Cuban-styled Socialism

[Louis N Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is the first of a series of posts that examines the political economy
of revolutionary Cuba. Originally intended as an reply to the state
capitalists on the list, it will soon be obvious that I am now more
interested in the general question of how to tell whether a country is
socialist or not. It doesn't get much more basic than that. Much
information will be drawn from James O'Connor's superb "Origins of
Socialism in Cuba" written in 1968, and available from Monthly
Review Press in New York. I will also discuss some of the ideas of Che
Guevara on socialist development written at the time of his deep
involvement with state planning in Cuba. This was prior to his
untimely death in Bolivia.

In this opening post, I will review what Cuba looked like under
Fulgencio Batista, the dictator who Castro toppled. The social and
economic contradictions of the island then were typical of nearly all
Latin American countries that had been exploited historically by
imperialism.

The Cuban economy was based on export agriculture. The main crop
was sugar, followed by tobacco, cattle and coffee. Agricultural
resources were underutilized. For the hacienda owner, this was no
problem. It might mean spending January through March in the US or
Europe, shopping or attending the opera. For the farm worker, this
meant unemployment and suffering. In 1954, for instance, Cuba's
424,000 agricultural wage earners averaged only 123 days of work;
farm owners, tenants and sharecroppers also fared poorly, averaging
only 135 days of employment.

Unemployment led to all sorts of hardship. 43% of the rural
population was illiterate. 60% lived in huts with earth floors and
thatched roofs. 2/3 lived without running water and only 1 out of 14
families had electricity. Daily nutrition was terrible. Only 4% of rural
families ate meat regularly. Most subsisted on rice, beans and root
crops. Bad diet and housing caused bad health. 13% of the population
had a history of typhoid, 14% tuberculosis and over 1/3 intestinal
parasites.

The main cause of backwardness in the countryside was the cartel
nature of agriculture, particularly the sugar industry. A production
quota was assigned to each cane grower, based on figures originating
>from 1937. The quota was subdivided into 2 export quotas, one for the US
and one for the rest of the world, and 1 quota for special reserves. The
reserve quota was a major problem since it caused over 1/5 of Cuban
land to lay idle.

The quota system also fostered inefficiency and prevented the rational
use of agricultural resources. Primarily, it inflated costs and
discouraged new investments. Seen superficially, the goal of modernizing
and rationalizing agriculture was not "socialist". Any capitalist reformer
could have taken a look at Cuba and said that capitalism needed to be
unleashed in order for the economy to develop. The cartel structure
should have been smashed and productive agricultural practices
encouraged.

It was actually Fulgencio Batista's desire to reform the Cuban economy
which motivated his seizure of power and many of his policies in the
1950s. He created public "New Deal" types of agencies to foster
agricultural development. Included was the Agriculture and Industrial
Development Bank, organized in 1951 to provide cheap credit to
Cuba's farmers and home industry. The Cuban Bank for Foreign
Commerce was established in 1954 in order to finance Cuban exports,
especially coffee.

These institutions and the rhetoric that accompanied their formation
had an unexpected impact on the consciousness of the Cuban people.
They conditioned the people to accept a more "activist" type of
government and raised expectations of rural society. It was this change
in consciousness that paved the way for the Cuban revolution,
especially when Batista failed to deliver what he had promised.

What accounted for this failure?

It can be primarily explained as the inability of capitalism to provide
rapid development in a neocolonial society, no matter what the
intentions are of reformist regimes. In Cuba, this meant that Batista
could not break the power of the cartels, which exercised political
power. It also meant that specialization in export commodities gave
the Cuban economy a distorted aspect. Land and labor were utilized
poorly. A mixed agriculture could lift the technical skills of the
workforce, but a plantation economy based on sugar cane condemned
rural Cuba to backwardness.

In addition to the straitjacket imposed on production by the Cuban
bourgeoisie, there was the additional penalty paid by Cuba's
dependence on the United States. The volume of sugar that entered the
United States was set by the US Congress and subject to the whims of
the American economy. Cuba needed economic independence but
there was no motivation for the native ruling classes to fight for it.

One other particular feature of the Cuban political economy which
fueled the revolutionary movement of the 1950s was the widespread
corruption. The excellent "Godfather Part II" dramatized this state of
affairs and, if anything, understated the degree of corruption. In higher
circles of the public economy, graft accounted for about 1/4 of state
expenditures. A high official of the Batista regime stated, "In the years
preceding the revolution, the average amount of graft in public works
(alone) cost as much as the works themselves." Corruption, it should
be added, was wiped out by the revolutionary government in a couple
of months.

If capitalism had been condemning Cuba to backwardness, what hopes
could be placed in the working-class, the historical agent of social
transformation. Jorn Andersen, quoting the bourgeois journalist K.S.
Karol, commented that the revolution did not involve the working-
class. I will have much more to say about this in a subsequent post, but
it is important at this point to take a cold, clinical view of the state of
the organized labor movement in Cuba in the 1950s.

The leaders of Cuba's most powerful unions owed their position not
only to the ranks, but to the political bosses who ran the country. They
also had developed a relationship to Batista that was decidedly non-
confrontational. Batista actually had a "pro-labor" policy not too
unlike Peron's in Argentina. He supported a compulsory check-off of
dues in 1955. Strikes with narrow economic aims were almost
invariably won by labor. In 1958, a bad year for the island economy,
four thousand telecommunications workers got wage increases ranging
>from $15 to $35 monthly, and the oil workers received raises ranging
>from 7 to 13 percent. Racist hiring practices were also widespread in
Cuban industry and the unions did little to fight them.

It was necessary for a revolutionary government to introduce a more
rational method of wages and labor classification. The "aristocracy" of
labor in Cuba had no intrinsic interests in these types of changes and
was lukewarm to the more thoroughgoing anticapitalist aspects of the
revolution. They would of course prefer to see an end to the Batista
dictatorship, but looked forward to nothing more than melioration
within a capitalist framework. When the July 26th Movement took
strong measures to overturn the traditional role of labor in Cuban
society, some sectors of the left interpreted this as simply a means of
consolidating political control by the Castro "dictatorship".

The reality, however, was that elimination of, for example, double
time pay on the Cuban waterfront was absolutely necessary for the
economy to move forward. In tobacco manufacturing, new work norms
shocked the existing factories. In one plant, employment was reduced
by 20% as superfluous workers were sent to technical schools of one
sort of another. Casual and part-time employment was eliminated,
however, thereby raising the income of non-privileged workers. To
approach the Cuban revolution from a narrow economistic or trade
union perspective is a big mistake.

In my next post, I will explain how the Castro government instituted a
series of structural economic changes that resolved many of the long-
standing weaknesses of the economy. These changes must be
understood in class terms. While Batista and Castro both stressed
"development", it will be obvious that Castro's path followed an
entirely class dynamic.


Louis Proyect



     --- from list marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---