What brings the Cuban Revolution to this critical juncture? What are the material and spiritual contradictions of the revolutionary process that demand a dialectical resolution? There are many clues to this in the excerpts from Fidel’s landmark November 17, 2005 speech that I quoted earlier, and in Raul’s insistence on the need to reassert the socialist principle of distribution “to each according to her work”.

More is revealed in the following vision of a future Cuba taken from a November 2007 interview with Eliades Acosta, then head of the Cuban Communist Party’s culture department, with the Cubarte website hosted by Cuba’s Ministry of Culture: “We aspire to a society that talks out loud about its problems, without fear, where the media reflect life without triumphalism, where the errors are aired publicly in a search for solutions, where people can express themselves honestly, where the economy works, where the services work, where Cubans do not feel they are second-class citizens in their own country due to some measures that were indispensable in the past but that are obsolete and unsustainable today. We want a society with plenty of information, varied information... [so that] we can communicate with the world in a natural manner and can defend the essence of our identity and the accomplishments of the revolution”.

Respected Cuban journalist Luis Sexto, recipient of the 2009 Jose Marti national journalism award, Cuba’s most prestigious, and a regular columnist for the Union of Young Communists’ daily paper Juventud Rebelde, captured the mood of the besieged island in a September 16 commentary Cuba, the reasons for patience published on the Progreso Weekly website:

“Today, after almost 20 years of the so-called Special Period, with its aftermath of deficiencies, shortages, equivocation, mistakes, the absence of a clear program ... The material accomplishments have deteriorated ... [and] many Cubans today suffer a disconnect between what should have been and what is. They suffer and even doubt.” Yet “they feel (rather than see) that the Revolution has been a creative enterprise and that, despite its turbulence and failings, its human and fair nucleus still harbours an opportunity for material and ethical improvement”; while “other people suffer but don’t doubt”.

Cuba’s revolutionaries, Sexto added, look forward to “a national, revolutionary policy that will cure the rigid slogans and arthritic mentality of our concepts by giving them flexibility and realism. Depending on the experience, change is the equivalent of survival; resistance goes through readaptation. Resisting also presupposes depositing our hopes in the bank of patience”.

In a December 9 commentary for Progreso Weekly titled Clock, don’t tick the hours, Sexto expands on these comments. I’m going to quote from these comments at length because they are, in my opinion, a good summary and because Sexto exemplifies what could be called the “critical renovationist” current among Cuba’s revolutionaries.

A professor of journalism at Havana University’s Faculty of Social Communication, Sexto is also a poet, social critic and commentator. He writes about Cuba as he sees it with a rare combination of subtlety, lucidity, human warmth and a provocative, gritty realism that embraces Cuba’s contradictory reality. Through his weekly column in Juventud Rebelde, Sexto has cultivated a loyal following among like-minded Cubans and stimulated a rich online debate.    

“Time”, Sexto writes in Clock, don’t tick the hours, “seems to be the dimension that observers and fortune-tellers paint as the stage where the revolutionary government and the [Communist] Party will decide the future of socialism in Cuba … Is the country taking too long to embark on its self-renewal and concretize the changes in concept and structure that, when announced as immediate tasks, were praised as the most revolutionary proposals to date?

“Because I write from Cuba and am committed to the fundamental ideas originally expressed in 1959, I have a flexible and open mind ... That is why I continue to believe that the situation in Cuba today cannot be simplified in the media propaganda that pictures Cuba as “a hell,” combining unethical equations and science-fiction formulas. Nor can it be defined in the unctuous, unilateral speech that, when defending Cuba, describes it as an advanced station of paradise on earth.

“Analyses that are militantly severe, absolute, usually tilt to the extremes, and, from the extremes, the emphasis usually falls on irrationality … I’m inclined to suggest that, because of a certain impatience spurred by reality itself, the most usual perception in Cuba considers the concretion of that “revolution within the revolution,” of “changing what needs to be changed”, a bit belated. But, is it true that everything stays the same in Cuba? Is the nation dull and cold? Tired? Unenthused? Or failed?

“No,” would answer many who, from retirement or administrative work, remember the feat that prompted them to become part of a unique historic process and share the glory of educating, laying down roads, building schools, factories, above all, justice and winning brotherly wars. All this while resisting invasions, sabotage and blockades conceived, paid for and fuelled by the United States, where one of its cities [Miami] became the capital of the counter-revolution in Latin America…

“‘Something is always happening’ in Cuba, even though the decision-makers may find it inconvenient to insist on what is agreed to, approved and applied. One has to be very sharp to bring together, as pieces of a single strategy, diverse events related to the essence of the Cuban system. The decrees about land and its multiple usages, and the decision to pay wages according to output confirm the willingness to dismantle the rigidity of the economy and the Cuban society.

“We must also take into account the adjustments that tend to eliminate egalitarian paternalism and productive entities that are inefficient and ineffectual, such as many [agricultural] Basic Units of Cooperative Production. Although this information may sound trivial, in several markets the buyers buy, freely and regularly, potatoes for a peso a pound, “national currency.” If we consider that this tuber was for decades strictly and jealously rationed, we realize that its liberation suggests something more than an occasional surplus.

“Silence [about problems] long ago became a “social pact” that localizes the extent of measures and debates, because the defensive scheme that tries to freeze any internal movement that threatens national unity and consequently facilitates an opening to Washington's never-denied and never-eased hostility is very old…

“The enemies of socialism gather mostly in [Miami]. Some also live on the island. I dismiss the so-called ‘dissidents’, who make a rascally living behind the policies sponsored from abroad. What I mean is that, sometimes unconsciously, the boxed-in mentality of some revolutionaries tries to slam the brakes on dialectical change, in the belief that everything done since 1959 is perfect.

“The rectification or readjustment of Cuba's socioeconomic organization, within the scheme of a united society, scares some, because it constitutes a correction of the distance vis-à-vis the discredited dogma. And it horrifies others, because it implies a hierarchical de-verticalisation of society to allow democratic horizontality, and that might eliminate authoritarian methods and privileges copied from extinct doctrines.

“That circumstance, so delicate for those who try to sew a ‘torn shirt’ that could rip elsewhere, explains, in my opinion, the correctness of the slow pace exemplified by the postponement of the Sixth Communist Party Congress, without whose approval little could be remade in the structural aspect, and the still undetermined date of the Party Conference, the stage previous to the Congress.

“However, even within the lack of definition, I believe I see that in Cuba there is a considerable tendency among popular, intellectual and political sectors to advocate the urgency of a socialist restructuring that would not imply concessions to the United States or disloyalty to the basic principles of the revolution…

“Is Cuba late in its reclaimed and planned socialist renewal? … I share the common criterion: time, our ally, could become our main enemy, both if we hasten and if we postpone the solution by waiting for a more benign climate. In politics, arriving early is bad; arriving late is even worse. Although, [as a] poet accurately wrote, perhaps when we think that we have all the answers, all the questions will change”, Sexto concluded.