Cuba Following Chinese Reforms, says Alarcón
HAVANA TIMES, Nov. 27 – “Cuba is prepared to take advantage of China’s development experience in reform and opening,” affirmed Ricardo Alarcón, speaker of the National Assembly of People’s Power (parliament), during a meeting in Beijing with his Chinese counterpart Wu Bangguo. The island’s government has begun a series of changes officially described as “updating of socialism,” reported IPS.
Chinese reform has worked for two basic reasons:
(1) The entrepreneur has been allowed to organize and lead industrial and commercial enterprise. Individual profit incentive has been unleashed, and this has trumped bureaucratic state monopoly planning. What this amounts to of course is re-introduction of private productive property rights and the trading market. And because the new Chinese entrepreneur was not and is not a cooperative entrepreneur, the new enterprise established has constituted a neo-capitalist mode of production.
(2) But China needed more than the above. She also needed factories and investment monies, and markets for the goods produced in factories and with these monies. For this foreign markets had to be opened, and this required a “deal” with world monopoly capitalism. The Chinese Communist Party made such a deal, and international capitalism began the long term de-industrialization of Europe and the Americas in favor of cheap-labor China. We now know what this “globalization” has come to mean for workers in the West.
What this means of course is that the Cuban Communist Party, if it is to “follow” the Chinese reforms, as reported in this news blurb, will have to do the two things noted above. Let’s just hope that the cooperative entrepreneur predominates over the capitalist, and that the deal made with imperialism is not as horrendous as that made by the Chinese.
One thing is certain. “Following the Chinese reforms” is not relevant for the struggle for a socialist republic in the US and other Western countries. Too bad the PCC does not wish to develop a form of socialism that would be a model for socialist transformation around the globe!
About time, if true. It is probably all we can expect from the current Cuban system, absent a new revolution. It is not bad, however. China’s path has led to higher living standards and greater personal freedom. Moreover, Cuba does not have the inertial mass of China. Located in a sea of almost all democratic states, political freedom will likely come much more quickly in Cuba.