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 --- from list marxism-general-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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