What Russia’s Model Could Do for Cuba

Rogelio Manuel Díaz Moreno

HAVANA TIMES — A wave of pro-Russian culture seems to be bathing Cuba’s current official discourse. Journalists and ideologues from our major official newspaper, Granma, write words of praise for the Euro-Asian giant, while politicians work to tighten relations with the country. It is therefore worthwhile to revisit some of the consequences of the new romance between the bear and the palm tree.

First and foremost, the material (or “Marxist”) reasons. Russia pardoned Cuba’s foreign debt, enough money to buy a couple of the country’s provinces, if not more. Very few details about the underlying negotiations and the conditions of such a generous gesture (which consisted in investment facilities, for the most part) were made public. What else was negotiated (something only the big-wigs know) remains to be seen. Business agreements, credits, strategic expansion facilities and many other things are being developed along the way.

After relations between Cuba and the United States began to be re-established on December 17 last year, this process has only hastened its pace. The Russian hierarchs do not want to lose the advantages they have secured in the stampede of competitors that has already been unleashed.

From a pragmatic point of view, the situation could prove favorable for our country and people. If the world’s merchants are competing for our favors, we can secure greater returns. But developments also suggest yet another major con and deception in the works.

There are those who maintain that, from the Left, one ought to assume a pro-Russian stance. Cuba’s government supporters adorn this new rapprochement with idealized expectations reminiscent of the Soviet era. But, on the one hand, Soviet socialism left a lot to be desired and, on the other, whatever may have existed in the past is gone without a trace. There is a Left in Russia, true, and there is also a communist party, but they are both in the opposition.

As comrade Fidel Castro recently referred to Marxism-Leninism, we will try and interpret Russia’s situation today from that perspective. Today, Russia is yet another imperialist power. This is a simple reality, almost a truism. Russian millionaires abound in all their shamelessness and invest the money sucked out of their country in luxury properties in the West. To make this possible, millions of people near the Kremlin sank into abject poverty. Inter-imperialist contradictions of the kind Karl Marx knew well arise between Russia and Western powers, assuming the form of conflicts over markets, resources and spheres of influence.

With respect to the country’s alignment with either of the two bands, the leader of the October Revolution would condemn it as a betrayal of the working class, as he did in his article about Russian social democracy and the World War.

I invite readers to have a look at a very serious indictment of the contradictions of capitalism in Russia. The Gini coefficient measures inequality in society. The higher the value, the greater the socio-economic differences between rich and poor. The Gini index for Russia is higher than that of nearly all countries in Europe. It is higher than that of the European Union and of paradigmatic neoliberal countries such as Great Britain and Spain. In a table available in Wikipedia, listing countries from the most egalitarian to the most unequal, Russia comes in 103^rd place (of a total of 160 countries). The Gini index for the United States is a little worse, but that isn’t saying much.

It is also outrageous to invoke the memory of those who died in the struggle against fascism. The tens of millions of Soviet citizens from the republics that made up the USSR at the time died in defense of something very different from what exists in Russia today. They would probably have called traitors those who today seek to usurp their immortal prestige.

In the hypothetical multi-polar stage that our government supporters like to portray, there is no difference between aligning oneself with this or that imperialist State. All options there are reactionary and counterrevolutionary. The true socialist option consists in joining the working, exploited, combative and progressive classes in all those states.

When people extoll the Russian State, I tend to get goose-bumps. Is that where our system is heading? Some time ago, Fidel Castro himself admitted he had made a mistake in believing one could profess to know how to build socialism, and the political and ideological leadership backed him on that pronouncement. Could it be they now know what it’s all about, and they are going to impose the McPutin version of Moscow on us?