Pedro Campos

All you can see is a cursed, ungrateful, ill-mannered, criminal and apish population that has been unable to appreciate the sacrifices you’ve made to ensure their happiness. Accordingly, you blame the people for the consequences of your own mistakes.

The way Party leaders are appointed – on the basis of intelligence gathered or produced by various State Security organs –, a mechanism imposed on the Party by the “founding leadership” of the Cuban revolution, in violation of bottom-up democratic election principles, is what robs Cuba of leaders able to identify and solve problems.

It’s an eclectic mix that proposes the continuation of economic domination by the State, flirts with national and foreign capital and merely flashes a smile at cooperatives without offering any real openings for developing independent worker-controlled production.

While the State-Party-Proprietor, the government, the press and central bureaucratic apparatus continue to blame company managers for Cuba’s low production indices, the economic disaster caught sight of in State companies – for which they have only themselves to blame – will also continue.

Who stand to benefit from Cuba’s expanded Internet services? No one other than the dissidents who receive economic aid from abroad and the island’s nouveaux riche.

If we understand the social revolution as conceived by Marx, in other words as a change in production relationships, and not just a change of government, as a political revolution, then we have to accept that social revolution in Cuba, the socialist revolution, has not yet arrived.

The present model needs to be changed, but doing so top down, out of the structures of the old system, appears impossible. We need to work for grassroots democracy, from the ground up, from within the local neighborhood, from the workplaces, from the alternative press, fighting for every space available for popular participation.

To freely defend its ideals, the socialist left has been forced to prioritize the struggle for the democratization of the political system. This is a summary of a much longer essay in Spanish.

The suggestions are founded on the recognition of democracy and human rights as universal values outside of any particular socio-economic system, and on the concrete and objective necessities of Cuban reality with the aim of advancing to a more superior society in every order.

Cuba has a new, younger, first vice president but does that really mean anything? As long as there’s no recognition of the economic, political and social failure of the centralized wage-labor state-centered model, the neo-Stalinist model, there will not be true socialist renewal.