I spent three weeks in Havana in April-May 2007. My comments are about what I saw there, from what I have heard and read the rest of Cuba is poorer than Havana, which explains internal migration within the country from the poorer provinces to the capital; therefore my comments are biased because I saw the "best" Cuba has to offer. I am not claiming to know everything there is to know about Cuba but I have read some about Cuban history, especially about racism and the revolution. With the caveats out of the way, my opinion on Cuba is this: it is not perfect, but it is a lot closer to perfection than any other Third World (i.e. country formerly colonized by a European power, excluding those for the settled by European majorities, e.g. the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia) country I have ever been to. What it comes down to for me is this: Cubans complain that often when they go to a doctor because of the embargo and/or communism the doctors don't have the medicines they need to treat them. They complain about this bitterly, but I am just left thinking "but motherfucker, you can see a doctor!" I am American, and I am uninsured I have to pray that I don't get sick cause if I do I am going to have to pay ridiculous out-of-pocket fees. And I am one of the lucky few that can probably afford the costs provided I don't need some crazy surgery. But I think about all of the people in the world who simply don't have access to medical care, either because they are too far away from a hospital or too expensive or both. And the same principle holds for other aspects of Cuban life, where the situation is less than ideal but still better than the vast majority of world's population gets. The food in Cuba is wack, but at least they all eat. My feelings on Cuban communism oscillated violently between feeling like Cuba was heaven, and feeling like it was all a hypocritical sham. First the good stuff: Cuba has an enviable social welfare program that other should Third World countries should envy and emulate (and more than a few "developed" nations should also). Healthcare, education, and to a lesser extent sports and culture. Like I said, I think it's unfair to compare Cuba economically to the US, Canada, Japan and Western Europe because Cuba was a peripheral nation in the world economy until 1959, a product of Spanish and American colonialism that had many of the same problems of other colonies: a history of slavery, racism, and cash crop export monoculture (in this case sugar). Cuba is not a "developed" nation because it has no other countries to exploit for its own "development" as the US, Japan and Western Europe were able to do (and continue to do). The healthcare system in Cuba is awesome, however. You don't see any of the same problems with preventable diseases or random diseases (no people with crazy skin diseases, random shit coming out of their necks, deformities, lepers, etc.) that you see in other poor countries. Everyone looks healthy, and you see a lot of old people everywhere. Cuba is probably the only country on Earth where there is an abundance of doctors, so many that they can afford to "export" them. The educational system is not at the standards in terms of facilities as American or European schools, but is a lot more accessible and just than pretty much anywhere else I can think of. Again, it isn't perfect, but the educational system does provide Cubans with a more equal opportunity at a quality education than any other government provides its citizens. One aspect of Cuban society that constantly amazed me was how knowledgeable and educated everyone was. Cuban children know more about US foreign policy and the War on Iraq than Ivy League graduates. And education is generalized, I had never been to a place where so many people could speak so intelligently about so many subjects, Amdericans are ignorant buffoons when compared to Cubans. Sports are also a lot more accessible in Cuba. Up until the early 90s the Cuban government even ran a national sports program where basically every child was encouraged to pick a sport and was trained in it so that every Cuban over 35 can tell you about their days as a wrestler, gymnast, volleyball player or basketball players. All of this in addition to a basic physical education at school and the national sports college system used to train athletes for international competition. But beyond that, I was there for the Cuban National Series and I was amazed to hear that any Cuban could afford to go to a game for a nominal fee. It was nothing like the US where I would have to a be corporate executive earning several hundred thousands dollars a year or have to move some kilos on the side in order to ever afford World Series tickets. Culture in Cuba presents the same dilemma as everything else, music, painting, sculpture, theater, cinema, everything is controlled by the government and is therefore censored but the government also subsidizes much of it so that "culture" is also more accessible to the average Cuban than it is to the average citizen of any other country. In Havana you can go to a movie, a play, an opera performance, the museum, etc. for practically nothing. Again censored culture, but at least they have culture. It just feels good to be in a poor country where no one is going hungry, where you don't see children begging or working in the street (they are all busy in school!), where there are no slums, no violent crime (I could roam the streets freely, with absolutely no fear, at any time of night, how blissfully liberating, I can't even do that in the center of the empire, New York City), and more important than anything else where the government gives a fuck. Say what you want to say about Cuba, criticize the regime all you want (and I am going to start soon) the one thing no one can say is that Fidel doesn't care. How many governments can you truly say care about the people they rule? Ironically I often found myself defending Cuba to Cubans. I felt like they didn't really know or severely underestimated what they had. I and other foreigners who had traveled to other peripheral countries kept trying to convince many of the people we met that much of what Cuba was special and that they shouldn't throw out the proverbial (or maybe cliche) baby with the bathwater. Now onto that bathwater. Superficially, food, communication and transport are wack in Cuba. The food just doesn't taste good. I have tasted Cuban food in the US several times (and honestly it's not all that different from Dominican or Puerto Rican food) so I have a decent idea of what it should taste like, but the food in Cuba was just wack. I felt like there were only two flavors in Cuba, salty or greasy (if you were lucky you got salty and greasy). Because of the embargo and government priorities there is even less variety of food than you find in most poor countries. There was no pepper, no beef, little chicken, just lots of bland rice and beans and fried pork. Ironically everyone in Cuba eats, but it's easy to go hungry in Havana because there are few street vendors and there just isn't a commercial culture (few stores, but how could I forget, probably the best part about Cuba for any American tired of being bombarded with images of how inadequate, fat, or stupid we are every second and how this one product, be it toothpaste, a pair of sneakers or a car, can make us cool and happy, is that in Cuba there are no commercials! None! You can watch hours of TV uninterrupted for free, no HBO bill at the end of the month, I remember how while watching one of the National Series games I kept waiting for a commercial to take a piss, only the "commercial breaks" where too short, the only commercials are either public service announcements, begging you to "consume less" or political announcements about the May Day march and the revolution, there are also no billboards or signs, and again the few that there are either exhort education or the revolution) so you can't just wander around and hope to find a restaurant or street vendor cause you will definitely end up walking a lot.
Communication is also wack. Cuba is stuck in the 1980s. Practically no cell phones, and most people don’t even have land lines. You need a license to have a cell phone, and only certain state and joint-venture (partnerships between Cuban and foreing companies, mainly in tourism and mining) employees can have them. Otherwise you have to be a foreigner or have a foreigner get a cell phone for you. Either way it’s super-expensive from what I hear. All of this makes communicating with people difficult. I missed several meetings with people because we would make plans and then one of us would be late or would change plans, but there was no way to reach people once they had left home. The government subsidizes land line phones (and therefore you have to wait forever to get one from the state phone company, too) so the calls are cheap and everyone is happy to let you use their phone, since everyone understands how difficult everything is. That is another thing the level of social solidarity in Cuba is amazing. There is an understanding that shit may be rough but at least they are all in it together, therefore things like the phone are seen more as a community resource than a personal object. Still, if the state gave people beepers or something that would be a lot better, since it was incredibly frustrating to keep missing people cause I of a misunderstanding. It reminded me that you don’t need a cell phone to live and that there is a certain liberation in not being attached to your phone, but I would have preferred to have actually met people on time rather than wandering around, wondering if they had said 23 & G or 23 & E ? In addition, the internet is basically non-existent as the vast majority of Cubans have no access. In Cuba if you have a computer (already an impressive achievement) you have access to a Cuban intranet that allows you to have an e-mail, but you can’t just Google something. In order to use the internet as we in the US undertand you have to pay at least US$6/hour at one of the major hotels for foreigners in Havana to use a slow-ass 56Kbps connection. But it being Cuba of course, you have to hope the hotel has the prepaid cards you need to use the internet. I discovered this as I spent one whole day walking around, willing to pay $6 for the internet and being unable to find any hotels that had cards. The computers were working, but there were no cards, nor could any one tell me when more cards would come. Again more “No hay.” God bless centrally planned economies.
Finally, public transportation in Havana is no good. This is the one area where you would expect a communist government to excel, but instead the public transportation system is woefully inadequate. One of the first things you see in Havana is ridiculously long lines (20-50) at the bus stops. It being Cuba, the people take a very fair approach to it, so that one you get to the bus stop you immediately ask who is last in line and take your place. There is no line hopping or pushing. Someone always announces that the bus is on its way and then the enormity of the situation dawns on you. The bus is already packed, so how the hell are all of these people going to get on the bus? Well, I don’t know how, but they do. I have never been on buses so packed in my life. I can’t think of an American equivalent. It even made me miss the chaotic Dominican buses. I decided then and there that I would never diss MTA buses again in my life. Apart from the buses there were public and private taxis, both legal and illegal. The public taxis are known as maquinas (carros publicos in the Dominican Republic, but there are a million names for the same concept) and costs 10 pesos for every neighborhood you cross, which is a lot money for Cubans, especially considering that the public bus costs 40 cents (I think it’s 80 cents if you take one of the express buses, the camellos or camels, so called because they consist of a tractor trailer pushing a double-humped wagon that hold up to 300 people. They go longer distances, and there are two lines, one for people who want a seat and one for those who don’t mind standing for a good hour in ridiculously cramped conditions. I declined the privilege to ride one of these buses). The maquinas are the old 1940s and 50s Chevys and Fords that you see in the postcards of Havana. They are not used because they are quaint, however. Many people rely on them for their daily transportation needs. How they keep these ancient behemoths running is beyond me, but I did keep hearing that apart from having the most doctors per capita in the world, Cuba also had the greatest percentage of auto mechanics on the planet. Then there were official taxis which were mostly for tourists and therefore charged dollars and were expensive. I avoided them almost completely. Finally, many people cabbed illegally. This was the most intriguing part of transportation in Cuba. Often if you just put your hand out like hailing a cab or hitchhiking (it’s like a mixture of both) random people stop and you negotiate a fare with them depending on where you are going. It is illegal to pick up passengers without a taxi license, and unlike all other Third World governments, the Cuban government can effectively (I would say maybe even too effectively) enforce the rule of law. There is no fucking around in Cuba, so you pay the cab driver discreetly before reaching your destination. I had never seen this before, but in Cuba money is so tight that if you are one of the lucky few that can own a car you can do this to pick up a little extra money since you can definitely charge more than 10 pesos. Usually I paid a dollar or two (25-50 pesos) for rides homes. Especially late at night, this is the only transportation option. This made for many interesting late night rides especially since you get to experience the full spectrum of Cuban automobiles. Rarely you get picked up by a man (they are all men, I never saw a woman drive in Cuba) in a nice new Audi or Peugeot, but most of the time is a 1970s or 80s Lada and you get to experience the wonders of Soviet industry. Many of these cars were barely roadworthy, and it was interesting that many of the American cars that were at least 20 years older were in better shape. Still owning a car—any car—makes you the man in Cuba. There simply weren’t that many cars. I never saw a traffic jam in Havana. I wondered if the roads were so well kept because the government was responsible or because no one ever used them. Havana felt like a big village. Most of the time you could play an entire game of stickball in the street and no car would ever interrupt. The streets at night were eerily empty.
Now what do I think is the cause of all of this? The problem in my opinion is that Cuba is not really socialist or communist. It is at best a non-capitalist, non-socialist “coordinatorist” society, and at worst “state capitalism.” Socialism (in the sense of an anti-capitalist redistribution of resources, not in the European sense of social democracy) implies that the workers or producers have control over their own production and workplaces i.e. those who produce wealth appropriate, distribute and consume their own surplus value. The following is a critique of Leninism within Marxism that existed even before Lenin led the October Revolution to create the USSR. The idea—or something similar to it—has gone under various names, libertarian socialism, anarcho-syndicalism, council communism, participatory economics, etc. But the basic idea is true economic democracy. Workers decide collectively how to management their workplaces and what to do with the product of their work. The very idea of the Soviet for which the Soviet Union was named was just this. Soviets were worker collectives, where the workers sought to take over ownership of the Russian factories from the capitalists to be run and administered by themselves democratically. The problem in Cuba is that it is Leninist. Leninism is an elitist, bureaucratic, positivistic, and anti-democratic ideology. It is based on the idea of a group of “enlightened” intellectuals organizing a “vanguard” party to lead the mass of workers and foment revolution. These parties are notoriously hierarchical and dogmatic. Once in power, this party rules in the name of the workers, assuming that as superior scientists and intellectuals they can devise the best way to administer the society as it progresses from socialism to communism. This is achieved by means of a single-party dictatorship and a centrally planned economy. The end product is supposed to be a classless society where the state withers away.
The reality is very different. The party creates a class structure with two opposing classes, the mass of the people and an elite of party bureaucrats. The party bureaucrats run the government and the economy while the mass of the people take orders. The party uses corporate-style hierarchies to run all of the enterprises, so you still have a coterie of bosses and managers who supervise the workers and monopolize all intellectual and creative labor. Because they consider their jobs to be more important and they run shit, these class feels the need to compensate itself more than the average worker. The privileges enjoyed by this class, the cell phones, cars, nicer houses, foreign travel, beef, etc. create widespread resentment among the Cuban populace. Meanwhile work in Cuba is decidedly non-revolutionary except for absolute job security (in itself something that is considered revolutionary today, but was the norm in Western Europe and Japan, core capitalist countries, until fairly recently). You go to work, the boss tells you what to do, you get your paycheck at the beginning of the month and then you go home. Cuban workers are just as—if not more—alienated than workers in the US or any other capitalist economy. Your job is just a job. No one wants to go to work. No one feels like working hard, cause there is no point, at the end you still get your paycheck. Everyone complains about their bosses. If you just heard Cubans described work without knowing that Cuba was communist you would never think anything was different. So yeah, Cuban are seemingly “lazy,” they take their time doing anything at work and drag their feet, but that is because work is drudgery like work is in the US. The answer is not to threaten workers with starvation like capitalists do, but to revalue work and make it a meaningful part of human activity. That is the revolution Marx wrote so much about. Instead what I saw in Cuba was one group of people living off the work of another group of people. Sounds like capitalism to me.
The communism in Cuba is like the communism that exists in the patriarchal family. The father distributes the family’s resources so that even those family members that cannot work, the children and the retired parents, get fed and clothed. The father may even pay for the children to go to school and to go the doctor when they are sick (like when the Cuban state decides to invest in education, hospitals and pensions). The wife may get all the appliances she “needs” to do the housework. But at the end of the day, the father is a dictator. When he is fair and just, everything works, like when he decides to help his elderly parents. But if he decides to go out and get piss drunk with the rent money or decides to go out a nice new car to impress his friends even though the family can’t really afford it there is nothing anyone in the family can do to stop him (to follow the analogy like when the Cuban state decides to invest in sports in order to gain international prestige when it could spend that money on badly needed medicine or decides to have a huge military and police force, or any case where the priorities of the Cuban people differ from that of their government). If the wife protests the father just beats her (like when the Cuban police represses dissent). The point is that although the Cuban Communist Party and Fidel Castro are a better father to their family than any other family on the block, the point of socialism is that there is not supposed to be a father.
So what is the answer? The answer is participatory economics and true democracy. Cuba needs a second revolution: One with worker self-management and workplace democracy instead of corporate hierarchies. One with “balanced job complexes” or rotation of tasks at work to further avoid the cementing of these hierarchies and to prevent the monopolization of intellectual and creative labor which would enable some workers to have more knowledge and therefore more power over the democratic decision-making process. One with participatory planning instead of centralized planning with all of its bureaucratic inefficiency. In my opinion all of Cuba's famous economic inefficiencies are more a product of centralized planning than of communism per se. Socialism is anti-"free markets" and private property, but that does not imply centralized planning and government ownership. That is merely one solution for how to organize production and distribution of goods and services and the one that best suits the elitist nature of Leninism. But just as there have been different capitalisms, there can be and have been different socialisms. For a more detailed exposition of the participatory economics check out
parecon.org.
Leninism has essentially left the Cuban revolution as an incomplete socialist revolution. Cuba has state capitalism with a strong welfare program. The ironic thing is that Cuba as a more egalitarian and better educated society is much closer to true democracy than any of the liberal bourgeois Western democracies. Still besides their lack of progress on Cuba I was also disappointed by the lack of progress in three other key social areas, gender, sexuality and race.
Cuba is still MAD sexist. Although important gains have been made by Cuban women like equal pay for equal work and free access to abortions, which cannot be overlooked I was mostly disappointed. Women are still objectified. Still harassed in the street. Still expected to pull a double shift, even if socialism has now “liberated” them so that they can work outside of the household for crappy wages. Still excluded from upper echelons of power. Still making less money than men because men monopolize the highest paying occupations. Basically nowhere near equality or the end of patriarchy.
Cuba is also heterosexist. Again here, as with gender, it is light years ahead of its Latin American neighbors, but the machismo and gender stereotypes are still very strong. Being gay in Cuba is still a tough road to travel. You will put up with many insults, be denied promotions at work, etc. Still a long way to go, but good progress considering they were still imprisoning gay people not too long ago.
Lastly race. Same story. Being black in Cuba is better than being black anywhere else in the world (including the US). The inequalities between black and mulatto Cubans and white Cubans are much narrower than those that exist elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere. But they still exist. I got the feeling black folks got the same healthcare as everyone else, but in terms of everything else, education, housing, employment and government black folks are still under-represented at the top and over-represented at the bottom. The biggest problem is that orthodox communism defines race as being derivative of class therefore when class disappears so does race. Except it doesn’t work that way. For one, the racist attitudes remain deeply engrained in the culture. White women are still the standard of beauty and black hair is still “pelo malo.” Black folks are still mainly seen as entertainers, and over-represented as singers, dancers, musicians, and baseball players. Most of the presenters on TV are white, most of the people working in highly-visible service occupations e.g. flight attendants, hotel receptionists, bartenders at nice bars, etc. are still white (mostly women). But since race no longer exists officially the government won’t undertake the affirmative action and media campaign necessary to truly eliminate racism. The saddest things is that since the government completely controls the economy (poverty is the structural base sustaining American racism, I don’t care how econimistic that sounds, it’s the truth) it has the power to make Cuba the first truly post-racist society on the planet.
Finally (yes I am going to stop soon, I am running out of internet time) there are a lot of things that Cuba does right, but I am not sure if I should attribute that to Daddy Fidel or to the ingenuity of poverty. For instance, Cuban simply don’t consume as much as people anywhere else, even other peripheral countries. One example is that you will see places where you can repair and refill lighters. Anywhere else in the world you would simply through your lighter away and buy another one, in Cuba you can replace the spare parts. Talk about reduce, reuse and recyle. Same thing with cars, they don’t have too many of them, a good thing for the environment, and they continually repair the few that they do have rather than buying new ones. Ditto with pesticides. After the USSR fell Cuba lost its source of industrial pesticides so that, I think, most food production is organic. Cuba is also famous among environmentalists for its urban agriculture. And its true you can buy locally, organically grown produce in Havana, but whether that was a conscious attempt to save the environment or merely to prevent starvation is hard to know. Despite my criticisms of Cuba I am willing to give Fidel the benefit of the doubt, but I also know how the modernist, positivistic basis for Leninism leads to the same dismissal of the environment and view of nature as something to be conquered and exploited as capitalism (or have we all forgotten acid rain in Siberia and Chernobyl?) so I am skeptical.
