Cuba
Cuba: A Country Without
Envío team
On the streets of Havana and other cities of Cuba, there are lines everywhere: For milk (you have to take your own bottle). For what's in from the list in your ration book (everything is rationed again and soap hasn't come in for four months). For the buses (of which there are fewer each day, and now fill so quickly they don't even bother to stop; they just chug by like a bunch of bananas on wheels). For pizzas (but now there aren't any pizzas either). For a tiny bag of coffee. There's only one thing that's not in short supply—money.
A question to a government official: "This crisis, this so-called special period, is it due to the problems of the Eastern countries or the problems of Cuba?" He answers: "It's 75% the crisis of the East and 25% our problems." The same question to a worker in light industry. He responds precisely the opposite: "It's 75% our fault and 25% what's going on there." A less official official balances the proportions more evenhandedly: "It's 60% external and 40% internal."
On the streets of Havana and other cities of Cuba, there are comments everywhere: ideas, opinions, reflections and more ideas about this new, extremely difficult situation. "We're being forced into an exercise of creation, the creation of a model that will make the revolution viable in a world that has already changed," says a young revolutionary, also full of ideas.
If there is one thing that everyone in Cuba is in absolute and clear agreement about, it is that the world has changed.
Everyone knows it and has taken it into account. The world the Cuban revolution was born into, grew up in and developed in is no longer. The enemies of the Cuban revolutionary process deduce from this that the revolution's "days are numbered." They not only deduce it, they are trying to induce it. They believe that the current crisis is "terminal," and, that after being born, growing up and reproducing itself, the time has come for revolutionary Cuba to die.
Afloat in a sea of capitalismAfter President John F. Kennedy signed Decree 3447 on February 3,1962, Cuba witnessed the breaking of every economic, commercial and financial tie it had with the United States. There were too many of those old ties. Back in 1923, the United States bought 83% of Cuba's exports. In 1958, the year before the revolution, 71% of all Cuban exports still went to the United States and 64% of its imports came from there. US trade with Cuba totaled $1 billion.
With this US blockade a fait accompli, the isolated island began to re-link all of its relations, at enormous economic and social cost. Cuba's new commercial partners were the socialist countries of Eastern Europe, particularly the Soviet Union.
"What's happening now is that we're being sandwiched between two blockades," explained a Cuban social scientist, "that of the United States and that of the Soviet Union.
One is de jure and the other de facto."
The de jure blockade, the one by the United States, is the one officially denounced by Cuba in the most recent session of the United Nations General Assembly as a violation of international law. The violation is not just the economic aggression that the bilateral embargo represents; Cuba's charge focuses much more on the pressure that the United States has exercised against third countries for more than 30 years to join ranks with its anti-Cuba policy. This issue—which will at long last be taken up in the 1992 UN General Assembly—becomes a strategic one in these times of the "new world order." International law is now the only framework that proclaims that states, whether large or small, are equal, and is thus the only one that can protect the smallest.
The de facto blockade is the result of the collapse of the Eastern European socialist countries and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Of Cuba's total foreign trade, 85% was with these countries, particularly with the USSR. Looking at this figure, some have always said, "The revolution just changed one dependency for another." Others say, "They didn't leave the revolution any other alternative."
Eastern Europe's rapid shift toward capitalism has led to the virtual disappearance of its trade with Cuba. One example among many: The now extinct German Democratic Republic used to send Cuba 22 million tons of powdered milk in exchange for 22,000 tons of yeast for animal feed. The trade was beneficial to both countries: the GDR had a milk surplus, and Cuba, using the molasses surplus from sugar refining could produce the feed very profitably. With the powdered milk it received, Cuba produced 220 million liters of liquid milk, the equivalent of five months of national consumption.
This milk no longer comes to Cuba, which largely explains the current strain on the supply of milk, to say nothing of cheese, yoghurt and butter. Despite that, there is not one Cuban child who does not have a liter of milk guaranteed daily at 25 cents. Nor is there a single elderly person who does not enjoy the same guarantee. Almost everything that Cuba earns today from its export of lobsters is invested in importing powdered milk to continue fulfilling this objective.
The problems have been more complex with the Soviet Union, Cuba's main trading partner. Contrary to what today's game—or war—of images about Cuba says, it has nothing to do with the now ex-Soviet Union deciding to stop "subsidizing" Cuba because it wants to distance itself politically or ideologically from the Cuban government.
What does it have to do with then? Cuba's main export product to the USSR has always been sugar, although nickel, citrus and, more recently, medical equipment have also been important. The main Soviet export product to Cuba has been petroleum.
In 1959, the year of the revolutionary triumph, Cuba consumed 4 million tons of oil annually and the barrel price on the world market was $2. With a ton of sugar, Cuba could buy 7 tons of oil. In the 1970s, after the spectacular hike in cartel oil prices, a barrel cost $30. At the same time, the price of sugar, while varying somewhat, has tended to fall steadily. To complicate matters further, Cuba, which was able to produce much more sugar over that period, had also come to need 13 million tons of oil annually for its economy to function. This led both countries to sign compensatory agreements against all possible imbalances. Again, this was beneficial not just to Cuba, but to the Soviet Union as well: while the Soviets paid Cuba 800 rubles per ton of cane sugar, it would have cost them at least 200 rubles more to produce the same ton of sugar at home from beets.
In neither of these two key products, nor in the other lesser ones, was it a case of the big country giving handouts to the little one. They were reasonable agreements between the two to slowly close the gap caused by unequal exchange that keeps making some countries ever richer while the majority of the countries become ever poorer.
The Soviet Union's political crisis and the administrative chaos this has generated are the reasons for its de facto blockade, not political isolation to which it has supposedly submitted Cuba. The problem began in 1990. For the first time in more than 30 years, the USSR failed to fulfill its petroleum agreement with Cuba; by the second half of the year the shortfall was 3.3 million tons. More than 20% of Cuba's annual needs, the cut required serious adjustments in the entire economy.
This year the Soviet Union agreed to less, only 10 million tons. By the end of November, Cuba had only received 8 million. The Soviet Union's failure to comply with its agreements for the remaining essential raw materials or products—also exchanged for Cuban products—was almost total, while Cuba met all its commitments. Wheat flour and grain, edible oils and lard, fertilizers, sulfur for the nickel industry, caustic soda for the soap industry, bicarbonate of soda for crystals, wood pulp for paper and cardboard, steel laminates for construction, tin plate for cans, inner tubes, spare parts for machinery and household appliances—all this and much more did not arrive. For every 100 inner tubes agreed to, 2 arrived. In the case of fertilizer, indispensable for the sugar crop and for the success of the strategic Food Plan—which should yield appreciable results in the next two years, giving Havana and other cities access to food supplies harvested from surrounding areas—Cuba has only received 5% of the agreed-to amount. There is no reason to believe that this crisis in Soviet supplies will be overcome in 1992. Uncertainty is one of the key words for understanding today's Cuba. And everyone counts on the situation worsening.
At the end of 1990, when the first symptoms of the crisis appeared, previews of the worst yet to come, the Cuban government readjusted its strategies and established strict controls over all the country's resources and goods. What was called a "special period in times of peace" was a structural adjustment plan, too, but very different from what the other Latin American countries are suffering. Different because it stems from other reasons and because people are informed of those reasons. And different because the government's policy is to maintain as an "invariable principle" a "climate of equity, of brotherhood and solidarity in which no man or woman, not a single child, not a single old person will ever be abandoned to their fate." Also different because there are no social upheavals or lootings or strikes or repression. Different, too, because it is an adjustment that has brought scarcity, but not hunger or widespread misery.
Although rationing evokes a "war economy," there is no war; the Havana landscape is abnormal only in the number of lines, and the predominance of bicycles, which have replaced automobiles by the thousands. The worsening of the standard of living brought by this imposed control over everything is the most visible and palpable point of the "Cuban crisis." Cubans feel this "special period" three times a day, although it is only part of a much wider economic crisis. If this tension is not resolved creatively, it could bring serious political erosion for the revolution, which is facing its most difficult and complex test ever.
From the United States, the Bush Administration is betting heavily on accelerating this political erosion. That is why the blockade that President Kennedy decided to impose almost 30 years ago, and that seven US administrations decided to perpetuate, has taken on new life.
Every door we open, they try to closeThe idea of blockading Cuba began to circulate in Washington only 22 days after dictator Juan Batista was ousted. The revolution, openly identified from the beginning with a fervent nationalism, "threatened" US interests on the island that had been its virtual colony for 60 years. The Agrarian Reform Law of May 1959, acclaimed by one UN organization "an example to follow" in all of Latin America, was not seen in that light by the US government. It was the first big proof of the "threat": 22% of all Cuban land was the property of US companies. From that very moment, a basic US objective became that of hitting the nascent revolutionary economy hard enough to make it abort its new changes.
The United States laid what Fidel Castro called the "first big snare" with petroleum. The three US refineries in Cuba (Shell, Texaco and Esso) refused to refine Soviet oil, which began to arrive in small amounts in April 1960. In response to this refusal, which violated Cuban law, Cuba took over the three refineries. The United States retaliated by cutting its oil supplies to the island. Only a few days later the Soviet ship Chernovci, with a 70,000-barrel carrying capacity, began a 10,000-kilometer petroleum bridge that was not interrupted for three decades.
After oil came sugar. In July of that year, President Eisenhower refused to purchase 700,000 tons of already refined sugar, part of the quota the US had assigned to Cuba. Two weeks later, the Soviet Union bought it, paying $3.25 a pound (the world market price at that time was $3.15).
In August, Cuba nationalized the three US oil refineries, 36 US-owned sugar centers and the Electricity and Telephone Company, also US property.
At the end of that year, the US government began the embargo: it prohibited all exports to Cuba except for medicines and divvied up Cuba's sugar quota among other Latin American countries. Those most benefited at the time were Brazil, the Dominican Republic and Peru. The US broke diplomatic relations with Cuba in January 1961 and exactly a year later, using one hand to pressure the Latin American countries and the other to promise them $1 billion in aid through the recently-created Alliance for Progress, the Kennedy Administration got all the Latin American countries with the exception of Mexico to do the same. They also expelled Cuba from the Organization of American States on the grounds of its government's "alignment with the Communist bloc."
A few days later, on February 7, the US government made its embargo total, prohibiting all imports from Cuba. Officially, medicines and some food were still exempt, but when Cyclone Flora caused havoc in Cuba in October 1963—100 deaths and hundreds of millions of dollars in damage—the US government prohibited the sending of any food or medical aid. These supplies became an official part of the embargo in May 1964.
If the United States had decided simply to have no economic, commercial or financial relationship with Cuba, it would have been a valid sovereign decision based on a bilateral fight. But the basis for Cuba to continue speaking out strongly against the blockade is that the United States, from the very first moment, tried to force sovereign third countries into line behind its fight and its policy.
Only a few days after decreeing the embargo, Kennedy sent Walter Rostow, a high-level State Department official, to Europe to convince NATO to economically isolate Cuba. He failed. It was only the first link in a long chain of pressures against third countries that stretches from that day to this. The United States is now trying harder than ever to strangle Cuba with it.
Cuba rallied from the first, admittedly brutal blow of the break in relations with the United States and the near-total isolation from the rest of Latin America. It did so by breaking ground in new economic terrain, that of the Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe. It meant adapting to other technologies, other raw materials and other consumer products; it meant dealing with long distances and five-year plans. It also meant things like having to build thousands of storage warehouses which had never been required when the island was separated from its main trading partner by only 90 miles. In those old days, US boats arrived with supplies almost daily.
"So they're threatening to maintain the economic blockade?" said Fidel Castro defiantly in those first years. "Let them maintain it for a hundred years if they want to!" The socialist rearguard in Europe felt immovable, eternal.
In the early 1970s, Cuba began to open commercial roads into Latin America, especially Panama and Argentina, which reopened the blockade debate in the US. For example, when the Cámpora government in Argentina offered Cuba a major credit line to acquire industrial products, the United States found itself in a bind: could Ford of Argentina sell vehicles to Cuba? From that moment on the US government would continually try to include offshore affiliates of US companies in the blockade net. But doesn't an effort to impose extraterritorial rights on company subsidiaries in other countries violate the sovereignty, labor laws and other legitimate rights of those countries? The United States got enmeshed in a conflict with international law from which it has yet to successfully extricate itself. And Cuba continues to press the case. Because it is a problem of international law, Cuba has taken it to the United Nations.
During the Carter Administration, some of the screws of the blockade worked their way loose a bit. But Reagan, reactivating the mechanisms that already existed, promptly tightened them all back down again to prevent so much as a bottle of aspirin from squeezing through any market in the world, particularly the quite open Panamanian one. Reagan was particularly energetic, for example, in going after Cuban nickel exports. Cuba is an important world producer of this mineral, and it is the country's most important export after sugar. Reagan's pursuit consisted of prohibiting the entry into the United States of any industrial product from anywhere in the world that contains so much as a gram of Cuban nickel. European companies have had problems, as have had those from Japan. The United States currently obliges the companies of any nationality—or transnationality—to certify in a number of different documents that the products they are exporting to US territory contain no nickel from Cuba.
Today the screws of the blockade are being given yet another turn, even though all the "reasons" the United States has ever brandished to justify both its bilateral application and its pressures on third countries have become obsolete. The Cold War has ended and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is well on the way to being none of those things. To make sure Cuba has no other market for its sugar if the Soviet market falls through, the United States has recently warned that it will not buy sugar from any country that cannot certify that its shipments contain not a single grain of Cuban sugar. And it has prohibited the Swedish medical supplies company Alfa-Laval, a longtime supplier to Cuba, from continuing to do so because the filtration membrane in one of its pieces of equipment is fabricated in the United States. The United States has also tried to pressure French President François Mitterand, through his Ambassador in Washington, to withdraw from Cuba the French company that is currently prospecting for oil on Cuba's marine platform: according to the agreement, the French will assume all the costs if no oil is found; if it is, half the benefits will go to Cuba.
The Soviet Union itself has been the recipient of the strongest US pressure. From the Houston summit to the last meeting of the international banking agencies in Bangkok, the United States has conditioned any aid to the Soviet Union on the suspension of its trade with Cuba.
All creditors with whom Cuba has tried to renegotiate its debts have received, alongside reports from the Cuban government, others prepared in the United States that "demonstrate" the Cuban economy's bankruptcy and inability to pay, so as to thus freeze any negotiation favorable to Cuba.
In this recent period, the pressure that the United States has applied on US company subsidiaries in third countries has meant that nothing from wood saws to soft drinks to eyewash has made it through the blockade. "We have proof from all over of these kinds of intrigues and surely there are others that we can't even imagine which show that they want to prevent our economy from having any breathing space," says a Cuban economist. "Any door we try to open, they try to close. And today they're pushing harder than ever."
Why target Cuba: Three viewpointsThe blockade is only one expression of US hostility toward the Cuban revolution, a hostility that has multiplied defensive attitudes within Cuba, among both the government and the people. This defensiveness has affected the development of Cuba's revolution as much as the fact that the country is an island. As Fidel Castro has said more than once, Cuba has spent all these years "talking" almost exclusively to the United States. It is one of the limiting factors of this revolution's particular history.
The end of the East-West conflict has now revealed that, among many other things, the central issue that has driven the United States' historic enmity was not so much a "Soviet enclave" Cuba as a nationalist Cuba. That nationalism, together with its project of social justice, frustrates the attempts at pillage and control of an empire that refuses to make its own "perestroika." That is why Cuba remains a US target in this ambiguous post-cold war.
In fact, it is more of a target than ever. The dominant perception in the United States is that the Cuban revolution is about to collapse, as happened with the Eastern European "socialist revolutions." Cuba would thus be the last geopolitical domino to fall, but in the reverse order from the predictions US anti-communist rhetoric always used to scare the world. The crisis of socialism, and of the USSR in particular, is perceived as having fundamentally affected Cuba's international alliances and aggravated an economic situation that already had serious problems.
This perception also put a lot of weight on other "critical" factors: That the revolution's historic leadership has gotten old. That Cuba's influence on the international revolutionary movement—which caused Cuba to be seen as a "power" in foreign policy—is now limited in terms of both political and economic solidarity; the most noticeable cases are Africa after Cuba's withdrawal from Angola and Central America after the Sandinistas' electoral defeat. The cases of General Ochoa (drug trafficking) and Minister Abrantes (corruption), both uncovered in July 1989, are seen as having affected the government's credibility among the Cuban population. All these elements are supported by objective data, but distorted in the United States through the lens of longstanding hatred.
Various policy currents stem from this package of perceptions. Among the three main ones, the first sustains that Cuba's crisis is serious enough that the only thing required is to "finish the job," turning the political, economic and even military screws as hard as they will go to provoke the complete breakdown of the Cuban system.
The second, dominant current is the one currently being implemented by the Bush Administration. In this version, all the screws are tightened down more slowly and opportunely, without ever putting on such an excess of pressure that it proves counterproductive for the United States by uniting Cubans in defense of the nation. The logic of this policy is to deny Cuba's current economic crisis the slightest respite, to squeeze it slowly but surely more until it provokes an irreversible political deterioration culminating in a debacle similar to that of the European socialist countries.
The new buttressing of the blockade is one manifestation of this political current. Its strongest pillar appears in the yet-to-be-approved Mack Amendment, which aims at legally institutionalizing the prohibition of any US subsidiary in any part of the world from trading with Cuba. It is even more crudely expressed in the bill prepared by Democratic Congressman Torricelli, which, among other things, proposes that the United States prohibit any boat that touches a Cuban port in its commercial activities from coming into a US port for the following six months. If such a boat dares to even enter US territorial waters in that period, the US government would be authorized to capture and search it, taking possession of its merchandise for purposes of sale.
The pressure put on Cuba regarding human rights, the strengthening of Radio and TV Martí and other anti-Cuban radio stations in Miami and the National Endowment for Democracy funds to bring together "human rights groups" inside Cuba are other expressions of official US policy today.
The third policy current toward Cuba is held by those who think that the most suitable way to bring about the "democratic changes" the US says it wants in Cuba is to be more flexible in its pressure tactics, even including an unconditional lifting of the blockade. "Kill the revolution with love, not with hate" is what this current proposes. For the most flexible of its adherents, "killing it" would only mean moderating its international positions favorable to other revolutions and against the United States. For others, this means undermining it from within, normalizing relations with the United States in the hope of destroying the Cuban model by bringing it into close contact with the contagious US consumerist one.
These three currents obviously represent a challenge for Cuba. This "special period" makes it harder than ever to confront the first two. But it is the third, led in Latin America by Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Pérez, that represents the most authentically new challenge. The Cuban revolution, accustomed to a more crass aggressiveness, does not seem to be readying itself for this sophisticated challenge, but there are those in Cuba who are worried about this lack of preparation for a scenario that could in fact come to pass.
The Cuban exiles: Three more viewpointsThree currents can also be distinguished among the Cuban exile community in the United States—a million strong, the majority living in Florida. Within these currents, particularly the most extremist and most political one, are a number of distinct groups that approximate each other at different points on the spectrum.
Farthest to the right, and economically and politically the most powerful, is the National Cuban-American Foundation, headed by Jorge Mas Canosa. Under-Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs Bernard Aronson works with this group, as does one of George Bush's sons. The Foundation already has offices in Moscow, four blocks from the Kremlin, so as to influence Soviet-Cuban relations at close range. It also has a program of systematic visits to Miami for deputies from the Russian Federation. The Foundation controls Radio Martí, which broadcasts from Miami with a varied programming of news, music, messages from family members in the community, comedy programs, etc. Mas Canosa, who projects himself as Cuba's future President, has announced that when he takes office he can count on $15 billion to reactivate the Cuban economy. The Foundation's positions are hard: any pressure is valid to bring down the government and there can be no deal with Fidel. A bloody overthrow of the revolution is not a price the Foundation is unwilling to pay. Another radio station, belonging directly to the Foundation, speaks openly of armed struggle and calls on the population to carry out all types of economic sabotage.
A second grouping within this political current, but at the most moderate end of its spectrum, is the Cuban Democratic Platform. It brings together center-right groups—Social Democrats, Christian Democrats and Liberals—and its most outspoken leader is journalist Carlos Alberto Montaner, who lives in Spain. The Platform holds that Cuba's problem must be resolved with strong pressures leading to negotiations, and would even talk with Fidel if he were willing. It insists on "pluralist and supervised elections" and "democratic changes."
Positioned between these two is Independent and Democratic Cuba, an organization headed by ex-guerrilla of the Sierra Maestra and ex-political prisoner Hubert Matos. Its Miami radio station is La Voz del CID. It favors neither armed struggle nor negotiating with Fidel.
All three groups have supporters inside Cuba as well, with public offices where they receive visitors and hold occasional press conferences for international journalists, always under close surveillance by Cuban security agents. A group that calls itself Cuban Coalition is linked to the Foundation and another called Democratic Concertación has hooked up with the Platform. When the Pan-American Games were held in Cuba in August 1991, these groups offered one of their most important press conferences, given the number of foreign journalists there to cover the competitions. Responding to their statement that there are now 18 parties and other groups opposed to the government, a Spanish reporter asked how many citizens these organizations were estimated to represent. "One hundred and eight people," came back the answer. Lacking quantitative representation, these groups have also yet to announce any qualitative platform not already embraced by the revolution itself—democratization, development and national dignity.
The second current within the US Cuban community is made up of a large number of small organizations and has much less political influence. They are struggling to resolve what they consider legitimate and apolitical interests and concerns: family visiting rights between Cuba and the United States, the right to send family remittances of goods and money to Cuba, and the like. They believe that those inside Cuba are the ones who should resolve the political problem.
The third current is the largest of the three, made up of the immense majority of exiles. They have made their lives and their money in the United States, they have married there, they have children who now speak Spanish poorly. For them Cuba is only a memory that brings nostalgia on certain dates. A visceral anticommunism unites them and they would celebrate if the Cuban government were to fall. But they will do nothing to make it happen, and if it did they wouldn't go back, because their roots are sunk so deeply in US soil.
Cheap shots in the image warAlmost everyone has bought at least a few, if not many ideas about Cuba in the international image market. We seldom think of the price we're paying for the purchase, and at times aren't even aware that there's a cost, that the ideas are not our own. We've not only bought the images, we've bought into them, taking them on as ours. There are few other countries about which these fixed images have been sold so persistently and with such relative success, not just in the United States, but around the world. It is only logical, given that nine of every ten images disseminated by the mass media worldwide are "made in the USA."
Second only to the crisis of European socialism, the image that has most been hawked in this market is of a fossilized, sclerotic revolutionary process in Cuba, prisoner of an obsolete ideology, wormeaten from within like one of those special effects that Hollywood does so well, with a leadership willing to lead a whole people to its death in defense of ideas that have failed everywhere in the world, a dictatorship closed to all change while the repressed population faces the most frightful of miseries. Those who crank out these images know that no "Berlin wall" is as symbolic for the immense majority of Latin Americans as the Cuban model, and that flashing the image that this symbol is crumbling is the best way to shatter the dream that things can change. Erecting the image of collapse from within is one of the main ways to cut away at its underpinnings from below. No matter that this image bears little resemblance to Cuban reality.
How many degrees will the Cuban ship turn?Particularly following the well-known crisis of socialism in Europe, Cuba is a country bubbling with ideas and change, with experiments and risky decisions to "defend the homeland, the revolution and socialism." That official slogan could sound rigid in these times, but it is nothing more than a call to adapt everything and everyone creatively to the changed world. To adapt so as to defend national sovereignty and social justice—the two basic pillars of Cuba's socialist model—and continue improving the quality of life of all Cubans, as was being achieved before the effort had to be interrupted by the "special period." A sovereign country (the homeland), with equality and improved living standards (the revolution and socialism) is the basis on which the Cuban revolution has created its majority consensus. Today's changes are oriented toward maintaining that consensus, which, in turn, aims to preserve those three objectives.
The changes most strongly demanded of Cuba from outside are formal political ones—what is called "democratization." In the image market, this is reduced mainly to carrying out traditional elections in a landscape of many political parties. Some reduce it even further: simplistically seeing the only reason for the supposed dictatorship as lying in the authority of the maximum leader, they ask that Fidel Castro abandon power.
The path Cuba has chosen for advancing democracy is much more complex than that. It responds to the historical reality of Cuba's political process—the one lived inside the country, not the one projected from outside.
The Fourth Congress of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) on October 10-14, 1991, is the most recent event that allows us a wide-angle view of the political, ideological and economic changes taking place in Cuba.
An immense image of Jose Martí, father of the country and of the revolution, prophet of America, presided over the meetings. Alongside it was another of Karl Marx. The PCC has defined itself by proclaiming that it is the "only party of the Cuban nation, rooted in Martí, Marx and Lenin," in that order. At the root of it all is the Cuban Revolutionary Party, founded by Martí in 1892, which he envisioned as the only force that could unify the nation against its nearby enemy neighbor, "the confused and brutal North" that he knew so well from his exile years there. Some came to the Fourth Congress hoping that the PCC would even adopt this new, 100-year-old name as its own, but it did not happen.
Degree 1: Taking the pulse at the baseA lot of time and grass roots participation went into preparing for the Congress. In more than 80,000 base assemblies, 3.5 million people discussed the Convocation document for the Congress. This Convocation, which called upon the entire population, not just the 800,000 members of the party, to express their opinions about the country's situation, is one of the most important and lucid documents to come out of the Cuban revolution. From these discussions came more than one million suggestions that ranged from the most simple to the most audacious. Once tabulated, they were combined thematically into some 850,000 concrete proposals for change. On that basis, a huge public opinion survey was undertaken across the country for the first time in its entire history. It was a veritable inventory of the opinions of Cuban society.
The fact that the overall results of this enormous process have not yet been made public has raised questions, among both the people who offered their opinions in these assemblies and the rest of society, which is also caught up in this process. Not even party members have had the opportunity to deal with this massive pulse-taking of a society of which they are the vanguard. The absence of a tradition of public political debate in Cuba can explain but not justify this omission. It is an obvious weakness in the Cuban system, whose strong suit has never been the social sciences, and may in turn have contributed to a certain lowering of people's expectations about the results that the Congress could bring. "Nothing ever comes out of these congresses," said some, used to the formalities of the previous ones and, above all, feeling that the Congress, in its final stage, was not taking up all the concerns that had been laid out with such energy in the base assemblies during the previous months.
Another problem is that the hard reality of the "special period" has already rendered obsolete a certain number of the suggestions, many of which were made for a "normal" period. Although Cuba's normal period was never one of a consumer society and never free of austerity, it has been decades since scarcity was as much a conditioning factor as it is in this new "special period."
Degree 2: Directly elected delegatesMore than 1,600 delegates attended the Congress, for the first time elected from the party base and not designated by the leadership. For four days they debated modifications to the PCC program and statutes, reforms to further democratize Popular Power and proposals for the economic development of the country. The urgent economic reality, not surprisingly, was the key agenda point.
It was clear that the Congress still had one foot steadying itself in the familiar ground of centralism-formalism, while the other gingerly stepped into the new terrain of democratic participation. The discussions in the plenary were presided over with a certain heavy-handedness, and all was debated behind closed doors—no invited guests or journalists were present. US propaganda referred to this absence of the press as proof of a "lack of democracy," though a far more reasonable explanation is that it was a way of guaranteeing that the debate would be real and not just a show for international consumption. The Cuban people were given ample written and broadcast information about the debates in written and broadcast form, albeit in state or party media. The government could have offered the international media daily press conferences and summary communiqués about the course of the debates, but its inexperience with—or defensiveness toward—these journalists under such circumstances prevented it from taking this simple step into the breach. The issue of images, information and the media communication in general continues to be one of the most questionable aspects of the Cuban process. Not even in the Congress was there a space for creative reflection on how to get past the growing gap between triumphalist reports and people's searching uncertainty.
These serious weaknesses notwithstanding, the Congress had profoundly renovating aspects, hammering out answers to many of the demands that had been put forward from the base. With respect to the draft resolution to reform the PCC Statutes, the Congress highlighted the need for "the broadest internal democracy" and for making the struggle for discipline within the party more coherent "with the promotion of creative and anti-dogmatic thinking, backed by constructive criticism." It was noted that the premise for reformulating the PCC's ideology should be "what is specific to the Cuban Revolution—the fusion of Jose Martí's radical body of ideas and a singular tradition of liberating, nationalist and social struggles, with the historic need for socialism as the only alternative to underdevelopment and neocolonial domination."
Degree 3: Lifting the religious obstacleThe approved changes will be incorporated into a final draft by the 225 members of the new Central Committee in consultation with party militants, and will go into effect within the coming year. Some of the modifications, however, are already in effect. The most important of them, and the one most debated at the grassroots level, was the elimination of religious beliefs as an obstacle to party membership. During the debates on this issue in the Congress itself, which were vastly more rooted in Cuban history than in philosophy, Fidel Castro expressed the view that "we are a party and not a religion, yet to a certain degree we have turned the party and atheism into a religion." He referred to the exclusion of believers as party members as a measure adopted at a specific historic moment and said that it would be a "huge error" and an "injustice" to cling to it now. "It is nothing but a tremendous contradiction," he argued, "that millions of believers in Latin America and the rest of the world defend the Cuban Revolution and are in active solidarity with it while we tell believers that we won't accept them into the party."
Not all members shared this view, which was finally adopted after heated debate. The winning line of argument used the criteria of national unity and democracy. If the PCC is the party of the Cuban nation, how can some Cubans be excluded? And if it is democratic, why such discrimination?
Speaking with some Catholic revolutionaries who experienced this discrimination for years, one could note a certain initial indifference toward the change. Some spoke of "opportunism," and asked rhetorically if the original measure hadn't long since ceased being valid for "historic" reasons. Others considered that the change was not too late. "Who comes at all does not come too late," they philosophized. Still others said that, with the doors of the party now open to believers, the Catholic hierarchy might decide to close the Church's doors to those who choose to join the party. They tell of well-known Christian revolutionaries from Havana whom parish priests have prohibited from reading the Sunday liturgies. The Protestant churches were the first to express their satisfaction with the measure adopted in the Congress. A month later the Catholic bishops followed suit, but with a notable lack of enthusiasm.
During the Congress, a worker from Guantanamo posed an unexpected question: what would happen if a long-time militant now converted to religion? The board of the Congress told him that he would find an answer to his concern in the Statutes once they are drafted. The change, whether too late for some or not, could be important for the new generations, for whom the "historic" context of the Church hierarchy's virtually uniform reactionary position in the pre-liberation theology period into which the revolution was born has little or no meaning. It could also have important cultural and ideological consequences in the sense that the Cuban revolution has paid too little attention to subjective factors. It has not studied them sufficiently and is still not at all clear about them. Although Cuban Catholics, Protestants or members of the syncretic Afro-Cuban religions have never had to live their faith "in the catacombs," the closed attitude about religiosity and the educational system based strictly on materialist conceptions of history not only isolated believers but also narrowed the flexibility of many party members on other ideological issues. "It's obvious that the revolution has power," said one party member, "but does it have people's consciousness?" There are so many changes in the world today, and so many in Cuba itself, that this question takes on a new relevance and is asked in a new tone.
Degree 4: Democratizing popular powerAnother important debate in the Congress was about how to further democratize the system of Popular Power, instituted in 1974 in the First Party Congress and now the backbone of the country's political system. The Resolution made a number of recommendations to the Popular Power National Assembly (Cuba's legislative body) regarding laws that should be drawn up to make changes in the system. The most significant of these is to introduce direct and secret elections for delegates to the Provincial Assemblies and representatives to the National Assembly. Up to now, people at the district level (the basic cell of the Cuban political system) nominated and directly elected only their local delegates. But at the next two levels—the Provincial Assemblies and the National Assembly—only the delegates themselves voted. Now people will directly elect all their representatives, at each of the three levels.
They will also do the nominating. The party will not nominate anyone, and candidates will not even have to be members of the party. It falls to the National Assembly to define in the Electoral Law the procedure by which the citizenry will nominate and elect their own candidates—a process to take place in 1992—but the main criterion for nomination will be the precandidate's own background.
Degree 5: Direct election of leadership?The Congress also took up for the first time the possibility of direct and secret elections for the position of the nation's maximum authority. In the debates, Fidel Castro, who is obviously preparing for his future replacement, commented that the Cuban system rejects both a presidential and a parliamentary formula, defending a system in which both the executive of the party and that of the state are collective, collegiate bodies. According to the Resolution, democracy in Cuba must be verified fundamentally through the participation of the people in the decision-making process and in their control of the government administration. Democracy will be exercised in the institutions of Popular Power, autonomous from the party. The Congress also ratified the single party system.
No one expects the electoral process in 1992 to take place totally unmarked by past convention or by the party's weight in decision-making, no matter how direct and secret voting may be. But if no one expects a 180-degree turn in the upcoming elections, they certainly do expect the steps already taken to begin changing some things, even if little by little. The reality is that not only the PCC but even the less-politicized population as a whole view the brusque, sweeping and disintegrating changes taking place in the USSR and the Eastern European countries today with great suspicion or open rejection. No one perceives them as the model to which to aspire.
To adopt the kind of "democratization" that the United States seems so fond of imposing everywhere but at home—a plethora of parties, campaigns that deal with profound issues about as seriously as Miss America candidates do (the one aspect that the US has also embraced at home) and internationally supervised elections—would be an historical irresponsibility. Taking into account Cuba's development, it would be quite artificial; furthermore its only aim would be to undermine the unity of the Cuban people against outside aggression.
What changes do Cubans want?Evidence of the artificiality of this brand of democratization is that almost no one inside Cuba is talking about elections or party pluralism. The immense majority of Cubans—and they are the ones who need to be listened to—are certainly talking about "change," but not that kind of change. Then what? They want changes "so that this functions better." "This" is what they already have, what the revolution has accomplished: the end of the economic and racial inequalities that existed before. Not tossing "this" out, but starting from it, they want to be able to expect a life that gets a little bit better each day. Their criticisms do not lead them to classic issues of formal democracy but to the real obstacles of the socialist bureaucracy, to its administrative tangles, its inflexibility and lack of creativity, its insensitivity. This immense majority perceives the "special period" and the current crisis not as a "failure of socialism" but as a moment in which everything bad done up to now has to be rectified: the waste, the bureaucracy, apathetic work styles, bureaucracy, insufficiently discussed decisions, bureaucracy...
There is no one who doesn't have something critical to say about the "bureaucratic alligator" that ambles slowly along trying to find solutions for problems and just finds problems with the solutions instead. But no one criticizes the essence of the system, which is national sovereignty and equality and social justice for all. No one complains about the Soviets or blames them for the shortages.
There is, however, a generalized sense among Cubans of their own responsibility in the crisis. "If only we had done this before" or "This was already discussed but we didn't get around to doing it in time." All these public opinion indicators, the ones that come up most frequently among people who can be found debating in any corner of the country, reflect a very healthy attitude: Cubans feel that the ball is in their court. And they want to run with it, rather than having someone else do it for them. They have an awareness of their own strength to get out there and win. These indicators also speak to the fact that pressuring and strangling the Cuban economy, while done in the name of democracy, is actually acting dictatorially, because it goes against the majority, violating their strongest desire.
The youth viewSome 50% of the more than 10 million Cubans living on the island are less than 30 years old. Born after the revolution, they don't know in their bones what a non-socialist society is like. Cuban youth don't know what it is not to have health services or guaranteed employment or to be without schools and food—however little there is to go around—guaranteed from birth. They have no concept of the insecurity in which the majority of Latin Americans live their entire lives. They can't even imagine it. And a sector of the youth quite ingenuously believes that the changes they want and expect for Cuba "so that this functions better" are also what the United States and other countries want for Cuba. A largely isolated island and socialism, with its quota of inherent paternalism, have generated this dangerous political ingenuousness.
However unexpected, new and difficult this "special period" may be, the reality of a generation that found “everything done” already and now sees its living standard and consumer aspirations that Cuba open spaces for a more democratic debate, not only within the party but in society as whole. Given that the Congress Resolutions are unfinished, they should channel, organize and facilitate this debate. Only in unity is there strength, but to force that unity with styles left over from the “normal period—which will never return—could end up weakening the revolution.
"One thing seems extremely relevant to me," says a veteran Cuban sociologist, "and that is that we are all experts in socialism. We have 30 years of Cuban socialism and we all know what functioned and what didn't; for that reason we all have substantive opinions to offer. With this crisis, there's immense controversy within the revolution precisely because the immense majority of the people are located inside of the revolution, inside the socialist option. But from there forward everything should be open to healthy discussion!"
Another, much younger intellectual, an economist, says, "The Cuban political subject is basically young. And within that bloc of youth, professionals who are only 23-25 years old are very numerous. They are people with political experience, who have a relationship with the revolutionary leaders and with the outside world that makes them fundamentally different from the generation that made the revolution. The current challenge will not be won if we don't keep this youth committed to the revolution. And we won't keep them committed if we don't create the channels for them to express their criteria, to debate them and to have them taken into account. When I speak of young people, I'm not talking only about those organized in the Communist Youth Union; I'm talking about an entire generation."
One of the greatest and most real challenges Cuba has today is how to organize and channel the debate, how to make it an open, real and profound discussion that can slowly transform the Cuban political system into one in which one doesn't only participate by working and applauding the just decisions that are taken to benefit the majorities, but does so by offering opinions and making small, medium and big decisions. That is the way to transform the current system, in which there is still a lot of paternalism and in which much is still centralized, particularly in Fidel—both a strength and a weakness of the Cuban revolution.
To open such a debate in this "special period" is risky. The social control necessary to confront the period successfully could be lost, not so much because irreconcilable disagreements about essential issues could surface but because of inexperience in debating. But the risk of backing off of it, of postponing it, is just as great and for the same reason: the crisis could be faced unsuccessfully. The current maturity of the Cuban people and their revolutionary process is the best possible basis for taking the risk with confidence.
Socialist economic changes: Now capitalism's best partnerThe economic changes being made in Cuba are more visible than the political ones and are occurring more rapidly. Cuba's sudden scarcities don't allow for dawdling. The PCC Congress was the time to unveil the new economic mechanisms, some of which were already partially functioning, and to debate their logic and give them an official seal of approval. According to some Cuban economists, the newest of these measures—Cuba's increased opening to foreign investment—is only one piece of a jigsaw puzzle whose overall design has yet to be drawn.
In the First Congress, in 1975, the Cuban revolution established a system of economic planning and management that reigned until 1985. A large part of this system copied institutions and mechanisms used in the socialist camp during its period of construction. Between 1985 and 1986, Cuba's revolutionary leadership made a critical evaluation of this system and Fidel gave a big impetus to the introduction of a "rectification of its negative tendencies." This largely modified the system, but did not replace it with a different one. Among the "decisive contributions" of this process were the fight against an import mentality and a new willingness to find local solutions, the end of outsized projects, the priority given to popular housing (now shelved), an economic policy oriented to the country's interests rather than those of the state enterprises themselves, better salaries for agricultural workers and labor legislation to overcome paternalism. Nonetheless, these measures were not enough to resolve the Cuban economy's obvious inadequacies.
The debate about why the economic system was not working better and about the characteristics of a system that should replace it continued on, although in the last few years there have been attempts "from above" to end it. In the Congress, however, the debate was very heated.
Some believe that too few people and resources were dedicated to thinking through a new system appropriate to Cuba's reality and the world situation, which bore ever less resemblance to the early 60s of Che Guevara and his economic institutions.
Others think that the speeding up of international events itself ran the clock out on imagination. "Suppose," said one sociologist, "that in this debate, which is truly transcendental, you and I are killing ourselves trying to decide whether the economy should be more centralized or more decentralized when suddenly our discussion becomes totally irrelevant because only one shipment of wheat has come in and we have to figure out who should get it. Presto, the economy becomes super-decentralized! You can't make decisions based on systematic debate because you're making emergency decisions every single day."
Still others believe that both have to be done: Cuba has to deal with the emergency and think through a strategy. The issue was not resolved at the Congress, but the prevailing view was that, given the current uncertainty, which doesn't even permit medium-term thinking, and given the need to maintain unity, it is impossible to articulate a whole economic strategy. So some new pieces were added to the jigsaw puzzle, but its overall design remained undrawn. The Resolution regarding Economic Development states at the outset that, "there is no room for doubt" that the current international economic period "is the most unfavorable one that the Cuban economy has been caught up in during the entire history of the revolution."
To deal with it, agreement was reached to move every lever necessary, while preserving the essential base of the Cuban economic system. The use of all resources would be programmed and services and consumer goods shared out even more equitably than before, "assuring that no one is left unprotected."
Lever 1: The food programOne of the most important of these levers is the "Food Program," which got underway during the rectification period but is being given a real push now. Other, more partial plans were also undertaken during that period, but did not produce the expected results and their failures were never sufficiently explained to the population. The goal of the current Food Program is more far-reaching than any of those others: "to assure, with the greatest possible speed, the growth of a group of basic foodstuffs for the Cuban population." This means increasing production and assuring distribution of fruits, vegetable, root crops, grains, milk, beef, chicken, pork and fish.
To achieve this goal an ample investment plan has been drawn up; the system of salaries and incentives (housing, integral community centers and the like) has been reorganized and improved for rural workers; and new scientific and technical discoveries (many of them Cuban inventions) in agriculture and livestock raising are being introduced.
To save on petroleum products, 100,000 bulls have already been domesticated and teamed up to replace tractors; another 100,000 are being readied. During the Congress itself, Havana was inundated with varieties of plantains obtained through a "micro-jet" cross-fertilization technique. Party members and officials at all levels dedicate 15 days to planting potatoes or harvesting beans in the rural areas, both to fill in for the as yet unconsolidated new rural workforce required and to contribute their own reawakened fervor to the race against time demanded by Cuba's food needs.
Some feel that the program should have already shown more results and attribute the problems to distribution more than to production. Others lay it to continuing laziness at certain links along the productive or administrative chain. Inflexibility and insensitivity to the needs of consumers has always been a weak flank of socialist systems, Cuba's included. But a kind of tacit agreement can be felt among the majority of the population to grant the revolution "another chance" to successfully resolve the problem of food supply.
Lever 2: Medical technologyAnother lever is to elevate and better orient the activity of Cuban scientists to resolve the problems generated by the current crisis. Cuba's impressive scientific-technical potential is the fruit of many years of education and of enormous investments made with a strategic vision and political desire that far predate the crisis. All of that investment has now reached maturity and is ready to be set to the task of filling in many of the holes of the puzzle design and assuring that the pieces fit together.
In the Congress sessions, Cuban scientists and researchers were provided plenty of time to explain their discoveries in detail and illustrate how they can be applied to the country's economic development. A number of them were also elected as new members of the party's Central Committee.
Over the years, Cuban scientists have already obtained a wide gamut of new chemical and biotechnological products from sugarcane, Cuba's mono-crop since the times of the Spanish colony and still its principal export today. These scientists are now being challenged to turn sugar itself into a mere byproduct of cane in terms of foreign exchange earnings or substitutes. Many products obtained from cane are already in use or are being studied as substitutes for raw materials that will no longer be coming from the Eastern European countries. There is huge potential in the multiple uses of cane pulp (paper, industrial filters, medications, livestock feed, etc.) and in what Cubans call saccharine, an innovative creation of scientist Arabel Elias, which is also used for livestock feed.
Another Cuban invention that guarantees import substitution and has notable ecological advantages as well is a creation by Heriberto Souza called a multi-plow. It permits a saving of half the fuels used by other methods of preparing fields and prevents the soil compacting caused by the weight of traditional tractors. At the beginning of the special period, 1,500 of these multi-plows were provided for use with animal teams and 4,000 more will be produced in the next six months following the decision in the Congress to "not lose another minute" in expanding the use of this technology. The Congress also discussed the "greenhouse effect"—the progressive heating-up of the planet. Various Cuban research institutes are working to obtain more heat- and pest-resistant new seed varieties. More than 200 experiments are already underway, with good results so far. They are also speeding up their work on the search for and use of bio-fertilizers that could replace imports and be more ecologically advantageous. Although much remains to be done, the Cuban research center INIFAT has the largest genetic bank of microorganism strains in tropical America, with more than 8,000 samples that are used as the base for experiments. "We have never felt more useful than right now," said Hortensia Cardoza, director of one of these research centers.
Advances in the medical and pharmaceutical field far outstrip the discoveries in industry or agriculture. The truly impressive breakthroughs in Cuban medicine include vaccines for meningitis-B and hepatitis-B and a surgical technique to cure pigmentary retinosis (a heretofore incurable disease which leads to blindness and affects 1 of every 4,000 people in the world). Cuba is already producing its revolutionary medical discoveries to treat heart attacks (without side effects), the skin depigmentation disease called vitiligo (which 3 million people suffer from in Brazil alone), a substance to help skin grow back after burns and prevent scarring and another that eliminates cholesterol in the blood without side effects. A sophisticated instrument Cubans call SUMA, which detects congenital defects and deformations in fetuses with high levels of precision, has already been produced for export to the Soviet Union. Cuba is one of the few countries in the world that produces interferents through genetic engineering to successfully combat 400 different types of cancer known today as well as many viruses. It is the only country that uses this same system to retard the appearance of AIDS in carriers of that virus. Cuba has also made notable strides in advancing medical technology in the field of molecular immunology, used especially in organ transplants.
After 10 years of research effort, it is no exaggeration to say that there is a Cuban "school" of biotechnology and no one would argue with the assertion that Cuba leads all countries of the South in genetic engineering, a field monopolized up to now by the most developed countries of the North. Concepción Campa, director of the Finlay Institute where the anti-meningitis vaccine was discovered and elected to the FCC Central Committee during the Congress, announced that her center is currently seeking a vaccine against cholera and other diarrhea-related illnesses. One goal of the center she directs is to convert Cuba into a major vaccine producer and exporter. "With Cuba's level of development in the medical field," Campa says, "it is already the hope for the poor countries of Latin America, which can't even dream of ever resolving such problems." Brazil recently imported 15 million doses of anti-meningitis vaccine from Cuba to combat an epidemic outbreak of that disease, and China invested $15 million in Cuban interferents against hepatitis. Cuba may no longer be a "power" in foreign policy terms but, with 2,000 volunteer doctors and other medical personnel still collaborating in 32 countries of the South, even under such difficult economic circumstances, it is a medical power capable of exporting health in significant amounts.
The growth of "health tourism" is another promising source of foreign exchange for Cuba. Since its technology is the most advanced and, relatively speaking, the most inexpensive, hundreds of Europeans and Latin Americans with the economic means now travel to Cuba to be cured of orthopedic, ophthalmologic, epidermic and other diseases.
The development perspectives open to Cuba based on its current dominion in other fields are immense and so far barely explored. Genetic engineering does not require any raw materials. Its only indispensable requirement is researchers and scientists who have mastered the technology. And Cuba has thousands of them. Given the current scarcity of supplies, this raw material "made in Cuba," or, better said, "made by the revolution," places Cuba in a realistically hopeful position.
Lever 3: Foreign investmentThe third lever is to stimulate foreign investment to create mixed enterprises. There are already a number of successful joint ventures between foreign investors and the Cuban state in tourism—Cuba's coastal beaches and keys are perfect tourist centers. In recent years, mainly Spanish, Mexican and Canadian business interests have made significant investments.
Cuba is currently encouraging foreign investments in all areas of the economy, and is especially interested in petroleum, transport and the textile and chemical industries. It is contemplating all possible forms of investment, from the most simple and traditional to the most complex and innovative. It is looking for investment of either capital or raw materials to replace what the European socialists formerly supplied and prevent the closure of factories. There is also an opening for investment in Cuban technology or the commercialization of its products, particularly the new medical or pharmaceutical ones. Cuba announced in the recent meeting of lbero-American presidents in Guadalajara, Mexico and reaffirmed in the FCC Congress that it would give Latin American investors preferential treatment, thus seeking to return to is own natural geographic sphere and simultaneously contributing to Latin American economic integration. In this return, Cuba, which has become more familiar with Eastern European and African ways than with the evolution of the Latin American continent, has a lot to relearn. But at the same time, Latin America has a lot to learn from Cuba.
The broad, flexible facilities with which Cuban legislation is elcoming investments explains the deluge of offers raining down on Cuba the past few months from big and small investors in Europe and Latin America. "We don't have enough time to study all the proposals," say the officials charged with evaluating each of the proposals in detail.
The Cuban government recently created what it calls a "Negotiating Group" to advise potential foreign investors each step of the way, accompanying the search and decision-making process until an accord favorable to both sides is signed. By the end of October 1991, 50 projects involving foreign investment had already been concretized and another 100 were in varying phases of study.
What attracts a foreign investor to Cuba? On the one hand, Cuba's flexible legislation. Gross and personal income are tax-exempt; customs tariffs and profit taxes (30%) are maintained, but with some room for flexibility. The investor is allowed to repatriate profits and salary in foreign exchange and may freely contract foreign personnel. (In the joint ventures, Cuban workers are hired for the Cuban part and the foreign investor may lay off any Cuban worker without legal intervention; that worker's job security is the responsibility of the Cuban part of the enterprise since it is the Cuban government's desire to leave no one unemployed). In three years, foreign investors would be able to recover their invested capital and in 10 years triple it. The same would be true for the Cuban part.
Giving the lie to US propaganda, foreign investors are also attracted by the social stability they see in Cuba—the work force's discipline, organization and technical and educational preparation. Cuba has a population with health levels similar to those in more developed countries and an adult population with at least nine years of schooling. Although the need for foreign exchange means that priority is being given to production for export, the possibilities of the domestic Cuban market make it yet another attraction. Ironically, part of its allure is Cuba's planned socialist economy itself, which guarantees fair competition and avoids the "law of the jungle" that characterizes the "free market" in the other countries of the South.
As Fidel Castro explained to the Presidents of Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela in the meeting of that "Group of Three" in Cozumel, Mexico a few months ago, the current boom in mixed enterprises "does not mean that Cuba is putting itself at the disposal of the transnationals." He added that "all that development with the participation of foreign capital must be done under the direction of the Revolution and the revolutionary government, and within the objectives of socialism." At the Ninth International Fair in Havana, Fidel told representatives of more than 700 companies from 24 capitalist countries of the North and South that "we Cubans will be the owners of the country, but we will be the best partners and allies of those who work with us and have confidence in us."
The mixed enterprises are viewed as having increasingly more future importance in Cuba's economy. They could even be an outside corrective to the failings of the Cuban system, which has, among its other weaknesses, generated paternalism, an emphasis on the big at the expense of the little, laziness through lack of competition and too many "fulfilled" and "exceeded" norms and production goals that only cover up for inefficiency and lack of initiative, and inexperience in marketing and in the quality of presentation of the products. But this new economic innovation will also bring cultural, social and even political challenges, since economic structures cannot be transformed without repercussions on the political structures that sustain a society. Massive tourism and the tourist industry's mixed enterprises have already brought changes and provoked new social challenges that are not positive in every case.
These new foreign investments raise many other questions as well. Will the new Cuban-Latin American enterprises, for example, be able to withstand competition from the transnational capital invading Latin America today? By choosing this road, will the Cuban economy really find the economic efficiency it hopes for and needs just as urgently as it needs capital and markets?
In spite of everything, the foreign investment boom opens new doors for the Cuban economy and for the socialist model that Cuba has pledged to maintain. It is an important breath of fresh air in this moment of strangulation, and precisely for that reason has hard-line anti-Cuban sectors very worried. The aforementioned Torricelli bill includes a provision that would permit the US government to punish Latin American countries that invest in Cuba by reducing aid to them in the same amount as that invested, whether in state or private funds. This nasty little provision, aimed at encouraging Latin American governments to prohibit their own business sector from investing in Cuba, rather blatantly contradicts the new cult of the free market, which the US has also done its utmost to encourage.
The most reactionary Cuban exiles are also quite preoccupied. Mas Canosa's Foundation has made a worldwide call to investors to put no money in Cuba. Fearing that persuasion might not be enough, Mas Canosa himself has threatened to confiscate all enterprises with foreign capital "when the Castro government falls." Other less hard-line Cuban business sectors living in the United States are just extremely frustrated by the new situation since other Latin American capitalists can sup at the new buffet table and they can't.
Alligators are lizards tooSome revolutionary Cubans see this new economic reality as a concession they must make, another sign of the socialist failure, while others have high hopes for it. Most understand that there is no other remedy and are trying valiantly to "make necessity a virtue."
In the economic field, as in many others in these difficult times, any decision by the Cuban government carries risks. But not making decisions would be just as risky. Risky or not, Cuba's overriding need for fresh capital and new markets in this unexpected curve in the road of history means that events are not waiting for all possible repercussions to be taken into account before making decisions. Risks, in fact, lurk around every corner for those unwilling to resign themselves to a "new world order" that is nothing other than the most excessive of all economic dictatorships. There are also risks because the contradiction between the "economic time" that Cuba needs to move forward again and the "political time" that the economic crisis is generating and Cuba's enemies want to speed up even more is not easily resolved. Economic time always ticks away more slowly than political time. And there are no short cuts; Cuba has to make radical changes in its economy.
The fact is that Cubans are on the move and showing a lot of agility. Although US propaganda is dedicated to projecting the image of an isolated country, with a sclerotic leadership and a cowering population, nothing is further from the truth. Just being in Cuba shatters this image into a thousand pieces. The more apt one is of an alligator, which until recently ambled along at the slow, five-year-plan rhythm of socialism, its meal ticket assured, but is now beginning to run like a lizard, slip through any crack in the wall and rapidly regenerate the tail that got pulled off. The more apt image is of a people who never stopped being happy, experts in making cocktails in which rum was always the key ingredient, who are now testing new mixes with new ingredients, but in which the rum of revolutionary nationalism is still the key one.
"We're finally independent of the United States... and of the Soviet Union!" Cubans say in jest. With its development foundations already laid, Cuba is now beginning the task of reconstructing its model of sovereignty and social justice. And it continues to be a reference point for the poor of Latin America. US images to the contrary, no other country on our continent today has such perspectives of providing for its whole population—not just a privileged minority—as socialist Cuba does.
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