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Title: Castro Agonistes Author: Kevin Carson Date: April 20, 2006 Language: en Topics: Cuba, US foreign interventions, state socialism Source: Retrieved on 4th September 2021 from https://mutualist.blogspot.com/2006/04/castro-agonistes.html
Larry Gambone recently wrote on Any Time Now Discussion:
...Latin Americans are well aware that Castro-the-dictator is as much a
US production as a self-creation. US policy has always been what they
can’t overthrow from outside, they destroy from inside by driving a
progressive government in as authoritarian direction as possible.
I’ve long taken a favorable view of Hannah Arendt’s observation, in On
Revolution, that virtually every revolution has significant
decentralizing elements: attempts at worker self-management, local
organs of direct democracy, etc. A classic example is the soviets and
the workers committees in Russia, before Lenin either liquidated or
coopted them. And outside pressure on a revolutionary regime and foreign
support for counter-revolutionary forces (e.g., the Western states’
support for the White armies in Russia) tends to strengthen the forces
of consolidation and centralization, and to accelerate the suppression
of decentralist tendencies.
I recall Chomsky arguing somewhere that the NLF, despite definite
authoritarian aspects, at least was also engaged in grass-roots
activities of genuine benefit at the village level like building
irrigation systems, organizing peasant cooperatives, and the like. It
had more genuine attachments to the peasants of the South than did the
ruling party in Hanoi, at any rate. The main effect of the U.S. war
effort in the South was to atomize civil society in the countryside,
along with successfully decimating the NLF. The result was a
hollowed-out shell, the almost total supplanting of the guerrillas by
the NVA, and the filling of the void by the North Vietnamese state when
Saigon collapsed.
In the specific case of Cuba, I’m not sure how much of
Castro-the-dictator was just in there waiting for an opportunity to come
out, but the pressures of the Cold War--the U.S. economic embargo,
combined with increasing alignment with the USSR--certainly helped to
bring his authoritarianism out. Via Fruits of Our Labour, I found an
interesting account of the early post-revolutionary period in Cuba, a
chapter in Cuba, Castro and Socialism, by Peter Binns and Mike Gonzalez.
It appears that cooperative and “petty bourgeois” elements were heavily
represented, if not predominant, in Castro’s early economic policies.
The Cuban Communist Party, before the revolution, had had a checkered
history of on-again, off-again collaboration with Batista. The Communist
Party certainly had little use for the 26 July movement before it came
to power. Castro, on the other hand, came from a background of
nationalist opposition centered on what Binn and Gonzales call “petit
bourgeois” elements and a “fundamentally non-working class tradition”:
the “urban middle class” and “middle farmers, small peasants and
university students,” supplemented by “the semi-incorporation of the
organised working class.”
Indeed, if I recall correctly, Castro actually liquidated the CCP for
unacceptable competition with his own revolutionary movement after
coming to power. When he declared himself a “Marxist-Leninist” in the
early 1960s, he incorporated the remnants of the old CCP into his own
revolutionary party.
Binns and Gonzalez, with typical Marxist blinders, see Castro’s
increasingly statist economic policy as a response to “objective
conditions.” The land reforms and other curtailments of exploitation
left the laboring classes with more disposable income and greater demand
for consumer goods, which (non sequitur alert) could only be met by
nationalizing the economy:
So why then did Castro move towards the creation of a monolithic
statised economy? The major reason must be found in his long standing
commitment to diversify the economy, to end its dependency on the US and
the vagaries of the world sugar market, and to all-round economic
development. The question that came to be posed in the summer of 1959
was this: how were the reforms of the first part of the year to be paid
for? The rapid increase in wages, the fall in unemployment, the drastic
reduction in rents (up to 50%), the cheapening of electricity, telephone
and medicine charges; all put much more money into the workers’ pockets.
This automatically increased the demand for consumption goods – all of
which had to be imported – and food. The latter automatically put
pressure on the land available for sugar; and since this provided Cuba
with more than 80% of the exports from which the imports had to be paid,
this situation could not be allowed to persist indefinitely. Only
industrialisation and diversification could solve the problem. The
fantastic variability in the price of sugar, and Cuba’s almost total
dependency on it as a source of foreign earnings, meant that the level
of demand in the domestic economy was much too unpredictable for most
capitalists to want to take the risk of relying on it as a source of
income. And, without that, no advantage attached to investing productive
capital in Cuba. With a very small and highly unpredictable home market,
and with just about the highest wage levels in Latin America, there was
not the least chance of the situation changing if the bourgeoisie was
simply left to its own devices.
The matter was made more acute by land reform. Again this was a long
standing commitment of Castro’s from the mid-1950s: antipathy to the
latifundistas, the huge landowners, was the cornerstone of Castro’s
radical liberal programme. The May 1959 Land Reform Act has to be seen
in this light. It was in no way a socialist measure, nor one which led
to collectivisation in any other form. It abolished only the very
largest estates (those of more than 402 hectares; though even here there
were exceptions which allowed much bigger farms – up to 1,342 hectares –
that were efficient to continue), and it did not solve the problem of
the indebtedness of the small peasant. Indeed one prominent agronomist
sharply contrasted the 1959 reform with those in East Europe in the
early 1950s; and suggested strong parallels with those in Italy in
1949–50 instead. Yet for all that, something like 25% of the cultivable
land was covered by the Act, and was distributed to the poorer peasants.
The effect was to increase the proportion of land that was devoted to
immediate consumption rather than providing the country with an
exportable surplus, and this added considerably to Cuba’s problems.
Although it was also true that much of the land previously owned by the
latifundistas was poorly tended, the fact remained that to increase
productivity significantly would have required levels of investment and
skilled personnel that were just not available at the time.
The initial reforms were thus in no way reminiscent of the
state-capitalist “collectivisations” of Eastern Europe in the 1950s, nor
Cuba’s own 1963 reform; but what they did do was to create a situation
that only a state-capitalist programme could solve.
I’m not sure why this is. If the standard of living had increased so
much (rents cut in half, the highest wages in Latin America), why was it
so self-evidently beyond the producing classes to pool their own surplus
for investment? Why could peasants not have cooperatively invested in
labor-saving technology to increase their own productivity, and free up
labor for other forms of production? In any case, if the increased
prosperity of Cuban society created more purchasing power, and the
increased demand for consumer goods could be met by importation, why was
that a “problem” to be addressed through the state? Domestic industry
would expand at the point when native producers could supply consumer
goods more cheaply than the foreign manufacturers. And if anything, the
removal of hindrances on cooperative marketing would have made the sugar
industry less dependent on the vagaries of world commodity markets. In
the meantime, the domestic agricultural sector would have been
increasingly diversified with staple crops for domestic consumption, and
the peasantry would have been capable at least of feeding itself on its
own land, with a little surplus for buying a few luxuries from abroad: a
marked improvement over the Batista dictatorship, I’d say.
I’m guessing a lot of this stems from the affinity for blockbuster
industrialization projects and a religious faith in economies of scale
(faith, because they’re “things not seen” beyond relatively low levels
of output). It also probably owes something to an implicit assumption
that large-scale industrialization can only be carried out by some
far-seeing “progressive” class against the will of the producing
classes: either “primitive accumulation” on the model of the Western
enclosures and expropriations, or “socialist accumulation” on the
Stalinist model. Either way, the producing classes will just sit around
comfortably chewing their cud unless they’re driven like beasts into the
factories.
The hyper-mechanization of agriculture that was brought about under
influence of Russian aid was actually less efficient, as shown by the
increased standard of living produced by intensive farming on the
neighborhood scale since the post-Soviet collapse of Cuban mechanized
farming. During the years of Soviet support, Cuba was locked into a
neocolonial policy of growing sugar for the Soviet bloc on giant
agribusiness plantations (sorry, collective farms) in return for
consumer goods. Hmmm--sound familiar? Since the end of fraternal
assistance between progressive peoples, and all that,
....Cuba... learned to stop exporting sugar and instead started growing
its own food again, growing it on small private farms and thousands of
pocket-sized urban market gardens—and, lacking chemicals and
fertilizers, much of that food became de facto organic. Somehow, the
combination worked. Cubans have as much food as they did before the
Soviet Union collapsed. They’re still short of meat, and the milk supply
remains a real problem, but their caloric intake has returned to
normal....
In so doing they have created what may be the world’s largest working
model of a semi-sustainable agriculture, one that doesn’t rely nearly as
heavily as the rest of the world does on oil, on chemicals, on shipping
vast quantities of food back and forth.
Anyway, justified or not, Castro probably did see the cutoff of U.S. aid
following the land reform as forcing him into an increasingly statist
path of industrialization.
It was the 1959 land reform – limited though it was – which first
brought a reaction from the USA. Before that America and its
multinationals coexisted peaceably enough with the new regime. But after
it things were quite different. A substantial amount of US-owned land
was involved and Washington demanded full and immediate compensation for
lands seized in the 1959 Act; it refused financial support to the Cuban
regime, supported the most reactionary of the Batista followers who had
now become refugees in Miami, and even began to aid their piratical
attacks on Cuba itself.
From the Autumn of 1959 through 1960 events moved very rapidly. Faced
with the refusal of the USA to grant aid, and an economy that could not
survive in its old laissez-faire form without such aid, Castro was
forced to use the state in a much more activist way in the economy. In
September 1959 he announced that henceforth economic development would
have to take place under the auspices of the state. On the land the
property gained by Batista’s followers during his regime was confiscated
at the end of the year. About 400 cooperatives and 485 Peoples Stores
(designed to eliminate rural profiteers) were set up by the newly
established INRA (National Association of Agrarian Reform). But Castro
at this point still hung back from nationalisation measures.
The latter were adopted in response to more active economic warfare by
the U.S.
The next phase in Cuba’s attempt to break from the stranglehold of
dependence was connected with oil. The USSR agreed to supply a limited
amount of crude to Cuba in the summer of 1960 in exchange for sugar. But
the multinationals – Texaco, Shell and Esso – refused to refine it in
their Cuban refineries. The Cuban government reacted swiftly, seizing
the installations at the end of June 1960. Within a week, Eisenhower had
cancelled Cuba’s remaining quota of sugar imports to the USA. This was
followed immediately by the confiscation of about $800m of US
corporation property – in oil, sugar, electricity and mines. The USA
responded with a total trade embargo to and from Cuba – a devastating
economic blow given Cuba’s total dependence on the US connection.
Finally the Cuban regime completed its hold on industry in October 1960
with the nationalisation of the banks, hotels, cinemas and most of the
factories and shops.
In the face of sabre rattling by Kennedy and a genuine threat of
invasion, Cuba became increasingly totalitarian. One manifestation of
this was the so-called “Committees for the Defence of the Revolution”
(CDRs), which were “[o]rganised on a block-by-block basis, [for the
purpose of forming] small squads of vigilantes to observe and report on
possible fifth columnists amongst the erstwhile lackeys of Batista and
the US multinationals.”
Meanwhile, as Castro increasingly resorted to autarky under the U.S.
embargo, a major part of those engaged in commerce and the skilled
professions left the country. Binns and Gonzalez describe the middle
class exodus in a disparaging tone that I consider completely uncalled
for:
the social basis of support for the old order within Cuba itself was
being rapidly eliminated by the fundamental changes that the
nationalisation and land reform measures were producing. More than 1/2
million refugees left Cuba in the first 3 years of the Castro regime,
unable to make a living from The exploitation of others any more. First
to go were the beneficiaries of US tourism: the US banned its citizens
from travelling to Cuba, and this led to the 10,000 pimps, the 27,000
croupiers, and many other hangers-on leaving. Then followed the business
men, the Batista ex-officers, the pampered state officials, the elite
professions, the landowners and so on. However much the US might have
wanted to put the clock back, by 1961 the layers of Cuban society that
would have enabled them to “Cubanise” any return to the old order had
more or less disappeared. The Castro regime had quite effectively
removed opposition to its continued rule.
No kidding. But it seems to me he had to create the opposition before he
could remove it. During the early days of his regime, virtually the
entire opposition came from Batista’s officers and the latifundia owners
who’d been expropriated by a fully justified land reform. To demonize
the entire commercial middle class, putting it into the same category as
landlord and military oligarchs and corrupt state officials, is insane.
And rather than a gradual and peaceful path to industrialization, with
the increasingly prosperous laboring classes cooperatively pooling their
own surplus as capital, Castro and Che were left with the prospect of
imposing industrialization as a top-down on a virtually gutted society.
The very petty bourgeois classes who had been the backbone of Castro’s
revolution had fled the country.
But I get the distinct impression that American policy elites not only
helped all this to happen, but that they actually preferred a
totalitarian Cuba with a nationalized economy, over the path the country
appeared to have been taking after the initial land reform. If Jones
couldn’t be brought back, Orwell’s neighboring farmers preferred at
least that the pigs run Animal Farm into the ground, rather than that
the animals succeed in peacefully working it with their own labor. A
“petty bourgeois” Cuba of peasant proprietors and small tradesmen and
storekeepers, peacefully producing and trading without paying tribute to
an oligarchy of landlords and generals, would have been even more
distasteful to the proponents of “free enterprise” in the U.S. than to
Marxists like Binns and Gonzalez.
There is a Cuban revolution to be reclaimed by anti-statists--much like
the Russian revolution before the Congress of Soviets was purged and the
anti-Bolshevik Left liquidated, when the soviets were still genuine
organs of self-government and the workers’ committees still functioned
in the factories. Castro and the Miami reactionaries, likewise, are not
our only choices.