The Centralized State Is the Root of Our Misfortunes

By Pedro Campos

HAVANA TIMES — Cuba has its charms. Motembo with its “giant” oil reserve, top notch Varadero, the idyllic neighboring cays, cheap flights from the US to Havana, cruises, proposed wind parks and 10 golf courses, exquisite Cuban rum, its aromatic tobacco and many others.

These appear abundantly in the Cuban government’s propaganda “for foreigners”, in the “state-owned business portfolios” which the bureaucratic system, that rules Cuba in the name of nonexistent socialism, wants to cram down foreign investors’ throats.

Foreign investment in unproductive state companies, like a magic wand, is brandished as the solution to our wrongs, when the truth of the matter is that foreign investment, even if in the billions, without denying the need for it, will never resolve our problems.

However, while the regime’s propagandists teem with these stories, news like this one from Intertass (Russia) appear where they report how Raul Castro went in search of cheap, secure and low interest oil supplies from Russia, unyieldingly proving our real domestic crisis.

Venezuela is falling… we better run, the strategists of Cuba’s so-called socialism had believed Maduro to be a magician.

However, be careful with the Russians, those who said they were Communists, those ones… Have they already forgotten about the rockets, about when they cut off our oil supply, when they closed their Lourdes military base… or “the son of Putin”?

It’s one thing having oil and it’s another thing to extract it from the ground. Havana’s charms, Varadero, Cuban rum and tobacco are one thing, and it’s a completely different thing to have this wealth administrated by a bureaucratic, populist and wasteful regime, which is only interested in holding onto the reins of power no matter what.

Russians who know “the score” want some guarantees first. What will they ask for?

There’s a problem that many people here, there and everywhere can’t seem to get their heads around. While we have an economic, political and social system which is based on bureaucratic centralism, the State and the vertical control from above regarding property, profits and all kinds of decisions, we’ll never be able to resolve our problems. It won’t matter if the blockade is lifted or that the Russians send 100 million barrels of oil per day for free!!!

Cuba’s so-called historical path holds firmly onto this model in order to have total control of society and it doesn’t realize that it has become, along with the mess it’s created, the greatest obstacle to the country’s full development.

Cuba is a country which has 11 million inhabitants residing within its borders and 3 million outside, where only a select few decide everything, especially what to do with the money that enters the country. It is inevitably destined to fail, because the rest of us Cuban citizens don’t count for anything.

Even if you assume that the governing upper echelons have good intentions, how do they know what we need, what we think should be done with everyone’s money? How can they have our interests at heart if they don’t communicate with us?

The Cuban people don’t have ways to express themselves, there’s no freedom of speech or association, if the political system and democratic participation has converted the “elected” into the appointed who are reduced to passing on mandates from above instead of representing its citizens.

When we, from the democratic Left, talk about the need to democratize Cuban society, to have freedom of markets, speech, association and choice, Stalinists immediately point their accusing fingers: You want capitalism, you work for Imperialism. You have to laugh.

That’s it. They know what they’re doing. We’re not doing this on a whim or to just to confront those who have historically ruled this country like they would some military barracks, but so that they understand that without real popular participation in all decisions, at every level, whether they are political, economic or social in nature, we’ll never be able to make progress and create a society where we can all live together, with our differences of opinion.

The Cuban government doesn’t understand that “the counter-revolution” which they call any different political opinion and activism, has been the direct result of a lack of democracy, of our economy’s excessive centralization, of the State’s concentrated power, of property and their continued exclusive politics in every respect.

It will never be enough for them to remind us that the revolution in ‘59 was widely supported by the Cuban people, by every social class, because their objective back then was to restore democratic institutionalization and the 1940 Constitution. Instead, it’s been Fidel and his relatives’ decision to ignore these demands and claim to carry out “his particular style of government according to his own ideas on social justice,” that has caused the social and political polarization that defined its early years and the development of a civil war that ended with the deaths of thousands of Cubans, tens of thousands locked up and hundreds of thousands of emigrants.

It’s not a question of going back in time, it’s nothing like that, but until it’s openly and officially recognized, in Cuba, that Fidel’s politics and his idealistic economic, popular and authoritarian approach are the cause for our current crisis, and that they need to be revised and changed, substituted instead with democracy, markets, private property and real cooperatives as well as complete freedom of speech, association and choice for all Cubans, without exception, in order to achieve the Cuba we dream of “for all and for all the wellbeing of all”. Until we do that, we’ll never be able to get out of this dark hole that is swallowing us.

The people who lived through those years of confrontation, breaking fundamental laws for social and political renovation, continue to rule today using their base of out-dated schemes of Cold War, the fight against imperialism (just against the US), State-socialism and their loyalty to a few “principles” which they themselves don’t even respect. Who then is the main capitalist exploiter in Cuba?

And let it be clear: democracy and freedom of speech, association, choice and economic activity aren’t completely unlimited in capitalist societies, however, this isn’t what characterizes Capitalism’s mode of production, it’s the exploitation of its work force and this is something which Fidel’s government has been doing to the large majority of Cuban workers for decades now.

These concepts of freedom existed before capitalism did and they have been the essential fragments of Socialists’ dreams throughout the ages and in Cuba they are banned.