Cuba’s Democratic Left

from Dissent magazine:


Cuba’s Democratic Left
James Bloodworth ▪ August 17, 2015


Notwithstanding the predictable fury on the Republican far right, Barack Obama’s recent overtures to the Cuban government—the president has announced overhauls to travel, commerce, and internet restrictions as well as a mutual opening of embassies—have been welcomed by everyone from the editors of the Economist to Noam Chomsky. Even among those who remain implacably hostile to Cuba’s Communist dictatorship, there is a sense that a change in tack is required; half a century of belligerence from its northern neighbor has made Cuba neither prosperous nor democratic. Indeed the opposite is arguably true: the economic embargo has provided the Castro government with a ready excuse for economic failure and the restriction of civil liberties.

Fittingly, considering the embargo was always more about protecting the profits of American corporations than safeguarding human rights, the thawing in relations between the United States and Cuba comes at a time when the latter appears to be inching towards capitalism. Since Raúl Castro succeeded his brother Fidel in 2008, restrictions on private business have been relaxed and large numbers of state workers have been laid off. In 2010 less than 15 percent of Cubans worked in the non-state sector of the economy, but the government aims to increase that figure to 40 percent by 2016. Meanwhile the Cuban government has eliminated the upper limits on government salaries and allowed Cubans to take out business loans from the state bank, buy and sell houses and cars, and register as self-employed.

Yet while economic reforms have been gathering pace, the apparatus of the one-party state remains much the same. As the Cuban-American scholar Samuel Farber has written, since Raúl Castro assumed the Cuban presidency, he has “taken a number of measures that he claims will improve the economy, while the key institutions of the one-party state that control the country’s economy remain fundamentally unaltered.” Reforms are being enacted with the stated aim of “updating” rather than abolishing socialism—socialism in this instance being of the top-down Stalinist variety rather than of an independent and emancipated working class.

Outside of Cuba, much of the debate around the future of the island’s political system hangs on a misleading binary: that Cuba must surrender to American capitalism or remain poor and adrift under the Stalinist system. The third option—apparently favored by Raúl Castro—is a hybrid of the two along the lines of the Chinese or Vietnamese model of state capitalism and political dictatorship. ...............(more)

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/cuba-democratic-left-opposition-today