Sovietisation

Cuba’s economic integration with the Soviet bloc from 1970 onwards coincided with the ebb of the revolutionary movements in Latin America and the Cuban leadership’s self-criticism of the idealism of the preceding decade. Soviet arms, technicians and trade were an indispensable lifeline for a revolution facing hostile capitalist encirclement. But the Revolution paid a high price for survival, gradually ceding ground to a pervasive “Sovietisation” that made itself felt in every sphere of national life.

Politically, a generation of cadres was educated in the sterile dogma of Soviet “Marxism” with the infamous Soviet manuals on “Marxism-Leninism”; the cultivation of values and leadership by example began to give way to the pragmatism of the Soviet-trained administrators and technocrats; bureaucracy began to flourish in bloated ministries; the mass organisations withered at the grassroots. Administrative “verticalism”, which had its roots in the first period of the revolution when the objective and subjective conditions did not yet exist to institutionalise proletarian democracy, became entrenched.

“Verticalism” refers to the situation where elected representatives and administrators feel unable to decide anything without consulting their superiors, and so it goes on up the chain until it reaches somewhere near the top, a minister perhaps, then a decision is taken and it creeps down the hierarchy, leaving Cubans exasperated as they wait for an answer – as satirized in the classic 1966 Cuban black comedy Death of a Bureaucrat. When it seems like the real decisions are being made elsewhere, popular participation in decision-making is effectively discouraged.      

In economic management, Cuba adopted the Soviet method of accounting in which state enterprises met abstract targets based on monetary values rather than completing actual projects of social benefit. For example, an engineering firm would build half a bridge span then move on to something else. The Soviet bureaucracy’s penchant for gigantic projects, ecological vandalism, woeful inefficiency and stifling state paternalism, also left their mark.

In the cultural sphere, a puritanical bourgeois moralism – combining conservative elements of Christianity and Afro-Cuban traditions, Latin American machismo and the conservative outlook of the counter-revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union – was imposed through creeping state censorship, stifling the cultural blossoming of the 1960s. Examples include official hostility towards gays, Beatles fans and men with long hair, and Leon Trotsky’s writings being considered taboo, if not actually banned.

Within the Communist Party, support for Soviet ideas and methods came mainly from cadres who had their origins in the old Stalinist Popular Socialist Party, which had merged with the other revolutionary organizations – Fidel’s July 26 Movement and the student-based Revolutionary Directorate – to form the Cuban Communist Party in 1965. More generally, there was tendency to uncritically assimilate these ideas and methods.

Yet the Cuban Revolution, unlike the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s, did not succumb to bureaucratic counter-revolution. Cuba’s revolutionary continuity and vitality always had the upper hand. One expression of this was Cuba’s international solidarity. Between 1975 and 1990 Cuba sent some 300,000 volunteers and her best weaponry to southern Africa. 

Together with their Angolan and Namibian comrades, the Cubans landed a crushing, humiliating defeat on the apartheid, nuclear-armed regime of South African imperialism – a defeat which led to Namibia’s independence, the freeing of Nelson Mandela and the downfall of apartheid. The Cuban leadership did not bother to consult the Soviets beforehand, and this feat of internationalism was accomplished with only minimal Soviet support.

Revolutionary continuity was also expressed in efforts to institutionalise a participatory socialist democracy, efforts which counteracted somewhat the entrenchment of administrative verticalism. Established island-wide in 1975, Cuba’s municipal, provincial and national assemblies of Peoples Power are based on the revolutionary democracy advocated by Lenin in The State and Revolution and embodied in the Russian soviets in the early years of the revolution.

Elected representatives in Cuba are paid no more than a skilled worker; there are no special privileges; delegates must submit to periodic accountability sessions and can be recalled and replaced at any time by their constituencies; electoral advertising is banned, so money has no influence; the smallest constituencies are based on a few city blocks or a rural township, so citizens are generally familiar with their candidates and elected delegates.