The Cuban Revolution and Western Intellectuals and Cuba: A Personal Report (continued)

In the twenties and thirties, it was precisely the equation of socialism with Soviet society that helped ruin the chances for creating an American socialist movement. The identification of socialism with Russia made radicals obsessed with the course of events in that country. Once Soviet society failed to fulfill the hopes many radicals held for it, they responded by abandoning socialism. Russia became a convenient excuse for their retreat from radicalism. Disenchantment with the USSR meant that the dream of social revolution was unattainable. Opponents of socialism began to attribute to socialism anything they disliked in Russia, while advocates of socialism were betrayed into defending events which in reality they found to be abhorrent. The pattern has been brilliantly explained by Richard H. Pells in his important study, Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years:

Because so many hopes were invested in the success of the Soviet experiment, and because Stalinism represented the only concrete model of a socialist society, it became psychologically impossible to achieve a balanced perspective on Russia. Intellectuals either defended the USSR with an emotional intensity that crippled rational judgment, or they implacably condemned every policy and program the regime advanced. Whichever position one adopted, the capacity to offer critical support--to analyze the Russian adventure dispassionately while sympathizing with its announced objectives--was almost always absent.

Contemporary friends of Cuba will argue that the Russian analogy does not apply. This has more than a partial degree of truth. Cuba is not Russia, and the 1970s are not the 1930s. Russia was an isolated nation at a time of worldwide reactionary assault; Cuba is one of many nations with a socialist economic system. Yet, Cuba's entrance into the socialist economic bloc has had some negative consequences.

As K. S. Karol has pointed out in his major study Guerrillas in Power, Cuba has not yet faced the question of how to construct a socialist democracy. Neither the martyred Che Guevara or his opponents during the 1963-65 economic debates "had come to grips with the problem of political power in, and the political organization of, all those societies where centralized reformist experiments in planning and economic management were taking place." Che failed to discuss the issue of "the direct participation of all the workers . . . in the running of communal affairs." He could have argued that trade unions had to function as autonomous institutions that expressed and defended the claims of the working class. Yet Che "preferred to take shelter behind two myths, both of them imported from the USSR," that workers had no other interest "than the acceleration of production in accordance with the overall economic plan," and that the revolutionary leaders "know best how to interpret the thoughts and needs of the working class."

Karol's point is that the problem of Cuban development went beyond a simple choice "between bad reforms and true socialism"--either the market economy of the Soviet bloc or reliance upon moral incentives. Without workers' control, he feared, Cuba would move in the direction of technocratic reform or it would maintain the status quo. In Russia, a similar course led to economic stagnation, political apathy, and political repression by the state.

In Cuba, as in any socialist society, "socialist democracy is not the kind of luxury people can only afford when everything else has been settled." Otherwise, Karol adds, it "matters little that great sacrifices no longer serve to enrich a minority of privileged people." It is precisely this point that some of the critics of my Liberation article have ignored. The social goals of production, even without any workers' control, are sufficient for them. "To work on a Cuban assembly line performing dull, repetitive tasks produces necessary goods for your fellow workers," they write, while a similar job on a U.S. assembly line "produces wealth for a small number of very rich men." For them, evidently, socialist democracy is a luxury.

In a similar fashion, the Cubaphiles believe that the mere fact of Soviet aid rescuing the Cuban Revolution makes any assessment of the price paid for that aid a counterrevolutionary act. To escape from the impact of the blockade, Cuba tried to further integrate its economy with that of the Soviet bloc. That decision was made clear in 1969, when Cuban leader Armando Hart declared that "the Soviet success is explained first and foremost by the extraordinary conditions resulting from the socialization of the means of production, and especially from their collectivization in the late 1920s and the early 1930s. . . . The fact that a major proportion of the country's resources was invested in industry, and that the basic resources of the nation were used for socialist development and investment rather than for home consumption has been another, equally decisive, factor in the forward leap of Soviet production, so that if we study the Soviet path with a view to the better planning of our own, we are bound to conclude that the factors which presided over the unprecedented rise in production in the USSR are the very same factors which our revolution stresses today."

The effort to harvest ten million tons of sugar in 1970--an effort that failed--became the nation's all-consuming task. Cuba did not possess the necessary capital goods for the job. They tried to make up for this lack by use of militarily organized labor brigades. This solution, as Fidel Castro later admitted, produced gigantic dislocations in the rest of the Cuban economy, as all production was diverted to concentrate on the ten million tons. The price paid, as K. S. Karol points out, was high: "Industrial and military conscription; closer ties with the Soviet Union; the kind of 'Communism' that prevailed in Russia during the thirties--all these are the direct consequences of his battle for the ten-million-ton zafra."

The Cuban government had opted for trying to gain socialism on the basis of a high investment rate, low consumption of goods, and rapid economic growth; a path, Karol notes, that "bore a suspicious resemblance to the doctrine of the Soviet Union at the time of forced industrialization and collectivization"; and less to the path espoused by Che Guevara, who sought to spare Cuba the distortions of Soviet-style economic development. The result, Karol concludes, was that Fidel Castro was "clearly defending a system of political power and economic priorities that contained automatic safeguards against the revival of heresies in Cuba." Once an economic battle for production was to be waged in the Soviet manner it might lead--as it had in Soviet Russia--to a loss of working class political initiative. Entrusted only with responsibility to fulfill the assigned plan, the workers became incapable of acting on their own and of developing a socialist consciousness.

It was Karol's hope that the Cubans would reject the Soviet path, and heed Che Guevara's word to guard against the type of socialism that based foreign trade on capitalist methods, and which would lead to movement away from social justice. Cubans, Karol wrote, still "have the means to start on a road that will lead to a free and equal society. One does not have to be a dreamer to think that this is, in fact, the road they will choose."

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5