Cuban socialism weathers the storm

In November, Cuba was lashed by Hurricane Michelle, the most powerful storm to hit the country in over 50 years. Despite winds of over 135 mph and extensive flooding, only five Cubans were killed. This compares with 12 deaths and 26 people reported missing when a much weaker Michelle crossed Central America earlier. In floods in the Philippines and Algeria in the same period, hundreds of lives were lost. JIM CRAVEN reports.

The difference was due to Cuba’s civil defence contingencies. The operation included moving over 700,000 people to safe shelters, together with animals and equipment, in just 24 hours. Electricity supplies were turned off to prevent accidents. After the storm the Cuban people mobilised to clear up and salvage anything that could be saved from the extensive damage. Reserve supplies of food and other essentials were immediately on hand to ensure no-one suffered unnecessarily.

Such a national co-ordinated effort is only possible because Cuba is a socialist country. It devotes a large proportion of its resources to the welfare of the people and it has an organisational infrastructure, which both serves the people and promotes their participation.

Compare this with the desperate plight we so commonly see when natural disasters hit other countries, even rich ones such as Britain. In this country welfare services have been privatised or cut back to the bone. People are expected to care only for themselves. If you’re lucky, insurance will pick up the pieces, assuming you could afford it in the first place. Imagine, if flash floods were to hit you tomorrow, would you know what to do or where you could be sure of help? In Cuba the people do.

Within three days the Cubans had a detailed list of all the damage, right down to the precise number of trees blown down in Havana. The national priorities were rehousing the homeless, roof repairs and resumption of electricity, gas and water services. The storm has been a major setback for Cuba. Nevertheless, Fidel Castro who was criss-crossing the worst affected areas even before the hurricane had gone by, said ‘We have the resources to recover ourselves. You can’t measure damage just by volume, by cost, that’s capitalism’.

The Cubans have refused offers of charity from the US government because it was conditional on political concessions. Instead the Cubans have challenged the United States to break the blockade by selling them food, medicines and raw materials. At the time of writing, two weeks after the hurricane, Britain’s Clare Short was still pondering whether to help!

Hurricane Appeal: an account is being set up by the Cuban Embassy in London to channel vitally needed financial aid to Cuba following the hurricane. Please send cheques/POs payable to the Cuban Embassy, London to The Hurricane Appeal, Cuban Embassy, 167 High Holborn, London WC1.

From Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 164 December 2001/January 2002

Enemy values

When Otto Reich, a key figure in the sinister alliance between Bacardi and the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), was nominated as the Bush Administration’s Under-Secretary of State for Hemispheric Affairs, the enemies of Cuba rejoiced, for this office handles all dealings with the island.

Last November, Reich addressed the US Chamber of Commerce, in what was essentially a plea against any US trade with Cuba, against lifting the blockade and against state credits or guarantees for exports which would ‘simply represent a transfer payment from US taxpayers to Communist Party elites in Havana’.

If, instead, would-be investors would only wait until Cuban socialism had been undermined and transformed into the ‘post-Castro’, free-market ‘democracy’ of Reich’s febrile imagination, the capitalist pickings would be rich indeed. ‘A free-market Cuba would once again be a great opportunity for business, as it once was...[representing] over $15.5bn within five years after a democratic [sic] transition.’ Reich tells us, ‘In 1958 Cuba’s exports were roughly equal to Argentina’s. And you know where Argentina is today’. Twelve months on and we do indeed know where Argentina’s economy is today - down the pan.

But business with ‘Castro’s Cuba’, Reich insists, would be immoral - ‘and I like to think that most business executives avoid immoral ways of making money’. Instead the blockade must be used to exert pressure on Cuba for ‘reforms’. ‘The vast potential of a free-market, democratic Cuba to provide trade and investment opportunities for US firms cannot be realised without rapid progress in encouraging commercial and institutional reforms.’

What we glimpse above all else in Reich’s speech is how searingly Cuba’s socialist system offends the capitalist soul, whose only purpose is the creation of profit through the exploitation of other human beings and the entrenching of division, poverty and inequality. Yet the measures Reich decries will reassure all those who support Cuba that the Communist Party is on the right path.

Reich cites:

• the cutting back of self-employment (recently reduced by 15% to 150,000 workers) and limiting it to ‘obscure categories’
• placing ‘draconian’ taxes on self-employment enterprises and fines and fees for improper commercial activity
• hostility to the accumulation of disposable income
• ‘confiscating’ the wages of those paid in dollars and paying them the equivalent sum in pesos, while retaining the balance as hard currency for the state
• giving state agricultural co-operatives priority for resources over ‘a small cadre of independent agricultural workers’
• preventing ‘significant’ capital flows into Cuba by retaining the right to expropriate foreign property without due process and retaining control of all economic activity
• rolling back the ‘dollarisation’ of the economy by the wider use of the convertible peso
• creating ‘enclave "apartheid" tourism’, sealed off from the wider community with ‘no domestic businesses to pull in effective tourist dollars’. As a result, US businesses would realise only around $187 per tourist, rather than the $1,500-$2,000 they might get in other Caribbean operations.
• a non-existent consumer market. ‘A monthly wage in Cuba would not be enough to cover a typical family dinner at Burger King.’

We can only applaud Cuba’s unsuitability as a cash cow for US imperialist interests. But the sinister intents of Reich and the US administration he is part of should not be underestimated. Fomenting dissent via support for so-called independent forces and a ‘small outpost of 150,000 self employed workers...the potential leaders in a growing Cuban economy’ is part of their strategy. So are economic isolation - Reich crows about how the Helms-Burton Act has already frightened off would-be foreign investors from Cuba - and the sabotage Reich supports through his work with CANF. By these means they plan the total overthrow of socialism in Cuba.

Lest we forget...

During a diplomatic posting to Venezuela in the 1980s, it was Otto Reich, whose murky past includes acting as head of Reagan’s Office of Public Diplomacy (later exposed as being ‘engaged in prohibited, covert propaganda activity’) who engineered the release from a Venezuelan prison of Orlando Bosch. Bosch is a Cuban-American terrorist gaoled for plotting the 1976 bombing of a Cubana Airlines passenger flight in which all 73 passengers on board were killed. He now lives with impunity in Florida, having received a full pardon from President Bush Snr. Luis Posada Carriles, also involved in the 1976 bombing, was sprung from gaol in 1985 by the Cuban American National Foundation. He immediately became involved in covert activities on behalf of the United States in Central America, including the Iran-Contra affair, as well as masterminding the bombing campaign against tourist installations in Cuba in 1997. He is currently in gaol in Panama for planning an assassination attempt against Fidel Castro last year but has never been brought to justice for the 1976 bombing. He told The New York Times: ‘The CIA taught us everything; they taught us how to use explosives, to kill, to place bombs; they trained us in sabotage.’

On 6 October this year, a million Cubans marched on the streets of Havana in memory of the 73 people murdered in the 1976 plane bombing and to denounce all acts of terrorism against Cuba.

John Negroponte, another fanatical anti-communist, well-known in Latin America for his support for terror tactics, has been appointed by the Bush Administration as US Ambassador to the United Nations. During his tenure as Ambassador to Honduras from 1981-1985, Negroponte oversaw the growth of US military aid to Honduras from $4m to $77.4m a year; during this time the CIA trained and equipped a unit of the Honduran army, Battalion 316, which kidnapped, tortured and executed hundreds of suspected activists with the complicity of Negroponte and the US Embassy in Honduras. Negroponte was also implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal, acting as a conduit for Nicaraguan counter-revolutionaries to the Honduran military.

Cat Wiener

From Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 164 December 2001/January 2002