Economy grows by 7.7%

Cuban vice president of the Council of State, Carlos Lage, said that the Cuban economy grew at a rate of 7.7% in the first six months of 2000 (it grew by 6% in 1999). This growth exceeds the regional growth rate, is several percentage points above the most optimistic forecasts for the developing countries and is well ahead of the former socialist countries. This growth is all the more remarkable in the context of the continued US blockade of Cuba and high oil prices that have required Cuba to pay out an additional $500 million compared to 1999.

There are improved electricity supplies, availability of food, telephones and gas supplies. In particular, after being paralysed for seven years the housing construction programme has been revived. Wage increases of 15-50% have been awarded to 70% of workers in the service sector, while 1.2 million workers are receiving incentive pay in hard or national currency. Total investment is now twice the level it was in 1995.

Tourism in Cuba is expected to increase by 12-13% this year compared to last, with 1.8 million visitors. The sugar harvest has been delayed until mid-December rather than the normal November start because of the effects of drought on the sugar cane.

Lage stipulated that state property would continue to predominate in the economy. He said that Cuba had designed a state economy not a free market one, where multinational corporations arrive and take over nationalised concerns, or where foreign capital leads to the flight of national wealth overseas to the developed countries.

Trevor Rayne

From Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 158 December 2000/January 2001

Shameful dogma
Why 'Socialist Party' attacks socialist Cuba

The new pamphlet Cuba - Socialism and Democracy by Peter Taaffe, one of the leaders of the Socialist Party (ex-Labour Militant) is a tedious and mendacious attempt to rewrite the history of the Cuban revolution to match his own tired and reactionary dogma.

For Taaffe, Cuba is not a socialist country but a 'deformed workers' state' ruled by a 'bureaucratic privileged elite'. This is because, Taaffe claims, the Cuban revolution was based in the countryside, predominantly on the support of the 'peasantry', and not on the industrial workers in the towns and cities. In fact, the majority of Cubans in the countryside were not 'peasants' but landless rural workers. Furthermore, the guerrilla war in the countryside was fuelled by a complimentary movement among workers in the cities, culminating in a general strike in defence of the guerrilla army as it entered Havana.

As well as twisting the facts, Taaffe fails utterly to understand imperialism. Thus he is at a loss to explain why the Cuban revolutionaries not only carried out agricultural reform, but later expropriated all foreign-owned assets and nationalised Cuban industry. Taaffe ascribes this to a mixture of unfortunate tactical errors on the part of the US, forcing Castro into the arms of the Soviet Union. In fact, the US imperialists wanted to destroy the Cuban revolution from the outset and have never ceased to try to do so. Soviet support gave the young revolution breathing space. The choice was to capitulate to the imperialists or to take them on and defend the democratic revolution by moving forward to socialism. Communists such as Che Guevara and Raúl Castro knew this very well and were planning the socialist transition from an early stage. Many of the Cuban bourgeois and petit-bourgeois elements who had supported the democratic revolution wavered. The Cuban people, both rural and urban workers, had no doubt about which side they stood on. When Fidel pronounced the socialist nature of the revolution on the eve of the Bay of Pigs invasion by US-backed forces, it wasn't just a dramatic rallying call, but a recognition of historical necessity. This is the dialectic of revolution - something Taaffe, with his mechanistic world view, cannot grasp.

Democracy in Cuba
In claiming there is no worker's democracy in Cuba, Taaffe ignores the evidence. He characterises the local Committees for the Defence of the Revolution (CDRs) as vehicles of oppression. The vast majority of the Cuban people are members of a CDR. Created to involve the mass of the people in the struggle against counter-revolution, CDR chairs are elected by the local people and today function as neighbourhood social and welfare committees.Taaffe does not even mention the Cuban electoral system, in which candidates are accountable and recallable, nor the tens of thousands of workplace and neighbourhood meetings at which Cubans debate government proposals.

Taaffe does mention favourably the workers' militia formed after the revolution as an example of workers' democracy in action, but fails to mention that the militias still exist and Cuban workers are still armed. He ignores the millions of Cubans who time after time come out onto the streets in support of the revolution.

When Taaffe tries to argue that the Cuban leadership is a privileged elite, the very cases he cites are those where the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) took action to cleanse their ranks during the rectification campaign of the 1980s. The PCC has maintained a constant ideological campaign against corruption and taken strong practical measures to stamp it out.

Why has he bothered?
At one level, such people as Taaffe in the Socialist Party and their opposite numbers in the SWP, cannot ignore Cuba at a time when it is attracting huge international support because of its leading role in the struggle against imperialism, world poverty and environmental destruction. They must constantly try to justify their opposition to Cuba to members who might start wondering why a so-called socialist organisation attacks a socialist country. Taaffe and the Socialist Party are trying to protect their own dwindling constituency.

Acid test for socialists
Support for Cuba is an acid test for revolutionaries. Groups such as the Socialist Party and the SWP proclaim socialism while attacking Cuba. They identify the 'real' working class only as those organised within the urban 'labour movement'. In Britain this means those within the orbit of the trade unions and the Labour Party. But in imperialist Britain this 'labour movement' is dominated by the middle class and the privileged section of the working class. It is reactionary, racist and anti-socialist because it benefits, for the time being at least, from the profits of imperialism. Taaffe's Socialist Party and the SWP are rooted within the 'labour movement'. This explains why they play down the role of imperialism. Objectively the Socialist Party and the SWP are not on the side of socialist revolution; not in Cuba, nor in Britain, nor anywhere else. The 'logic' of their argument leads them to the grotesque position of calling on Cuban workers to overthrow their socialist government, while calling on British workers to vote for the imperialist Labour Party.

Jim Craven

Cuba: Socialism and Democracy by Peter Taaffe. CWI Publications, London, June 2000. See also The Cuban Revolution and its leadership : a criticism of Peter Taaffe's pamphlet Cuba: Socialism and Democracy: Analysis of the Revolution by Doug Lorimer, Democratic Socialist Party of Australia

From Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 158 December 2000/January 2001

Healthcare for all
British doctors are learning from Cuba

In Britain, the Labour government talks about public-private partnership in the NHS. It pushes through PFI deals which further cut hospital beds and seeks a deal with the private sector to help make up the shortfall. Capitalism must cheapen the cost of health care and the concept of need is subordinated to profit.

Recently, there has been growing interest in the Cuban health system, with its huge advances in health care since the revolution in 1959. A new Anglo-Cuban primary health care initiative was launched this year with a study tour for English primary health care workers, including GPs, to Cuba in March, followed by a visit to Britain in October by leading Cuban public health officials. For the Cubans, it provides an opportunity to promote their social system, share expertise and investigate new avenues for medical material aid and exchange of information. For the NHS it is an opportunity to examine a health service which has provided Cuba with health statistics to compare with the best in the industrialised nations at, as The Guardian sees it, 'only a fraction of the cost incurred elsewhere'. However, while Cuba spends less per capita on health, it in fact spends more as a percentage of its GNP.

Health for all
Pre-revolutionary medical care in Cuba was almost exclusively private. Doctors did not practise in rural areas because it was not profitable. Doctors routinely accepted bribes for hospital beds. In 1959 there were only 6,000 doctors in the whole of Cuba, half of whom fled to the USA within weeks of the revolution - transferring, in the process some $1-2m from the Cuban hospital fund to personal Miami bank accounts.

The new revolutionary government set about providing access to education and health care for all. In 1984, the family doctor programme was set up and primary health care and community health promotion declared as priority targets. Today, there is a family doctor and nurse for every 120 families. Despite the hardship imposed by the 40-year US blockade, Cuba, whose economic parameters rank it amongst the oppressed nations, has the same life expectancy and infant mortality as Britain and the USA.

Cuba has also invested heavily in research. For example, the Cuban meningitis B vaccine, which now forms part of its universal childhood vaccination programme, has been exported free to Latin American countries. After years of silence, while meningitis B continues to kill and maim children in Britain, the imperialist countries have only just acknowledged the existence of the vaccine. By 1991, Cuba had more doctors working abroad in oppressed countries than did the World Health Organisation (WHO).

It has recently offered to send out 300 doctors to Africa to help tackle the AIDS crisis. In 1988, the WHO presented Fidel Castro with its Health for All award in recognition of Cuba reaching all the WHO health goals set for developing countries to achieve by 2000.

These are the gains of a socialist society, based around the needs of the people. They cannot be simply imported to Britain to create a health service 'on the cheap'. If we want to emulate Cuba's success, then we too must work towards changing our society and building socialism.

Hannah Caller

Recommended reading is a recent pamphlet by John Waller, Health for All, available from the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, 129 Seven Sisters Road, London N7 7QG, £2.

From Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 158 December 2000/January 2001