016

Of all the tributes to Fidel Castro and assessments of the Cuban leader’s contribution to the world socialist movement, this one by Argentine political economist Claudio Katz seems to me particularly outstanding. It was published first on his web site. My translation and notes.

– Richard Fidler

Our Fidel

by Claudio Katz

With Fidel’s death Latin America’s principal revolutionary figure of the last century has left us. Amidst our great sorrow at his passing it is difficult to assess his stature. But while emotion clouds any evaluation, the Comandante’s influence[1] can be appreciated with greater clarity now that he has left.

The media simply emphasize that importance in a descriptive sense. They describe how he was present in the major events of the last 50 years. And his worst enemies in the empire confirm that overwhelming historical influence. They celebrate his death in order to forget that he lasted in office throughout the mandates of ten U.S. presidents and survived countless assassination attempts by the CIA.

Cuba is the obsession of the Pentagon and the frustration of the State Department. No other country of that size has inflicted so many defeats on the empire. After 53 years David forced Goliath to re-establish diplomatic relations.[2]

Fidel arouses admiration that borders on devotion. The praises stem from his capacity to make possible what was highly improbable. But this fascination is frequently divorced from the content of his achievement.

Many idolize Fidel but from the standpoint of capitalism. They extol the Caribbean leader while promoting variants of the system of exploitation that the Comandante fought throughout his life. In reality, they praise the creator of alien universes while rejecting any such journey by themselves.

For the Left, Fidel always had another meaning. He was the principal designer of a revolutionary socialist project of Latin American emancipation. He put into practice the objective inaugurated by Lenin in 1917 and therefore occupied in Latin America a place equivalent to that of the promotor of the soviets.

But unlike his precursor, Fidel led for decades the process he initiated in 1960. He can be assessed as much for his triumph as for his management.

From a longer-lasting perspective, Castro’s achievement is comparable with the campaigns undertaken by Bolívar and San Martín. He led regional actions attempting to link a second independence for Latin America with the international advance of socialism.

Fidel tackled these tasks of Cyclopean proportions while maintaining a very close relationship with his followers. He addressed his messages to millions of sympathizers who cheered him on various continents. He achieved a rational and passionate connection with the multitudes who heard him speak in countless meetings.

The man and the epic

The Cuban leader always acted with audacity. He radicalized his project under the pressure of the empire and adopted a socialist assignment that smashed all the dogmas of the epoch. He demonstrated that it was possible to initiate an anticapitalist process 90 miles from Miami, and with the OLAS[3] he restored the objective of the region’s anti-imperialist unity.

These three facets — the revolutionary, the socialist and the Latin American emancipator — Fidel shared with Che. The same meeting of minds that brought them together in the landing of the Granma[4] was verified in the strategy of armed actions against the dictatorships and reactionary governments. They maintained political agreements that disprove everything written about the animosity between Castro and Guevara.

The Comandante restored socialist internationalism after decades of mere statements (or clear betrayals) by the Kremlin bureaucracy. He extended this to Africa with the sending of fighters who played a central role in the defeat of apartheid.

These actions replaced the old connection of slavery between Africa and Latin America with a new relationship of solidarity against the common enemies. This attitude elicited enormous affection for Cuba in the Afro-American communities, corroborated in the impressive visits Fidel made to Harlem and his encounters with Mohammed Ali, Malcolm X or Harry Belafonte.

But Fidel’s historic stature emerged with greater clarity after the implosion of the USSR. He achieved anew what appeared impossible by sustaining Cuba’s survival amidst unprecedented adversity. He led in the harshest sacrifices of the special period and sustained a collective resistance forged after three decades of revolution.

That battle of convictions was probably more extraordinary than many military actions. Fidel achieved what very few leaders have achieved in similar circumstances.

That victory served as an example for the radical processes that sprouted in the new millennium. When neoliberalism touched off popular rebellions in South America, Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales had a political reference that was absent in other parts of the world. Fidel maintained the socialist ideal as a compass, to be recreated on other foundations.

In Latin America’s new stage, the Comandante encouraged campaigns against the external debt and Free Trade treaties, and with ALBA[5] promoted agencies adapted to the post-dictatorship context in Latin America.

In this context the longing for the “new man” reappeared in the missions of the Cuban doctors. These healthcare contingents demonstrated how the life of the defenseless cast aside by capitalism could be protected.

Fidel combined his aptitude as a speaker (e.g. the “history will absolve me” type of discourse) with military genius (the battle of Cuito Cuanavale in Angola) and geopolitical intelligence (for acting in the international order).

He developed this remarkable profile while maintaining an extremely modest life style. His private life is almost unknown because of the strict separation he established between his privacy and his public exposure.

Over several decades he was involved in all the details of Cuban reality. His tireless activity was popularized with a saying that alluded to this ubiquity (y en eso llegó Fidel – “and therein came Fidel”).

He probably decided to organize his own retirement in order to counteract that overwhelming effect. Beginning in 2006 he placed himself in the background and concentrated his entire activity on the battle of ideas. He deployed a prolific critical analysis of environmental depredation and the poverty generated by capitalism.

Castro’s surprising trajectory confirms many conclusions of Marxist theoreticians on the role of the individual in history. A society’s direction is never dictated by the exceptional conduct of the great leaders. That evolution is mainly determined by the objective conditions prevailing in each epoch.

But in the decisive events that define that course, certain individuals play an irreplaceable role. Fidel confirmed that principle.

It is important to remember that protagonism when confronted with the naive myth that attributes the achievements of the Cuban process to the “pressure of the masses.” This formula assumes that the extraordinary direction taken by the country was due to radical demands from below that the leaders had to support.

In fact it was the opposite that occurred. A consistent leadership convinced the majority through the exemplary nature of their conduct. Fidel led the leaders who were in charge of this epic achievement.

Unresolved dilemmas

Cuba has carried out not the revolution it wanted but the one it could make. There is therefore still a significant distance between ambition and attainment. The major cause of this disparity is glaringly obvious: no titan can fully build socialism in a small plot of land under the relentless harassment of the planet’s major power. The surprising thing is the degree to which Cuba was able to advance albeit faced by such a rival.

This small country has won enormous triumphs that reinforced national self-esteem and the authority of the Comandante. From the Bay of Pigs to the return of the child Elián and the liberation of the five captives in the United States, Cuba won major victories under Fidel’s leadership.

But none of those milestones managed to remove the blockade, to close Guantánamo, or to neutralize the terrorist groups trained by the CIA. Faced with the economic harassment, the family blackmail, the temptation of U.S. citizenship or the mirage of opulent consumerism conveyed by Miami, the tenacity of the Cubans seems miraculous.

This heroism has coexisted with the particular problems the revolution has confronted for a long time now. These difficulties must be assessed in comparison with what has been achieved, bearing in mind the objective limitations affecting the island.

The economy is a central area among those problems. Cuba has shown how a non-capitalist way of thinking can help to avoid hunger, generalized delinquency and school abandonment. In a country with resources closer to Haiti’s than Argentina’s advances have been achieved in infant nutrition, mortality rates or healthcare that surprise everyone.

But the mistaken imitation of the Russian model of complete nationalization produced ineffective results that severely hampered agro-industrial productivity. This mistaken course reflected the difficulty in reconciling continental revolutionary strategies with market-oriented policies. The idealism required by the first objective collided with the egoism of commercial life.

After the special period the country has survived with tourism, agreements with foreign companies and a dual currency market that has segmented the population between those who receive remittances and those who don’t. The society has changed with this emerging social stratification and the subsequent expansion of market activity in order to save foreign exchange and revive agriculture.

Fidel was personally the motive force behind this difficult turn, well aware of the suicide that a return to the shortages of the nineties would entail. Many analysts thought that a return to capitalism had begun, forgetting that the capitalist system presupposes private ownership of the major companies and banks. The reforms have so far opened up more favourable opportunities for the cooperatives, small property and undertakings without allowing the formation of a new ruling class.

The present model seeks to recover high growth rates while simultaneously limiting social inequality. It therefore preserves the economic pre-eminence of the state sector combined with public health and education systems.

Although the changes are proceeding slowly within a context of increasing relief, the three long-term alternatives — capitalist restoration, the Chinese model, or socialist renewal — remain open.

The primacy of one of those models will no longer be the work of Fidel, who rejected the first option, was assessing the second, and favoured the third. His legacy is to continue the egalitarian project within the narrow margins that currently exist in which to implement it.

It is not easy to disentangle this course when the weight of the market, foreign investment, tourism and remittances is increasing. But the suppression of those supports of the economy would lead to the end of the revolution through simple asphyxiation. The balance sought by the reforms is an indispensable foundation for any future transformation.

Significant challenges

The bourgeois establishment has always contrasted the “dictatorship” of the island with the marvels of western democracy. The presidents of the U.S. plutocracy, with great hypocrisy, typically object to the island’s single party system as if the commonality shared by Republicans and Democrats allowed more diversity.

In addition, they avoid mentioning how the electoral colleges violate majority suffrage, and the low level of electoral participation in their country compared with the high participation of the Cubans.

Even greater duplicity is exhibited by the rightists in Latin America. While endorsing the institutional coups d’états in Honduras, Paraguay or Brazil, they wax indignant over the absence of republican formalities in Cuba.

The critics on the left point in a different direction. They question the restrictions on individual freedoms that have given rise to numerous injustices in Cuba.

But if we assess the five decades that have gone by, what is notable is the almost bloodless nature of all the radical transformations effected. It is enough to compare the small number of human losses with the record in other revolutionary processes. The high level of political participation explains this achievement.

Cuba has never suffered the tragedy of the Gulags and therefore avoided the collapse experienced by the USSR. Its political model is very controversial, but to this point no theoretician of direct, soviet or participative democracy has indicated how to govern under the empire’s harassment without resorting to defensive measures that restrict citizens’ rights.
The revolution itself has tried different mechanisms to correct the errors that this situation generates.

Many analysts think the bureaucracy is the main cause of the country’s misfortunes, or the great beneficiary of the malformations in the political regime. There is no doubt about its responsibility in many mishaps. But since this stratum will exist as long as the state endures, not much is to be gained from blaming it for all the ills.

To be sure, the bureaucracy greatly increases the inequality and inefficiency. Egalitarianism helps to counteract the first but does not correct the second. A growing democratization provides a counterweight to these misfortunes but produces no miracles. In those intricate fields of state functioning Fidel’s calls to assume responsibility were always more useful than waiting for magic laboratory recipes.

Foreign policy is another focus for harsh questioning of Castroism. The mass media presented Fidel as a mere pawn of the Soviet Union, not recognizing the difference that separates a revolutionary from any servile ruler. They did not imagine any conduct for Cuba other than that practiced by the puppets of the empire.

Some left critics did not understand Fidel’s strategy either. The Cuban leader based himself on alliances with the USSR in order to drive forward a global revolutionary process that his partner rejected.

The tension between the two parties was confirmed on countless occasions: the October missile crisis, the Vietnam war, the uprisings in Africa or Latin America. There were concessions and sometimes errors by the Comandante, such as his approval of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. That occupation buried the socialist renewal that the Prague Spring had promised.

But throughout the period of greatest revolutionary ferment in Latin America, Fidel opted for a balance between diplomatic compromises and continued support of the rebel movements. He sought to overcome Cuba’s isolation, maintaining support for the struggles of the oppressed. Castro had to combine the new exigencies of foreign policy with his ideals as a revolutionary.

The right continued to criticize him for his support to popular uprisings, and some currents on the left objected to his indulgent attitude toward governments of the ruling classes.

Much of Fidel’s advice was certainly problematic, but responsibility for the decisions remained in the hands of those who received these suggestions. The Comandante always conveyed the validity of the decision as he saw it in the processes of each country and his approach was marked by defiance of the authorities of the left of his time.

Nor should we forget how Castro dismissed the recommendations of the Communist party[6] in the Sierra Maestra and the opinions of the Kremlin in regard to the Latin American insurgency. The Cuban leader taught us through his own practice how a revolutionary acts.

The best tribute

Fidel has died in a very difficult year. Figures as detestable as Macri, Temer[7] or Trump have come to government. Their ideologists are back to proclaiming the end of the egalitarian projects, forgetting how many times they have pronounced this same sentence. Fidel would have said that we must accordingly understand what is happening in order to overcome despondency.

Many editorial writers state that Castro did not understand the present period of consumption, individualism and pragmatism. But in any case he grasped the crisis of capitalism that determines such conduct. That central fact is invisible to Fidel’s challengers.

His most vulgar enemies in Miami celebrated his passing with music, confirming the worthless value they assign to human life. But the festivities were meagre consolation for conspirators who have failed to build the least base of support within the island.

Since Fidel retired a decade ago, the repeated speculation over Cuba’s future has drawn less attention. However, it is of great interest to find out what Trump will do. We do not know yet whether the brutal statements he made about Castro’s death are part of his uncontrolled verbal diarrhea or are a foretaste of greater aggression.

Whatever the case, Latin America must prepare to resist a president-elect who has promised to expel millions of undocumented residents. A new anti-imperialist battle is approaching, and it requires fighting against scepticism and resignation.

Some people say that Fidel embodied the ideals of an older segment of the population removed from the expectations of the youth. They do not take into account how capitalism is striking at the new generation, pushing it to recreate the resistance. The development of that action will tend to update the socialist project of Latin American emancipation.

Fidel struggled for the revolutionary transformations that this society needs. It is now up to us to continue his work.

December 2, 2016

Claudio Katz is a researcher with the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), a professor at the University of Buenos Aires, and a member of the Left Economists (EDI).


[1] Fidel Castro is often referred to as Comandante, or Commander, in the Latin American left, in reference to his informal title as “Commander in Chief of the Cuban Revolution,” a legacy of the guerrilla struggle of the 1950s.

[2] See “Release of Cuban Five Opens New Chapter in Cuba-US Relations.”

[3] Latin American Organization of Solidarity.

[4] The name of the boat in which the initial cadres of the anti-Batista guerrilla force travelled from Mexico to Cuba in 1956.

[5] Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America.

[6] Then known in Cuba as the Partido Socialista Popular.

[7] Mauricio Macri, the right-wing President of Argentina, and Michel Temer, the acting President of Brazil installed in a parliamentary coup against the elected President Dilma Rousseff.

Saturday, December 3, 2016

Cuba is poor, but who is to blame – Castro or 50 years of US blockade?

By Helen Yaffe, London School of Economics and Political Science

[For an interview with Helen Yaffe, “Fidel Castro’s Death and the Cuban Revolution,” see https://youtu.be/yu8DbilITmw.]

Alongside his depiction as a “brutal dictator”, negative reflections on Fidel Castro since his death on November 25 have focused on his “mismanagement” of the Cuban economy and the consequent “extremes of poverty” suffered by ordinary Cubans.

This caricature is problematic – not only because it ignores the devastating economic impact of the United States embargo over 55 years, but also because it is premised on neoclassical economic assumptions. This means that by stressing economic policy over economic restraints, critics can shift responsibility for Cuba’s alleged poverty on to Castro without implicating successive US administrations that have imposed the suffocating embargo.

This approach also ignores key questions about Cuba after the revolution. Where can medium and low-income countries get the capital to invest in infrastructure and welfare provision? How can foreign capital be obtained under conditions which do not obstruct such development, and how can a late-developing country such as Cuba use international trade to produce a surplus in a global economy which – many claim – tends to “unequal terms of trade”?

It was the search for solutions to the challenge of development that led Cuba’s revolutionary government to adopt a socialist system. They adopted a centrally planned economy in which state ownership predominated because they perceived this system as offering the best answer to those historical challenges.

But the commitment to operate within a socialist framework implied additional restraints and complications, particularly in the context of a bipolar world. My book, Che Guevara: the economics of revolution, examines the contradictions and challenges faced by the nascent revolutionary government from the perspective of Guevara’s role as president of the National Bank and minister of industries.

Literature on Cuba is dominated by “Cubanology”, an academic school central to the political and ideological opposition to Cuban socialism. Its emergence and links to the US government are well documented. Its arguments are that the revolution changed everything in Cuba – and Fidel (and then Raul) Castro have personally dominated domestic and foreign policy since, denying Cuban democracy and repressing civil society. Thanks to their mismanagement of the economy, growth since 1959 has been negligible. They simply replaced dependency on the US with dependency on the USSR until its collapse in 1990.

These ideas have also shaped political and media discourse on Cuba. But the problem with this analysis is that it obstructs our ability to see clearly what goes on in Cuba or explain the revolution’s endurance and Cuban society’s vitality.

What did Castro inherit?

Arguments about the success or failure of the post-1959 economy often hang on the state of the Cuban economy in the 1950s. The post-1959 government inherited a sugar-dominated economy with the deep socio-economic and racial scars of slavery. Cubanologist Jaime Suchlicki argues that Batista’s Cuba was “well into what Walter Rostow has characterised as the take-off stage”, while Fred Judson points to structural weaknesses in the Cuban economy: “Long-term crises characterised the economy, which had a surface and transient prosperity.” So while one side insists that the revolution interrupted healthy capitalist growth, the other believes it was a precondition to resolving the contradictions obstructing development by ending Cuba’s subjugation to the needs of US capitalism.

Following the revolution, Castro set out to bring social welfare and land reform to the Cuban people and to confiscate the ill-gotten gains of the Cuban elite. But when the defeated Fulgencio Batista and his associates fled Cuba, they stole millions of pesos from the National Bank and the Treasury. The country was decapitalised, severely limiting the capacity for public spending and private investments. Wealthy Cubans were leaving the island, taking their deposits and taxes with them. How was the new government going to carry out the ambitious socio-economic reforms without financial resources?

We have to consider these real circumstances at every juncture. For example, when the US embargo was first implemented, 95% of Cuba’s capital goods and 100% of its spare parts were imported from the US – and the US was overwhelmingly the main recipient of Cuban exports. When the Soviet bloc disintegrated, Cuba lost 85% of its trade and investment, leading GDP to plummet 35%. These events produced serious economic constraints on Cuba’s room for manoeuvre.

Putting a price on poverty

Moving on, we should also ask: how are we to measure Cuba’s poverty? Is it GDP per capita? Is it money-income per day? Should we apply the yardsticks of capitalist economics, focusing on growth and productivity statistics to measure “success” or “failure”, while paying little attention to social and political priorities?

Ration cards symbolise poverty and shortages in Cuba. EPA/Alejandro Ernesto

Even factoring in its low GDP per capita, the Human Development Index (HDI) lists Cuba in the “high human development” category; it excels not just in health and education, but also in women’s participation and political inclusion. Cuba has eliminated child malnutrition. No children sleep on the streets. In fact, there is no homelessness. Even during the hungry years of economic crisis of the 1990s, Cubans did not starve. Cuba stuck with the planned economy and it enabled them to ration their scarce resources.

Yes, salaries are extremely low (as both Fidel and Raul have lamented) – but Cubans’ salaries do not determine their standard of living. About 85% of Cubans own their own homes and rent cannot exceed 4% of a tenant’s income. The state provides a (very) basic food basket while utility bills, transport and medicine costs are kept low. The opera, cinema, ballet and so on are cheap for all. High-quality education and healthcare are free. They are part of the material wealth of Cuba and should not be dismissed – as if individual consumption of consumer goods were the only measure of economic success.

Operation miracle

The specific and real challenges Cuban development has faced has generated unique contradictions. In a planned economy, with an extremely tight budget, they have had to prioritise: the infrastructure is crumbling and yet they have first-world human development indicators. Infant mortality rates reveal a lot about the standard of living, being influenced by multiple socioeconomic and medical factors. Cuba’s infant mortality rate is 4.5 per 1,000 live births, which sits it among first-world countries – and above the US on the CIA’s own ranking.

It is not just Cubans who have benefited from these investments. Tens of thousands of Cuban doctors, educators and other development aid workers have served around the world. At present some 37,000 Cuban doctors and nurses work in 77 countries. They generate foreign exchange of some US$8 billion a year – Cuba’s biggest export.

In addition, Cuba provides both free medical treatment and free medical training to thousands of foreigners every year. As a direct initiative of Fidel, in 1999, the Latin American School of Medicine was inaugurated in Havana to provide foreign students from poor countries with six years of training and accommodation completely free. In 2004, Cuba teamed up with Venezuela to provide free eye surgery to people in three dozen countries under Operation Miracle. In the first ten years more than 3m people had their sight restored.

Prohibiting even trade in medicines, the US embargo led Castro to prioritise investments in medical sciences. Cuba now owns around 900 patents and markets pharmaceutical products and vaccines in 40 countries, generating yearly revenues of US$300m, with the potential for massive expansion. The sector produces more than 70% of the medicines consumed by its 11m people. The entire industry is state owned, research programmes respond to the needs of the population, and all surpluses are reinvested into the sector. Without state planning and investment it is unlikely that this could have been achieved in a poor country.

Cuban researchers developed the first synthetic vaccine against a bacteria that causes pneumonia and meningitis. EPA/Alejandro Ernesto

In the mid-1980s Cuba developed the world’s first Meningitis B vaccine. Today, it leads in oncology drugs. In 2012 Cuba patented the first therapeutic cancer vaccine. The US embargo forces Cuba to source medicines, medical devices and radiology products outside the United States, incurring additional transportation costs.

Sharing economy

Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa, told me in 2009:

A great example provided by Cuba is that in its poverty it has known how to share, with all its international programmes. Cuba is the country with the greatest cooperation in relation to its gross domestic product and it is an example for all of us. This doesn’t mean that Cuba doesn’t have big problems, but it is also certain that it is impossible to judge the success or failure of the Cuban model without considering the US blockade, a blockade that has lasted for 50 years. Ecuador wouldn’t survive for five months with that blockade.

Let’s consider the embargo: the Cuban government estimates that it has cost the island US$753.69 billion. Their annual report to the United Nations provides a detailed account of that calculation. That’s a lot for a country whose average GDP between 1970 and 2014 has been calculated at US$31.7 billion.

Yes, Castro presided over mistakes and errors in Cuba’s planned economy. Yes, there is bureaucracy, low productivity, liquidity crisis, debt and numerous other problems – but where aren’t there? Castro pointed to these weaknesses in his own speeches to the Cuban people. But President Correa is right – to objectively judge Castro’s legacy, Cuban development and contemporary reforms today, we cannot pretend that the US blockade – which remains today despite rapprochement – has not shaped the Cuban economy.

Castro almost saw out 11 US presidents since 1959, but he never lived to see the end of the US embargo. New challenges face Cuba, with economic reforms underway and the restoration of relations with the United States. Next week, I will begin new research in Cuba to assess the revolution’s resilience in this post-Castro, Donald Trump era.

Helen Yaffe, LSE Fellow, Economic History, London School of Economics and Political Science

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.