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The Cuban Crisis and the Future of the Revolution: A Latin American Perspective
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CUBA, LA RESTRUCTURACION ECONOMICA: UNA PROPUESTA PARA EL DEBATE. By ValdésJulio Carranza, UrdanetaLuis Gutiérrez, and GonzálezPedro Monreal. (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1995. Pp. 211.)
LA DEMOCRACIA EN CUBA Y EL DIFERENDO CON LOS ESTADOS UNIDOS. Edited by DillaHaroldo. (Havana: Centro de Estudios de América, 1995. Pp. 215.)
CUBA EN CRISIS: PERSPECTIVAS ECONOMICAS Y POLITICAS. Compiled by BeruffJorge Rodríguez. (San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1995. Pp. 218.)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2022
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Footnotes
∗
I should like to thank Steve Ellner for his comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
References
Notes
1. Apart from the evidence of the texts analyzed in this review, the recent numbers of some of the more important Cuban academic journals offer eloquent testimony. See recent issues of Cuadernos de Nuestra América, Economía y Desarrollo, and Temas.
2. The tendency of Cuban academics in the mid-1980s to view the academic production on Cuba published in the United States as little more than propaganda at the service of the Reagan administration is clearly reflected in the pages of the journal Temas de Economía Mundial. Number 7 (1983) included an article by José Luis Rodríguez entitled “La llamada cubanología y el desarrollo económico de Cuba,” in which this paranoia was so evident that the journal eventually published an article by Carmelo Mesa-Lago responding to the personal accusations (see no. 15, 1985). In the following issue (no. 16, 1985), the brief response offered by Rodríguez indicated that the lack of communication had hardly diminished. During this same period, the journal published an article written by Swedish analyst Claes Brundenius (no. 11, 1984), which advanced an analysis of Cuban economic performance notably more favorable than in most of the literature published in the United States. Yet the opening to Brundenius (and his U.S. coauthor Andrew Zimbalist) followed more a military logic designed to weaken the enemy than any interest in opening up a space for genuine debate.
3. The lack of dialogue between Cubans and their Latin American colleagues cannot be attributed simply to the increasing reluctance of the Cubans to debate. In the 1960s, beyond the texts reproduced by the Cuban government, the materials available in Spanish that could have nourished a critical debate were almost all translations of English- or French-speaking authors, most of them Marxists from the developed capitalist countries (such as Jean Paul Sartre, Leo Huberman, Paul Sweezy, K. S. Karol, René Dumont, and Régis Debray). From the early 1970s on, some erstwhile supporters broke with the revolution (as did Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa as a result of the so-called Padilla case). But the majority combined continuing solidarity with a notable reluctance to discuss in public the growing reservations of many as the regime adopted reforms increasingly inspired by the Soviet model. Even those most radically critical of the Soviet system, such as the Trotskyists, generally preferred not to emphasize their doubts about the Cuban regime. The result was a meager body of literature on the Cuban Revolution by Latin Americans. The bibliography available in Caracas illustrates this situation. See Dick Parker, La Revolución Cubana, Serie Bibliográfica no. 1, Fondo Bibliográfico sobre América Latina: Ciencias Sociales (Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela and the Biblioteca Nacional, 1996), pp. xxxix, 168.
4. Theoretical discussion was truncated because any doubts over the official Marxist-Leninist ideology could be interpreted as a deliberate questioning of a key source of legitimation for the existing order. Cuban Marxists did not even participate in the debates that preoccupied their Marxist colleagues in the rest of Latin America because the discussion was at least implicitly rooted in a rejection of a Soviet orthodoxy that had molded most of the recent generation of Cuban intellectuals and was firmly ensconced in official circles. Meanwhile, many Cuban academics tended to eschew theoretical considerations, often covering themselves with perfunctory references to the Marxist classics, one or another Soviet specialist, and (almost inevitably) Fidel Castro. Where the Soviet academic hierarchy had already assimilated a politically conservative theoretical tradition dominant in the West (as in psychology), an instrumental behaviorism could be justified in the name of Pavlov, or political and sociological studies could be presented as examples of a “systemic approach,” as if it were a modern equivalent of the Marxist concept of “totality.” For a more detailed analysis of this problem, see Dick Parker, “El proceso de rectificación y su impacto en las ciencias sociales cubanas,” paper presented to the Congreso of the Asociación Latinoamericana de Sociología, Caracas, 9–13 May 1993.
5. Raúl Castro, interview in El Sol, reproduced in Granma, 23 Apr. 1993, p. 1.
6. See The Fractured Blockade: West European-Cuban Relations during the Revolution, edited by Alistair Hennessy and George Lambie (London: Macmillan, 1993).
7. The literature on the various Cuban communities abroad merits a review article in its own right. Special mention should be made of José Cobas and Jorge Duany, Los cubanos en Puerto Rico: Economía étnica e identidad cultural (San Juan: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1995).
8. Although Robinson does not mention it, the most explicit recognition of the U.S. Right's debt to Gramsci is to be found in the Santa Fe Documents.
9. Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 13.
10. Carl Gershman, “The United States and the World Democratic Revolution,” Washington Quarterly 12, no. 1 (Winter 1989):127-39, 129.
11. Michael A. Samuels and William A. Douglas, “Promoting Democracy,” Washington Quarterly 4, no. 3 (1981):52-65, 52–53.
12. Although the Cubans may not be aware of it, their attitude is basically that of the youthful Haya de la Torre, who in the 1920s was the first Latin American to argue that “the only effective instrument for fighting against imperialism is a party that draws into its ranks all the classes threatened by imperialism and organizes them scientifically, not on the terms of bourgeois democracy but by means of a functional or economic democracy that is class-based.” See Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre, El antimperialismo y el APRA (Caracas: Centauro, 1976), 240.
13. Valdés examines the political system in general and imagines as one possible scenario “a really representative state based on the separation of powers … without an official state ideology, as decentralized as possible and depersonalized” (p. 115).
14. The results of this research are summarized in the article Dilla coauthored with Gerardo González and Ana Teresa Vicentelli, “Participación y desarrollo en los municipios cubanos,” in the volume edited by Rodríguez Beruff. See also Dilla's article on Cuban unions in the same volume.
15. The most illuminating discussion of this point is to be found in Pedro Monreal and Manuel Rúa's “Apertura y reforma de la economía cubana: Las transformaciones institucionales (1990-1993),” Cuadernos de Nuestra América (Havana), no. 21 (Jan.–June 1994):159–81 (reprinted in the Hoffmann volume).
16. It must be emphasized nevertheless that these controversial proposals are presented within the context of a basic national consensus on the need to preserve “the achievements of the Revolution”: universal and free access to health and education and to the social security system. Furthermore, the authors insist on the desirability of avoiding marked disparities in the distribution of income and wealth, improving the mechanisms of representative and participatory democracy (particularly at the regional and local levels), and strengthening the unions and other social organizations whose central function is to defend the interests of their members.
17. Carranza, Gutiérrez, and Monreal argue that the identification of a sector dedicated to producing “goods and services for incentivization” makes sense only in a society like Cuba. They recognize that its precise limits may well be difficult to define and could vary over time. They nevertheless stress the importance of a deliberate policy designed to guarantee the availability of such goods, beyond the satisfaction of basic consumer needs.
18. For an evaluation of the different dimensions of the problem that covers the experience until late 1994, see Dick Parker, “La apertura al capital extranjero en Cuba: ¿Hacia dónde lleva a la Revolución?” Revista Venezolana de Economía y Ciencias Sociales (Caracas), nos. 2–3, (Apr.–Sept. 1995):49–67.
19. Given Cuba's relative lack of previous experience, the complaints about excessive bureaucratism in the negotiations appear largely misplaced. The Cuban authorities seem to have considered that in such circumstances, the possibility of attracting foreign investors without abandoning the socialist priorities of the revolution called for a detailed negotiation of each agreement and progressive accumulation of experience that would enable it later on to elaborate a series of administrative and legal norms.
20. Carlos Lage, as quoted by Lessmann (p. 94). The new Ley de Inversión Extranjera (5-9-1995) confirms the importance of this state agency.
21. “Informe del Buro Político sobre la situación política y social del país y la correspondiente labor del Partido …,” Granma Internacional, 10 Apr. 1996, p. 7.
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