Pedro Campos

The tendency of the Latin American “left” to look for the solution to all problems in the centralized State (rather than popular) control has in fact nothing to do with the left or authentic democracy.

The number of young Cubans leaving for the United States through any means possible has been rising dramatically of late. Thousands of Cuban families experience the anxiety of waiting to receive information about their children, who took to the sea or the jungles and borders of Central and South America. The phenomenon stems from both current and long-lasting circumstances.

A doctor friend of mine told me that ankle sprains are one of the most common accidents suffered by people in Havana. When I asked him whether this had anything to do with the state of the terrain, he replied that that was one of the main reasons.

I will focus on three important regulations stemming from the hard-headed, bureaucratic reluctance to raise worker salaries, “until the country’s productivity is increased,” as well as the excessive centralization of foreign and domestic trade and the insistence on egalitarianism in subsidies afforded by the ration booklet.

The idea of a participative and democratic socialism in Cuba is spreading, no matter how much they seek to ignore them, how much mud is flung at them or how many people oppose them here and there.

The peoples of Cuba and the United States in fact never cut friendly ties. We see this clearly among the island’s population, which exudes joy at the reestablishment of relations, which clearly shows that the years of obfuscation and confrontation between the two governments did not manage to change popular sentiment.

Two paths are becoming clear to Cuba after the failure of “State socialism”: the authoritarian-capitalist one offered by the current “reform process”, sustained by an alliance between State monopoly capitalism (dressed up as socialism) and foreign capital, under the control of the same old government-State-Party, and the all-inclusive democratic one, which I will try to summarize here, while also exploring how we can reach it and what obstacles lie in the way.

“Irreconcilable enemies” in the Cuban government and US Congress are acting like two mules working in tandem to haul Cuba down the same annexationist path. Once again the Cuban population is completely left out of the debate.

Policies aimed at making the State responsible for a better distribution of wealth are not characteristic of a new form of socialism, but belong to the socialism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Pedro Campos on Cuban State Security repression: “Since they cannot accuse me of treason, of working for the “enemy”, they are now looking for another way to try and neutralize me, to silence my political and economic analyses of Cuban reality”.