Marce Cameron
The February 19 Good Weekend, the magazine supplement of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Age, ran a cover story titled "Children of the Revolution" with a nice picture of smiling Cuban kids. "[Cuba's President] Fidel Castro", wrote respected SMH staff writer Paul McGeough, "has defied the constant bullying of successive US administrations for 46 years. And, although old age is catching up with him, the Cuban president is showing no signs of easing his stance."
What stance was McGeough referring to perhaps? Cuba's outstanding achievements in health care, education and culture? The revolution's selfless commitment to sending tens of thousands of internationalist volunteers to every corner of the earth? Cuba's large-scale transition to organic agriculture? The fact that Castro's government cannot be bought or intimidated by Washington? No, McGeough is studiously silent on all this.
Instead, we are told that "those caught speaking out against the ailing dictator run the risk of death". Yet nowhere in the six pages of shock-horror sensationalism that follows about the alleged "show trials" in May 2003 of 75 so-called dissidents (in reality, paid agents of the US government) and the hardships of daily life in Cuba is there even a shred of evidence presented to justify the slander that Cuba executes people because they speak out against the government.
McGeough is a respected liberal journalist whose reportage from occupied Iraq was mostly a cut above the usual pro-US propaganda. Why did the SMH think it necessary to assign McGeough to compromise his credibility by dashing over to Havana, interviewing a few dissidents, then hurrying home to write a frame-up of the Cuban Revolution?
It might be because Cuba's achievements are becoming more well-known among young people. Maybe Cuba, its music and its heroes, is seeing a resurgence of hip-ness in Western youth culture.
The Walter Salles film The Motorcycle Diaries, released in 2004, gave audiences around the world a glimpse of the man behind the iconic image of Che Guevara. Che, who became a central leader of the Cuban Revolution, is portrayed as a sensitive young man who rebels against injustice. Then there's the rapid advance of Venezuela's Bolivarian revolution â with the help of Cuban doctors and educators.
Cuba is now a popular tourist destination and many who see the island first-hand are impressed by the revolution's achievements.
Castro was a central leader of the movement that threw out Cuba's US-backed dictator in 1959, and of the subsequent socialist revolution that put control of the country into the hands of its people. Since then, the world's imperialist powers, chief among them the US, have tried to destroy the revolutionary government in Cuba, in order to replace it with one that will understand that the world's poor countries should be at the mercy of the world's richest corporations. This has involved a systematic propaganda effort to downplay the gains of the revolution, and paint the island as a terrifyingly repressive dictatorship.
The real Cuba, while far from a paradise, is light years away from the grim caricature painted by the capitalist media. Whatever hardships its people have had to endure, Cuba is living proof that a people-centred economy and society is possible, that there is hope. It's this subversive hope, the dream of billions of exploited and downtrodden people across the planet, that imperialism's hired scribes are desperately trying to kill off.
Cuba is blockaded, harassed and demonised in the popular imagination because the Cuban people possess something far more powerful even than nuclear missiles. What is this fearsome weapon, which so unsettles the capitalist elites? Nothing more than the power of a good example.
In the early 1990s, the Cuban Revolution passed through its most difficult moment as the Soviet Union disintegrated and the island was plunged into a profound economic crisis. In a matter of months, Cuba lost four-fifths of its trade with the outside world. Factories closed, stores emptied and transportation ground to a halt as the convoy of ships carrying everything from Soviet oil to Hungarian sausages gradually ceased their vital deliveries of food, fuel, raw materials and manufactured goods.
By 1993 the Cuban economy had contracted 35%. Frequent blackouts would pitch half a city into eerie darkness for hours on end; if you lived in an apartment building, a morning shower had to be carried up stairs in buckets; soap, milk and cooking oil had to be strictly rationed. With public transport almost at a standstill, many Cubans rose in darkness and trudged for hours to schools, offices, fields and factories. In a country that had long since banished hunger, the spectre of malnutrition returned.
Meanwhile, US imperialism further tightened its cruel economic blockade and stepped up its subversive anti-communist broadcasts. Washington's cold-blooded calculation was that the Cuban people, driven by hunger and despair and seduced by the consumer paradise to the north, would surely rise up against "the repressive Castro dictatorship".
Across the Florida Straits in Miami, stronghold of Cuba's counter-revolutionary migr community, bets were taken as to how many days, weeks or months the revolution would last. Cuba's friends, too, held their breath. It seemed impossible that the revolution could survive.
But the Cuban Revolution defied all such predictions. There was no social explosion, as would have confronted any capitalist government faced with a sudden crisis of such magnitude; there were no scenes of riot police with tear-gas, water cannon or rubber bullets dispersing angry street demonstrations. By and large, Cubans responded with a sense of dignity and solidarity that can only be described as heroic. Immense multitudes, well over 1 million people, continued to gather at annual celebrations and demonstrations is support of the revolution.
The only notable instance of social unrest, a rock-throwing rampage through Old Havana in August 1994 by a few hundred disillusioned people urged on by counter-revolutionary provocateurs, was met with a spontaneous counter-mobilisation of local residents and construction workers from nearby building sites. When Castro heard about the riot and arrived at the scene of the standoff, he instructed his security detail to put away their weapons and engaged in a dialogue with the protesters, at the end of which the rioters, who only hours earlier had been shouting anti-government slogans, broke into chants of "Viva Fidel!" and the crowd dispersed.
The way this incident was resolved â through the force of persuasion rather than the persuasion of force â is revealing. How many times have we heard that Cuba is a dictatorship held together by fear, repression and the diabolical personality of Fidel Castro?
When Cuba's revolutionary leadership called on the Cuban people to confront the economic crisis of the early 1990s, they appealed once more to the internationalist spirit exemplified by the revolution in decades of selfless solidarity with the peoples of the Third World. In an interview with Radio Havana Cuba in October 2003, US left-wing academic Noam Chomsky praised the decisive role of 50,000 Cuban volunteer fighters in defeating South Africa's imperialist aggression against Angola and Namibia between 1975 and 1990:
"It's an astonishing achievement...[and] another reason why Cuba is hated [by imperialism]. Just the plain fact that black soldiers from Cuba were able to beat back a South African invasion of Angola sent shock waves throughout the continent. The black movements were inspired by it. The white South Africans were psychologically crushed by the fact that South African forces could be defeated by a black army. The United States was infuriated. If you look at the next couple of years, the terrorist attacks on Cuba got much worse."
Today, Cuba has more than 10,000 doctors, 8000 educators and 2000 sports trainers, agricultural experts, military advisors and technicians working in Venezuela alone. This is just an indication of the tiny and poor country's internationalism. In our local region, Cuban doctors are also quietly saving lives in East Timor and healing the sick and wounded in tsunami-devastated Sri Lanka.
This is hardly surprising, given that, that Cuba would continue to resist imperialism was the first principle of the "special period in time of peace", as the crisis period was referred to. Three other key ideas have guided this epic resistance.
Firstly, it was recognised that Cuba's battered planned economy would have to be reinserted into the capitalist world market and that there would be no choice but to reintroduce elements of capitalism and concessions to market mechanisms- foreign investment, legalising the possession of US dollars, a free market in agricultural produce, the expansion of self-employment, self-financing of state enterprises and a tourism-led recovery â during a necessary period of adjustment to the new reality.
The Cubans' knew this would involve painful and difficult choices, since greater reliance on market mechanisms would inevitably be accompanied by the market's attendant evils â inequality, marginalisation, the growing power of money and the penetration of such capitalist values as selfish individualism and racism.
Cuba's embattled revolution now must walk a precarious tightrope between economic stagnation and the tendency of the forces unleashed by the market concessions to lead to growing inequality, the corrosion of socialist values and the restoration of capitalism.
Secondly, it was recognised that, while the revolution would not abandon its goal of creating a socialist society, during the special period, the construction of socialism would necessarily have to be put on hold while every effort was made to safeguard the basic conquests of the revolution in health care, education, defence, culture and international solidarity. The political supremacy of Cuba's working people, who run the country and are ready to defend it arms in hand, would have to be safeguarded and Cuba's participatory democracy reinvigorated.
The third principle was that nobody would be abandoned to their fate. This was the very opposite of the neoliberal "shock therapy" of privatisation, mass sackings and sharp cuts to social spending that was being imposed on other Latin American countries by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (Cuba is a member of neither) at the time.
In Cuba, workers whose factories lay idle for lack of energy or raw materials did not lose their jobs, but were sent home while they continued to receive 60% of their salary. Not one school, hospital or childcare centre was closed down. Despite the scarcity of construction materials and the crumbling state of disrepair of many homes and apartment buildings (and resulting overcrowding), homelessness is unknown.
Despite being plagued by material shortages and an exodus of some professionals who left their jobs to seek work in tourism or self-employment (a hotel waiter can make more money in tips in a single day than a surgeon's monthly salary), Cuba has maintained a world-class system of free health care and education, an amazing achievement for a small, poor, blockaded Third World country. State-subsidised rationing of basic necessities is based on the principle that what little there is should be shared as equitably as possible.
Reflecting on the resilience of the Cuban Revolution in the most difficult period in his speech to the closing session of the eighth congress of the Union of Young Communists (UJC) on December 5, 2004, Fidel Castro said that "the revolution was able to hold out because it sowed ideas".
The importance of ideas, values, ethics and culture as both the sword and the shield of a liberating revolution has deep roots in the Cuban revolutionary tradition going back to Jose Marti.
Marti, a prolific poet and leader of Cuba's 19th century wars of independence from Spain and an admirer of Simon Bolivar and Karl Marx, wrote that "trenches made of ideas are stronger than those made of stones", that "a just cause, even one buried in a cave, is mightier than an army", and the phrase that graces billboards in Cuba today: "Our homeland is humanity".
In his December 5 speech, Castro referred to comments he had made to an earlier gathering, the 5th Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) in October 1997 where Castro, the PCC's first secretary, had spoken about the challenges facing the new generation of Cuban revolutionaries.
"Political work is not the same as parroting a slogan. For a long time the party was also, at times, simplistic and dogmatic, working with slogans instead of arguments... Based on the profound conviction that we are right and that we are defending what is fairest, most beautiful [and] most humane, we must discuss things for as long as we need to, explain things as many times as necessary, we must teach and educate. We must delve more deeply into knowledge, into ideas, into what happens here and in the world. We must be frank, courageous and truthful."
What "dictator" would indulge in such noble preoccupations?
Believing their own propaganda that Cuba was just a brittle dictatorship dependent on Soviet support, Cuba's enemies underestimate the creative power of an authentic revolution. As the Chilean journalist Marta Harnecker has aptly observed, "revolution is the art of making the impossible, possible".
Among the creative contributions to Cuba's resistance are the large-scale transition to organic farming, the proliferation of urban agriculture and the substitution of millions of bicycles for buses and cars immobilised by fuel shortages â a unique experience that demonstrates the viability of an alternative to corporate agribusiness and car-choked cities.
There's the successes of Cuba's homegrown biotech industry in developing vaccines for Third World diseases ignored by the pharmaceutical transnationals, such as the Cuban vaccine against meningitis B; hundreds of other practical innovations that have been generalised through a grassroots movement of innovators and inventors; and the widespread use of volunteer work brigades in construction projects and agriculture, a concept promoted by Che Guevara in the 1960s in an effort to move away from reliance on money as the main motivation for work.
As the Cuban economy began a gradual recovery in the second half of the 1990s, Cuba was swept by a vast popular movement against Washington's kidnapping of the Cuban child, Elian Gonzalez. Gonzalez survived a boat sinking in the sea between Cuba and the US, but Washington refused to return him to his father in Cuba. The movement for his return was initiated and led by the mass organisations of Cuba's children, youth and students. For seven months until Elian was returned in June 2000, the country was inundated by huge mobilisations and a multitude of discussions and debates as every sector of Cuban society was aroused in indignation.
From the gains and momentum of that struggle, Cuba launched "The Battle of Ideas" to begin pushing back the ideological encroachments that capitalism was making on the island, to empower Cuba's young people to be the vanguard in the revolution's battle for survival and to transmit Cuba's message and example to the world.
From Green Left Weekly, March 23, 2005.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.