by Dr. Frederic Clairmont
Global Research, March 21, 2008
- 2008-03-20
" The victory of the Revolution is a rampart that ensures that
never again will Cuba become the most sordid brothel our planet has ever
known linked to a criminal gambling and drug infested inferno of the
colonial occupiers." Comandante Ernesto Che Guevara, 1 May 1959.
Invariably, after every speaking engagement on Latin America. the
question was raised about Cuba's fate after the exit of the Comandante
from the political stage. The question was not malicious although among
my listeners there were those who believed , or prayed for, that the
departure of Fidel Alejandro Castro Rua, born (1926) in the former
province of Oriente on his father's farm (Manacas) ,marks the terminal
point of the socialist revolution. Throughout the ages and by the very
nature of our existence it is part of our normal being to ask that basic
question: from whence have we come and whither are we are going? There
are many that have personalized one of the most momentous historical
metamorphoses of all times.
Fidel Castro and the Revolution that he incubated and flung into battle
with such resounding surprises and successes for more than a half a
century cannot be abstracted from the role of the masses as the
energizing dynamic of change.
The personalization of leaders as the drive wheel of change is erroneous
as it assumes that the makers of history are exclusively the leaders of
social and political movements. Such a muddled perception is the
incarnation of the Fuhrerprinzip of Nazism that sweeps aside the seminal
role of ordinary peoples that battle to defend the Revolution and build
on it. It deliberately eviscerates the world of labour: workers,
farmers, professionals, the men and women that comprise the armed
forces. In short, it ignores the creators of wealth as the engine of change.
History is about numbers and very big numbers that dramatically erupt
onto the political stage at certain nodal points in response to the
contradictions of our time stemming from irrepressible convulsions . The
revolutionary that is Fidel Castro is thus inseparable from the masses
that catapulted him into the fires of national struggle from the Moncada
Barracks to the liberation of Havana, in much the same way as Gandhi and
Mandela in their freedom struggles; and no less so Lenin and the October
Revolution.
Thomas Carlyle enriched our understanding of this duality when he wrote
in his classic depiction of the French Revolution:
"Hunger and nakedness and nightmare oppression lying heavy on
twenty-five million: this, not the wounded vanities or contradicted
philosophies of philosophical advocates, rich shopkeepers, rural nobles,
was the prime mover in the French Revolution; as the like will be in all
such revolutions, in all countries."
The penetrating insight of Marx with its sublime message of hope and
struggle as humanity faces up to the exigencies of smashing the
inherited mould of capitalism, a system of class power, privilege,
profit and exploitation, illumines the compulsive sweep of revolutionary
change.
"History does nothing; it possesses no immense wealth, fights no
battles. It is rather man, real living man who does everything, who
grapples with everything and who fights."
As a teacher and writer (and Spanish speaker) I tracked the Revolution's
trajectory spanning more than half a century. I was never a member of
any political body nor was I ever enamored by the phony cult of
objectivity. In those decades, I talked to its peoples from all walks of
life. I met its leadership. I participated in its seminars and
conferences. It was in those years of agony and ecstasy that I witnessed
the unending twists and turns of its ascendancy. In those years, I also
encountered the hate-filled émigrés, who had chosen the path of
counter-revolution, dishonor and mendacity, ensconced in Miami and
elsewhere.
To grasp the nature of the transition – and that is the crucial word of
this lecture - that has reshaped the nation's psyche it is well to
recall that the Revolution was generated as a reaction against the
exploitation and sheer cruelty perpetrated by the US occupation and its
domesticated political Quislings that reigned through the
instrumentalities of unadulterated state terrorism since the
consummation of the conquest in 1898. Listen well to the Comandante's
words framed on the eve of the freedom upsurge . Its relevance to the
new transition is all too obvious.
"Some have insisted that the only way out for Cuba was to guarantee
private investments. That , we are told, would solve the whole problem.
But foreign capitalists had these guarantees in Cuba for fifty years ,
and similar guarantees in practically every other country of the
American continent. Did these guarantees solve the pressing problems
confronting its peoples? Did they solve the problem of mass
unemployment, education, public health? Indeed, what did they solve in
all these fifty years? Joblessness straddling more than one third of the
labour force, poverty, hunger and chronic malnutrition…"
I recall on one of our walks on the Malecon with my friend the late
Renato Constantino, a celebrated Philipino resistance fighter,
philosopher and writer pointing his hand to the waters of the bay in the
direction of Florida and saying: " Over there, just a couple of
kilometers away. I believe it's around 90 kms. There is the
super-colonial Goliath , that has flung everything against this bastion
of a socialist David and what we've seen is that the power of the
imperio has been clubbed. Why? You know the answer. What Voltaire said
about God applies no less so to Cuba: If Cuba did not exist we would
have had to invent it." What Renato was saying was that the White Man's
world of the imperio cannot coexist with Cuba; and hence, in their view,
it must be destroyed. It is toxic and contagious.
Its sheer capacity to survive and strike back owed nothing to a world of
miracles and Shamans. What Bush, his acolytes and predecessors mean by
transition is something quite different from the meaning emblazoned in
the theory and praxis of the Revolution? It reminds me of the words of
Ho Chi Minh formulated after the breakdown of the Fountainbleau
negotiations in 1946. " Words have different meaning for different
people. If you spit in the face of the colonialists they will always
call it rain."
We cannot speak of the multi-faceted transitions in Cuba without
studying the grim transition of imperialism. They are inter-related.
American capitalism has leapt into the big transition, that of
recession, galloping fast towards the Big Depression. The credit
seizures and foreclosures are gobbling up jobs and earnings at an
alarming tempo. Panic stricken stock markets are plummeting with many
major financial institutions going bust. The industrial capacity of US
capitalism has withered. What remains of its colossal industrial
heritage, a legacy mainly of the decades 1865-1914, is being swiftly
offshored. Detroit, the once proud citadel of industrial might is now a
wasteland. Its financial structures are wobbly, shackled with
uncontrollable debt: household, corporate and government that continues
to burgeon exponentially. Americans and foreigners have lost confidence
in the greenback that is swiftly ceasing to be a store of value.
Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hammered the point when he said:
"the dollar is nothing but a worthless piece of paper." A contention
that few will contest. Its claim to be the world's reserve currency is a
fairy tale. Credit flows are drying up . Banks are dumping their assets
into collapsing markets. Defaults and bankruptcies are soaring. In sum,
US financial capitalism is in the throes of an implosion. Uncle Sam is
an enfeebled mendicant living off borrowed time and borrowed money. But
not for long can this game continue.
The empire has over 700 military overseas bases in over 130 countries
but its effective power is shrinking day by day. This then is the big
contrast with Cuba's transition. Its growth in real terms has steadily
topped 6%over the last six years. The brutalizing years of the Special
Period have largely been vanquished. The economic and spiritual
revolutions in Cuba are nothing short of mind-boggling that bear no
comparison with any Latin American countries. Let there be no illusion.
Cuba is a Third World nation. It still is a poor country. The wages of
its labour force are still abysmally low. The exploitation of man by man
has vanished. Of pivotal importance, however, is that it has now
achieved full employment, a reality once regarded as the unattainable
Nirvana. Illiteracy, malnutrition and mendicancy have ceased to exist.
Its life expectancy is almost on a par with Japan and Sweden, as against
56 in Batista's neo-colony. Its infant mortality rate is on a par with
Canada and has already outstripped that of the United States. These are
the transitions that the media masters of the corporate gulag chose to
eliminate from their specious references on transitions.
I well remember the Revolution's formative years when the white-skinned
medical personnel bolted the country boasting that medicine is dead and
the only thing that will take its place is Voodoo. In their imbecilic
gasp of triumph they had forgotten to say that their political cronies
had plundered the nation's Treasury and dispatched its pickings to the
land of the ex-colonial master. Cuba now has around 90,000 students
spanning the entire range of medical care. This nation which, according
to its unbending liquidators, has abolished 'human rights' has set its
goal of becoming the paramount medical science citadel in the world.
There are now over 12,000 students in ELAM: La Escuela Latinoamericana
de Medicina, one of the world's top educational establishments. Over the
next decade it will be graduating with Venezuela more than 100,000 Latin
American and Caribbean doctors within the integration framework of ALBA:
Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas. Together with Venezuela,
Operation Miracle was launched designed to restore vision to no fewer
than 6 million in all of Latin America and the Caribbean.
These astounding numbers would have been inconceivable without a
socialist order and the discipline and sacrifices that moved in tandem
with it. Tens of thousands of Cuban medical and non-medical personnel
are working in 27 countries under difficult physical conditions. In his
visit to Cuba in 2007, in which he decorated the 140 medical personnel,
General Pervez Musharaf ( a fervent ally of the empire) was not
indulging in hyperbole when he noted:
"Yours was one of the greatest acts of solidarity that humanity
has ever known. We thank President Castro and the Cuban people. You came
thousands of miles away, in the depth of one of the most severest
winters, to heal and save the lives of thousands of our people stricken
by that appalling natural disaster. You even brought your own medical
equipment and medicines. There is not a single village in our country
that has not heard of your heroic deeds and sacrifices. These awards are
a modest token to express our gratitude. You gave everything but took
nothing in exchange except our love. The word thanks , you will
understand, is too small a tribute to convey the immensity of our debt
and feeling towards you."
The systematic state terrorist onslaughts against Cuba pre-date 1962
that marked the start of the official embargo that has endured with no
respite for almost half a century .Attempts to quarantine Cuba have
failed. Year after year in the UN General Assembly just two countries,
the United States ( plus its two Pacific island protectorates) and
Israel voted for the embargo's perpetuation. Its cumulative cost
according to foreign minister Roque approaches $100bn. And yet,
notwithstanding the permanent war including several aborted attempts at
assassination of the president, Cuba has lurched forward prodigiously ,
not only in its dispensation of education and medical aid to countries
on many continents, but as a fraternal catalyst in the liberation
struggle. No country in the world has given as much to Africa as Cuba
has done and continues to do. A gift sealed with the blood of its peoples.
Nelson Mandela touched on one of the energizing roles of Cuba when he
spelt out in his homage to the Comandante during his visit to South
Africa following the liquidation of the Apartheid regime.
"We and all the peoples of the Free World are honored to have you
here. And by the Free World we refer to the peoples whose blood has been
shed profusely to liquidate imperialism. Consider South Africa as your
land. We shall not forget the decisive role you played militarily in
destroying the South African army. You came thousands of miles to
participate in the freedom struggle with us. You fought nobly,
unstintingly and shed your blood to ensure our freedom. Without you our
freedom would not have been consummated."
Obviously such views were in contrast to the architects of Cuba's
annihilation. These avalanches of death-dealing hatred had nothing to do
with the familiar claptrap that the island of socialism had repudiated
all the vestiges of human rights and democracy. The heights of vulgarity
scaled by the practitioners of exterminism were exhibited by General
Alexander Haig, one of President's Reagan's henchmen, when he fulminated
in a meeting of the National Security Council : "You just give me the
word and I'll turn that fucking little island into a parking lot." If
this is not an exhortation to the Holocaust then words have no meaning.
The mass exterminism propounded by Haig was not galvanized because of
the apprehensions of the upshot of another Bay of Pigs.
It was because even at that time Cuba had made yet another dramatic
transition: it had become militarily invulnerable. This was matched by
the decline of the imperio and its military over-reach that exposed its
soft underbelly. To this was added an event of the greatest importance ,
the alliance with Venezuela concretized in the words of Chavez:
"An attack against Cuba will be countered by an immediate cut-off
of oil. More important is that it will lead to a flow of blood including
the blood of Bolivarian patriots since revolutionary Cuba and Venezuela
are blended in the war against imperialism. It will be an horrendous war
if the imbeciles that rule the imperio are so dumb as to unleash it. And
I need hardly say that it will be a devastating counterpunch that
overspills the confines of Cuba." For the first time in the history of
the Americas a black man was calling the shots.
In yet another of his preachments on Cuba's transition, Bush excoriated
Barack Obama for declaring that if he's elected he would talk to
everyone. In a regime in which the very mention of dialogue is anathema
Bush flatly pontificated that "there can be no dialogue with the Castro
tyrant that has brought nothing but disaster and poverty to his people
and eliminating all traces of human dignity and freedom." This is quite
a mouthful from a man that continues to prattle endlessly about human
dignity when in his own backyard the American prison population stands
at 2.3 million with no signs of tapering off. According to the Pew
Report it now has 750 prisoners per 100,000 as against 79 per 100,000 in
Switzerland. One in 15 African Americans are behind bars, as against I
in 75 for Hispanics and 1 in 106 for whites.
Is Bush oblivious to the crimes against humanity in the war that he has
waged against Iraq in which more than one million Iraqis have been
killed and wounded? In addition, their factories, farms, homes and
infrastructure have been smashed. The cost of that war has moved from
billions to trillions of dollars seen from the American side of the
balance sheet. The numbers are misleading in that they do not include
the costs to the people of Iraq. Indeed, the policies of US exterminism
was neatly encapsulated in the pithy comment of the British dramatist
and Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter " You either do as I say or I'll
kick your ass in." Because of its refusal to have its ass kicked in Cuba
has been condemned to the chopping block. To be sure there are no
presidents since 1945 that are not indictable on war crimes charges.
Bush launched one more of his transitions when his administration
created a Cuba Transition Coordinator bossed by Cleb McCarry, former
ambassador to Afghanistan. On 10 July 2006, a report of the Commission
for Assistance to a Free Cuba demanded immediate action "to ensure the
failure of the Castro's regime succession strategy."
There was nothing new in this verbose report. It was framed as an
ultimatum that bluntly stated that the land and industrial and financial
sectors must be denationalized. The Roman Church and its prerogatives
must be fully restored including its extensive land holdings and the end
of the separation of Church and State.. It was a blueprint for the
return of the neo-colonial occupation from 1898-1959. Noteworthy is that
its goals could be succinctly summarized in an utterance made more than
50 years ago by an American oilman at the peak of the oil bonanza in
Venezuela.
"Here in Venezuela you have the right to do what you like with your
capital. This right is dearer to me than all the political rights in the
world."
The Economist, that militant mouthpiece of Big Capital (it's owned by
the Pearson Trust) hollers for US intervention to halt the nationalist
and socialist offensives gathering speed in Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and
Nicaragua. "To put it bluntly , Latin America needs more Lula da Silvas
[and his version of neo-liberalism] and fewer Chavez's and Morales's.
This is where the United States could help." The imperial masters ,
however,do not require such morsels of advice because it is central to
the applied logic of state terrorism.
As we have seen, institutional changes have been a permanent trait of
the Revolution and the current debates and their implementation do not
mark a qualitative change in their direction. It is but yet another
phase of the greatest importance given the immense strides and
complexity of the national economy. Cuba today is a power house of
modern science and technology embracing bio-technology, electronics,
engineering, information technology, the chemical and petrochemical
industries, mining, the iron and steel industry, etc. To that inventory
we should simply say that Cuba stands at the summit of world educational
attainment.
The debate on the new transition In Cuba has reached a frenzied pace and
straddles the problem of optimizing capital and labour resources. No
holes are barred in these debates on the extent of administrative
incompetence and corruption, and the theft of national assets. The
current projects call for a massive overhaul of the bureaucracy whose
swollen numbers are a deterrent to the nation's productive advance.
These changes now underway demand a decentralization of economic
decision making slated to boost productivity. The changes will require
an overhaul of wholesale and retail price structures, wage payments and
incentive payments, subsidies and the prevailing rationing system The
latter was never designed to be a permanent fixture of a socialist
order. These changes call for, as President Raul Castro stated in his 26
July 2007 policy statement, for the elimination of a host of
prohibitions and red tape. Illustrative is the case of the dairy
industry and specifically milk distribution. There are no overall
directives engulfing the entire economy. Experimentation is proceeding
on a piecemeal basis in various municipalities and then gradually
extended. In the case of milk distribution this has resulted in savings
of over $40 million and in addition huge savings in fuel costs.
This is how Fidel puts it in his Reflections of 16 January. "We do not
intend to give anything to those who could be producing but do not
produce, or who produce very little. We shall reward the merits of those
who work with their hands and their minds." The question is obviously
open: to what extent will these transitions, that cut deeply into the
flesh of Cuba's socialism, engender enhanced inequalities in a society
whose egalitarianism is legendary.? Our query will soon be answered by
unfolding events.
There are well-intentioned critics who propagate that Cuba should
embrace the free market magic and its propertied social relations from
whence it follows that the Chinese model is appropriate. One recalls
Deng Xiaoping's epic outburst. "To be rich is glorious" Deng's ideas and
their reverberations have been discussed in depth for several years in
Cuba. But let us be realistic. What is Deng's rallying cry other than a
resounding clamour for the restoration of capitalism? A visit to China's
cities and countryside and the monstrous inequalities between them and
within them is amply confirmatory of the workings of the system. Its
millionaires have become billionaires. China and Cuba belong to two
opposed universes. China's level of inequality, measured by the Gini
coefficient, is similar to that of American capitalism.
The capitalist reality of the islands of Hong Kong and Macao owned and
dominated politically by a cabal of at most a dozen mega capitalist
families that are entrenched through marriage, extended family
connections and their daily economic wheelings and dealings would
suggest that the Cuban leadership and its people will not be following
this road. Thus the relevance of the Chinese capitalist model to Cuba
smacks of total irrealism.
Our lectures on transitions both within imperialism and Cuba are taking
place not in an abstract world but in a world where capitalism - and
American capitalism in particular – is traversing one of the most
cataclysmic upheavals since the Great Depression of the l930s. The
resultant of this tragedy is beyond the scope of these lectures.
But what I believe will be the most important conditioner of the future
direction of socialism in Cuba are the ethical foundations on which it
reposes. This is enshrined in what I conceive to be one of the most
penetrating manifestos in Cuban history. It is the definition of the
Revolution so masterly articulated on 1 May 2000 by the Comandante that
merits quotation at length.
"The Revolution is the sense of the historic moment; it is to change all
that must changed; it is equality and freedom in their plenitude; it
means that we must be treated, and to treat others, as human beings; it
is to emancipate ourselves by our own powers; it is to challenge the
powerful dominant forces within the nation and abroad; it is to defend
our values at whatever price and sacrifice; it is modesty,
disinterestedness , altruism, solidarity and heroism; it means not
having recourse to lies or thrashing ethical principles; it is the deep
conviction that there is no force in the world capable of crushing the
power of truth and ideas. Revolution is unity; it is independence; it is
to fight for the materialization of our dreams for Cuba and the world;
it is the foundation of our patriotism, our socialism and our
internationalism."
Frederic F. Clairmont is a prominent Canadian academic who for many
years was a permanent senior economics affairs officer at the United
Nations Economics Commission for Africa and the United Nations
Conference for Trade and Development (UNCTAD).
He taught at the University of Kings College and Dalhousie University in
Nova Scotia. His classic work is The Rise and Fall of Economic
Liberalism and his latest book is: Cuba and Venezuela: The Nemeses of
Imperialism published by Citizens International in Penang, Malaysia. He
is a a frequent contributor to Le Monde Diplomatique and The Economic
and Political Weekly.
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