Why is a radical renovation of “the Cuban model of socialism” both necessary and urgent today? By the “model” I don’t mean a blueprint or a preconceived idea of how to build socialism, I mean the Cuban Revolution as it exists today in the totality of its concepts, structures, methods and mentalities.
In his first major speech as acting president in July 2007, Raul Castro called for “structural and conceptual” changes. To give an example of one such conceptual change, Raul has repeatedly stressed the need to abandon the notion that social equality means egalitarianism, that is, equal access to goods and services regardless of one’s labour contribution to society. This in turn implies a profound structural change: the elimination of most state subsidies and the recovery of the role of wages as a means to allocate goods and services according to the individuals’ or work collectives’ labour contribution.
“Socialism means social justice and equality, but equality of rights, of opportunities, not of income”, Raul said in a speech to Cuba’s National Assembly of People’s Power on July 11, 2008. “Equality is not the same as egalitarianism. Egalitarianism is in itself a form of exploitation; exploitation of the good workers by those who are less productive and lazy.” This is not a new idea but a reaffirmation of the necessity, during the transition period between capitalism and socialism, for the distribution of goods and services to be linked to the individuals’ or work collectives’ social contribution through their work, as the founders of scientific socialism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, explained in the nineteenth century.
Only in a fully communist society – a remote objective for the Cuban Revolution today and conceivable only long after capitalist rule has been abolished on a world scale – could distribution conform to the communist principle “from each according to her ability, to each according to her needs.”
When we talk about the necessity for a radical overhaul of the Cuban socialist model we need to distinguish between the revolution’s concepts, structures, methods and mentalities, on the one hand, and its ethical and political principles, on the other. The Cuban Revolution is a collective project of individual and social liberation that strives to realise certain ethical and political principles and objectives.
Among these are international solidarity, national sovereignty, social justice and equality, participatory democracy and the ethic of “being” as opposed to the ethic of “having”, meaning that the yardstick by which an individual should be judged is not the size of one’s bank balance but one’s personal qualities and social contribution.
These core ethical and political principles have taken deep root in Cuban society, and their validity is not questioned by Cuba’s revolutionaries. “The system’s principles must be defended”, says Rafael Hernandez, editor of Cuba’s pro-revolution Temas magazine, “but the model itself must be transformed.” Progreso Weekly website’s Havana bureau editor Manuel Alberto Ramy adds: “It is not a question of dismantling the system but of rebuilding it with the effective participation of all citizens, through the established institutions.”
A radical renovation of Cuba’s socialist model is necessary because much of this model is obsolete, and obsolescence brings with it the danger of stagnation and retreat. The contradictions within the existing model have accumulated to the point where the Cuban Revolution, not for the first time in its turbulent half-century, has reached a critical juncture.
Necessity combines with urgency, since the conditions for this renovation have ripened and it cannot be postponed indefinitely. In fact it is already underway. As Cuban journalist Luis Sexto observed on July 15, “Cuban society, rigid for many years, shakes off the starch that immobilised it ... [t]o change what is obsolete.”