The political changes in Cuba

By Jesús Arboleya Cervera

A widely expressed opinion is that the current economic reforms in Cuba do not imply any relevant political changes. That’s what the U.S. government contends, to deny the reforms’ significance.

The official Cuban discourse feeds this perception because, by emphasizing that the changes do not constitute a negation of the process’ socialist course, it evades stressing their inevitable impact on the political sphere.

Neither history nor current events confirm this assertion. From its origin, Cuba’s socialist economic model has been conditioned more by political exigencies than by orthodox economic strategies.

It is true that there is always a possibility to choose among several alternatives – and sometimes the choice leads to successes or failures – but these options have been particularly constrained in the case of Cuba.

The centralized state model that has ruled Cuba’s economic policy for 50 years, with greater or lesser rigor, was conditioned by the U.S. blockade and other forms of aggression; by the opposition to the system from the principal U.S. businessmen and their links to the counterrevolutionary groups; by the widespread emigration of managers and professionals during the early years, and by the possibility of an almost exclusive economic insertion offered by the socialist camp, which inevitably was accompanied by its own structural and political conditions.

Today, it is argued (often with reason) that such an insertion had negative consequences for the Cuban economy, and stress is placed on Cuba’s dependence on those markets, especially the Soviet one, as well as the backwardness of the technological park we acquired.

In reality, it was an alternative that offered fewer standards of development than the industrialized capitalist world did. The question is whether better possibilities existed, under Cuba’s specific conditions. Also, whether that kind of integration has ever been possible for poor countries.

The economic model that resulted from that alliance was, above all, the fruit of a strategy of survival, which does not deny the presence of a political passion that limited critical capacity and led to the myth of the “irreversibility” of the so-called real socialism. To the credit of Cuban leaders, from Che to Fidel Castro, is the fact that, despite that passion, they alerted us – as few others did – to real socialism’s problems and deviations.

I do not share the opinion that that experience ended in “absolute failure,” as many allege. Despite its imperfection, there was an economic growth that surpassed the levels seen in Latin America at the best of times. It also generated a relevant human development, improvements in the quality of life, and social indicators that still compete with the best in the world.

Starting from its premises, a model of life was created that sustained a social consensus and, therefore, the ways to do politics, sometimes imperfect but assumed as legitimate by a majority of the population.

The problem is that that model of life became unsustainable once the world on which it relied disappeared. The collapse of the European socialist camp accelerated the process of globalization and shaped it along the patterns of neoliberalism.

Today, there’s practically no other market, and experiences of other types, such as ALBA, cannot escape its influence. The questions for Cuba are how to function under those rules, given the leonine conditions imposed by the blockade, and how to save the socialist goals that are in Cuba’s nature.

It is essential to build a new social consensus, which implies considerable political changes and conflicts in their application. A mindset must be changed, as Raúl Castro said, not because it was necessarily wrong but because it cannot be sustained in the new reality.

Bureaucracy, ever harmful, resists the changes and has the ability to act against them. I am not referring to the necessary administrative and governmental functions but to a parasitic sector that, often unaware, feeds from superfluous mechanisms of control, generating mediocrity, opportunism and corruption. Therefore, its elimination constitutes a political battle that transcends the purely economic measures.

More importantly, the current economic reforms imply a different relationship of the citizens with the State. It is estimated that the State will soon cease to be the employer of more than half the nation’s workers, and the State-run companies will require more participatory mechanisms in their management, inasmuch as the workers are at risk and their jobs will hinge directly on those mechanisms.

By assigning a greater role to the local structures, economic decentralization gives greater participation and oversight to the people, just to mention the most evident and wide-ranging repercussions.

To what degree is it possible to reconcile these changes with the objective of going ahead with the socialist project?

To begin with, we’d have to agree on the very concept of socialism and assume that it can no longer be conceived as before, which implies a profound ideological transformation, with inevitable political consequences.

One of the traps that dogmatism set for Marxism was to spread the opinion that socialism required a single model, establishing inviolable premises to define its nature. While capitalism coexisted for centuries with slavery and feudal forms of ownership (some of which are still present in certain places) socialism was denied the right to assume its concrete reality and engage, from objective foundations, in the transformation of society.

Another Marxist premise is that socialism is conceived so it can develop on a global scale. Of course there is a possibility, even a necessity, for socialism to exist in a single country, and history has so confirmed, but that’s the first step in a long journey, reminding us of a newborn child who has to learn to live and develop its abilities beginning with his confrontation with daily life.

That is the phase where we find ourselves. The possible socialism is the one that assumes that man and woman are its priorities and does everything possible to satisfy their basic existential needs; it endeavors to eliminate exploitation as much as possible; acts against alienation in all its forms, and exalts dignity and human solidarity. All this conditions the limits of capitalist activities within socialism, and takes the nation along roads that are not determined by uncontrolled avarice.

So long as this doctrine does not change, socialism will remain in Cuba despite the economic and political transformations that may be imposed.

The truth is that, in order to succeed in its intention to “adapt,” Cuba is committed to a “revolution within the Revolution.” And us Cubans who believe we can advance along that road, as well as the left in general, have to learn to defend our “real socialism” without fearing the heresy of distancing ourselves from the overly utopian utopia the dogmatists fabricated for us.

Clearly, these are not the changes the U.S. government would like to see and that’s why it denies their existence. But that’s their problem.

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