Cuba: Tradition and reality, a plausible mixture

By Luis Sexto

Cuba’s official discourse has found the most appropriate term to name the renovative process that, despite many doubts, is moving slowly through the archipelago’s socioeconomic structures.

I know that when I write that term, this article might seem to be a scatterbrained manipulator of the dictionary, or that it may be accused of playing with reality. However, I am sure that President Raúl Castro used the one word that could generate more adhesion than other words used until now, such as “changes,” “modifications” or “reforms.”

In his speech of Dec. 20, 2009, he used the word “actualization” to refer to the process of transformations still in a stage of study and reflection, although some of the formulas have already been put to practice.

In my judgment, actualization – “the action and effect of actualizing,” as the dictionary states – is a term that appeases the concerns of a certain sector of bureaucracy that passively resists any change that may affect its capital as political beneficiary of the social surplus.

With this term we can reduce the controversy about whether the “changes” imply a return to capitalism. Suspicions regarding the word “change” are understandable, because it seems to be a bit discredited in the eyes of the left. “Changes” in socialist Europe and the Soviet Union led to shifts to the right, with all their apparently irreversible economic and social sequels.

In truth, we could appraise that reticence as an unimportant detail, rather, a lexico-semantic minutia. In Cuba, however, any opinion that attempts to get near the bottom will have to take it into account.

To actualize, therefore, suggests what it means in reality. So the matter boils down to its phonetic aspect, as a word with a more attractive, less hostile sound. To actualize, to update what aged, to keep up with the times, with the need to avoid stagnation; to promote an antidote for the rust that eats up the iron of material production and causes sclerosis in the services, to the point that its actions accelerate the decadence of productivity.

To actualize is to put new spark plugs, carburetors and belts in the machinery and circuits of state property. It means to write a traffic code that enables workers to experiment, in the flesh, in the so-far-unconcretized principle of being “owners of the means of production.”

Last month in Progreso Weekly, I referred to the anxiety over the revolving hands of the clock, the persistent countdown regarding the critical point – the opportunity to overcome the fever or be its victim – of Cuban society. We see that something is being done, I wrote, but the solutions don’t come to the fore. Not all the solutions, at least. Today, I shall not return to that subject.

We know that actualization is a struggle against time carried out in a time made complex (particularly in its external aspects) by the triple crisis that has beset the planet, or part of it, for behaving as the ancient Romans did: they ate and drank until satiety and then vomited, so they could continue to eat.

Well, in my opinion, the crisis is economic, ecological and moral. And Cuba, with its stubborn efforts to be a new society in an old world, also complains about this tripartite crisis that restricts and disquiets the nation by adding material and financial limitations to the existing limitations of various kinds that afflict the Cuban economic model.

Speaking with honest objectivity, I am willing to admit that the inheritance of the 1959 Revolution has survived in the past 20 years as an outstanding display of collective will. The interpretations made abroad – particularly in Miami – usually boil down to the rhetoric about tyranny and oppression. They even define the survival of the revolutionary government as the result of six million policemen watching and terrorizing six million civilians, the other half of the population.

Maybe that explains why those “sacrificed and glorious exiles” (a mere fable) have never gotten their act together. Not even by chance, although I suspect that their income from those little wars prospers as their operations are frustrated.

Here on the island, some believe that the valid solutions are those that were generally applied to each episode of our crises in the past half-century. Not long ago, a reader wrote to me at Juventud Rebelde suggesting that, in order to solve the deficiencies in agriculture, the right move would be to shut down all factories and send the workers to the fields.

I answered him with several questions. What did we do in the early 1990s? Didn’t we see each other in the farm areas of Havana province? And what happened? Did we eat more? Did we solve the insufficiencies in food? Did agriculture improve its efficiency and effectiveness?

Things finally began to improve, I told him, when a resolution by the Communist Party Politburo set up cooperatives to work the inefficient lands exploited by the state. It was an in-depth response, a desire to actualize farm property.

If things didn’t turn out as expected, it was (in my opinion) because of the meddling of bureaucrats who constricted the autonomy of the basic units of cooperative production. In an apparent show of self-determination, the workers assumed the debts and the bankruptcies, and the companies – which remained as methodological entities – continued to determine what to do and when and how to do it.

In 1994, I wrote an article in Bohemia magazine based on a personal survey conducted in several provinces. The topic was the Shakespearean reality: To be or not to be autonomous, that is the question.

Of course, actualization will not explore failed formulas. If it did, it would actualize stagnation. Because if the conservative mentality that has ruined very progressive initiatives in Cuba tried to impose ideas that have repeatedly failed, we Cubans would be like the dog that tries to chase its tail and runs around in a never-ending circle.

From my point of view, those who conceive, analyze and, above all, decide the solutions will have to evaluate and control, in political terms, this mentality of immobility – sprinkled with some opportunism – that, like marabú, refuses to be eradicated. I have heard people say, “It will take a long time and a lot of patience to break it through persuasion and the actualizing reaccommodation of the economy.”

It seems, therefore, that the correct equation is the interdependence of tradition and novelty. In other words, what can be salvaged from the scheme made moot by circumstances, plus the new concepts that should revive that scheme and replace its obsolete aspects. The method, as I see it, is caution, a caution justified by this question: What socialist society in the 20th Century, with the exception of Vietnam and China, has survived its strategy of renewal?

Luis Sexto, a Cuban journalist who won the 2009 José Martí Award, is a regular contributor to Progreso Semanal/Weekly.