Communist Optimism Runs Dry in Cuba

By Benjamin Noria

HAVANA TIMES – On July 11, 2021, Cubans took to the streets not to ask for a stable electricity supply or because of food shortages, but to demand that Socialism does good on all of the promises it hasn’t yet fulfilled in 62 years of revolution. Cubans took to the streets because Communist optimism is running dry.

Communism is no longer the system that will resolve social inequality or the imbalance of private capitalist companies and their tyranny. This has been proven, for example, by the failure of the system established by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union, by Pol Pot in Cambodia, by Mao Zedong in China, by Kim il-Sung in North Korea and the Cuban leaders.

What’s more, the dictators I’ve just mentioned took away the bourgeoisie’s power over productive forces and means of production, to then control them themselves. They pocketed the State’s power.

Like many people have been able to see from the outside, government and State leaders in countries with a socialist system live in luxury residences and travel in nice cars, and yet their people are dying of hunger. I don’t believe this is making progress in trying to eliminate social inequality.

They have all used a propaganda system excessively to bewitch their subordinates with a Communist utopia that would supposedly solve the greatest of humanity’s evils. They portrayed themselves as socialists so as to win over the masses and to stay in power for so many years.

Communist governments have crushed every kind of threat to their power: they have dissolved parliaments, founded a single political party, have ordered the assassination of opposition members within their governments, etc. They made the working class worship the one-party State; they monitor their every move and keep them under constant control from above.

What they needed to do was free the working class from exploitation, convert them into owners of production, take them to the dictatorship of the proletariat. That was Karl Marx and Engels’ ideology. However, they distorted these philosophers’ doctrines and became the exploiters, repressors, absolute monarchs, high priests of the people. They ended up distorting the social model conceived by Marx.

Socialism was supposed to be liberating, was supposed to give way for spontaneous associations of workers to organize factory committees, which were able to decide what was best for their own interests, on their own. A democratic system needs to arise, without a clash of the classes. It may have flaws, but it would have great potential for freedom.

It’s likely that Communism may be remembered as a totalitarian system where a group of fanatics took power and ruled for a long time, impoverishing their people and deciding over the lives of their citizens with an iron fist.

The Socialist ideal can no longer be saved because the ruling classes have destroyed the libertarian meaning of revolutionary struggles, with all their might.

Read more from Cuba here on Havana Times.