The Militant (logo)  
   Vol. 68/No. 23           June 14, 2004  
 
 
Tufts University symposium discusses
‘Cuban policies, politics since Cold War’
(feature article)
 
BY TED LEONARD  
SOMERVILLE, Massachusetts—“But what happened to us was as if one day the sun didn’t rise at 6:00 a.m., nor at 7:00 a.m., nor at 10:00 a.m., nor at 12 noon, and in the midst of this darkness we have to look for solutions.” That was how Cuban president Fidel Castro in 1993 described the “Special Period,” the political and economic crisis that exploded in Cuba more than a decade ago when the bureaucratic regimes and parties in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe imploded and Cuba, whose main trading partner had been the Soviet Union, lost 85 percent of its foreign trade almost overnight.

Tufts University professor Claudia Kaiser-Lenoir cited Castro’s description in opening a May 4 symposium at Tufts attended by more than 100 students and others. Titled “Cuban Policies and Politics After the Cold War,” the program featured Susan Eckstein, professor of Sociology at Boston University and author of Back From the Future: Cuba Under Castro; and Mary-Alice Waters, president of Pathfinder Press and editor or author of more than a dozen titles on the Cuban Revolution, many of them books of speeches, writings, and interviews with its leaders. Eckstein is a past national president of the Latin American Studies Association.

The event, jointly sponsored by the Latin American Studies and the International Relations programs at Tufts, also included an award ceremony for graduating seniors who had completed the Latin American Studies Program, and a buffet dinner for all the participants.

Professor Peter Winn of the Latin American Studies Program welcomed people to the late afternoon symposium, which was open to the public. He introduced Kaiser-Lenoir, who chaired the discussion.

In introducing the speakers Kaiser-Lenoir, who taught a class on the Cuban Revolution during the spring semester and helped organize a parallel Focus on Cuba lecture series on the campus, explained that the program would discuss how Cuba responded to the Special Period.

Speaking first, in a presentation entitled “Dollarization and Discontents,” Eckstein, laid out the view that she developed in Back From the Future. In the preface to the second edition published last year she notes, “When I wrote the final words of the first edition in 1994, I thought that Castro’s regime might be relegated to the dustbin of history before the printed version saw the light of day.”

Now, she states, “a new Cuba is in the process of formation…. No one talks any more of Castro’s initial project, to create the utopian egalitarian communist society in which people work for the good of society, not private gain…. ”

“Tourists, as well as family abroad, have dollarized the domestic economy. Cubans unable to obtain dollars through either source, or through domestic jobs that now offer hard currency supplements, have turned to pilfering, corruption, and black marketeering…. The socialist moral order is in the process of decay.”

Waters on the other hand began her presentation explaining, “Since the early 1990s and the collapse of the bureaucratic regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the Cuban Revolution has emerged stronger not weaker.”

Through the challenges they have faced and conquered during that period of time, Waters noted, a decisive component of workers and farmers in Cuba, and broadening layers of young people for whom new alternatives are being created, have developed more confidence, more creativity, and taken more initiative in dealing with the contradictions and problems they confront. They are less isolated from the class struggle throughout the capitalist world, including its political, cultural, and artistic expressions. A new generation of revolutionary leadership is being tested and gaining experience in the process, answering in practice the often asked question, “What will happen after Fidel?”

Eckstein in her presentation detailed how Cuba’s income from tourism and remittances sent by relatives who have emigrated to family members at home has grown dramatically over the last decade, while dollar earnings from exports have declined.

Immediately after the revolution, Cubans emigrated because they were opposed to the revolution, Eckstein noted. “But since the 1990s there is a new type of Cuban emigrating—one who is leaving to help out his family.”

The legalization of dollar holdings, and the opening of “dollar stores” supplying many otherwise unavailable necessities, have produced, according to Eckstein, a “population that is desperate for dollars.” Many people take jobs “so they can steal things and then sell them on the black market,” Eckstein stated.

Explaining the growing inequalities that have developed due to the “dollarization” of the economy, Eckstein argued that “Blacks who were beneficiaries of the early days of the revolution” are now finding that those gains are coming back to haunt them. Few Blacks emigrated and today there is no “overseas network” of Cubans who are Black that can send dollars back to their families, she stated.

Finally, there is a “deschooling of society” in Cuba, Eckstein argued. “People are finding education isn’t necessarily getting them good jobs. Good jobs are no longer defined by prestige, like the professions,” she argued, “but by getting access to dollars. It is really hard to survive in Cuba today,” Eckstein said, “and the more educated you are the greater the contradiction.”  
 
A revolution not a rose garden
“To understand Cuba you have to start with the world,” Waters countered in opening her presentation. “If you just put Cuba under a microscope and look at this little slice or isolate that little fact you will understand nothing. You’ll miss the class political dynamics that explain what is happening in Cuba,” Waters said.

“The Cuban Revolution was the most important historical event in the second half of the 20th century,” she explained. “It brought to power a government that used state power to defend, protect, and advance the interests of a different class—not the capitalist owners of land and industry but the working class, allied with the peasantry.”

Waters quoted Armando Hart, one of the historic leaders of the Cuban Revolution and author of Aldabonazo: Inside the Cuban Revolutionary Underground 1952-58 (see ad on page 5), recently published by Pathfinder Press. “Revolutions are not a stroll through beautiful meadows and gardens, where men march without difficulty or anguish. A process of change is filled with both, and multiplies them,” Hart wrote.

Contrary to the picture painted by Eckstein of a society marked by corruption, alienation, and social decay, Waters emphasized the continuity of what is happening in Cuba today and the policies being implemented by the revolutionary government, with the class course that has been followed since the earliest days of the revolution.  
 
Cuban Revolution: course of action to defend toilers
“The Cuban Revolution,” she noted, “is not the product of a preconceived set of ideas, an ideology. It is a course of action to defend the interests of toilers, in Cuba and internationally.” She pointed to the sweeping, nation-wide land reform immediately following the triumph of the revolution in 1959 and the building of hundreds of day care centers during the “Rectification Process” in the late 1980s as two examples.

Taking up Eckstein’s portrayal of an economic and social order dominated by theft and desperation, Waters noted that economic hardships had accentuated the class differentiation in Cuba.

While many of those in administrative and professional positions had indeed become demoralized and felt helpless to affect the outcome, she explained, the vanguard of the workers and peasants reacted differently. Workers in the plants and on the farms rolled up their sleeves and began to produce, defying all the hardships. They organized to deal with problems such as theft, saying “we know who is doing it, how it is being carried out.” They organized factory meetings to discuss it and discipline those responsible, and 24-hour guard duty to stop it. That process, she explained, was part of “the working class gaining confidence, recognizing that what they did would be decisive. And that is why you can say the revolution has been strengthened not weakened.”

Without the progress registered by the Rectification Process, she noted, the outcome of the Special Period would have been very different.

Far from Cuban society becoming “deschooled” and education less important today, Waters insisted, the most significant and most revolutionary initiative that has been taken in recent years is the extensive expansion of the education system under the banner of the “Battle of Ideas,” which she described as “a massive affirmative action program for the working class.”

She pointed to the establishment of university centers in every municipality, the daily television University for All courses, and the special programs to pay high school drop-outs and workers between jobs to study, as evidence of the strengthened working-class course of the revolution today.  
 
Broad range of questions
After both presentations questions were taken from the audience and each speaker had a chance to reply. Questions included were: How has the Cuban education model changed during the Special Period? What about the Special Period and women, and is the women’s movement independent of the government? What about the 75 “independent journalists” and others jailed last March? What do you think about globalization?

In replying to the questions Eckstein pointed out that the organizers of the meeting deserved to be commended “for bringing together the presentation of two very different points of views.”

Agreeing with the student who had asked about the jailing of “dissidents,” Eckstein said she thought there were real problems with freedom of political expression in Cuba. “The hardest thing to justify is the execution of three people for hijacking a ferry to go to the U.S.,” she stated. “The crime did not deserve the punishment.”

Waters took issue with the claim that “the people who were arrested and imprisoned were ‘independent journalists’ expressing ideas in opposition to the course of the revolution.” What was demonstrated in the trials she said was that “those were people on the payroll of the U.S. government.”

And the execution of the three hijackers, she noted, was a deliberately harsh action aimed at halting an accelerating wave of hijackings before many lives were lost in one of the them and the hijackings became a pretext for U.S. government intervention that could lead to a major confrontation with Washington.

Waters ended by reiterating “the historical importance of the Cuban Revolution in the world today and its example, including for those in the United States who are unwilling to accept the brutality of capitalist society.”

After the program almost all the participants stayed for a dinner of traditional Cuban foods, an hour of informal discussion, and music by a student trio playing tango music written by one of the students in the Latin American Studies program.
 
 
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