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Cuba

What will happen after Castro?

Will Cuba inevitably go the way of Russia and Eastern Europe following the collapse of the BerlinWall in 1989, with the return of a virulent capitalism? This question is prompted by the recent illnessof Fidel Castro, reportedly suffering from intestinal problems, and his temporary handing over powerto his brother Ral Castro in August. PETER TAAFFE analyses the situation.

US IMPERIALISM CERTAINLY expects regime change, not just in the government of Cuba butalso in its social system. In July, a special report of the Bush governments Commission forAssistance to a Free Cuba set aside $80 million (43m) to achieve this objective. Ominously, unlikeprevious reports, parts of it were not published, "classified for security reasons", with the clearimplication of future US military intervention in Cuba. Castros illness led to delirious celebrationsamong sections of the 650,000 Cuban exiles, particularly the parasitic rich elite who salivate at theprospect of a return of their property, which they expect would quickly follow the death of Fidel

Castro.

Conversely, millions of working-class people and the poor, particularly in the neo-colonial world andespecially in Latin America, are hoping against hope that the predictions of the imminent collapse ofCuba will prove wrong. The Cuban revolution, right from its inception in January 1959, and throughits planned economy, gave a glimpse of what was possible for humankind as a whole if thestraitjacket of landlordism and capitalism was eliminated. Fidel Castro and Che Guevara were then,and remain today, heroic figures for many workers and youth throughout the world.

If anything, Cubas reputation has been enhanced when set against the background of the brutalneo-liberal offensive of capitalism worldwide throughout the 1990s and the first part of this century.The achievements in health, housing and education are spectacular when compared to the dismalrecord of landlordism and capitalism in the neo-colonial world. Even while the bourgeoisie of theworld and its hirelings seek to use the illness of Castro as an excuse to pillory Cuba and itsrevolution, other, more serious, journals of capitalism are compelled to recognise Cubasachievements.

For instance, El Pas, the Spanish journal, recently outlined Cubas impressive performance in keyfields. There are 200,000 teachers in a population of 11.4 million. This means there is a teacher forevery 57 people, one of the best ratios of teachers to pupils anywhere in the world, never mind theneo-colonial world. Moreover, following the Pakistan earthquake in 2005, Cuba sent 2,660 doctorsand health technicians to help in the worst areas. In six months in Pakistan, they dealt with1,700,000 patients 73% of those affected by illness and carried out 14,500 operations. Inaddition to this they offered 1,000 courses to young people from the worst-hit areas to studymedicine in Cuba. Thirty-two temporary hospitals were left by the Cuban government to be used bythe Pakistani people to combat serious illnesses. Naturally, this raised the profile of support for Cubain Pakistan. In Indonesia, following the earthquake in May 2006, 135 Cuban health workers attended100,000 patients. Two hospitals were built and left by the Cubans when the medical expedition leftthe country. Thirty-six thousand Cuban health professionals and technicians are working in 107different third-world countries. In addition to this, Venezuela and Cuba have announced a project,operation milagro (operation miracle), to provide six million Latin Americans with free operations ifthey cannot afford them over the next ten years. Cuba has also offered 100,000 places in Cubanuniversities to train Latin American doctors free of charge.

The propertied classes worldwide fear that this example (the product of a planned economy, albeitone not managed or controlled by the working class but by a bureaucracy), will become even moreattractive to the starving masses of poor in the event of an economic tailspin in world capitalism.Notwithstanding these achievements, however, the maintenance of a planned economy is,unfortunately, not at all guaranteed on the present basis, particularly in the event of Fidel Castrosdeath. His towering figure, together with the image of the martyred hero of the revolution, CheGuevara, combined with the solid social achievements of the revolution, have warded off previousattempts at counter-revolution, even in the most diff icult circumstances of the special period of the1990s.

Hanging by a thread
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FOLLOWING THE RESTORATION of capitalism in Russia, the former Stalinist bureaucracy, whichwas then in the process of transferring to capitalism, inf licted colossal economic damage on Cuba.Castro commented about this period: "In no historical epoch did any country find itself in the situationin which ours found it, when the socialist camp collapsed and remained under the pitiless blockadeof the USA. No-one imagined that something as sure and steady as the sun would one daydisappear, as it happened with the situation of the Soviet Union". (Fidel Castro: A Biography, VolkerSkierka, p282) He went on to declare: "We will defend ourselves on our own, surrounded by anocean of capitalism in this periodo especial". (ibid, p283) An author recently commented: "Rationingof food was introduced but there was virtually no butter, with milk only for small children, old peopleand those in special need; the bread allowance was 250 grams a day. Soap, detergents, toilet paperand matches were not often seen".

The economy declined by 2.9% in 1990, 10% in 1991, 11.6% in 1992, and 14.9% in 1993.Malnutrition, unknown since the triumph of the revolution, became widespread. The historicachievements of free education and medical attention were preserved, but a brutal austerityprogramme was inflicted on the great mass of the population. One of the most important economieswas the slashing of energy consumption by 50%. As one commentator put it: "Cuban society almostliterally stopped moving until the commandante [Castro] had the saving idea that the mass of thepopulation should ride back to the future on horse-drawn carts and bicycles". Making a virtue out of anecessity, Fidel Castro declared: "The special period also has its positive sides like the fact that weare now entering the age of the bicycle. In a sense, this too is a revolution".

Undoubtedly, cycling was good for the average Cubans health, as was the absence of McDonaldsand other US junk food, but this austerity programme in itself is not enough to satisfy the hunger ofyoung people and workers for access to modern technology, modern goods, rising living standards,and freedom. Forced back on its own resources, Cuba was also able to tap into the ingenuity of thepopulation with the spectacular development of bio-technology, for instance, which resulted in Cuba,in the early 1990s, becoming "the worlds largest exporter of such products, the demand beingparticularly high in the field of skin regeneration and immunisation against meningitis, hepatitis B andother diseases". Opposed by the capitalist multinationals of the USA and Europe, Cuba was alreadymaking a profit by 1991 and aggressively competing as a supplier of low-priced products, especiallyto third-world countries. Nevertheless, this successful sector of Cuban production has onlyamounted, still, to a share of total exports of 3-5%.

The ability of Cuba to compete in the pharmaceutical market was linked undoubtedly to themaintenance of the splendid health sector, a direct product of the planned economy. It continued toemploy 340,000 staff and 64,000 doctors throughout the years of the special period. Currently, thereare 70,000 doctors, a ratio of one doctor per 193 inhabitants, compared to one per 313 in Germany.Castro was able to contrast the life expectancy in Cuba with that in the ex-Soviet Union, which felldrastically as a result of a return to capitalism: "Life expectancy in the part of the USSR which isRussia is now 56 years, 20 years less than in Cuba, 20 years!" Despite this, because of its isolation,

Cuba still experiences severe shortages even in the field of medicine.

Moreover, unemployment, hitherto an unprecedented phenomenon, began to rise, with a minimumfigure of 8% unemployed in a total labour force of 4 millions. A Spanish institute at the timeestimated, "in May 1999 that nearly a third of all Cuban workers were either jobless or unemployed".In 1999, the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America (CPAAL) estimated "that in1999 the Cuban revolution reached the point at which it had been 40 years before, in 1959". In theearly 1990s, the revolution hung by a thread and, for the first time since the Bay of Pigs invasion, thethreat of counter-revolution, the return of the ex-landlords and capitalists based in Miami, and USimperialist domination loomed.

Castro was consequently forced to make concessions to the market, that is, to capitalism. Throughdollarisation, a parallel economy developed, which resulted in relative privileges for those involvedin tourism, where they were paid in dollars, and in sectors involving joint ventures. Paradoxically,those who remained firm supporters of the planned economy, such as doctors, teachers, etc,continued to be paid in pesos and suffered accordingly. Richard Gott, a well-known left-wing authoron Cuba, wrote that "the state monopoly over foreign trade was abolished in 1992, and the

constitution was amended to permit the transfer of state property to joint ventures with foreignpartners". This implied that Cuba was on the way to the return of capitalism, if it had not alreadyarrived at that point.

It is true that a legal amendment in 1995 to the Cuban constitution even introduced the provisionwhereby foreign capital could acquire 100% stakes in companies, although in practice this was rarelyfollowed up. Castro himself declared: "There are no rigid prescriptions. We are ready to consider anykind of proposition". However, despite all the difficulties, Cuba has essentially remained a plannedeconomy. Import and export operations were carried out by Cuban enterprises and other dulyauthorised "entities registered at the National Registry of Importers and Exporters attached to thechambers of commerce". (Official report of the Cuban Chamber of Commerce) Foreign enterprises


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required authorisation from the ministry of trade to perform their operations.

Simmering discontent

A CERTAIN DECENTRALISATION took place. An estimated 350 enterprises were permitted toimport and export on their own authority. This undoubtedly was a gap through which foreign capitaland its domestic Cuban supporters could find a basis. But Cuba still maintained significant non-tariffbarriers and the government inspected and approved most imports. Castro made it clear in 2000 the

limits of such concessions to capitalism. He remarked to the UNESCO director, Frederico MayorZaragoza: "As a general principle, nothing will be privatised in Cuba that is suitable for, and thereforecan be kept under, ownership by the nation or a workers collective. Our ideology and our preferenceis that socialism should bear no resemblance to the egotism, the privileges and inequalities ofcapitalist society. In our country, nothing ends up as the property of a high-ranking official, andnothing is given away to accomplices or friends. Nothing that can be used efficiently, and withgreater profit for our society, will end up in the hands of private individuals, either Cubans orforeigners".

However, it is not true, as Fidel Castro argued, that inequalities did not exist in Cuba. The periodicdenunciations and campaigns against corruption, pilfering and privilege, which Castro himself hasconducted, are indications of the real situation. In fact, the dollarisation of the economy was a severeblow to revolutionary pride and opened up divisions in Cuban society, leading to a further growth of aprivileged elite. A change in the law granted small business activity and had a significant effect increating a relatively prosperous petty bourgeoisie in the urban areas. Like many similar reformsintroduced by Stalinist regimes prior to their collapse in 1989 in Eastern Europe, the former SovietUnion or China, this led to a burgeoning capitalist sector. The austere period inevitably generated

discontent and the lifting of the controls on the dollar was a response of the Cuban regime to thepressure of the population from inside the country.

But it was not sufficient, as shortages persisted. The simmering discontent with this resulted in a riotin central Havana of several thousand people in August 1994. Mostly young people moved throughthe city throwing stones at the windows of hotels. For the first time, anti-Castro slogans could beheard: "Weve had enough! We want freedom! Down with Fidel!" They were met by 300 policemenfiring warning shots in the air and a major confrontation appeared to loom until "suddenly, themaximo leader himself [Castro] appeared on the scene with a large entourage and launched into adiscussion with the young people. The crowd immediately calmed down, listened to him, anddispersed". This is a striking example of the colossal authority which Castro and the revolution hadthen and still probably enjoys today. On this occasion, it was enough to prevent the protest spillingover to involve a wider movement. The discontent still existed but was forced once moreunderground.

Clampdown on corruption

ALTHOUGH THE CUBAN economy has recovered, partly as a result of economic assistance fromHugo Chvezs Venezuela, trade deals with China, etc, shortages, combined with corruption, stillexist and were recognised clearly by Castro on the eve of his illness. Leaning on 30,000 youngpeople, the trabajadores sociales (social workers), Castro launched a battle of ideas to maintain thepresent system in Cuba and, in particular, mobilisation of vigilantes against corruption. This force,sympathetic to Castro and the revolution, was similar to Mao Zedongs mobilisation of the RedGuards in the 1966 Cultural Revolution. Before his illness, flushed by the economic benefits flowingfrom tourism, as well as the benevolence of the Venezuelan regime, Castro was involved in theprocess of recentralisation and curtailing of the pro-capitalist concessions made in the 1990s. Hewas also conscious of the consequences for Cuba if he was no longer on the scene. In particular, hewas concerned about the corruption which inevitably flowed from the two-tier economic system. Hetherefore was engaged in a Cuban version of Maos Cultural Revolution, although obviously not onthe same scale nor with the same brutal hooligan methods.

Five of the 14 provinces have seen the top Communist Party officials replaced. So have theministries of light industry, higher education, and audit and control. Some members of the 21-strongPolitburo have been sacked abruptly for errors, which included abuse of authority and

ostentation. In a speech to Havana University, Castro painted a picture of widespread graftthroughout the state-controlled economy. He said that this was endangering the communist system:"We can destroy ourselves and it will be our own fault". The student social workers, dressed inblack or red t-shirts, were mobilised, for instance, in petrol stations to check on the sale of scarcepetrol resources. This exercise revealed that, previously, about a half of all fuel sold was notaccounted for.

But the question naturally arises: How is i t, in a democratic socialist Cuba, where in theory power isvested in the masses and their organisations, such a scale of corruption can suddenly be revealed?Following from this, the new Cuban red guard has been mobilised on missions to audit statecompanies, where they discovered rampant pilfering. Sections of the armed forces have also beenpressed into anti-graft duty. The army is now managing Havanas port, where it has been


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discovered entire containers went missing when civilians were in charge. Castro is obviouslyhaunted by the example of the collapse of the Soviet Union and hopes to develop a system whichcan prevent Cuba from following a similar path.

However, the blunt instrument of students and shock brigades will not solve the problem. The issuesof corruption, graft and bureaucratism are not questions of red tape or a few minor misdemeanours.The very character of Cuban society, where power is concentrated in the hands of the officialdom inthe state, the army and the Cuban Communist Party, inevitably leads to abuse. In the early 1990s,

faced with the catastrophic economic situation, the Cuban leadership, led by Fidel Castro, did openup a discussion on the constitution and constitutional amendments to the National Assembly,including a form of direct elections. However, this was stil l in the context of only one candidate foreach seat in parliament. That candidate would be a party loyalist, who would have been gone overwith a fine tooth comb. At best, it was a form of democracy, which allowed voters to select acandidate for a list but from just one party. At the same time, the members of the Central Committee,Politburo, and the Council of State, ultimately were subject to the will and veto, if necessary, of FidelCastro.

This exercise did result in a cutting down of the bureaucracy for instance, party members werereduced by two thirds, the number of Central Committee secretaries halved from 19 to nine but thisdid not fundamentally solve the problem of power being concentrated in the hands of a bureaucraticelite, many of whom enjoyed a privileged existence in comparison to the mass of the population.Castro himself, despite the recent absurd claims of Forbes magazine that he was one of the richestmen on the planet, is not personally corrupt, and does not lead an overtly privileged existence. Butthe problem is not just of one man or a small number of men and women, devoted to maintaining theplanned economy, but the fact that real power is in the hands of a top-down elite. The great majority

of the workers are elbowed aside, at best consulted, but without real power, control andmanagement being vested in them.

Workers democracy

SEVENTY YEARS AGO, in Revolution Betrayed, in relation to the Soviet Union, Leon Trotsky posedthe question: "Will the bureaucrat devour the workers state, or will the working class clean up thebureaucrat? the workers fear lest, in throwing out the bureaucracy, they will open the way for acapitalist restoration". (p215, Dover Publications) For big sections of the population, this probablysums up the mood in Cuba today. But the discontent is growing, particularly among the newgeneration; 73% of Cubas population were born after the triumph of the revolution in 1959. Thisalienation of the new generation may lead, as one commentator put it, in the long run to a "revolutionwith no heirs". Castro does not appear to recognise the problem, nor is he or the group around himcapable of implementing measures to guarantee the gains of the revolution. He has declared: "Idont believe it is really necessary to have more than one party How could our country have stoodfirm if had been split up into ten pieces?... I think that exploitation of one human by another mustdisappear before you can have real democracy".

However, without real workers democracy the ending of the one-party monopoly, fair elections togenuine workers councils with the right of all those (including the Trotskyists) to stand in elections,strict control over incomes, and with the right of recall over all elected officials the Cuban revolutionis in danger, especially if Fidel Castro is off the scene. Cuba is not a socialist state. Even a healthyworkers state, with workers democracy, in one country or in a few countries, would be transitionalbetween capitalism and the starting point for socialism.

Cuba is not a healthy workers state as understood by Lenin and Trotsky, and generally accepted byMarxists following them. Nor is it a workers state with bureaucratic deformations, as some haverecently argued. Such a regime did exist in the f irst sage after the Russian revolution between 1917-23. The Bolsheviks, in the words of Lenin, because of the cultural backwardness of Russia, hadbeen forced to take over "the old tsarist state machine with a thin veneer of socialism". This problemcould only be overcome on the world arena by the spreading of the Russian revolution. In the statewhich existed even after 1923, Trotsky and the Left Opposition fought for reforms, measures to cutdown the bureaucratic deformations. However, the consolidation of the bureaucratic elite,personified by the rise of Stalin, posed the issue not of reform but of the Stalinist state and the

bureaucracy being removed if Russia was to move towards socialism.

Cuba and its revolution had many different features than the Russian revolution, and Castro was notStalin, as we have explained elsewhere (See Socialism Today No.89, and the book, Cuba: Socialismand Democracy). But the existence of a defined caste, a bureaucracy, with interests of its own, nowcounterposed to maintaining the Cuban revolution and its further advance, is confirmed by Castrosalarm for the future and the measures he initiated against the bureaucracy before he fell ill.

Cuba is what Trotsky called a deformed workers state, a planned economy, but with power in thehands of a privileged caste of bureaucrats. Flowing from the characterisation of Cuba as merely aworkers state with bureaucratic deformations, some argue that what is needed is reforms and nota political revolution. But historical experience has shown that a ruling, privileged layer of society,


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whether it be capitalists or a bureaucratic elite, is conscious of its power and will fight to retain it,sometimes using the most ruthless means.

The need for a political revolution in Russia, advanced by Trotsky, was a scientific description ofwhat was required to free the planned economy from the grip of a wasteful, greedy bureaucracy. Itwas not a day-to-day action programme, with Trotskyists in Russia urged to go out onto the streetsand proclaim political revolution. They argued for workers democracy.

The starting point for socialism would be a higher level of production and technique than the highestlevel reached by capitalism up to now. This means that the beginning of socialism would imply ahigher level of technique and therefore of living standards than the US, which is only possiblethrough a world plan of production controlled by the working class. However, with the absence ofworkers democracy, the transition towards socialism in one state or a number of states is impossibleand might lead, as the example of the Soviet Union implies, not to socialism but to a degenerationand, ultimately, to a collapse back to capitalism. The real danger to an isolated workers state, asTrotsky commented, lies not so much in a military invasion but the "cheap goods in the baggagetrain of imperialism". A huge influx of tourists, particularly millions from the US with dollars in theirback pockets, would pose big problems for Cuba and strengthen the elements of capitalism thatalready exist.

Divisions in the regime

BUT FOR THE stupidity of US imperialism, particularly in the 1990s under Clinton with theintroduction of the Helms-Burton legislation, an isolated, besieged Cuba may not have even beenable to hold out to enjoy the position it has today. This act ruled out that a future government in Cuba

could endorse, by parliamentary means, the takeover of industry and property of the 1960s, as hadbeen done by the capitalist government of Germany when it reunified. Germany ratified allexpropriations of land by the state of over 100 acres in East Germany that the Soviet occupationauthorities carried out after the second world war. If the Helms-Burton act was implemented to theletter, this would be ruled out by a future capitalist Cuba, which would mean "that Cubas futuredevelopment, a return to the old property relations, would be as catastrophic as an obligation to paycompensation at todays values". (Fidel Castro: A Biography, Volker Skierka, p313)

As another commentator has put it: "The Helms-Burton act is a blunt law for custodianship over afuture Cuba: its aim is not democratisation of the political system and its institutions, butreappropriation of the island by its neighbour to the north. A return of large chunks of the Cubaneconomy to private US corporations would not only mean restoring the (scarcely desirable)conditions existing before the revolution. The people of the island would still bear the burden ofinterest, and interest on interest, for generations to come, while the real beneficiaries would includethe offspring of those Mafiosi who came into their possessions through violence and repression,corruption, theft, tax evasion, and the f iling of dubious ownership claims". (ibid, p314) The Helms-Burton act also has the effect of reinforcing the rigidities of the Cuban system in the sense that even

those bureaucrats who wished to see the dismantling of the planned economy "are shown only adeep precipice but no space in which to carry out a reform in dignity".

And there are divisions within the bureaucratic elite of Cuba. There is a section which wishes toopen up to capitalism, in a democratic form. There is undoubtedly another wing which will fight tomaintain a planned economy. Marxists, as Trotsky advocated, would seek a principled bloc with thislayer of the Cuban leadership and bureaucracy, and seek to mobilise mass Cuban resistance to anythreat to return to capitalism. But by its very nature, this bloc would inevitably pose the issue of howto free Cuba from the dead hand of the bureaucratic officialdom as a means of safeguarding therevolution. Some Marxists have posed the question of abandoning the idea of the political revolutionto remove the bureaucratic elite. In its place is advanced phrases about workers democracy. Butthis is sheer demagogy. The idea of a political revolution and workers democracy are the same.While Trotsky gave critical support to this or that measure with which the bureaucratic elite wasprepared to defend the planned economy for its own ends, this did not mean the abandonment ofthe idea of the political revolution. He pointed out: "The revolution which the bureaucracy ispreparing against itself will not be social, like the revolution of 1917. It is not a question this time ofchanging the economic foundations of society, of replacing certain forms of property with other

forms. History has also known elsewhere not only social revolutions which substituted the bourgeoisfor the feudal regime, but also political revolutions which, without destroying the economicfoundations of society, swept out an old ruling upper crust (1830 and 1848 in France, February 1917in Russia, etc)".

The replacement of a privileged caste which undoubtedly exists in Cuba by workers democracydoes not necessarily have to be violent but will have to be deep going, giving real control andmanagement to the masses in place of the top-down control exercised by the present Cubanleadership, even when this is implemented by charismatic leaders. Workers democracy in Cubawould hold out the hand of friendship to the Latin American masses. Almost immediately, a realdemocratic workers confederation could be formed between Cuba and Venezuela, especially if therevolution is completed in the latter, and the same with Bolivia. Along this road is the only hope for


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maintaining the gains of the Cuban revolution. Without a planned economy, Cuba will be thrownback for decades and the expectations of the socialist revolution in Latin America and worldwide willsuffer a severe blow. The maintenance of this revolution should not be placed in the hands of oneman, or in a group of men and women, but in an aroused, politically conscious, Cuban working class.

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