Finishing Cuba's Revolution

1 Finishing Cuba’s Revolution Cuba is a complex issue. The solution starts with giving land to people. By Tshiamo Malatji (@tshiatji) In the middle of Bloemfontein, South Africa is a proud statue of Fidel Castro at the entrance of a government building, also named after the Cuban revolutionary. In most of our memory, Castro is known for rising against and defeating U.S.-supported Fulgencio Batista, who was military dictator in Cuba from 1952 - 1959. For some, the narrative is that Castro immediately became an authoritarian communist with a lust for cultish glory and the defeat of foreign powers. Certainly, there is much to criticise with regard to Castro’s long authoritarian regime. However, the early days of Castro’s regime were certainly not deserving of this character. It was in this time that global powers should have embraced the best of Castro’s economic alternatives and programmes for rural development. In fact, if they had, the ability for his regime to exert power for so long due to the threat of external imperial forces would have not existed. We could have seen a political discourse in Cuba that allowed a sensible transition from Castro. At the time, as long as an imperial enemy remained, there was always a sense of fear that if power was relinquished, this would simply return the state of Cuba to a military dictatorship with foregin control. After all, Patrice Lumumba was assassinated in 1961 and this created the conditions for a military dictatorship in Congo in 1965. This is not true today, but it was true then. If back then, socialism had been embraced by the world, we may be seeing a very different situation in Cuba today. 2 The focus squarely on Castro’s legacy is convenient for people who shy away from the United States’ imperial objectives in Latin America and the Caribbean. More to the point of this article, the United States’ present-day actions are disastrous for people in Cuba. Shifting the focus from Castro to the United States is important for figuring out what should be done to address the climate of uncertainty and looming crisis in Cuba today. Certainly, neither Donald Trump nor Joe Biden, present a policy of acknowledging the United States' imperial history in Cuba, closing their detention centre in Guantanamo Bay, lifting trade embargo, or creating any of the concessions they were willing to offer South Africa's apartheid regime. The rhetoric they use is that Cuba is a dictatorial regime and so must be crushed. They are correct that Cuba today is an authoritarian state, but the U.S. has a history of installing and/or supporting authoritarian states around the world. In many of those cases, authoritarianism was argued to be "necessarily evil" to contain communism and the liberation of indigenous peoples. The U.S. cannot claim it shall never enter into an agreement with oppressive governments when it maintains positive relationships with Saudi Arabia and Israel in the Middle East. It seems rather that the U.S. will consider their interests and then decide whether an oppressive government aligns with those interests. This is the kind of foreign policy Noam Chomsky has rallied against and Bernie Sanders offered an alternative to. In fact, Chomsky points out that the entire world disagrees with the U.S. position on Cuba: “Meanwhile, the sanctions have been very harsh sanctions against Cuba, right from the Eisenhower regime, picked up, extended by Kennedy, extended further under Clinton, who actually outflanked Bush from the right on extending the sanctions. The world has been totally opposed to this. The votes at the General Assembly—you can’t 3 do it at the Security Council because the U.S. vetoes everything, but at the General Assembly, the votes are just overwhelming. I think the last one was 182 to two, you know, U.S. and Israel, and sometimes they pick up Papua or something like that. This has been going on year after year. The U.S. is utterly isolated, not just on this issue, many others. However, given that this political regime in the United States will not be changing soon, many have taken to simply accepting U.S. foreign policy as fact. They have stopped criticising it altogether in fear of opposing power-holders within the U.S. After all, when Bernie Sanders complemented Cuba's education system, the resulting backlash was enormous. Similarly, when Bernie Sanders criticised the U.S. foreign policy objectives, he was considered a sympathiser with "foreign enemies." After all, the U.S. is in a constant state of war. To those that have given in, it is helpful to unpack Western misconceptions about socialism and the role the West played in terrorising Cuba and solidifying the Castro regime, in the first place. It must be clear that the West is not a solution to issues in Cuba. Margaret Thatcher's famous tongue-in-cheek criticism of socialism is a good starting point for understanding the core problem. In a 1976 interview, Thatcher claims: “Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people’s money. It’s quite a characteristic of them. They then start to nationalise everything, and people just do not like more and more nationalisation, and they’re now trying to control everything by other means. They’re progressively reducing the choice available to ordinary people.” Thatcher could do well to explain how it is that “other people” made their money in the first place. More than this, she would need to justify if the 4 method they used to “earn” their wealth is legitimate. The history of imperialism suggests an immoral acquisition of wealth through conquest and exploitation. In Cuba, for instance, immense wealth was generated through documented criminal industry, as explained in this article: “Havana was then what Las Vegas has become,” says Louis Perez, a Cuba historian. It attracted some of the same mafia kingpins, too, such as Meyer Lansky and Santo Trafficante, who were evading a national investigation into organized crime. In Cuba, they could continue their stock trade of gambling, drugs and prostitution, as long as they paid off government officials. The fees, however high, were a small price for an industry that raked in millions of dollars every month.” Historical record reveals that wealth was illegitimately accumulated in Cuba and the Batista dictatorship benefited from this. The “other people” should not have had their money and they certainly were not going to give it back to the Cuban people. That is why nationalisation must occur. That is what angers imperial governments. As stated in this record: “Since taking power in January 1959, Castro had infuriated the American government with his policies of nationalizing U.S. companies and investments in Cuba.” Why were there U.S. companies and investments in Cuba? How did they get there? How were they running their businesses? What should be done about these companies? These are not questions that critics of nationalisation answer critically. What else was there to do but nationalise these industries? Thatcher’s reasoning suggests that nationalisation only occurs because the government has run out of money and to limit people’s choices. However, nationalisation in Cuba occurred at the very beginning of Castro’s regime, not after “running out of money.” Moreover, there were certainly limited 5 options during Batista’s rule. Research shows that ”Cuba had only 1 rural hospital.” However, Castro’s regime improved rural healthcare. “In 1960, the Rural Medical Service (RMS) was established, posting hundreds of newly graduated physician volunteers in remote areas over the next decade. By 1970, the number of rural hospitals had reached 53.” So Thatcher’s critique is incorrect on all accounts here. Nationalisation certainly can have these consequences. But to claim this as certainty or even likely in Cuba’s case ignores historic fact -- at least in the early days. But Thatcher’s statement is still helpful for understanding the problems in Cuba today. The West genuinely believes that the money they earned illicitly is their money. They claim property over illegal earnings and even the legal, but exploitative, labour of workers. For the elite capitalists, money and property can belong to them and only them. They despise the idea that resources should be shared equally among all people. For them, this is considered a waste of these resources. The money “runs out” because it is used on the poorest of people and not for the wealthiest. We still see this attitude today. In 2017 when American Airlines raised the wages of its staff, the response from a JPMorgan analyst was: “We are troubled by AAL’s wealth transfer of nearly $1 billion to its labor groups. In addition to raising fixed costs, American’s agreement with its labor stakeholders establishes a worrying precedent, in our view, both for American and the industry.” For this analyst, raising wages is a “wealth transfer” to be troubled by. This comes from the position that wealth does not belong to workers and giving them higher wages is a “cost” to the company. The exploitation of work is expected under capitalism. For the elite, wealth should concentrate among the few. These few are the “other people” that Thatcher does not name. 6 So when a government tries to establish a fair system of resource distribution, these “other people” retaliate. This record summarises the US response to nationalisation in Cuba: “In January 1961, the Eisenhower administration severed all diplomatic relations with Cuba. In April 1961, just a short time after taking office, President John F. Kennedy ordered the Bay of Pigs invasion, and the Cuban exile force, armed and trained by the CIA, landed in Cuba.” Eisenhower and Kennedy were motivated by retaliation for Cuba’s nationalisation programme.

Load more