Date: Sat, 31 May 1997 21:17:34 -0400 (EDT)
From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-I: Cuba, South Africa


>Cuba and South Africa: The Fate of Revolution
>
>by Joel Kovel
>The ties between Castro's Cuba and Mandela's South Africa run very deep.
>Cuban slave society was less efficient in demolishing linkages to Africa
>than its North American counterpart, allowing Cuba to retain a strong sense
>of the mother culture. Accordingly, revolutionary Cuba has held, amidst its
>many allegiances, to a special affiliation with the African homeland. It
>was in this spirit that Castro intervened in the Angolan wars of the
>1970s--against the wishes of the Soviets, who considered the action
>adventuristic. The bold gamble pitted Cuba directly against the armies of
>apartheid South Africa, who were intervening on the other side, and
>indirectly against the United States in its strategy of counterrevolution
>on tha African continent.
>The result was a stunning triumph. Cuba's victory in the battle of Cuito
>Cuanevale in 1987 profoundly demoralized the racist state and played a
>decisive role in the decision to liquidate apartheid. Few in the US realize
>this, and most of those few are black, hence Fidel's extraordinary
>reception in Harlem in 1995 when he travelled to New York for the fiftieth
>anniversary of the founding of the UN. The Abyssinian Baptist Church was
>transformed that evening into an island of enthusiasm in a sea of ignorance
>and antipathy. In South Africa, however, no one is oblivious to the meaning
>of Cuba; and of all the delegates to Nelson Mandela's joyous inauguration
>in 1994, Fidel received the greatest welcome, much to the discomfort of Al
>Gore, who headed the US contingent and more or less stood in the corner
>gnashing his teeth as the two great revolutionaries came together.
>Today, three years after the birth of the new South Africa, the perennially
>generous Cubans are sending doctors to the new democracy to work in
>underserved rural regions. Yet even as this destitute nation clinging to a
>dissolving socialism aids Africa's superpower, considerable numbers of
>well-heeled Britons are migrating to Cape Town in search of la dolce vita.
>Why this should be is a subject for some reflection and not a little
>sadness.
>In February the opportunity arose to visit both Cuba and South Africa once
>again. I was in Havana for an international conference on the
>environment--itself a remarkable occurrence--and immediately afterward made
>my way to Cape Town where I was to help in the development of an exchange
>program between my school, Bard College, and the University of the Western
>Cape. I had been in both places before--most recently in Cuba in 1994, and
>in South Africa in 1989, as the anti-apartheid struggle was gathering for
>the final assault. No place could have been more thrilling, and awful, than
>South Africa in that period: thrilling, because great masses of humanity
>had been set irrevocably in motion to bring down one of the most detestable
>regimes in modern history; and awful, because the regime still had teeth to
>murder and torture even if it could no longer effectively rule. The mingled
>elation, revulsion and dread was unforgettable.
>Cuba in 1994 had, as it has since 1959, a similar spirit, compounded of
>struggle, sacrifice and risk taken against a cruel adversary, and
>manifested as legendary generosity, fierce pride and organic collectivity.
>The sense of awfulness was there, too, distilled into an omnipresent
>hunger, and even a kind of national emaciation, as if the society had been
>in a concentration camp--which, in a way, it was, thanks to Uncle Sam's
>murderous and implacable blockade.
>Three years later, the blockade grinds on, reinforced by the Helms-Burton
>bill. But Cubans are once more well-fed, though still quite poor and
>wanting in many amenities. Two major successes--one dubious and the other
>extraordinarily hopeful--account for their renewed well-being. The dubious
>achievement is the growth of tourism. Glitzy hotels spring up along the
>coast to suck pesatas, Deutschmarks, lira and Canadian dollars into the
>country--along, necessarily, with bourgeois commodities and values. You can
>now buy Yves St. Laurent ties and Swatch watches in the boutiques that have
>cropped up here and there like so many cancer cells metastasizing into
>socialist austerity. A billboard for toothpaste was spotted on the road
>alongside the noble and stern images of Che; and the taxi radio blares
>hypno-rock music, the voice chanting, "whatever turns you on  . . .
>whatever, whatever," and "I will, I will," to induce a proper frame of mind
>for the consumerism knocking at the door. Some enterprises have gone
>further yet: in the gleaming hotel next to the conference center, the gift
>shop no longer carries revolutionary post cards and other tsatzkas of Cuban
>socialism. The theme is now folklorico; thus revolutionary Cuba is rendered
>into another instance of the exotic South for jaded travellers on the road
>from Frankfurt or Seoul.
>And so it goes. But not entirely so. There is an intact core to Cuba, built
>up over two generations of what has arguably been, for all its flaws, the
>most fully realized proletarian socialism the world has ever seen. This
>does not yield so easily, nor does it stand still. The conference I
>attended was testimony to this, and to the other major success that has
>liberated Cuba from the bondage of hunger.
>The collapse of the USSR sent Cuba's economy into free fall. No sector was
>more disasterously affected than agriculture, already gravely compromised
>by decades of single-crop industrial farming under Soviet aegis. The near
>starvation could not be blamed simply on the blockade; it also stemmed from
>a rigid agricultural system that even in good years had been unable to feed
>the Cuban people. This system is no more. In a creative adaptation of
>world-historical proportions, Cuba has been able to transform its food
>production along organic lines. This has engaged not only the full
>repertoire of organic techniques (including oxen in place of tractors), but
>also a major research effort drawing upon traditional wisdom as well as
>current science, and, necessarily, a social transformation in the
>countryside, where in the last five years 2800 co-operatives employing
>270,000 people have sprung up. Even the city of Havana blooms with scores
>of urban gardens and small farms and is on the road to actually feeding
>itself. Organic agriculture on this scale becomes more than a way of
>providing superior food; more even than a way of restoring the soil and
>avoiding pollution by pesticides. It provides as well the foundation for
>autonomous as against dependent third world development, and it instills
>cooperation and creativity in a necessarily democratic framework. Compare
>this with the social relations of tourism, with its parasitic leisure, its
>degradation of the local to a commodity, and its latent authoritarianism,
>for where tourism grows, so must the police.
>Cuba today is a country of wide-open struggle, its future still actively
>contested. Three tendencies are now afoot. The traditional party
>bureaucracy comprises one model, offering a recycled Stalinism, while
>technocratic capitalist-roaders form the second, and the
>socialist-ecological-communitarians the third. The danger is that the first
>and second tendency may come together, as they have in China, with deadly
>effect. Meanwhile, the success of the organic agriculture program is the
>strongest card in the hands of this third force, just as the incipient
>integration of Cuba into global commodity circuits constitutes its greatest
>danger. The big question is, what happens as prosperity passes a certain
>point? How many are harboring the expectation that once credit and oil flow
>again, the island should return to less labor-intensive and more
>immediately productive--though ultimately ecocidal--ways? Clearly the
>outcome of this struggle will be affected by the response and solidarity of
>the international community to the drama now unfolding. Just as clearly,
>the stakes are not confined to the island of Cuba.
>Seven thousand miles away, another kind of struggle unfolds, in a society
>much wealthier than Cuba, and one no longer a pariah. Here, however, South
>Africa's quest for integration looks very much like a curse. Why should
>this richly-endowed and advanced country, with world-class universities,
>great urban centers and immense mineral resources, need to import Cuban
>doctors? Cape Town, after all, was the site of the first heart transplant.
>Isn't that "developed" enough? Why can't they supply their own physicians
>for their rural poor?
>There are two parts to the answer, both harsh. First, the gap between rich
>and poor South Africa is perhaps the worst such chasm in the world. And
>second, South Africa is being subjected to a Structural Adjustment Program
>(SAP) in which the government of the African National Congress, heroic
>victors of the democratic revolution, is desperately trying to make the
>country attractive to transnational capital. An incident from the evening
>news in Cape Town may convey the flavor. There, in African garb, was the
>national icon, Nelson Mandela resplendant and radiant as ever; and next to
>him, his distinguished guest, the Prime Minister of Singapore, dour and
>puritannical in his gray suit. Yes, said the sombre PM of the squeaky-clean
>entrepot of authoritarian capitalism, Singapore genuinely likes South
>Africa. Singapore will even trade with South Africa. And someday, sooner or
>later, Singapore may even decide to invest  in South Africa. Not a word
>about the terms of this future, but no one doubts what they would be: curb
>the working class and its powerful national union federation, COSATU. Bring
>them under control, provide us with cheap and docile labor, and we will
>consider investing in you. Until then, there's always Bangladesh.
>Thus the terms of the SAP are applied here as in El Salvador and Haiti:
>privatize (during my visit, plans were unveiled for selling off the
>national telecomunications system), deregulate, and cut back the state
>sector and its services. And so health-care is being ravaged, driving
>doctors out of public service, indeed out of the country, and creating the
>need for the eternal generosity of Cuba.
>At the same time, major cuts have been announced in the education budget.
>The result--does this begin to sound familiar?--has been to drive up
>student fees and effectively exclude poorer students, a result only
>disturbing to the soft-hearted, as there is no foreseeable employment of
>the kind that requires education for maybe forty percent of the population.
>Protests have been breaking out on a number of campuses, though not,
>significantly, at the University of the Western Cape. This is surprising,
>since UWC was by consensus the most militant campus of the late apartheid
>period. When I lectured there in 1989, the authorities were given to the
>permanent emplacement of tanks before the school gates, and a weekly
>workshop on Marxism drew as many as 400-500 participants. Today the tanks
>and the workshops are both gone, and the students walk about docilely and
>as if in a daze, and wait for their next get-drunk party.
>The explanation involves that most cursed disease of modern society, the
>disease that the heroic rebellion was supposed to have cured: racism. UWC
>was originally a "colored" campus, that is, assigned to those of mixed
>descent and intermediate hue in the great racial fantasy game. During the
>80s many blacks (who comprise about 3/4 of the total population of the
>whole of South Africa, but not of the Western Cape), came aboard. Because
>everyone was engaged in the common struggle, internal racism was
>suppressed. Now there is no clear enemy to struggle against, the campus is
>sixty percent black and forty percent colored, and for practical purposes
>has become split in two, with predictable effects on militancy. Whites
>meanwhile withdraw to the beautiful inner city, send their children to
>elite schools, live in high security residences fret, not unrealistically,
>about crime, and brood over the great mass of black people who live outside
>the gates of their city. The colored population of Cape Town traditionally
>has mistrusted the ANC, and, rather than vote for blacks, have made the
>province of the Western Cape the sole bastion in South Africa of the justly
>hated National Party which led the apartheid regime.
>It is the ANC, however, which gives the most pain by retreating from its
>own emancipatory promise. This is not to dispute that there are any number
>of individuals in the government who put to shame the best public servants
>in the United States, and toil to extract from the current situation the
>best possible terms for the future of the country and its people. The
>problem is that the direction chosen by the leadership, namely, submission
>to transnational capital, has as much chance of alleviating the horrendous
>poverty in which half the population lives as the sun does of setting in
>the East. People feel this viscerally, but they cannot say it outright,
>because the leadership still enjoys so much legitimacy, and because capital
>has today its aura of godlike inevitability--and so South Africa lives
>uneasily from its mythology, rudderless and unsure. A thought occurs, which
>cannot be broadcast in South Africa: maybe the country has to wait until
>Nelson Mandela steps down before it can begin a real debate about its
>future. He is too great a man, and too beloved, for an honest appraisal to
>occur today.
>At dinner with some leftist friends (white, needless to add), I shared
>these concerns and was met with the commonplaces one hears everywhere:
>nothing else can be done, the capitalist system is the only one, South
>Africa has no choice but to knuckle under in order to get investment, and
>the best that can be hoped is to become a more benign African equivalent--a
>"lion," perhaps--of one of the "Asian Tigers." South Africa can aspire then
>to become like Malaysia, best of the bunch yet still a repressive country
>that harshly suppresses unions and fills no sails with inspiration.
>It is doubly painful to hear these plaintive hopes, because they are not
>only unworthy but unrealistic as well. None of the Asian Tigers had to
>contend with the cruel legacy of race and class foisted upon South Africa
>by colonialism and apartheid, and the terrible, palpable gulf between
>people that results. The sad fact is that South Africa, today, three years
>after the revolution, is full of places one is warned against visiting. The
>commuter train is declared off limits, as are whole townships on the vast
>and sandy flats that spread away to the North and East, squatter camps
>where the dispossessed still come drifting in from as far away as Nigeria.
>The police advise those driving late at night to not stop at red lights
>lest they get carjacked. Johannesburg is far worse, I was told, but Cape
>Town is bad enough, reproducing a kind of apartheid through alienation and
>fear in the midst of beauty and promise.
>It's not like this in Cuba, I remind myself. Cuba: the last outpost of
>socialism, and for all its distortions, the least racist society on earth.
>Yes, I know one can't sustain a claim like that at all levels (the Cuban
>leadership, for example, is very much skewed toward light-skin); but if you
>spend time in Cuba and walk the streets, and observe the face to face
>interaction of everyday life, and see black, brown, yellow and white people
>all together, and sense their openness to outsiders, then you will
>experience what I mean.
>But then look again. Here, too, there have been sightings of the New World
>Order. Reports leak in of street crime, while prostitution is an
>unmistakable fact of Cuba's new/old life. And if the technocrats and the
>international bourgeoisie get their way--and the rest of us remain
>passive--Cuba will get its very own Structural Adjustment Program, too.
>It is cowardly and wrong to insist that these things have to be. The Cuban
>experiment in organic agriculture shows what can be done when human
>ingenuity is applied, free of capitalist strictures, in a desperate
>situation. Is this too much to ask of South Africa? Is it too much to ask
>of us? Please, do not be too hasty with your answer.
>








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