Just as a football coach knows that one cannot repeatedly plow through the middle of the line, that sometimes one has to run to the right, sometimes a little to the left, and sometimes far to the left in order to keep the opposition off balance, so those who wield political power understand the need for employing a variety of tactics to maintain control over the working people.
Scott Cooper is an associate editor of a publication called, The Organizer, which is promoting the formation of a new “workers’ international.” And in its November ’91 issue, Cooper presents an extremely negative assessment of the Cuban Communist Party Congress which had just concluded its work, a congress held under the grimmest conditions since the revolution 31 years ago. For not only is the US continuing to tighten its own economic blockade against Cuba, it is increasingly pressuring other countries and foreign companies to join in the blockade. And now, with the collapse of socialism in East Europe and the Soviet Union, the Cubans are suddenly cut off from those toward whom most of the Cuban economy had been oriented, friends who had enabled Cuba to overcome some of the blockade’s most damaging consequences. Now whether through some political motivation or simply because of the chaos of economic collapse, the countries of East Europe and the Soviet Union are failing to live up to their contractual obligations on which Cuba has based its plans. It is suddenly cut off from vital raw materials, such as oil, from other vital products and equipment, and from the customers who constituted Cuba’s primary market.
All of this is set against the backdrop of an imperialist-dominated world economy which has brought ruin to most of the Third World generally, and disaster to the Caribbean in particular. And yet Cuba holds on, even as many others are sinking, including the powerful industrialized countries of the West.
Meanwhile, in these days of the “New World Order,” the US Government has made no secret of its plans to destroy one of the world’s last bastions of socialism. How galling it is for Washington that while the once mighty Soviet Union kneels in obeisance to US power, tiny Cuba refuses to bow down!
Precisely at this moment of dire peril to the survival both of Cuba’s social gains and its national independence, Scott Cooper finds it opportune to try to give Cuba a swift kick — a “revolutionary” kick, to be sure -venting his disapproval of the results of the Cuban Congress, disapproval of the course of the Cuban revolution, disapproval of its political leadership.
The essence of Cooper’s criticisms is that workers are excluded from the major decisions affecting their lives and the life of the country, in short, that Cuba lacks real workers’ democracy.
Let us first dispose of one pure fabrication. Cooper says that candidates for the Cuban National Assembly will have to be Communist Party members. This is simply a lie, more bald-faced than the malicious distortions of the Western Establishment.
Cooper says the workers are “excluded from basic economic decision-making,” are “without any real say.” But the facts point to just the opposite conclusion. The economic plans of the country are debated in minute detail in tens of thousands of gatherings of working people throughout the country. They are discussed in workers’ assemblies. They are discussed in the unions, in organizations of working youth, as well as in Communist Party meetings. In these meetings, substantial alterations to proposals are made, as well as new ideas put forth which ultimately are collated and take up in the country’s highest bodies — again, made up of representatives of unions, the youth, the Communist Party, etc.
As a matter of fact, labor unions in Cuba have power unheard of in our own country. For example, the union controls the discipline of workers in the office or factory. Factory managers do not have absolute power but must operate within the framework of joint responsibility with the unions and the councils of workers. Incidentally, union membership is voluntary, and there is no requirement for union leaders to be Communist Party members.
On the factory level, the directorate must present plans for the coming year to an assembly comprising all the workers, and the final plans are worked out through discussion and agreement. Never are conditions of production, wages, etc., merely imposed on the workers.
Cooper admits that “town meetings” were held throughout Cuba to chart the nation’s political and economic course, but claims they were “shelved soon after they began as the criticisms of the Castro leadership became ever more vocal.” The truth is that while the town meetings were suspended because people got caught up in discussion of purely local concerns when the purpose was to develop a national plan, those meetings resumed, and this time the people really dug their teeth into all the fundamental problems facing their nation as a whole. And it was precisely these meetings that provided the basis for the Congress decisions. Incidentally, contrary to what Cooper would have us believe, Fidel is virtually universally revered by his people, as admitted even by the reactionary media here.
Nor should one overlook the CDR’s, Committees in Defense of the Revolution, which completely blanket the island. These local associations, formed to prepare against imminent invasion thirty years ago an invasion which indeed materialized in the form of the Bay of Pigs
landing have now had their powers extended to encompass a wide range of social concerns, from distribution of medicines to integration of mothers in the workplace to fighting crime.
Speaking of crime (whose low incidence, by the way, is the envy of every country in this hemisphere), Cooper points to the denunciations by the Congress delegates of “multiplying cases of crime, corruption and black marketeering,” of “widespread robbery and fraud at public institutions” — all of which, he says, seem to be chiefly perpetrated by the bureaucracy. Cooper wishes to convey an atmosphere of growing lawlessness and corruption. What the Cuban self-criticism shows, however, is that unlike the situation in the capitalist world where corruption is the norm ard where punishment is the exception — or unlike the situation in the newly “democratic” countries of East Europe and the Soviet Union, where corruption is encouraged under the new political ethos of “enrich yourself,” in Cuba they do not tolerate it — as most dramatically illustrated in the execution of General Arnaldo Ochoa, a former hero of the Cuban revolution who had sunk into the morass of drug-running.
The Congress “reiterated,” says Cooper, “that the Communist Party bureaucracy would continue to make all the decisions.” What could be further from the truth! For the Party apparatus is being slashed and popular organizations increasingly called on to take the weight of decision-making, organizations such as the CDR’s, the Workers’ Assemblies, the labor unions, the youth and women’s organizations, and the popular organs of municipal, regional and national administration. It is precisely this which is one of the most important developments in the history of Cuba, the drive to bring the masses into much more active
participation in the decision-making and implementation process. This marks a new departure in the history of socialist construction worldwide and will undoubtedly serve as a model for all progressive humanity.
We next come to a number of Cooper’s criticisms -implicit and explicit — of the Cuban Communist Party itself. The Party is treated by Cooper as a body alien to the Cuban working class. But who is the Party? It turns out that the Party is made up in its great majority of workers, the majority of whom, in turn, are production workers.
Moreover, in order to become a Party member, the Party candidate must be discussed at open meetings with non-Party fellow workers and neighbors. Thus, Party members not only are workers themselves but enjoy the confidence of the working people generally. Party members enjoy no privilege. Their only reward for extra toil and personal sacrifice is the esteem in which they are held by their people.
While Cooper cites the Congress decision to amend the Party statutes to ensure the “widest internal democracy,” he complains that “Tendencies are still outlawed in the Party.” By “tendencies,” of course, he means factions. For Cooper, like others inspired by Trotsky, the test of a party’s democratism is its toleration of just those kinds of factional struggles that for half a century have ripped all Trotskyist parties and groupings apart and kept them as impotent sects. (There are other reasons for their impotence, as well, but we will not discuss them here.) Cooper wants the freedom to ignore the decisions of the majority in one’s own organization, to try to evade the discipline immposed by a majority. Such discipline would seem to be an elementary demand of democracy, but not in the logic of mcst Trotskyists.
Cooper tries to depict the Cuban Party’s renovation of its leadership, its turn toward the youth, as something sinister, as if the old tried and true revolutionaries are being replaced by those perhaps less revolutionary. But Cuba, in this as in other areas, intends to learn from the mistakes of the former socialist countries where leading bodies could easily be mistaken for geriatric associations. Moreover, revolution is not an event but a process in which different tasks come to the fore at different times. Those individuals who are outstanding in the solution of certain problems at one stage of the revolution sometimes prove less effective with new sets of problems.
The Congress “failed to adopt a political perspective for extending the revolution throughout the Latin American hemisphere,” complains Cooper. By that, the Committee for a Workers International means that Cuba should export revolution — a completely discredited notion, one would have thought, after the experiences of the 1960s and 1970s. The Cuban leadership, on the other hand, has wisely pointed out that the greatest contribution that Cuba can make to revolution in Latin America or anywhere else is to survive as a socialist state, to beat back the menace of US intervention, to break the US attempt at strangulation, to hold onto the social gains of the Revolution, and if possible under these trying conditions to extend them, to unite the Cuban people even closer around socialist ideals, and to involve them ever more intimately in the administration of their own affairs.
Finally, in line with the entire tone of the article, which attempts to put into question the authenticity of the Cuban Revolution, Cooper criticizes the policies which invite foreign investment and tourism in the development of the Cuban economy. The question to be asked is this: Does foreign investment violate the principles of socialist construction? The answer is it may or may not, depending on how it is controlled and whose interests it is made to serve. Obviously, the measures now taken by the Cuban Government are in response to truly desperate circumstances. The aim is to save the revolution, to strengthen socialist power. There is no question here of privatization. The Cuban state shall maintain control over all, enterprises. And no foreign investor shall be permitted a controlling interest.
Why is Cuba turning to outside capitalists? Because Cuba cannot herself provide all the means necessary to further her development at this time or even to preserve that which has already been gained, without such help. Cuba requires outside capital because she lacks sufficient means to employ the entire workforce, lacks the necessary hard currency to keep industry supplied with vital raw materials, energy resources, equipment, spare parts, etc., lacks sufficient hard currency to keep the Cuban people’s vital needs supplied, such as medicines, medical equipment, shoes, and so on. What Cuba is doing, then, is not succumbing to capitalism, not opening the door to capitalism. It is, rather, placing the capitalist’s insatiable drive for profits, which sometimes is stronger than his ideological convictions, at the service of preserving and strengthening Cuba’s socialist system.
We began by referring to the flexible tactics of the enemy. Cuba is most frequently attacked from the Right, from conservative or liberal positions that represent the mentality of the propertied class or of those who aspire to enter the propertied class. But in order to split Cuba from those who are disposed to sympathize with the achievements of the Cuban people and their leadership, another tactic is required. So Cuba comes under attack from people of the “Left,” in the name of revolution, in the name of the working people. Having first slandered Cuba, having perverted the real meaning of events there, having tried to place the Cuban leadership in the worst possible light — in short, having attempted to destroy any degree of enthusiasm for Cuba’s accomplishments, the Committee for a Workers International proceeds to call for a week of solidarity with Cuba! A hollow call indeed.
Whether or not types such as Scott Cooper and his associates are conscious of their role, the practical effects of their efforts is to sow confusion, act as a Trojan Horse within the Left, and split and weaken the progressive forces. In short, with all its revolutionary phrase-mongering, it is doing the work of the people’s worst enemies!
