Date: Wed, 2 Aug 1995 14:34:25 -0400 (EDT)
From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: "State Capitalist" Cuba?


              FACTS ON THE CUBA REVOLUTION

I. Gains in Cuban Well-Being after the revolution:

Availability of Basic Goods and Services per Capita--Cuba 
1958-1978 (1958 = 100)

        Food &
      Beverages   Clothing   Housing   Education   Health

1958     100         100        100       100        100
1962      99          52        107       173        105
1968     102          52        107       173        105
1972     110          90        103       224        120
1974     120          95        103       275        151
1976     123         100        103       363        175
1978     125         100        104       446        202

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

Comments:

1. Decline in clothing figures can be explained by the fact 
that a lot of raw material for the textile industry was 
imported from the US and needed to be replaced by local 
inputs, a structural transformation that was long and 
difficult.

2. Lack of growth in housing is because priority for the 
construction industry was given to building infrastructure, 
schools and industrial plants.

3. Gains in health took place despite the fact that 1 out of 
3 doctors left Cuba in the first 3 years of the revolution. 
The infant mortality rate in Cuba, up until the recent 
economic crisis, was one of the lowest in the developing 
world.

4. The illiteracy rate in Cuba went from 23.6 percent to 3.9 
percent in less than one year. This was corroborated by 
UNESCO and described as a feat unequaled in the history of 
education. In 1979 compulsory schooling embraced 92 percent 
of all children between 6-16 years old, and more than 1/3 of 
the total population was attending some form of school.

II. Confronting racism
Private Schools in Cuba were abolished in 1961. Before 1961, 
roughly 15 percent of grade school students and 30 percent 
of high school students attended private schools which were 
primarily white. This had led to a 2 tier system in which 
under-financed public schools were attended by blacks and 
poorer whites, while the private schools were confined to 
the privileged elite. This is the state of affairs, of 
course, that is emerging in the United States.

After the abolition of private schools, the bulk of Cuban 
students started attending fully integrated schools where 
blacks and whites received equal treatment.

The Cuban revolution also attacked racism in housing. It 
instituted an immediate 50 percent reduction in rent and 
eventually ownership of the houses was granted to the former 
tenants. Thus, more blacks as a percentage of the population 
own their homes in Cuba than in any country in the world 
according to Lourdes Casal ("The Position of Blacks in 
Brazilian and Cuba Society", Minority Rights Group Report 
No. 7, pp. 11-27)

III. Gains for Women
Getting women out of the home to join men as equal partners 
in the work-force has been a real challenge to the woman's 
movement historically. How has the Cuban revolution fared?

Before 1953 and 1974, there was a 14.1 percent increase in 
the number of salaried women in the national work force. 
Even more significant were the changes in the kind of work 
women did. In 1953 domestic work represented 25 percent of 
the total female work force, but by 1970 this occupational 
category had disappeared.

Another change involved the elimination of underage women in 
the work-force. In 1953, women ten to fourteen years old 
represented 10.9 percent of the work-force, but by 1970 
nearly no women workers could be found in this age category.

Finally, certain sectors of industry, which had been 
traditionally closed to women before the revolution now saw 
the highest percentage of female employment, including 
textiles, beverages, tobacco, chemicals, food and graphic 
arts. So reports Max Azicri in "International Journal of 
Women's Studies", Vol. 2, No. 1 (1981).

IV. Conclusion
Behind these stark statistics is the living reality of 
positive change in the lives of poor Cubans after the 
revolution. It explains their defeat of the gusano army and 
their US backers at the Bay of Pigs. It also explains their 
willingness to put up with the difficulties of life under 
embargo and economic crisis.

This progress was made at the expense of the rich and many 
middle-class Cubans. The Cuban revolution followed, in other 
words, the opposite trajectory of the "trickle-down" 
policies of recent US administrations such as Reagan, Bush 
and Clinton. Resources in Cuba were diverted from the cities 
into the impoverished countryside. The Cubans who did not 
want to make a sacrifice in the name of social justice fled 
to Miami.

Cuba's experiment in socialism may or may not survive the US 
embargo, the end of Soviet support, or the current economic 
crisis, which affects not only Cuba but every developing, 
agriculture-based country. But whatever the eventual fate, 
the model that has existed will continue to inspire Latin 
Americas for generations to come.

People like Richard Greeman can only exist in the insular world of 
left-wing sects or academia. He can portray Cuba as "capitalist" while 
receiving the approving nods of co-thinking sectarians or pedagogues. I 
defy the good professor to name another "capitalist" country in Latin 
America that made as much progress as Cuba in as short a time. The reason 
Washington has been so eager to stamp out revolutionary Cuba is that it 
knows better than schema-concocting academics where its real class 
interests lie. I have never seen much reason to glance at "Rethinking 
Marxism". With rot like yours now featured in it, I see even less reason.


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