Currents of opinion

I suggested earlier that Sexto is part of what could be called the critical renovationist current among Cuba’s revolutionaries, which represents one current of opinion within the revolution and one pole in the national debate promoted by Raul Castro on the future of socialism in Cuba. What defines this current, and are there any others?

The critical revolutionary current is made up of those revolutionaries who perceive that unity of action and unanimity of opinion are two different things and their confusion in practice does great harm to the revolution; secondly, that nothing less than a deep, integral transformation of Cuba’s socialist model – of many of its concepts, structures, methods and mentalities – must be carried through if the revolution is to endure in the post-Fidel era, part of which is forging a real culture of public criticism and debate, something Cuba has lacked.  

It’s clear from the excerpts I quoted earlier from Fidel’s November 2005 speech that Fidel is part of this critical renovationist current, as is Raul, who has called for structural and conceptual changes and has initiated some such changes. Under Raul’s presidency, for example, new spaces for ongoing critical reflection and debate have been opening up, but not without resistance.

As Eliades Acosta noted in his November 2007 interview, “There’s the abuse of institutional practices to limit criticism. We must abandon the practice of shushing down the problems, which does not help the revolution but instead protects posts or positions or postures that are harmful to the ethical climate of society. Raul [Castro] himself, who heads the party and the state, with all the moral authority he enjoys, told the people that this is the time to ‘remove our shirts’ and discuss our problems.

“The [Communist Party] Political Bureau issued a document that supports criticism in the media. But what did we find? There is reluctance, inertia; there are people who are not prepared because they find it difficult to break the psychological barrier. But when we read the press, and we read the non-institutional press, and the e-mails (which are here to stay), we see that the people are participating. We see a very healthy activation of the civic spirit of Cubans.”

Here, Acosta alludes to what the critical renovationist current is coming up against: “the abuse of institutional practice to limit criticism”, that is, the efforts of certain functionaries to stifle critical viewpoints and debate. Yet such attitudes are not limited to functionaries. There is a conservative current of opinion within the revolution that is wary of debate and fearful of change.

In Clock, don’t tick the hours, Luis Sexto makes the sharp observation that some oppose change “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” – a reference to the influence of Soviet Stalinism. Sexto even goes so far as to describe such misguided revolutionaries as unwitting “enemies of socialism”, arguing 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.”

As Temas magazine’s Rafael Hernandez explains, “The resistance to new ideas, criticism and changes is something that I find in my neighbourhood. I don’t have to go to any government office to meet with resistance ... It’s not a mentality that’s exclusively installed in the heads of some bureaucrats but in the heads of many citizens I know ... In our civic culture, there are elements that resist change and refuse to accept specific criticism or reject the convenience of discussing specific problems in public.

“When we talk about debate or criticism, we often talk about censorship, restrictions, control, but we never talk about our own lack of a ‘debate culture’. We must foster a culture of debate from the start, because our society doesn’t have it. We often call a debate ‘good’ when the participants say the same as we think. That’s not debate; debate is discrepancy. And it is very important that in a debate we express divergent positions in a spirit of dialogue, of mutual respect. And I think that [Cuban] politics is going through that stage right now.”

Haven’t there been such debates in the past?  Indeed, Hernandez points to “a very important process of public discussion” that took place between 1986 and 1990 during the “Rectification of errors and negative tendencies”, culminating in the debates around the call to the 4th Communist Party Congress at the onset of the Special Period. According to Hernandez, this was “the most profound and democratic critical debate ever staged in Cuba”.  

So today’s debate on the future of Cuba’s socialist project is not unprecedented. Another example is the legendary “workers parliaments” held in 1994. These were lively grassroots debates held in workplaces across the island to strive for consensus on economic measures to confront the Special Period crisis. But such debates haven’t been institutionalized, that is, they haven’t become an organic part of the political culture of the Cuban Revolution. This is now beginning to change; and what is different about the present debate compared with previous such debates is that, as Hernandez notes, the culture of debate is maturing.

In a well-known passage from his May Day 2000 address that adorns billboards all over Cuba and which many Cubans can recite by heart, Fidel defines revolution as, among other things, “having a sense of the historical moment” and “changing everything that must be changed”.  The critical renovationists have made “changing everything that must be changed” their catchcry. Let’s take Fidel’s advice and step back from the debate itself to try to grasp the context, the historical moment in which this debate is unfolding.

The history of the Cuban Revolution can be divided into four relatively distinct periods or epochs, and today the revolution is on the cusp of, or entering, a fifth. The first epoch spans the decade of the 1960s, from the overthrow of the Batista dictatorship in January 1959 until 1970 when Cuba became integrated into the Soviet bloc’s Council of Mutual Economic Assistance, which ushered in a second epoch of “Sovietisation”. This period drew to a close in the mid-1980s with the launch of the “Rectification of errors and negative tendencies”.

Then there’s the post-Soviet Special Period, a crisis period from which revolutionary Cuba has yet to fully emerge. Yet today Cuba is entering a new era thanks to two developments of great significance: the merging of the Cuban and Venezuelan socialist revolutions in the context of the new rise of the left in Latin America and the failure of US efforts to isolate Cuba; and the fact that Cuba is now gradually, and gracefully, entering a post-Fidel era and an approaching generational renewal of leadership at the highest levels.