In the months since Raul Castro was elected as President of Cuba the media has been dancing in the streets with every story of reform and liberalization. The story between the lines — or not-so between the lines in some cases — is that Cuba has supposedly turned away from socialism, that they have accepted the “failure” of the system and are going to embrace capitalism.
This judgment is made based on a misunderstanding of what socialism is. Socialism, in their mind, equals restriction. Cuba is liberalizing. Therefor they are becoming less socialist.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
What people don’t understand is that Cuba is a relatively poor country, and yet maintains a planned economy. It differs from the United States and other countries (mostly in the north) in that the marketplace isn’t flooded with cheap consumer goods. Some things we take for granted simply aren’t available in high enough quantities to satisfy everyone. This can’t be entirely blamed on the embargo, but it certainly doesn’t help.
Cuba is also different than the good old U.S. of A. in another way. In Cuba you won’t find someone like myself who has a laptop computer and can’t afford medical care. We have Levi’s and Coca Cola, they have education and health care. They have limited resources and have to choose between consumer goods and quality of life, and they choose a little more wisely than we do.
The situation in Cuba is also different than a lot of similar Latin American countries. In those countries there are no legal or accessibility barriers to purchasing goods, it’s just that simple people live in such abject poverty that they can’t afford them if they are available. We hear about Cuban “dissidents” complaining that the government has “banned” broadband internet access in private residences, as if that is such a terrible human rights abuse, but do you ever hear about Mexican or Honduran farmers complaining about not having the internet?
So Cuba is faced with a situation: there’s not enough of a good to go around, and in the interests of creating an egalitarian society it would be bad to just throw things on the market and let only the rich gobble them up. The answer is to distribute with priority. So, sticking with the internet example (because the bandwidth which connects the island to the world is scarce) the answer is limiting access to public internet cafes and promoting the use of a national intranet.
Lately we’ve seen the reversal of this: cell phones, hotel rooms, all sorts of consumer goods are being put onto the open market for all to purchase. What does this mean? Is the socialist system failing? Is Cuba about to turn? Is it just a way to try to calm the supposed rampant dissidence on the island and let Fidel Castro….err, I mean Raul Castro, maintain his iron grip on power?
Those of you who guessed “the socialist system is failing” are exactly wrong. What’s more likely is that socialist system is succeeding. The leadership of Cuba has determined that the economy has recovered from the special period following the fall of the USSR and that the inequality caused by unregulated distribution of certain goods and services has been reduced to a level that it is no longer necessary to restrict them.
What about the distribution of collective farmland into small, private plots? Is that the beginning of the end for socialism in Cuba? Hardly. The point of socialism is that the workers control the means of production, but there can be different forms of socialist property. In some instances collectivization makes sense, but if smaller farm plots produce food more efficiently, what’s wrong with that? The land is still in the hands of those who work the land, as opposed to the huge foreign-owned plantations before the revolution.
But how about renters being given private ownership of their homes? Is that anti-socialist? Well, Cuba has already had the highest rate of homeownership in the western hemisphere, so this is nothing new.
All the cheerleading and ballyhoo in the media about Cuba’s supposed turn from socialism is totally premature. The problem is that people are ignorant about what socialism really is and how their system differs from that of the rest of the world. When people take into account the planned economy and open their mind to different ways of implementing socialism, the picture becomes clearer.
April 21, 2008 at 10:11 pm |
I agree with you 100%.
The Western world is dying to get some news from Cuba that the society there is spiraling downward and the people are anxious to overthrow the socialist regime. Just because Cubans don’t have as many iPhones and iPods as we do doesn’t attest to the failure of socialism in Cuba. It’s all a matter of priority. Cubans, like you said, are much more focused on the education of their people and ensuring sufficient healthcare for anyone who needs it.
We need a little dose of Cuban socialism in our own country. Public education has gone to shit. While we pride ourselves on having the world’s most prestigious and admired institutions of higher learning, the reality is that more and more international students taking seats in our best schools where Americans once sat.
Plus, we’re the wealthiest nation in the world with the best doctors and hospitals, yet too many of our citizens have little to no access to proper health care. When we push for universal health care for every American citizen, the opposition labels our cause “socialized medicine” in an attempt to make it seem perverse and un-American. What could be more American than providing proper treatment for any person who enters one of our hospitals? That is the democratization of medicine, if anything else.
Keep writing. I’ll keep reading.
June 15, 2008 at 7:10 am |
Absolutely wrong. Socialism means the government control of the economy. Cuba is relaxing the government control of the economy. Therefore, Cuba is taking steps away from socialism.
If you don’t like the correct definition of socialism — tough. You don’t get to create new meanings to well-established words.
But if it helps you to embrace market reforms, you can call them whatever you like. China feels the need to call their reforms “market socialism” so that they can pretend they weren’t wrong for the past 50 years. If you call yourself “socialist” but entirely reject socialism… then you’re on the right side. You just don’t understand the nomenclature.
Hector — public education is shit because it is run by the government. Private education is higher quality, and uses less resources. And the USA is not the wealthiest nation on earth. That distinction belongs to Luxemburg (or perhaps Qatar now) — both free-market countires with MUCH higher standards of living than Cuba.
July 28, 2008 at 10:25 pm |
If you want to play dictionary jockey fine. But let’s remember that Cuba is led ideologically by a communist party, and Communism is a stateless society. Socialism is a means by which to transition to communism, so it naturally follows that in order for a socialist society to become a communist one state controls have to be relaxed.
Finally, a comment on private education: it is “shit” because if the private sector were left to educate a people by itself 90% of us would be illiterate. Private education would refuse to educate me or my children because I can’t afford to send them to private schools. How can you say it accomplishes its task of educating people when it purposely withholds education from students on the basis of their ability to pay?
Whether it’s education, health care, whatever, I would rather have a public system that is “pretty good” for everyone than a private system that is great for the very insignificant minority I assume you identify with.