[Marxism] Tom Hayden interviews Ricardo Alarcon: "A Top Cuban Leader Thinks Out Loud"

["Walter Lippmann" <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(Tom Hayden is one of the very small number of left activists
from the sixties who won elective office and never lost it.

(Tom Hayden was profiled in the Cuban daily JUVENTUD REBELDE 
at the time of his visit to Cuba earlier this year at the time
of this interview: http://www.walterlippmann.com/docs694.html)
 =============================================================

A Top Cuban Leader Thinks Out Loud
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060829_tom_hayden_alarcon/
Posted on Aug 29, 2006
By Tom Hayden

?Let?s try to imagine what Karl Marx would be doing today.?

It was Sunday, May 21st, and my host posing the question was Ricardo
Alarcon, president of the Cuban National Assembly. It was Alarcon?s
69th birthday, and I was having difficulty understanding why he had
pressed me to fly down for a visit. The purpose was nothing more than
?two old guys talking,? according to his daughter Maggie, a
thirty-something single mom and formidable interpreter of Cuba to
many North Americans.

Looking back today, I don?t know whether or not Alarcon already knew
that his longtime comrade Fidel was diagnosed as needing serious
surgery. The question would become a ?state secret,? at Castro?s
wish. Alarcon is third in line to succeed Fidel after Raul Castro,
although it is more likely Alarcon will blend into a collective
transitional team.

The prospect of three days? conversation with Ricardo Alarcon
reflecting on his long revolutionary experience was too important to
put off, and our interviews may be of greater value during the
current rampant and reckless speculation over Fidel?s status. Few
individuals alive have the range of Alarcon?s experience, from being
a Havana student leader during the Cuban Revolution to Cuba?s United
Nations ambassador (1965-78 and 1990-92) to foreign minister
(1992-93) and National Assembly president since 1993. And so we sat
at a seaside restaurant on his birthday with daughter Maggie and his
advisor, Miguel Alvarez. A Venezuelan cargo ship passed just
offshore.

?I think Marx would be asking what are we doing about all the
millions today who are protesting for peace and justice,? said
Alarcon in answer to his question. In a recent essay on ?Marx After
Marxism? he argued that Marxists should begin to see the world anew.
Scoffing at neoconservatives who embrace the end of Marxism (and the
end of history itself), Alarcon also emphasizes the need for
?self-critical reflection on our side as well.? In effect, he is
proposing a return to the original spirit of Marx before the
20th-century revolutions in his name. That original Marx organized an
early transnational labor movement, with the central demand the
eight-hour day, and wrote more theoretical works on 19th-century
capitalism. According to Alarcon, that earlier Marx never meant a
science-based, inevitable march to socialism based on some objective
truth revealed through communist parties. That Marx was a practical
revolutionary who himself famously declared ?with all naturalness,?
Alarcon points out, ?I am not a Marxist.?

For Alarcon and the Cubans, history always has been contingent,
subject to human will and unexpected developments, rather than an
unfolding of the inevitable. After Cuba?s decades of dependency on
the Soviet Union during the Cold War, which caused a degree of
?subordination? to Soviet interests and ?reinforced dogmatism,?
Alarcon calls for active exploration of new trends in global
capitalism and its oppositional movements. ?Old dogmatists are
incapable of appreciating new possibilities in the revolutionary
movement,? he says.

All the talk of the United States becoming a sole superpower ?falls
to pieces with its bogging down in Iraq? and the derailment of its
neo-liberal agenda for Latin America, Alarcon believes.

He identifies new obstacles facing capitalist growth. Every 25 years
a population equivalent to the whole planet?s numbers in Marx?s time
is born. Alarcon believes climate changes are irreversible, forests
are being transformed into deserts, cities becoming uninhabitable
and, as a result, an environmental challenge to capitalism has arisen
which requires rethinking of Marxist political economy.

Alarcon revises the Marxist (and Leninist) conceptions of the
19th-century proletariat accordingly. Today there are growing numbers
of those from different stations of life ?who do not conform, are
unsatisfied and rebel.? ?For the first time, anti-capitalist malaise
is manifested, simultaneously and everywhere, in advanced countries
and those left behind, and is not limited to the proletariat and
other exploited sectors.? And so ?a diverse group, multicolored, in
which there is no shortage of contradictions and paradoxes, grows in
front of the dominant system.?

?It is not yet the rainbow that announces the end of the storm,?
Alarcon says, warning that the diverse movements lack a common
theory, are marked by spontaneity more often than organization, and
need to develop further without either sectarian factionalism or
becoming carried away.

He pauses, points an index finger for emphasis, and tells me ?the
most important task for the Latin American left? is to reelect
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil. Having met with
leftists highly critical of fiscal moderation in power, Alarcon says
that ?notwithstanding his faults, if Lula is defeated, all of Latin
America will be worse off.? This advice may not sit well with some
radical advocates of Latin American revolution, but Alarcon takes a
longer view. The recent nationalist electoral wave in Latin
America?Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Uruguay, Chile, and a
near-success in Mexico?inevitably brings dilemmas of governance to
the forefront. But for Alarcon and Cuba, the overall changes in Latin
America further a benign result, the full integration of Cuba into
Latin America after decades of Cold War antagonisms. The permanent
embargo by the United States makes the Cubans especially wary of any
reversals in the continental process, as the defeat of Lula in the
Oct. 1 election would represent.

Alarcon is pragmatic. He believes in the Cuban philosophy that ?the
duty of the revolutionary is to make the revolution,? that it must be
a ?heroic creation.? But he is aware, perhaps painfully, that
revolutions cannot be ?imprinted or copied? and that the ?mandates?
of mass movements like those that have elected Lula must be
respected. ?There is no alternative in Brazil. The guys who were mad
at me for saying this went to meet with the landless movement
representatives in Brazil, and they told them the same thing.?

Continuing at a dinner conversation, Alarcon opined that there should
be ?many forms of socialism,? depending on the needs of different
countries and movements. Even the social-democratic parties, the
historical rivals of the European communist parties, have an
important role to play today, he said. ?I hope they go through the
same sort of introspection we have,? Alarcon said, referring to the
tendency of the moderate socialist parties to cut social programs and
?tail? after U.S. military and economic policies. ?I would go
further,? he said. ?I don?t believe that capitalism cannot be
reformed. The Great Society in your country is an example.?

Alarcon seems to be hinting at a role for revolutionaries in shaping
a clear alternative to global neo-liberalism, one pushed in the
streets by social movements and eventually resulting in a reform of
capitalism like the New Deal on a global basis. Differing with some
earlier views of Third World liberation, he sees a crucial role for
activists and movements inside the North American colossus itself.
Whereas earlier Marxists argued that unionized workers were a
?privileged aristocracy? benefiting from the exploitation of the
Third World, he says, ?they are not any longer an aristocracy. If you
go to North American workers and tell them they are an aristocracy,
they will say you are crazy.? He points to the 1999 Seattle protests
against the World Trade Organization, in which labor called for
?workers of the world to unite.? Marx, he says, would be ?very
interested in North American workers losing jobs to India? and what
that means for workers? movements.

His point is that ?the Third World [now] penetrates the First, as
dramatically illustrated by the current immigration controversies,
rooted as they are in the historic patterns of capitalism needing
cheap labor and resources and impoverished workers needing jobs. The
Empire harvests its own internal opposition from the May Day 2006
immigrant marches inside the U.S. to the growth of Islamic rage
inside the ghettos of east London or housing projects on the edge of
Paris.

?To free the immigrants from their exploitation becomes essential to
the emancipation of the workers in the developed countries,? those
who are undermined by cheap immigrant labor. ?One must help these two
[groups of workers] to converge,? both to avoid an upsurge of racism
and forge the basis of majority coalitions favoring reforms like a
global living wage as the alternative to neo-liberalism?s notorious
?race to the bottom.?

What is interesting about these words of a top Cuban leader, spoken
freely and without reserve, is how far they diverge from the
stereotypes of Cuba as a gray, thought-controlled Marxist
dictatorship. Cuba is not a free society by measurements like
multiple parties, but Cuba?s people, from Alarcon to the
neighborhoods, are more conversant about trends in the United States
than Americans are about Cuba. The ever-tightening U.S. embargo has
boomeranged into a dangerous narrowing of American thinking,
demonstrated in recent weeks by one hallucination after another. For
example, Sen. Mel Martinez, a Florida Republican, was seen on
television several weeks ago opining that Fidel was already dead. The
streets of Miami filled with cheering Cuban exiles with no way to
influence the island. According to the Los Angeles Times, the ?most
obvious interest [in Castro?s passing] comes from the gambling and
tourist industries,? which were run off the island in 1960 [July 6,
2006]. One Florida-based developer?s master plan envisions ?moving
out all Cubans currently living in Havana? and replacing them with
Miami exiles. The U.S. government is constantly updating its official
?transition plan? to restore both free markets and the Miami exiles,
with the emphasis on ?disruption of an orderly succession strategy,?
according to the Congressional Research Service [Aug. 23, 2005].
Eighty million U.S. dollars was recently budgeted to support Cuba?s
opposition groups. ?There are no plans to reach out,? declared White
House spokesman Tony Snow after Fidel was hospitalized [Miami Herald,
Aug. 2, 2006].

The notion of opening a dialogue with an accomplished diplomat like
Ricardo Alarcon is completely out of the question. The Helms-Burton
Act forbids any negotiation or loosening of the embargo if Raul
Castro remains in power after Fidel.

Voices of realism like the head of the Organization of American
States (OAS), Jose Miguel Insulza, say ?there?s no transition, and
it?s not your country? to prepare a transition for [Reuters, May 23,
2006]. ?It just drives the Bush people crazy,? says one former
diplomat, referring to the fact that Cuba hasn?t collapsed in accord
with neoconservative wishful thinking.

The fact is that Cubans will not rise up to welcome a mass influx of
mostly white, revenge-oriented exiles from Miami backed by U.S. arms.
The neocon analogy with the so-called ?captive nations? of Eastern
Europe doesn?t fit. Despite all the Cuban people?s legitimate
criticisms of their government, it remains their government and they
will not trade it for a U.S.-installed one. However they complain,
Cubans have become more socialist in everyday life than many of them
realize, as seen in their common acts of solidarity, their response
to the Elian Gonzales showdown, their educational achievements, their
healthcare and their social safety nets. They hardly lack for world
support and, in Venezuela, have found a solid source of oil and a
continental opportunity for their legions of doctors and teachers.
[?In the 60s, we only had a revolutionary ideology to export, but now
we have valuable human capital,? one Cuban intellectual told me.]

A persistent interest of mine is why Cuba seems to be the only
country in the world without street gangs. There certainly is a black
market in contraband goods, but nothing like the pandilleras found
everywhere else in the Americas. Part of the reason is an
extraordinary network of 28,000 social workers who persistently act
on the belief that ?some morality remains in everyone,? as opposed to
the ?super-predator? theories popular among the neoconservatives.

It seems evident that the Cuban people want reform of their socialist
state if and when Fidel passes on, and obviously not the ?regime
change? anticipated by the Miami Cubans and their Washington, D.C.,
patrons. They want a peaceful process controlled by Cubans, not by
foreign powers. Who wouldn?t? The question is whether the United
States government has an interest in normalizing relations with a
better, more democratic, more open but still socialist Cuba. Sadly,
it is doubtful, because such a Cuba would be a triumphant example to
Latin America and the world. And so the United States, along with
Miami?s Cubans?the armed and aggressive state within a state on
American soil?hold out against the 182 nations of the world who
condemn the embargo at the United Nations. In fact, our government is
holding out against the desires of many of its own capitalists who
hunger to invest in Cuba; even The Wall Street Journal has
editorialized for repeal of the 1996 Helms-Burton Act [WSJ, Aug. 2,
2006]. A walk through Old Havana reveals some 20 new hotels and 65
restaurants, none with American investors.

Meanwhile, Ricardo Alarcon waits. He has negotiated with the United
States before, in secret, during the Clinton era. He managed the
Elian Gonzales crisis with aplomb. He is overseeing the case of the
Cuban Five?men imprisoned in the U.S. for surveilling Miami-based
exiles trying to bomb and sabotage Cuba. Alarcon is an experienced
man of this world, one who could facilitate a normalization deal with
the United States if ever one was on offer.

Instead, he sits for hours with the likes of me discussing the state
of the revolution which he helped start over 50 years ago. He takes
care of an invalid wife. He plays with his grandchild, Ricardito. He
goes to dinner with a never-ending stream of visitors. He patiently
answers reporters. He runs the domestic affairs of the National
Assembly. He flies to international conferences.

He even finds time to read ?The Port Huron Statement? line for line
in English, with an updated foreword titled ?The Way We Were? (in
Spanish, he says, ?como eramos?). He also reads a book of mine on
religion and the environment, ?The Lost Gospel of the Earth.? He did
so, apparently, to prepare himself for a documentary interview for
Cuba?s historical archives. When the morning of the interview
arrives, he is perfectly ready to ask questions comparing Vietnam
with Iraq, Chicago 1968 versus Seattle 1999, or issues of
environmental spirituality, without stumbling once in English. When
the interview is complete, our several days together have ended as
well. ?Sorry, but I have to go back to government business,? he
apologizes, and with a hasta luego returns to his daily rounds. I
miss him as he drives off. Maybe he knew of Fidel?s diagnosis that
day, maybe not.

I flew back to Los Angeles that afternoon, carrying the strange
feeling that America has embargoed itself from a Cuba that it refuses
to recognize. In the weeks following Fidel?s surgery, according to
friends who spent 10 days on the island, Cuba remains quiet, stable
and alert. A transition definitely seems underway, but U.S. officials
may be the last to know of it.


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