BY SUE BOLAND
One of the main claims made about the capitalist system by its defenders is that it is based on freedom of choice. If this was true, then the capitalist rulers in the United States and other countries would not go to such extraordinary lengths to economically cripple any country which embarks on the path of building socialism.
If the US rulers believed their own claims that capitalism is based on freedom of choice, there would be no rational reason for their unrelenting hostility to the small island nation of Cuba. Where's the threat to the US from such a small nation?
It's not that the US rulers collectively suffer from a paranoid psychiatric illness. It's just that they don't want US citizens, or the citizens of any other country, to get the idea that there is an alternative to the exploitation, poverty, lack of democratic rights and environmental destruction that are fundamental to the capitalist system.
The very existence of Cuba challenges the essential ideological prop that is used to maintain mass allegiance to the capitalist system, that it is pointless to struggle for a socialist alternative to capitalism because socialism is unachievable and does not work.
This is the key reason why the US rulers will go to whatever lengths they can get away with to attempt to rub out the Cuban Revolution. It is also why the US has laws to prevent its citizens from visiting Cuba.
At its 19th congress held January 3-7, the Democratic Socialist Party adopted the resolution The Cuban Revolution in the epoch of neo-liberal globalisation. It is 18 years since the DSP last adopted a resolution on Cuba and there have been many changes in Cuba during that period.
The DSP's resolution raises the question "if Cuban people, beset by difficulties for 42 years and target of unremitting US hostility, can set the foundations for a humane and fair society, what could be achieved in richer, bigger countries...?
"No country of comparative income level can boast anything like Cuba's gains in the fundamental aspects of social, human and environmental development. The central principle of Cuban social policy is to guarantee as every citizen's democratic right access to an adequate diet, health care, education, employment, housing, leisure, sport and welfare..."
US policy
US policy towards the Cuban Revolution remains what it always has been, to eliminate the revolutionary government and to show that any revolution in its "backyard" is doomed to fail. The Democrats and the Republicans are united in this policy.
US strategy comprises five elements: terrorist acts, economic sabotage, biological war and military attacks; the 40-year old economic blockade plus an intensified economic war in the 1990s, which includes the Torricelli Act (1992), the Helms-Burton Act (1996) and a campaign to dissuade investors from doing business with Cuba or buying Cuban exports; incitement of Cubans to leave Cuba illegally through the provisions of the Cuban Adjustment Act, which grants automatic residency rights to Cubans reaching US territory; a campaign of financing domestic dissidence; and, a propaganda and disinformation war implemented in violation of international law through 24 radio transmitters and Television Marti.
The Torricelli Act prevents entry to US ports for any ship that has visited Cuban ports in the previous six months. The Helms-Burton Act provides for the punishment of foreign companies that are allegedly trafficking in confiscated US properties.
The US is particularly hypocritical in regard to Cuban migrants. The Cuban government has always allowed its citizens to migrate freely but the US government routinely rejects applications from Cubans to migrate to the US.
Instead, the US promotes illegal immigration by granting immediate residency to any Cuban who leaves Cuba illegally. Contrast this with its treatment of illegal migrants from other Third World countries, who usually face deportation.
A key policy goal behind the economic blockade is to force the Cuban government to maintain a more punitive regime than would be necessary if the struggle for existence were less difficult.
The US is campaigning in the United Nations to convince world opinion that the Cuban government is a violator of human and democratic rights and therefore an illegitimate government. This campaign is designed to prepare the ground for more overt forms of economic and military aggression. Contrast this anti-Cuba campaign with US policy towards China. Despite a lot of demagogic posturing, Washington imposes no human rights conditions on Beijing.
The campaign is also entirely hypocritical. If you compare the latest 2001 Amnesty International reports on the United States and Cuba, Cuba's crimes are puny compared to those of the super-powerful United States. In the US there are more political prisoners, the death penalty is used far more extensively and the prison population as a percentage of the total population is far higher.
There is no mention in the Amnesty International report of the economic and social impact of Washington's 40-year aggression against Cuba, nor of the Cuban view that human rights starts with the right of every citizen to the material and social underpinnings of a decent life that frees them from the desperate struggle to survive, a gain which only the revolution has made possible.
Likewise, when Cuba is criticised for not allowing political parties other than the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC), there is usually no mention of the US's aggressive campaign against the revolution. The Cuban government has not ruled out the existence of other parties for all time, but they are well aware of how the US destroyed the Nicaraguan Revolution.
The 1986 Nicaraguan elections were won by the Sandinistas. Although international observers declared the elections to be free and fair, the US immediately denounced the result and intensified its support for the contra war against the Nicaraguan population.
By the time of the next elections the US made it clear that unless the Nicaraguan people voted for the opposition parties, it would continue to fund the contra war. Exhausted by the long-running war, the Nicaraguan people voted the Sandinistas out of government.
The US rulers' campaign against the legitimacy of the Cuban Revolution has been weakened by the fact that it cannot point to any evidence of systematic human rights abuses as existed in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin and his successors, and neither can it point to any evidence of a privileged ruling elite.
Bureaucratism?
"One crucial reason why the US is determined to destroy the Cuban Revolution", states the DSP's resolution, "is that it has never undergone bureaucratic degeneration, unlike the former Soviet Union, nor was it in the hands of a bureaucratic elite from the outset, as in the case of China."
The document points out that much "left" criticism of Cuba has typically confused the various symptoms of bureaucratisation such as corruption, waste, incompetence, privileges, elitism, arrogance, arbitrariness, restrictions on democratic rights and lack of accountability with "a qualitative shift to a regime of bureaucratic reaction".
While Cuba has certainly suffered from many of these problems, nobody can point to anything resembling an elite with institutionalised special privileges standing above the working masses and pursuing its own separate interests, along the lines of the Stalinist bureaucracy of 1924 to 1933.
On the contrary, bureaucratic factions in Cuba were defeated in 1962 and 1968 and while increased bureaucratisation certainly spread between 1970 and 1986 as the Soviet economic model was introduced, this did not lead to bureaucratic usurpation of political power. Rather, it helped trigger the anti-bureaucratic rectification process in 1986.
Throughout its history, the revolutionary leadership has sought to guard the PCC from bureaucratism by ensuring that party membership carries no special privileges nor access to soft jobs or an easier career path.
The revolution's institutions are not there to defend a bureaucratic elite that has usurped power from the mass of working people. That's why there's so little in the way of a "dissident movement" in Cuba, and it's why the revolution retains majority support.
However, the fundamental battleground between Cuba and Washington is not about human rights and democracy; it's about whether Washington can strangle Cuba's economic recovery for the hope that the more difficult the economic situation of Cuba, the more receptive Cuban people will be to the US propaganda and promises, if only in desperation.
This is why the US tightened the economic blockade on Cuba in the 1990s. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European socialist states, Cuba's main trade partners, Cuba lost 85% of its foreign trade, most of its export markets, spare parts for industry and chemical, medicine, food and oil supplies. Industrial output between 1989 and 1993 fell by 35%.
Special Period
In 1991, the Fourth Congress of the PCC, preceded by 80,000 meetings across the country, responded by developing the emergency economic reform for the "Special Period". Its main features were a shift in the mix of property forms, with cooperative, mixed and private property (especially joint ventures with foreign capital) expanding at the expense of state industry.
This emergency economic reform plan has begun to pull the economy out of crisis. Since 1994, the year of the turnaround, GDP growth has averaged 1.1%. However, Cuba still needs between four and nine years of further growth before output and income is restored to 1989 levels.
It wasn't the economic plan alone which was responsible for the economic turnaround. "The underlying reason for the revival" states the DSP's resolution "has been the continuing support of the Cuban people for the revolution ... and their conviction that a socialist austerity plan — a program of shared sacrifices and commitment and not a purely technocratic operation — could restart the economy.
"Such was the basic message of the special 'Workers Parliaments' attended by three million workers in 1994 to develop practical measures and methods for making the Economic Reform work. It has been the intersection of this sort of mass input with the government's policies of spreading the pain equally while maintaining the basic gains of the revolution ... that has guaranteed the social order, discipline and political stability essential to success."
The DSP's resolution discusses the evolution of institutions for mass participation in the revolution. It points out that "it should always be kept in mind that there cannot but be objective limits to the development of socialist democracy in a Third World country under present-day conditions.
"The socialist (and Cuban) ideal of advance towards ever-increasing levels of mass self-government depends on achieving an ever higher general level of productivity in the economy... the lower the level of productivity, the greater the battle for production, the longer the working day, the less time and energy is available for the business of administration and self-government. Thus there will always be a limiting situation where no matter what particular form of working class self-organisation is attempted it cannot deliver the content of participatory democracy... throughout its history the Cuban leadership has always tried in every given objective situation to find the way to best deepen the process of participatory democracy."
While Cuba has made good progress in digging itself out of its economic crisis, it still faces huge difficulties. Like all Third World countries it has to operate in a global economy marked by excess capacity, ever-increasing competitive pressures and worsening terms of trade.
Currently, Cuba is playing a key role in the G77 group of nations, trying to consolidate a more united bloc of resistance by underdeveloped countries around such issues as debt and market access to the advanced industrial economies.
Through its proposals for a new global trading regime and the cancellation of the debt, Cuba has helped put the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank on the defensive. Its call for the abolition of the IMF and the World Bank, and the unconditional cancellation of the Third World debt are the sort of practical measures needed to underpin a just world order.
This makes Cuba an essential part of the emerging global movement against neo-liberal globalisation, as well as a beacon of hope that an alternative to capitalism is possible.