File spoon-archives/marxism-general.archive/marxism-general_1997/marxism-general.9711, message 70


Date: Sat, 8 Nov 1997 09:46:20 -0500
From: hariette-AT-easynet.co.uk (Hariette Spierings)
Subject: M-G: El Diario Internacional opens debate on Cuban revisionism


ANNOUNCING THE
Publication of El Diario International Number 41

Headlines:

FIFTH ANNIVERSARY OF CHAIRMAN GONZALO'S EPIC SPEECH FROM INSIDE PRISON

LET US PAY HOMAGE TO CHAIRMAN GONZALO


-  Balance Sheet of the Struggle Against Opportunism within the RIM


-  Cuba: Socialism or Capitalism?


-  COMMUNIST PARTY OF PERU: OVERCOME THE BEND IN THE ROAD WITH PEOPLE'S WAR

We shall be delivering the translation into English of this new edition in
the next few days. FIRST to the genuine subscribers of LeninList, and later
distributing articles to other lists.

FIRST DELIVERY:

from El Diario number 41:

ANALYSIS AND DEBATE

Now we open up a debate around Cuba, Castro, modern revisionism and the
basic Marxian thesis about socialism and the proletarian dictatorship.  For
over 35 years Cuba has been portrayed as the paradigm of a socialist country
in Latin America.

Many speak of this country as a lighhouse of revolution and anti-imperialist
struggle. What is there of truth in this assertions?

Precisely as the opening shot in this debate, we are publishing ar article
originally published in English under the title "The imperialist
Helms-Burton law and the myth of Cuban socialism".  This important analysis
about Cuba was authored in Detroit USA, and published by the paper Communist
Voice, October 1996.

The aforementioned text was reproduced in French by the newspaper SOCIALISM
MAINTENANT (Canada) in February 1997. We have taken it from this latter
publication and translated it into Spanish under the responsibility of El
Diario Internacional. 

CUBA: SOCIALISM OR CAPITALISM?


OPENING UP SHOP FOR FOREIGN INVESTMENT

Despite its socialist signboard, Cuba has for a long time been a
state-capitalist system. But the fact that the Castro government has been
pleading with the foreign multinationals to pour into Cuba is a vivid
exposure of the class nature of the Cuban social order. 

Just as other revisionist regimes in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and
China sought a way out of their economic woes through capitalist "market"
reforms and
opening up to Western capitalist investment, so now are the Cuban rulers.

Castro, of course, claims that he is inviting the foreign firms in to help
save Cuban "socialism". But in Cuba, too, what is happening is that the
state-capitalist forms are giving way to more naked capitalist measures.

The last few years have shown Western investment and market reforms in the
former revisionist countries have not solved the economic woes of the
masses, much less having anything to do with socialism. Rather they have
generally lowered living standards and increased the gap between rich and
poor.

But Castro is doing all he can to turn Cuba into a haven for the capitalist
exploiters of the world. A law enacted in 1995 enables foreign corporations
to own outright enterprises in almost every sector of the Cuban economy.
Prior to this law, foreign capitalists were allowed to own 49% of Cuban
enterprises, but in practice, the government allowed majority foreign
ownership. 

The Cuban revisionist rulers have bent over backwards to make
foreign enterprises profitable. There are generous tax policies, ease in
remittance of profits out of the country, and foreign employers are exempt
from the normal labor codes. 

The government even agreed to pay for the construction and infrastructure of
facilities to entice foreign investors to participate in new and
already-existing ventures. In the tourist sector, an area of heavy foreign
investment, the Cuban authorities boast that there is a 100% return on
investment within five years. 

Among the forms of partnership between the Cuban enterprises and Western
capitalist investors are debt-equity swaps. Cuba began borrowing heavily
from the Western imperialist countries in the 1970s and the debt crisis
grew acute in the 1980s with Cuba unable to meet its debt payments. To
solve this problem, the Castro government, has begun to turn over
its state enterprises in return for debt relief. 

For instance, a Mexican firm got part of a billion dollar Cuban textile
enterprise under a deal where part of the export earnings of the joint
venture go toward reducing debt to Mexico.

Theresult of these new policies of the Cuban regime have attracted more than
five billion dollars in direct investment. This is enormous in Cuban terms
considering that the gross domestic product was about $14-15 billion in 1992. 
According to Jorge Perez Lopez, by 1993 there were about a hundred joint
ventures. Foreign investment in the tourist industry has played a major role 
in tourism outstripping sugar, Cuba's traditionally dominant main export, as
a source of gross income and hard currency. (Shrinking levels of sugar
production in recent years are another factor.)

"CUBA IS A PARADISE FOR THE EXPLOITERS OF THE WORLD"

Among the bigger investment deals is the $500 million commitment of the
Canadian company, Sherritt International, to engage in oil exploration,
cobalt and nickel mining, the sugar industry and other areas. 

In the tourist sector, foreign investors include Spain, Canada, Germany, Japan,
the Netherlands and Colombia. U.S. hotel magnate Donald Trump has declared
himself anxious to get in on the action. 

All told, some 1,300 U.S. business executives have met with Cuban officials
though actual deals are presently blocked by the U.S. embargo. These
meetings have produced a number of non-binding agreements, reportedly as
large as $10 billion, which is huge by Cuban standards. Though these deals
are non-binding, they not only indicate the interest of U.S. corporations,
but that the Cuban revisionist rulers are placing their hopes for the future
not in socialism, but in a mix of Cuban and foreign capitalism.

ECONOMIC REFORMS AND CUBAN ENTERPRISES

Parallel with the opening to outside market capitalism has been the
adoption of ever-more market reforms within the domestic economic set-up.
The Cuban rulers have not only offered up ownership of state property to
foreign capitalists but to small groups of the Cuban bureaucratic elite.

The so-called sociedades anonimas are state companies turned over to
private ownership of big shot managers and party officials. These companies
operate outside even the pretense of a central government plan. They run on
their own income and keep whatever profits they generate.There isn't much
to distinguish them from "normal" capitalist businesses. 

These enterprises are not merely small businesses either. For example, these
firms are big players in the tourist industry. Some of these enterprises
increase their power through interlocking ownership/management with similar
companies, and not only offer shares of their businesses to the Cuban elite
but to foreign investors. These firms may also branch into different fields
of services and production.

The Cuban tourist operation, Cubanacan, is an example of these large
businesses. It not only built hotels and conducted other tourism business
but branched into the import business, promoting products from 27 different
foreign companies and became the sole exporter of certain medicines among
other products it exported. Cubanacan even set up some medical clinics in
other countries. 

Another large enterprise of this type is Cimex, with 48 subsidiaries and 
a dozen associated companies in seventeen countries. Among other things, 
Cimex has its own merchant fleet, sugar refineries and export businesses. 
It uses part of its income to speculate in international stock and commodity
markets. The sociedades anonimas compete against each other for foreign
investment and hard currency. For instance, rivalries developed between
Cubanacan and Gaviota enterprises and the national airline for dominance 
over air travel.

In agriculture, state farms have, in effect, all but been abolished. These
farms occupied 80% of agricultural land. Reforms in 1993 divided state
farms into competing co-ops. These co-ops have the right to use the land as
they see fit with some restrictions. Originally these farms were to sell to
the state whatever they didn't consume themselves. But evidently these
co-ops are now allowed to sell their surplus production on the open market.
Participants in the co-ops no longer will get a set wage as on the state
farm but will be get a share of the income of the co-op. 

In a society on its way to socialism, co-op agriculture may serve as a
transition from small private farms to large-scale agriculture belonging to
society as a whole. But these co-ops are not moving society toward
socialized property but are designed to increase the competition among
groups of farmers. 
Such competition between the co-ops will lead to ever-greater gaps between
wealthier and poorer co-ops and their members. Cuban agriculture is thus
moving toward co-operative forms that have operated in any number of
market-capitalist countries.

The Cuban government has given growing room for small private
entrepreneurship. Even before recent reforms there were 100,000 small
private farms alongside the dominant state sector. 

In 1994, the government returned to a policy it tried in the mid-80s 
of allowing free-market sales of the surplus production of small private 
farms. The original experiment led quickly to extreme profiteering and 
was temporarily canceled by the regime. But the return to the market 
shows that it was not the free market per se that upset the government. 

Rather the Cuban authorities were upset over particular results of the 
mid-80s plan such as the undermining of government agricultural procurement
and rampant selling to private speculators who brought up production and
then marketed it at exorbitant prices. 

Small private service, artisan and manufacturing businesses have been 
given wide latitude. A large section of the population supplements
their income with self-employment ventures. 

Cuban government estimates indicate that about 20% of the 1991 workforce 
of four million participated in petty enterprises. And the Cuban 
authorities are discussing allowing individuals to pool their 
resources and form larger businesses which would be permitted to hire
wage-labor. In fact, the private hiring of wage-labor already goes on 
to some extent.

The expansion of the private sector is Castro's solution to the crisis in
the state sector. Cuban official are planning massive layoffs in the state
sector including the shutting down of unprofitable enterprises. 

As the state sector shrinks, private business is supposed to take up the slack.
Thus, Castro is paving the way for sizable private companies built off of
state assets along with a large petty-bourgeois section of small producers.

But such market reforms are only part of the story of the spread of market
capitalism in Cuba. Cuba has long had a major black market economy. With the
economic disaster that hit Cuba with the collapse of the Soviet bloc
regimes, the black market assumed huge proportions. 

With the production of Cuban state enterprises greatly reduced, the 
black market became the major source of retail sales. Cuban government 
research estimates that black market sales were equal to about 17% 
of total retail sales in Cuba in 1990.

Two years later they accounted for two-thirds of retail sales From the
materials studied for this report, it is not clear whether the partial
economic recovery of the last couple of years has shrunk the size of the
black market. But clearly it remains a huge factor in Cuba. While the Cuban
rulers periodically clamp down on some "excesses" in the black market, it
has generally been tolerated.

FROM STATE CAPITALISM TOWARDS PRIVATE CAPITALISM

Even before the market reforms of the last several years, Cuba was not a
socialist society, nor in the process of becoming one. Rather the Cuban
state enterprises are state-capitalist in nature.

Under Castro, Cuba developed an extensive social welfare system which was of
benefit to the masses. But society remained divided between exploiter and
exploited. The main means of production has been in the hands of the state
in contrast to the typical capitalist countries where private ownership
predominates. 

But the state property is, in effect, the collective property of the managers
and party and state officials. The wealth produced by the state enterprises
goes to maintain the disparities between the privileged few of the
bureaucratic elite and several millions of workers.

One feature that marks an economy running on Marxist socialist principles is
that it operates as an organic whole according to a centralized state plan.
In Cuba, there was a central plan for the entire economy, but this plan was
widely violated in practice.  Even if enterprises were nominally property 
of the state, these have developed mimicking several features of capitalist
private property. 

State enterprises largely had to survive on their own resources, 
creating forms of anarchic competition. For example, there has 
been a constant scramble between enterprises for materials for 
production. That is why this has resulted in massive trading of
resources between enterprises outside of state control. Likewise,
enterprises commonly charged more than allowed by the official price
structure. 

On this basis, the government generally wound up sanctioning wider and
wider autonomy for the enterprises. The autonomy of the enterprises, even
when subject to the state production plan, paved the way for the recent
measures turning state property over outright to private individuals.In
other words, state-capitalism has been paving the way for private
capitalism.

Although a central plan exists today, a series of reforms over the last
several years has further weakened its influence. Indeed, of all the
different products produced by the government enterprises, most have now
been exempted from the state plan. 

Cuba's state-capitalist course has also been connected to its historic
dependence on the Soviet revisionists. After the early post-revolutionary
years, Soviet advisors largely devised the Cuban economic plans, modeling
them on the principles on which the Soviet economy ran. 

As well, Cuba was integrated into the Soviet bloc and this integration
maintained the country's lopsided dependence on sugar exports, a backward
feature left over from the days of U.S. domination.

Large trade deficits to the Soviet bloc contributed to Cuba's mounting debt
crisis. Eventually, the economic collapse of the state-capitalist regimes
of these countries dragged the Cuban economy into severe crisis.

UNMASK CUBAN REVISIONISM

Even as Cuba adopts one after another market reform, even as its pretenses
of being socialist are being stripped, the predominant view in left-wing
politics is to glorify the state-capitalist system there. 

Such views are pushed by an array of revisionist and trotskyite groups. 
Some, like the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) or the Workers World 
Party (WWP), gush over every move of the Castro regime and tout Cuba 
as the model of socialism.

Others have criticism of the regime but consider Cuba as essentially
socialist or support the regime's alleged "anti-imperialism." But in
whatever form, such views must be opposed.

Of course, the apologists of Cuban revisionism may claim that Cuba's rulers
are just organizing a temporary retreat, not giving up on socialism. After
all, according to Castro, the concessions to capitalism are just a "special
period" of socialism. This is nonsense. Marxism recognizes that even
revolutionary societies striving to establish socialism may have to
temporarily put up with the vestiges of the old exploitative order. 

But the so-called "temporary retreat" really began decades ago when the
state-capitalist order was consolidated. The naked capitalist forms 
that are fashionable today are merely the retreat from one form of 
capitalism to another.

But the apologists don't care much about the consequences of Cuban
revisionism. For instance, a member of the Chicago Workers' Voice group,
which has constantly belittled the notion of anti-revisionism, argues that
it was necessary for Castro to form an alliance with the social-imperialist
Soviet Union to combat U.S. imperialist pressure on Cuba. 

This is a good example of using the theoretical possibility of making 
unpleasant concessions to capitalism into an apology for concessions that
cemented Cuba's path toward state-capitalism at home and undermining the
revolutionary movements abroad.

Instead of apologies for Castroism, it is time for revolutionary-minded
activists to combat its influence. Just as the socialist ideal was dragged
through the mud by the Soviet and Chinese revisionists, so Cuban
revisionism is following in these footsteps. Pawning off Cuban society as
"socialism" undermines the ability for inspiring the masses for a truly
revolutionary struggle.

Standing with the Cuban masses means not only fighting U.S. imperialist
bullying, but encouraging our class brothers and sisters to build up 
their own class organization, independent of, and opposed to
the Castroite revisionist rulers. 

Only the building of such a trend really means supporting the cause of 
socialism in Cuba. Only such a trend can offer a revolutionary 
opposition to imperialism. 

As well, only an anti-revisionist trend can build the communist movement and
defend the immediate interests of the Cuban toilers in the face of austerity
measures and the ravages of the free market policies.

Unmasking Cuban revisionism is a vital task facing all those who want to
hold up the banner of socialism and the Marxist-Leninist ideals.



End


Further message to comrades Jay or Jacques:

>From el Diario Internacional Number 39, Brussels is requesting that we send
again the article entitles "The People's War advances amidst the Crisis if
Fujimori".  I have no archieves of this which was posted to all in the
LeninList back a couple of months ago. May these two comrades, or maybe
comrade Godena, who also keeps archieves, be able to forward this article in
English to the minilist?


Many thanks and comradely regards,


Adolfo Olaechea




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