From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-panix.com>
Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2002 20:37:29 -0500
Subject: Re: AUT: capitalist cuba?


On Tue, 5 Mar 2002 01:51:30 +0100, Harald Beyer-Arnesen wrote:
>
>I am not very interested to enter into this
>discussion. As I doubt very much if it has much
>to do with facts rather than a willingness to
>see them and call them by their proper name.
>Noone is denying the difference  mentioned
>above. No more than that between for instance
>the Scandinavian countries, or for that sake
>Canada, and the U.S.
>of A. in this field, without this making the
>Scandinavian countries socialist.

This is silly. These are G7 nations. Socialist revolution occurs in 
countries that are driven to the edge of desperation. The 
Scandinavian countries shared in the exploitation of the third world, 
despite the fact that Sweden, etc. did not have direct control over 
any colonial territory. They shared in the extraction of the surplus 
product through banking, sales of manufactured goods, purchase of 
cheap agricultural commodities. It only confuses things to compare 
the US to Sweden or Canada, which I assume is your goal.

> No one is
>either denying the importance of such
>improvements. Cuba was none the less never quite
>the typical Central or South American country.
>There were for instance more doctors per head in
>Cuba in the last years of Babtista than in
>Sweden at the same time.  Infant mortalliy also
>actually rose during the first years of Castro,
>if you are to believe the regime's own
>statististics. 

This is called lying with statistics. What Harald leaves out is the 
availability of medical care in the countryside. In any case, here 
are the stats on medical care from Claus Brudenius, a respected 
economist, with 100 equated to the base year of 1958.

Year	Education	Health
1958		100		100
1962		173		105
1968		173		105
1972		224		120
1974		275		151
1976		363		175
1978		446		202

from Claes Brundenius, "Growth With Equity: The Cuban Experience 
(1959-1980)", World Development Vol. 9, No. 11/12(1981) pp. 1083-96 

>As far as relative wages are
>concerned,  Cuba, according to ILO statistics,
>compared extremely much better with West
>European countries, as well as with United
>States and Canada in the 1950ies than today.

Very sneaky, Harald. I see you have mastered the art of using 
statistics like the common anticommunist. What your comparison leaves 
out is the devastating impact of the collapse of the USSR on the 
Cuban economy, especially with the continuation of the blockade. A 
good comparison would be Cuba in 1958 with Cuba in 1978. The Human 
Development Indicators would reveal that, whatever the wage rate, the 
average Cuban lived better under the revolution than before it. Even 
with the difficult situation facing Cuba, a bourgeois economist is 
forced to admit:

The Scotsman, May 2, 2001, Wednesday
WORLD BANK HEAPS PRAISE ON CUBA

CUBA was praised yesterday by the president of the World Bank in 
recognition of the Caribbean island's achievement in providing some 
of Latin America's highest standards of health care and education 
without a penny of foreign funding.

"Cuba has done a great job on education and health and if you judge 
the country by education and health they've done a terrific job," the 
bank's chief, James Wolfensohn, said at a press conference in 
Washington.

"So I have no hesitation in acknowledging that they've done a good 
job, and it does not embarrass me to do it. They should be 
congratulated for what they have done," he added. Statistics in the 
bank's World Development Indicators report, issued during its spring 
meetings over the weekend, show that Cubans live longer than other 
Latin Americans, including residents of the US Commonwealth of Puerto 
Rico.

At the same time, the island's literacy levels are equalled only by 
the middle-income nations of Argentina and Uruguay.

The bank's data shows life expectancy in Cuba is 76 years. Among 
Latin American countries, that is second only to Costa Rica at 77. It 
equals the showcase market economy of Chile, while it is ahead of 
Puerto Rico at 73 years; Argentina, Uruguay and Mexico, where the 
average person lives for 72 years; and Brazil, which lags at 67 
years.

Infant mortality in Cuba is seven deaths per 1,000 live births, much 
lower than the rest of Latin America.

Only 3 per cent of Cuban males above the age of 15 years cannot read, 
a literacy rate that is five times better than Brazil and 16 times 
ahead of Haiti, the data shows.

Cuba withdrew from the World Bank and its sister lending agency, the 
International Monetary Fund, in 1959, less than a year after the 
revolution led by Fidel Castro. It still remains outside these 
so-called Bretton Woods institutions, along with North Korea, Libya 
and Burma.

At last month's World Bank Summit of the Americas in Quebec, Mr 
Wolfensohn said the Bank had pledged to support Latin American and 
Caribbean countries, proposing $ 12 billion to $ 16 billion in loans 
and credits for the region over the next three years.

"About one in three people in Latin America and the Caribbean lives 
on less than $ 2 a day," he said, emphasising that it was up to 
governments to determine the priorities for World Bank loans.

He singled out health and education for special attention. "A 
full-scale attack on poverty requires investments in health care and 
education, to build the human resources countries need to compete."


> I
>think you will also find that the were greater
>wage increase during Franco's Spain than there
>has been in Castro's Cuba. 

I think you will also find that Spain enjoyed being part of the 
postwar boom in Europe, while Cuba was the target of an economic 
blockade by the most powerful imperialist nation in history. In any 
case, wages alone do not tell the whole story. It is interesting, 
btw, that you true communists show so little interest in the fact 
that people enjoy free medical care in Cuba. Perhaps the obsession 
with wages indicates that you have a poverty of imagination when it 
comes to social transformation.

>called "socialist" governments.  Your problem is
>a difficulity to distinguish between fascism and
>socialism.)

Oh, right. Here's the beginning of a fascist speech Castro gave at 
the conference on racism in Durban a few months ago.

Excellencies:

Delegates and guests:

Racism, racial discrimination and xenophobia are not naturally 
instinctive reactions of the human beings but rather a social, 
cultural and political phenomenon born directly of wars, military 
conquests, slavery and the individual or collective exploitation of 
the weakest by the most powerful all along the history of human 
societies.

No one has the right to boycott this Conference which tries to bring 
some sort of relief to the overwhelming majority of mankind afflicted 
by unbearable suffering and enormous injustice. Neither has anyone 
the right to set preconditions to this conference or urge it to avoid 
the discussion of historical responsibility, fair compensation or the 
way we decide to rate the dreadful genocide perpetrated, at this very 
moment, against our Palestinian brothers by extreme right leaders 
who, in alliance with the hegemonic superpower, pretend to be acting 
on behalf of another people which throughout almost two thousand 
years was the victim of the most fierce persecution, discrimination 
and injustice that history has known.

Cuba speaks of reparations, and supports this idea as an unavoidable 
moral duty to the victims of racism, based on a major precedent, that 
is, the indemnification being paid to the descendants of the Hebrew 
people which in the very heart of Europe suffered the brutal and 
loathsome racist holocaust. However, it is not with the intent to 
undertake an impossible search for the direct descendants or the 
specific countries of the victims of actions occurred throughout 
centuries. The irrefutable truth is that tens of millions of Africans 
were captured, sold like a commodity and sent beyond the Atlantic to 
work in slavery while 70 million indigenous people in that hemisphere 
perished as a result of the European conquest and colonization.

The inhuman exploitation imposed on the peoples of three continents, 
including Asia, marked forever the destiny and lives of over 4.5 
billion people living in the Third World today whose poverty, 
unemployment, illiteracy and health rates as well as their infant 
mortality, life expectancy and other calamities --too many, in fact, 
to enumerate here-- are certainly awesome and harrowing. They are the 
current victims of that atrocity which lasted centuries and the ones 
who clearly deserve compensation for the horrendous crimes 
perpetrated against their ancestors and peoples.

Actually, such a brutal exploitation did not end when many countries 
became independent, not even after the formal abolition of slavery. 
Right after independence, the main ideologists of the American Union 
that emerged when the 13 colonies got rid of the British domination 
at the end of the 18th century, advanced ideas and strategies 
unquestionably expansionist in nature.

It was based on such ideas that the ancient white settlers of 
European descent, in their march to the West, forcibly occupied the 
lands in which Native-Americans had lived for thousands of years thus 
exterminating millions of them in the process. But, they did not stop 
at the boundaries of the former Spanish possessions; consequently 
Mexico, a Latin American country that had attained its independence 
in 1821, was stripped off millions of square kilometers of territory 
and invaluable natural resources.

Meanwhile, in the increasingly powerful and expansionist nation born 
in North America, the obnoxious and inhumane slavery system stayed in 
place for almost a century after the famous Declaration of 
Independence of 1776 was issued, the same that proclaimed that all 
men were born free and equal.

After the purely formal slave emancipation, African-Americans were 
subjected during one hundred more years to the harshest racial 
discrimination, and many of its features and consequences still 
persist after almost four more decades of heroic struggles and the 
achievements of the 1960's, for which Martin Luther King, Jr., 
Malcolm X and other outstanding fighters gave their lives. Based on a 
purely racist rationale, the longest and most severe legal sentences 
are passed against African-Americans who in the wealthy American 
society are bound to live in dare poverty and with the lowest living 
standards.

Likewise, what is left of the Native-American peoples, which were the 
first to inhabit a large portion of the current territory of the 
United States of America, remain under even worse conditions of 
discrimination and neglect.

Needless to mention the data on the social and economic situation of 
Africa where entire countries and even whole regions of Sub-Saharan 
Africa are in risk of extinction the result of an extremely complex 
combination of economic backwardness, excruciating poverty and grave 
diseases, both old and new, that have become a true scourge. And the 
situation is no less dramatic in numerous Asian countries. On top of 
all this, there are the huge and unpayable debts, the disparate terms 
of trade, the ruinous prices of basic commodities, the demographic 
explosion, the neoliberal globalization and the climate changes that 
produce long draughts alternating with increasingly intensive rains 
and floods. It can be mathematically proven that such a predicament 
is unsustainable.

The developed countries and their consumer societies, presently 
responsible for the accelerated and almost unstoppable destruction of 
the environment, have been the main beneficiaries of the conquest and 
colonization, of slavery, of the ruthless exploitation and the 
extermination of hundreds of millions of people born in the countries 
that today constitute the Third World. They have also reaped the 
benefits of the economic order imposed on humanity after two 
atrocious and devastating wars for a new division of the world and 
its markets, of the privileges granted to the United States and its 
allies in Bretton-Woods, and of the IMF and the international 
financial institutions exclusively created by them and for them.

>It is also true that the (socialist?) European
>Community has done a lot to end widespread
>poverty in places life terms the  (two-layered)
>health services of Cuba are far more privatised
>what is (so far still) the situation in the
>Scandinavian countries.

This is because they extract surplus value from the third world. 
Haven't you heard of imperialism?

>Cuban class society. But noone here is denying
>the existence of far worse regime's than that in
>Cuba, just that the later is in any ways a
>(socialist/ communist) classless society. No
>more than, let us say France.

Nobody should discourage you from dreaming about classless societies. 
It is much less harmful than speculating in real estate.

-- 
Louis Proyect, lnp3-AT-panix.com on 03/04/2002

Marxism list: http://www.marxmail.org




     --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---