> You don't know where this is going. No one does. On the conference call, Sweig said that Cuba paid careful attention to the transitions in Eastern Europe and in Latin America (from military dictatorship to some kind of democracy), and they're going to take it slow and cautious.
On 2010-09-15, at 3:33 PM, Wojtek S wrote:
> Who knows how it all would have played out
> had Khruschev and his E. European counterparts prevailed? Cuba could
> follow a similar trajectory or it could not - all depending who the
> players are and how they play the transition.
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I hope you're both right, but I don't detect much conviction behind your statements. I guess it's because you're both aware, as I am, that the historical precedents are not encouraging. I expect Cuba's future development will have less to do with the hopes and intentions of its leadership than with the logic of the path on which it has embarked, which is not a new or uncharted one.
The Cubans are, in effect, seeking a "third way" between full public ownership and an unbridled capitalism as discouraged socialists have fruitlessly sought for more than a century now - from the social democrats in the Second International at the end of the 19th century who concluded the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism in the west was unrealizeable, to Marxists like Gorbachev and Deng living in societies which had experienced the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism but where state ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange began to appear as fetters on development in in a world economy controlled by the more advanced capitalist states. These social democratic and Marxist "revisionists" each in their own way fell back on the model of a mixed economy in which large strategic firms would remain in state hands while private ownership was reintroduced on the land and in small commercial and industrial enterprises, with cooperatives seen and encouraged as an alternative to both rigidly bureaucratic central planning and the anarchy of the capitalist marketplace.
Like the Cubans, all initially denied they were abandoning socialism, and insisted that private ownership would remain subordinate to the public sector. The Chinese continue to insist they are building socialism with "Chinese characteristics" but its recent sensational growth has been accompanied by widening social inequality and the destruction of the social safety net; the full or partial privatization of state enterprises whose purpose is now profit rather than the fulfillment of working class needs; the celebration of entrepreneurship, personal enrichment, and other values associated with capitalism; and an ideological shift from class struggle to class harmony, expressed in a revival of Confucianism. Social democrats in the West and former Communist officials in the fSU and Eastern Europe have long ceased to pretend they are administering other than capitalist states; the Chinese and Vietnamese differ only in refusing to acknowledge their own retreat from the anticapitalist goals of their revolutions.
I suspect it is China, above all, which is the growth model the Cubans have in mind, and that they will be seeking to emulate its social and economic reforms and corresponding attraction to foreign, especially US, investors. They may, as Sweig contends, also be looking at "transitional" regimes in Latin America which have shed military rule, an apparent allusion to Lula's Brazil, which is also experiencing surging growth, and which would suggest a reorientation of Cuba's foreign policy away from Venezuela, its current ally which is trying to move in precisely the other direction.