REVIEW BY MARCEL CAMERON
Cuba as Alternative: An Introduction to Cuba's Socialist Revolution
By Neville Spencer et. al.
Resistance Books 2000
116pp, $11.95 (pb)
Order at <http://www.dsp.org.au/rb/rb.htm>
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Cuba was hit by a severe economic crisis due to the loss of its principal trading partners. As supplies of fuel, food, raw materials and spare parts dried up the island's economy contracted by 35%. Taking advantage of this crisis the US tightened its economic blockade of Cuba.
Among right-wing Cuban-Americans in Miami, bets as to how long Cuba's socialist government would hold out ranged from days to months. Today, all such bets are off. There has been no political crisis, the revolution has survived and it shows no signs of imminent collapse.
As Cuba consolidates its economic recovery with the basic conquests of the socialist revolution intact, interest in all things Cuban is growing. The epic campaign to demand the return of the Cuban child Elian Gonzalez, held hostage by anti-Castro Cubans in Miami, made headline news for seven months during 1999 and 2000. Images of the gigantic street demonstrations in Cuba and the dramatic rescue of Elian at gunpoint came at a time when the Buena Vista Social Club was becoming something of a cult film.
Alongside the growing numbers of tourists who are visiting Cuba for its Caribbean beaches are people who are curious to see the reality of the Cuban revolution for themselves. Even British public health officials have toured the island recently. They came not to teach, but to learn — to discover how it's possible for the blockade-ravaged Cuban health system to provide free, high quality medical care to all Cubans for a small fraction of the per capita expenditure of its British counterpart.
The Cuban revolution stands as living proof that there is an alternative to neo-liberal capitalism. The extraordinary and enduring achievements of the Cuban revolution are undeniable on any objective examination of the facts. They are even more impressive when it is considered that this socialist alternative is being built by a small island nation under permanent siege from the richest and most powerful state on Earth.
Cuba's central role in the movement against neo-liberal globalisation in the Third World must also be recognised. Since 1985 Cuba has campaigned among the Third World countries for a solution to the growing debt crisis: that the Third World simply unite and refuse to pay the debt. Of course, this is not the preferred solution for the capitalist elite but it would certainly force the rich countries to the negotiating table.
During a recent trip to Cuba a friend and I spent a few days in the provincial city of Camaguey, famous for its large terracotta jars which were used to store drinking water in colonial times. As we said goodbye to our host, a veteran Cuban Communist Party militant, he gripped my hand and asked me, with tears in his eyes, that we "please tell everybody the truth about our revolution".
In capitalist countries like Australia most people believe that Cuba is a "repressive communist dictatorship". This image of Cuba as a tropical Stalinist tyranny headed by the "dictator" Fidel Castro, all too common thanks to the capitalist-owned mass media, is based on little more than the tabloid journalism principle that if you throw enough mud some of it will stick. Even among leftists it's not uncommon to hear echoes of this slander.
This book helps to clear away the mud. As the authors note in the preface, Cuba as Alternative is not an exhaustive account of the Cuban revolution but rather "an introduction to some of the main issues of significance for progressive and socialist activists". It brings together a selection of articles, speeches and interviews from a variety of sources, many of which have appeared previously in the pages of Green Left Weekly.
The book is divided into three sections. The first, entitled "Cuba's Economic, Social and Political Alternative", consists of seven essays beginning with Roberto Jorquera's overview of Cuba's economic transformation from the 1959 revolution and the principles on which it has been based. The expropriation of foreign and domestic capitalist enterprises in 1960 and the building up of a planned economy layed the foundation for Cuba's rapid social advances in the coming decades.
For Che Guevara, Cuba's Minister of Industry and head of the National Bank in the early 1960s, "a socialist economy without moral values does not interest me. We are fighting poverty but we also fight alienation. One of the fundamental aims of Marxism is to eliminate material interest, the factor of 'individual self-interest' and profit from human's psychological motivations."
The Cuban revolution has been particularly successful in its systematic struggle to eliminate racism, the subject of an essay by Jorquera. He outlines the history of race relations in Cuba from the time of the Spanish conquest to the present day. While racial prejudice still exists among some members of the older generation who grew up in pre-revolutionary Cuba, the revolution has undermined the social foundations of racial oppression and has largely overcome the legacy of centuries of slavery, colonialism and neocolonialism.
Nancy Iglesias Mildenstein, a leader of the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), contributes a lively speech from her recent tour of Australia. Cuba's progress towards equality for women can be summed up in a few eloquent statistics. In 1953 Cuban women made up only 19.2% of the workforce, but by 1999 this figure had increased to an impressive 43.2%. Today 60% of university graduates are women and of these 49% are science graduates. As for medicine, traditionally a bastion of male domination, no less than 74% of the graduates are women. This has led to a unique problem: how to design an affirmative action program to encourage young men to enrol in medicine!
Mildenstein also considers the ongoing challenges faced by Cuban women in the context of the economic crisis of the early 1990s and the strengthened US blockade. She looks at the work of the FMC to encourage the participation of women in Cuba's "People's Power" system of elected government, and the work of the FMC among women prostitutes. Prostitution had disappeared in the early years of the revolution but emerged again with the economic crisis and an influx of foreign tourists.
The attitude of the revolution towards gay men and lesbians has changed in recent years. Between 1965 and 1968 homosexual men and others who were considered to be "counter-revolutionary" were incarcerated in military-style camps where they faced brutality and attempts to turn them into "real" men.
Since 1986 however the Cuban government has played an active role in countering homophobia through the repeal of discriminatory laws and initiatives such as the popular Cuban film Strawberries and Chocolate. An article by Havana-based journalist Karen Lee Wald argues that Cuba's care for people with HIV/AIDS is among the best in the world.
Other contributions outline Cuba's "green revolution", notable for being the only attempt at a large-scale conversion from conventional farming to organic and semi-organic agriculture; Cuba's "People's Power" system of popular democracy; and a comparative look at living standards in Cuba, with particular reference to Cuba's generous "social wage" in the form of free and subsidised goods and services.
The second section of Cuba as Alternative looks at how the Cuban revolution was made, from the 1953 attack on the Moncada barracks to the proclamation of the program of the revolution in Fidel Castro's courtroom defence speech "History Will Absolve Me." An accompanying article summarises "Four Decades of the Cuban Revolution".
Part three of the book is titled "A Socialist Island in a Sea of Capitalism". US activist Jose Perez offers a concise explanation of Washington's use of immigration policy as a political weapon to attack and undermine the Cuban revolution.