The greatest threat to humanity today is global capitalism and its armed wing, the United States and NATO. Our central short term goal has to be to dismantle the capitalist empire. Some countries have broken at least in part from the empire’s domination and among them is Cuba. For this if no other reason, Cuba requires the utmost in solidarity from progressive and socialist people throughout the world and especially in the US. This has to be the starting point for discussions of the difficulties and problems of the Cuban revolution.
The rulers of the US have been attempting to destroy the Cuban revolution for over half a century, making use of military, diplomatic, economic, clandestine, propaganda, and intellectual means. In the recent period, the US has been especially active in trying to turn progressives against Cuba through critical studies. While some of these are blatant fabrications, others make use of real weaknesses in Cuban society to reject the revolution as one of the great liberating events of the last century. Therefore it is important to distinguish between Cuba bashing and serious examination of the Cuban experience. But how can we tell them apart?
The first criterion is that the starting point for all progressive examination of Cuba is solidarity with the revolution, a stance rooted in anti-imperialism and committed to enabling the Cubans to experiment with building their own besieged socialism. This does not require supporting all the decisions that the Cuban government has made or ignoring deficiencies in Cuban socialism, but it does take as its starting point that Cuba must survive and develop.
Americans have traditionally looked at revolutionary societies from the perspective of their own needs and desires, often the inverses of the mostly deeply felt miseries of our own societies and communities. It colors the nature of our errors.
Error is inevitable in any science and in policy. But it is not enough to acknowledge error. Each community makes errors according to its own place in society. In particular, Cubans and progressive Americans make different sorts of errors in relation to the needs of Cuba. By laying these out on the table, both groups are in a better position to correct these errors and solidarity can go beyond defending Cuba from the siege to a deeper level of collaboration.
For Cubans, with a sense of economic urgency and ongoing threat, the typical errors are errors of pragmatism, of putting aside their long-range goals to alleviate present difficulties, misreading differences of opinion as disruption, and placing such a high priority on unity as to mistrust criticism. A second type of error is the belief that since we now hold state power we can solve social problems such as racism and sexism by legislation alone, undervaluing the continuous battle of ideas. The third is the error of voluntarism, the belief that having done so much, we can do anything.
But American leftists see Cuba as a place to project what they want from the Other World – impatient with the talk of shortages, the blockade, and the ongoing war. Their typical error is utopian, the desire for immediate fulfillment of long term goals and dreams, and the measurement of Cuba against these goals. Following the customs of US pop-political science, they attribute the things they don’t like to the malice of leaders seeking to hold onto power by deluding the people.
Thus critics of Cuba tend to ignore the achievements of the revolution as mere material goods. They do not give much weight to free universal medical care, universal education, support for culture, environmental protection and other long term features of Cuban socialism that are outstanding on a world scale or the major accomplishments in promoting gender and racial equality in order to stress what remains to be accomplished. Discussion of homophobia is more focused on past abuses than on current struggles.
American leftists often set as goals a clean, multiparty electoral system. But are the highest accomplishments of liberal democracy really the way to build a new society? There are no examples of elections transferring power from the capitalist class to the workers and peasants although people’s parties have won elections and government office. But not state power. At best elections have ratified changes won in the streets and in the forests. A new kind of society requires a new kind of system of government. The experience of indigenous communities in Chiapas and Bolivia suggest one way to go based on discussion and consensus. The Occupy movement is in the same tradition. The Cuban and Venezuelan experiments in participatory democracy are steps in that direction, not deficiencies imposed by the enemy.
The attempts to build a new kind of democracy, not just a cleaned up liberalism, is a long and difficult struggle. Rosa Luxemburg warned us that we are trying to build the new with the materials of the old, including ourselves. Capitalist liberal democracy, perhaps dated from the Magna Carta, is still far from attaining its own nominal goals, is not an appropriate goal for socialists, and now is even regressing.
The second criterion is, who is the analysis directed at? If aimed at Cubans it may or may not be well founded but can be part of the process of rectification of errors in a context of solidarity. But aimed at the American left, it works not to rally solidarity with the Cuban people and help them improve the revolution but to alienate their friends, a kind of addition to the blockade.
And finally does it offer a complex whole system analysis that admires the achievements of the Cuban people, feels its failures, and can propose remedies? But if it mostly gloats at a list of grievances, weaknesses, alleged abuses, all glued together by pop poli-sci to “grade” Cuba, then it is part of the counterrevolution.
So: With the revolution everything, against the revolution nothing!
