The oxygen of debate

By José Alejandro Rodríguez

HAVANA – In a country that is more and more heterogeneous, Cuban socialism today disparages that obsolete and unviable unanimity it attempted in years of excessive verticalism and centralization and navigates in waters that challenge consensus and disagreement, without naively playing the game of those who, inside and outside the island, wish to dismantle all vestiges of the Revolution.

Of course, it is very complex to redesign a society without already consummated references to socialism, a system in its infancy compared with centuries of shrewd and chameleonlike capitalism. The easiest thing to do would be to destroy everything with the neoliberal prescription, in order to ride the hardest times and slide back into the past.

Also useless is the model of real socialism that failed in Europe, from which Cuba received gray and inoperative inheritances that today it needs to let go, like ballast, to seek effective progress, not only in words and wishes.

The obstinate intolerance of politics’ most twisted right demonizes Cuba, no matter what Cuba does, and demands a multiparty system, as if it were the superworld’s Kryptonite.  Whip in hand, the right will never accept that Cuba has been looking inward for a while and gradually exorcising its atavisms, dogmas and failures without removing the good sap that runs through its veins, the juice that has carried Cuba to this point in time and would reject “transfusions” that are incompatible with the ideals of justice, knowledge, light and welfare for all.

Respectful as I am of adverse opinions and discrepant of those in Cuba who attempt to standardize opinions, I ask permission from neither side to affirm that the debate on domestic affairs is becoming ever stronger.

The changes being recorded in the economy and society, although slow to many, are already touching sensitive areas of Cubans’ lives, property and imagination. And those transformations arose from a popular debate about the Economic and Social Guidelines of the Communist Party of Cuba – a pluralistic public forum organized by a single party.

Can anyone deny Cuba’s right to weave diversity from the fabric of national unity, in the face of such powerful enemies?

President Raúl Castro himself has called for discrepancy and debate, but that style – which is not chaos but collective elucidation – cannot remain in the abstract or in the mere occasion of a summoned gathering. It has to become the flesh and blood of daily life.

The entire system of the Cuban government, from the barrio to the Parliament, has been challenged to leave behind the tranquil complacency of the concordances that neither see nor hear what happens all around, while looking at falling stars and waiting for signals.

In the latest expanded meeting of the Council of Ministers, the Cuban president insisted on the need “to discuss any proposal at all levels, allowing the people’s participation.” That clinches the appreciation that popular consultations must be a systemic style, not seen in the instrumental sense of occasional summonses.

Of course, the changes in what is being called “the actualization of the Cuban economic model” inevitably generate social transformations in institutionality and the ways of governance. They imply developing greater spaces for socialist democracy and popular participation, and that bothers certain orthodox foot-draggers who prefer to issue orders and commands.

Even so, this is an opportunity to make revolution inside the Revolution and aspire, like Martí and Marx, to govern “with all and for the good of all.”

The other antidote against voluntarism and zigzagging – the other facilitator of a permanent critical observatory that keeps society from repeating old errors and generating new fiascos – is the degree to which the management of the nation’s course and decisions (always political) is supported by criteria and diagnoses that are more and more scientific.

The recent Extraordinary Party Conference endorsed the importance of that scientific foundation and the importance of research in social sciences at the time of making decisions.

How can Cuba achieve these objectives without being distracted by the siege and hostility of those plotters who deny Cuba a chance to improve within socialism, without jumping over the fence? How can the nation do it without exhausting itself fighting the internal resistance of certain bureaucrats who applaud while hindering progress, in an attitude that is openly counterrevolutionary?

The answers will come from the life, tenacity, intelligence and finesse of the revolutionaries. But they must allow Cuba to prove itself in the attempt.

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