{"id":764,"date":"2019-03-05T14:35:02","date_gmt":"2019-03-05T14:35:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wsm.prolerat.org\/?page_id=764"},"modified":"2019-10-20T12:31:28","modified_gmt":"2019-10-20T11:31:28","slug":"cuba-no-workers-paradise","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/cuba-no-workers-paradise\/","title":{"rendered":"Cuba: No workers paradise"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
October 2003, U.K.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
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\nLeftist fantasies exposed.<\/em>\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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The scene is typical: the dog-end of a trade union branch meeting; \nmembers are tired after discussing complex pay and discipline issues; \ntired from listening to the hyper-activists glorying in the sound of \ntheir own voices; desperate to escape. Item 9 on the agenda of the \nhour-long meeting is expenses for a delegate to the Cuba Solidarity \nCampaign meeting. Exhausted hands fly up to approve the monies, without \ndebate, voting as much for escape as for sanction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nCuba has become a cause celebre amongst many on the left. For example, \nMichael Albert of Z-Magazine\nin the USA had to give a rearguard defence of his criticisms of Cuba’s \ndecision to murder a number of hijackers (his critics themselves being \nactivists and opponents of state-murder in the US); anarchist superstar \nNoam Chomsky warmly supports Cuba’s defiance of the US, staying \nstoically silent on Cuba’s internal regime, save that it is a matter for\n Cubans themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nIn European literature, Utopia was always supposed to be an imaginary \nfar-flung Island in uncharted seas like the Caribbean; now, it seems, it\n is a very real island in perfectly well-charted waters for a good \nmajority of the left \u2014 even if those are waters that have been well \nsailed by the USSR and its sundry fellow travellers. This misty eyed \nrespect for Cuba would not be so worrying were it confined to the dying \nranks of Tankie Stalinists; however, its tendrils reach well beyond \nthem. Like Chomsky, many take an anti-American reflex and root for the \nunderdog versus the hyperpower: excusing the repressive parts of \nCastro’s regime as mistakes, or excesses of siege warfare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nThis is a siege that has been going on for a very long time. Castro’s \nguerrillas emerged from the hills in 1959 to drive away the US-backed \nkleptocrat dictator Batista. What began as a simple nationalist movement\n was quickly driven into the \u201cCommunist\u201d camp by the hostility of the \nAmerican government. The new regime weathered numerous attempts to \ndisplace it, including Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs invasion, and miscellaneous\n attempts by the CIA to assassinate Castro.  Simultaneously, the former \nguerrillas declared for \u201cCommunism\u201d, and abandoned dreams of national \nautarky by becoming a sugar plantation for the USSR rather than the US. \n(See Socialist Standard, April 1984).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nThe US has never been able to forgive the expropriation of its \nmillionaires by Castro’s party, and has maintained its siege ever since.\n For its part, the Castro regime has proven remarkably resilient (to the\n point at which American planners are now taking the ‘biological \nresolution’, i.e. Castro’s death from old age, as the most likely way \nfor them to advance their cause). In that time, the regime has \nmaintained a tight control over the economy. At times, this has meant a \nheavy bureaucratic hand, requiring strings of permits to produce, \ndistribute and export or import goods.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nNone of this has abolished the commodity nature of production, nor the \nwages system. A fact starkly illustrated by the collapse of the Soviet \nUnion, and the loss of Cuba’s export markets as well as the convenient \nsupply of oil for industrial purposes. The economy underwent serious \nrecession, from which it has yet to fully recover. Since then, the \ngovernment has been trying to re-orientate the economy towards tourism \nto bring in essential foreign currency. This has led to a situation in \nwhich goods are produced solely to be consumed by tourists in their \nenclaves which are denied the Cuban workers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
 The continued existence of the wages system has meant the need for  measures to impose labour discipline. The Cuban state only recognises  one trade union federation, Central de Trabajadores Cubanos (CTC). This  consists of unions entirely dominated by the ruling Communist Party,  wherein officers are vetted (not just by their present affiliations, but  on a documentary of their entire lives going back to their school  records) before they are allowed to take up posts. Whilst independent  trade unions are not entirely illegal, their existence is subject to  repressive controls and harassment, beginning with the Associations Act  (Leyes de Asociaciones) and escalating to the generally repressive  political order laws. .<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nAs Amnesty International notes, in the past few years, the numbers of \nlong term political dissidents imprisoned has fallen; but this is \ncounter-posed by an increase in short-run harassment techniques, like \narrest without trial, breaking up of meetings, threats of eviction, etc.\n According to the ICFTU (an organisation which the British TUC is \naffiliated to) in the early months of this year over 78 union activists \nhad been targeted by the Cuban state. One, for example, was arrested for\n attempting to resist a state organised eviction of a family.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
 Although Cuba nominally has 100 percent post-16 suffrage, this is  restricted to candidates approved by the Committee for the Defence of  the Revolution. Likewise, a plethora of laws make free criticism and  electoral organisation impossible: Article 144(17) of the criminal code  prohibits disrespect to authority; Articles 200-201 preventing the  spread and cause of panic and disorder have been used to imprison people  publicly voicing criticisms; Article 103 prohibits ‘enemy propaganda’  which is interpreted as anyone inciting criticism of the Cuban system  and its international allies; Article 203 criminalises disrespect to the  flag and symbols of the regime; Article 115 prevents the dissemination  of ‘false news against international peace’; and the piece de r\u00e9sistance  is articles 72-74 which forbid anything ‘dangerous’, which can be  anything the police and courts decide are so (www.amnesty.org<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nThis battery of laws amounts to an arsenal fit to stop any independent \nthought and organisation, and amounts to a capacity to arrest anyone the\n state doesn’t like, any time they want. In a situation in which workers\n cannot hope to organise politically, it makes free association in trade\n unions impossible. All of this needs to be borne in mind when stories \nare repeated by supporters of Cuba (such as the Cuba Solidarity \nCampaign) about how workers have democracy and freedom to organise in \nCuba; or of how workplace committees and trade unions decide industrial \nmatters. Indeed, as the ICFTU points out, the requirements of the Labour\n Code demand that collective agreements be decided by both workers’ \nmeetings, and the employers, with the Communist Party being heavily \ninvolved on both sides of these negotiations. There is no \nlegally-sanctioned right to strike.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nThus, although there are formal and nominal freedoms, much like in the \nUSSR, in practice they are undermined by highly centralised capacity to \ncrush dissent. In the absence of political and trade union freedoms, \nthen, the working conditions of Cuban workers are hard. Their living \nstandards drastically cut by the recent recessions, even if they \n\u201cagreed\u201d to this in mass meetings to save their jobs. International \ncompanies that invest in Cuba are compelled to hire their workers via \nagencies. These agencies pocket 95 percent of the dollar value of the \nwages. State officials maintain that this is to maintain Cuban equality,\n and not to direct the dollars into state hands. This despite the \nobvious stratification of Cuban society that has emerged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nThe romantic supporters of Cuba put their concerns for \u201cnational rights\u201d\n before class solidarity, in supporting the Cuban regime. They excuse \nits actions as a necessary defence against US aggression, and will it to\n survive against the greater power, even at the expense of its workers’ \nlives and liberties. And they can point to its impressive record on \nhealth care, education and education (much better than in much of the \nrest of Latin America: including a healthy 76 year life expectancy). <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nCuba does indeed show what could be possible, even with meagre resources\n to meet the needs of human beings, and how artificial the deprivation \nacross much of the rest of the world is. But the difference in treatment\n stems largely from an autarkic nation’s need to maintain a functioning \nworkforce versus the surplus population of the mono-export countries of \nmuch of the rest of South America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\nSocialists do not consider that the best way to assist the workers of \nCuba is to support the r\u00e9gime that dragoons them in siege warfare with \nthe US, but that the spread of the world socialist revolution is the \nonly way to rescue them from the unpalatable set of choices facing them.\n To do that, we need to free socialism from the taint of the \nundemocratic methods applied in Cuba and stand clearly for the political\n freedoms of association and speech for the working class the world \nover, so as better to spread the ideas and consciousness required for \nthe building of a truly stateless classless world co-operative \ncommonwealth.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Back to the State Index<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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Back to the World Socialist Movement home page<\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
October 2003, U.K. Leftist fantasies exposed. The scene is typical: the dog-end of a trade union branch meeting; members are tired after discussing complex pay and discipline issues; tired from listening to the hyper-activists glorying in the sound of their own voices; desperate to escape. Item 9 on the agenda of the hour-long meeting is…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"magazine_newspaper_sidebar_layout":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-764","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=764"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/764\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2559,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/764\/revisions\/2559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}