Rethinking the Revolution: Nine Testimonies from Cuba
In 1961, Fidel Castro defined the parameters of the revolution's cultural policy for decades to come with his famous pronouncement: "Inside the revolution everything; against the revolution,...
...We need to widen that base, to create new channels that presuppose a different correlation of interests...
...We have constantly had to live with the stress of living so close to the United States...
...That is what is called living in the service of the enemy...
...Instead, we should try to determine what caused them to take up prostitution and try to solve these problems...
...You cannot find a democratic, peaceful country with vast inequalities and enormous injustices, because that engenders violence...
...For instance, the Cuban economy functioned practically without taxes before...
...Here nothing is hidden: the Cuban people are very spontaneous, very extroverted...
...It would have to compete, however, with private enterprises...
...His most recent film, El siglo de las luces, based on the Alejo Carpentier novel of the same name, premiered recently in Havana...
...U Juan Antonio Blanco is a professor essayist and diplomat...
...I wish the changes-both economic and political-were taking place more quickly, but the difficult international situation justifies the slowness...
...Yes, social services have been affected by the crisis, but the principle of offering free universal health care and education has not been abandoned...
...Like everyone else, I think that we have to struggle to ensure that this country doesn't lose the advances it has made in the fields of health and education...
...I do not believe in a single-party system...
...Inertia can be equally fatal to the revolutionary process...
...There are, of course, others who are not only satisfying their basic necessities, but also buying luxury consumer items...
...Socialism as it existed in the Soviet Union and the East Bloc no longer exists...
...The country lived too much, too fast...
...It revealed that the economic crisis has given rise to a social crisis, which can turn into a political crisis...
...I need to know, since so many products are only available in the dollar stores, if one day a part of my salary will be paid in dollars...
...Don't ask me how, I don't know...
...I don't know, but I hope that doesn't happen...
...Things end and begin...
...We have lived through five years of economic crisis, of not knowing what is going to happen from one day to the next, of living with a sense of imminent disaster hanging over our heads...
...What economic prospects do these people have...
...Most of us have the capacity to assimilate experiences, to not feel beaten down by them...
...Did you know that many of them are taking out U.S...
...she is going to transmit her point of view...
...While different members of the fam- ily perhaps share certain tasks, ultimate responsibility falls on the shoulders of the woman...
...One is never the same, because things change and evolve...
...Official discourse has not had the time, or has not wanted to, or has not been able to make this reformulation...
...I was talking with a friend of mine in the Writers' Union about the managerial class-the business sector that manages the tourist enterprises and the corporations...
...Even though many of them don't believe in the single-party system or the legitimacy of the leadership, many of them don't want Cuba to go back to the way it was before the revolution either...
...I have in mind social democracies like Switzerland and Sweden...
...The capacity for resistance demonstrated by not only the Cuban people but by the system is considerable...
...to be an ongoing process, because one cannot impose an eternal form on political activity...
...The romantic era when we were all young and living the adventure of beginning the revolutionary process is over...
...They need things, as we all do, that you can only acquire with dollars...
...embargo-when and if it occurs- we are acquiring a great mosaic of foreign investment from different countries which is contributing to a multilateral instead of unilateral relationship with the world...
...There are two possibilities: you can commit physical, moral or ideological suicide, or you can have enough lucidity to say, okay we are going to get through this...
...By that I mean the revolution is a moment of changes, of transformation of social structures...
...It's a challenge because political participation in Cuba was conceived of within a paradigm that preceded individuation...
...The Cuban nation lived very quickly until 1958...
...As a consequence, some of the traditional mass organizations have been left with a narrow social base of participation...
...The United States today is ter- ribly dependent upon the fluctuations of international markets...
...To understand why Cuba has survived, you have to analyze the national culture, the antecedents, the paranoia that Cubans feel toward the democraticc project...
...Then, of course, we have the reemergence of prostitution in Cub'a...
...Secondly, I believe that the farmers' markets are absolutely necessary...
...I would call it a tie...
...Of course, a part of the leadership is afraid that these new sectors will be totally co-opted by the United States...
...But this is a risk that Cuba has to take...
...A spectrum of positions were taken on such key topics as the extent and direction of Cuba's economic reforms, the viability of a one-party system, and the role of the exile community in shaping the country's future...
...It would be a pitched battle...
...Moreover, this process is taking place in the context of a tense relationship with the United States, which now is being expressed again with the attempt to pass the Helms-Burton bill in the U.S...
...He wants to imitate the Cuban of the 1940s and 1950s, but with the achievements of socialism...
...This was a very serious error that was committed in the past, but now the era of slogans has passed...
...When you arrive at this point, you become paralyzed, you've lost the fight...
...You can't draw blood from a stone...
...Now we are the sacrificial lambs...
...We all know that thousands of families have survived thanks to family remittances...
...In the end, inertia can have consequences that are as negative as extreme audacity...
...That is what will allow thought to mature in this country...
...When you hit bottom, the future has to be better...
...We have the Popular Councils, the National Assembly of Popular Power...
...This country has something that makes it distinct from the rest of Latin America...
...The moment that you allow a social sector to be owner of its means of production, it can one day become a pressure group with its own aspirations of political power...
...I believe that precisely what will create a space for disintegration is the supposition that we all think alike, or that I will stay in my house ruminating, like cows do, about my opposition to a particular decision...
...We are talking about a model where the state would retain the capacity to redistribute the surplus of sectors that have the highest levels of accumulation to those that have lower accumulation levels...
...I believe that a single party is necessary in times like these in order to direct society and maintain unity...
...I think that people would be ready to bet on a relatively modest future...
...In the political sphere, I believe we must reconceptualize the meaning of democracy in a socialist system...
...Perhaps it's not the moment now...
...The leadership has created a population with the capacity to think and confront reality...
...There is no good reason why a class allianceto use a classical Marxist term-can't be established...
...A new social sector which is quite young is growing, though its growth is offset by migration off the island...
...We are so used to hardships here that anything that will alleviate the situation a bit is going to look marvellous to us...
...I'm certain that the leadership is convinced of this necessity, but given the economic crisis, the U.S...
...Ten kilometers outside Mexico City, you feel like you are in the fifth world...
...We worked like dogs to educate every single child so he or she could go to college or technical school...
...Cuba is much more stable and egalitarian...
...These are men who were raised within socialist society, who want to be capitalists but don't know what a capitalist is...
...This state is very paternalistic, very generous...
...It's the global reality right now...
...When they give such opinions, you can't call them counterrevolutionaries because to be critical is the revolutionary way of thinking...
...Why must we think about suicide or holocaust...
...The black-outs have gone from lasting ten hours to three...
...As long as we don't manage to do this in Cuba, we are not going to mature...
...I would place myself in the first tendency...
...Such an opportunity for debate will strengthen the workers' movement, the unions, the life of the country, everything...
...This creat- ed an economic vacuum in markets, technology and financial sources...
...There is no reason for perestroika or glasnost...
...We would have saved ourselves much grief and many problems if there had been ways to express certain dissatisfactions and ask certain questions...
...If that occurs, blood will run, but it will run with justice because we are not going to let anyone come here and force us out of the homes that we acquired honestly and legally-we who have not had privileges...
...Finally, there is a third group-the orthodoxy-that sees these economic reforms as extremely harmful and believes that in the long run they will destroy socialism...
...But we cannot think that we are always at war...
...The vast majority of the youth today are much more sophisticated...
...This does not mean that income differences will be eliminated...
...Either we are daring and risk the economic and political costs, or we permit inertia to eat away at us little by little...
...The economic crisis, and its profound social and political consequences, has prompted tremendous soulsearching on the part of the Cuban intelligentsia...
...We have the capacity to think that though life presents impasses and difficulties, we have to struggle to surmount them and find the appropriate response to each situation...
...Those resources have to come from the national economy's capacity to generate internal savings...
...He is the author of Biography of a Runaway Slave and Rachel's Song (Curbstone Press), and is the vice president of the writers' union, UNEAC...
...That is what is occupying women's time...
...He is the author with Luis Rogelio Nogueras, of the detective novel El cuarto circulo...
...The differences lie in the degree, order, integration and systematization of the measures...
...NACLA's associate editor, Deidre McFadyen, travelled to Cuba in April to talk with a range of prominent individuals associated with the revolution...
...Extreme measures were taken in the 1970s that Cuba is still weighed down by today economically as well as culturally...
...They will come from the recovery of the country's economic productivity and from the state's redistributive capacity...
...A danger exists right now: Cuba depended upon the United States at the time when the revolution began...
...For me, it is a great contradiction that we have opened the country up to foreign investment while the market is still closed to Cuban non-governmental property...
...Could this sector come to be so powerful that it ends up becoming independent and living a life totally separate from that of the rest of society...
...While I am dealing with all these problems, I don't want a minority sector to begin to function as a new class with all sorts of possibilities open to them...
...The maturity doesn't exist yet...
...We have to figure out how the revolution's cultural and ideological values can be made to appeal to the spirit of these adolescents without resorting to slogans...
...The state, from an economic point of view, would have four fundamental characteristics: it would retain control of the fundamental means of production...
...These taxes should, of course, be progressive...
...Now it has to pull back very slowly so that it doesn't harm people in the deepest part of their being...
...Why hasn't the government taken a more VOL XXIX, No 2 SEPT/OCT 1995 31REPORT ON CUBA integrated approach...
...They also called us the Jews of the Caribbean...
...I think Machiavelli was the one who said: when you attack a population too much, you unify it...
...People in this group personally experienced capitalism and want to avoid returning to it at all costs...
...The fundamental values that we are trying to save are associated with social justice, ethics, morality and national dignity...
...Cuba was an exploratory territory for U.S...
...The word "crisis" doesn't frighten me...
...Cuba is part of this world that has this reality...
...People used to call us the Argentines of the Caribbean...
...We are a country accustomed to crisis...
...As a consequence, Cuba did not believe the political project of liberalism would resolve any of the problems in this country...
...There is no need to be afraid of life...
...The preoccupation with economic problems is such that I believe people are giving less priority to the question of a political opening...
...Fidel Castro didn't want to accept it before, but I believe that he is now more ready to than the exile community is...
...Every time we are going to do something noble and just, we run into obstacles put there by that govern- ment...
...I hope that it will also be, in the cultural and intellectual realm, a rich future...
...The old political structures have not failed...
...The values that have been transmitted from generation to generation are in danger of being lost...
...E Guillermo Rodriguez Rivera is a university professor poet and literary critic...
...We will not have a future where we will be the center of the universe or where we will have created a new society with a new moral and cultural life...
...Regardless of whether or not we can maintain a oneparty system, the Communist Party needs to be more than a vanguard party...
...The Cuban people have not only earned the right to define it but they have the capacity to define it, because the essential character of our political system is not to separate people from power but to use power to cultivate people and familiarize them with policy questions...
...They have many more opportunities open to them than we had at that age...
...they have a kind of maniacal obsession with Fidel Castro...
...They saw what happened with the UNO in Nicaragua, for example...
...This country, either through a violent process or one of co-optation-and I would say theJatter is more likely-will move towards standardization with the rest of the countries of Latin America...
...It's simply that the century has NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 24 actsREPORT ON CUBA played a bad joke on us...
...Perhaps in a certain way, older people reject them, but in general they are not looked down upon by society because they are solving a family problem...
...0 Ambrosio Fornet is a writer literary critic, editor and screenwriter...
...This year there is going to be a significant expansion of self-employment and possibly family microenterprises...
...these are problems that the community can solve on its own...
...In this intermediary period that we are passing through between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the lifting of the U.S...
...No country, not even the most powerful, can be absolutely independent...
...People say: "I don't have transportation, there isn't enough food, there are black-outs twice a week, my kids need shoes and powdered milk...
...For instance, I would apply the process of collectivizing the state farms to the area of services...
...All of these young women are victims of the moment that we are living...
...Drug abuse was rampant...
...it would retain the capacity to strategically plan economic development through direct and indirect mechanisms...
...Then the intelligentsia as a socio-professional group is changing...
...He has just pub- lished a history of the printed book in Cuba...
...he only solution to the present crisis is to take strong action through an informed debate...
...In a certain sense, the revolution is over...
...Even though social inequalities are greater than they were before, in no way do these inequalities include the loss of the state's capacity to guarantee social spending...
...If the process of liberalization of economic actors does not take cooperative forms, in a number of years, we will see ourselves returning to economic relations that we left behind some years ago...
...The notion of personal dignity and independence, the personal capacity to work and create projects, the desire to distinguish oneself from the rest of society are very marked right now...
...Miguel Limia is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the Cuban Academy of Sciences...
...This would be completely tragic...
...We shouldn't feel sad or pained about this process...
...That background, all that consciousness goes along accumulating information...
...We shouldn't blame these women...
...We have a family code of law that is the envy of other countries...
...Once economic stability is achieved, political democracy will be much more possible because I think these two things are connected...
...What we need is more economic tolerance...
...Believe that the revolutionary project has to be reformulated...
...The government is moving in the right direction, but it has adopted a sort of scattershot approach...
...Most people believe that, whatever happens, this country has to be different...
...There are vengeful generations on both sides...
...We are not going to have the future we dreamt of...
...Although this new model of socialism would have distinct characteristics, it would continue being a project that benefits the interests of the majority of Cuban society...
...and it would have the capacity to produce the necessary resources to guarantee social spending high enough to impede the emergence of acute poverty...
...Although this helped us to survive, it cre- ated a new dependency...
...This has led, in many cases, to a radical rethinking of the nature of the revolution and more generally, of the prospects for leftist social transformation throughout Latin America...
...when a population is more relaxed, debate and new ideas come in more easily...
...policy, instead of encouraging the internal debate in this country, is having the opposite effect...
...I believe that what can safeguard intellectual thought as the protagonist of the revolution is precisely the multidimensionality of discussion, the space which allows the most contradictory positions to be voiced...
...Foreign capital is important because it offers resources that the domestic economy does not have in terms of capital and technology, but it also introduces many interests at odds with the national project...
...I am truly proud of being Cuban, because it has taken courage to survive these years...
...It would be possible to reconcile these new forms of property with community needs...
...That protest was the first act of large-scale civil disobedience since 1959...
...A mixed economy is healthier than an exclusively state economy, not because I believe in the sacrosanct virtue of private property, but because this is the international and economic reality of the world in which we are living...
...It's a dehumanizing attitude...
...I believe that today we are advancing toward a new, different society...
...I speak of the fam- ily because the demands of daily life such as getting and preparing food and keeping the house clean have become the most difficult...
...With these ground rules, there is also a role for financial capital because the very dynamic of foreign capital in the productive and commercial spheres demands a financial platform that the country is not in a position to provide...
...That took place in the 1960s...
...There is no need to be afraid that certain institutions, certain things will disappear...
...The FMC, for example, is putting greater emphasis on its base, on decentralization, and on democratization of its organizational structures...
...It will become a client state of the United States...
...N Miguel Barnet is a poet, ethnologist and novelist...
...Even so, I would summarize my position on that subject in the phrase: "single party, yes...
...Few civilized countries have experienced what we have...
...It gave everything...
...What right do we have to decide the holocaust for a five-year-old child...
...It continues expressing the revolutionary project in traditional terms, only now couched with the motto that we should try to salvage the achievements of socialism...
...We argue that there must be a wider range of economic actors...
...capital...
...In Cuba, there was institutionalized pornography-in the 1950s, there were pornographic theaters in Havana with pornographic films made in Cuba...
...In this country, there is hope in the midst of crisis, dissidence, prostitution, corruption...
...That is a very generous attitude, because many of those people, when they left the country, lost family ties...
...This situation, which existed before, has been aggravated by the economic crisis...
...These changes have already led to many contradic- tions in social life...
...Some fear that the fragmentation of political institutions will create a space for disintegration...
...Those advances are being eroded...
...When I travel abroad, in restaurants people say to me: resist...
...Cuba has a enormously qualified and technical population, so with significant investment this country will rapidly take off...
...In the current crisis, the revolutionary govern- ment has had to make concessions-joint ventures, market socialism, the legalization of the dollar...
...N Mayra Vilasis is a filmmaker based in Havana...
...They would be better off if they would just accept that they lost the battle to overthrow Fidel Castro and prepare for a transition, just as I think that Fidel Castro has to accept that he lost the battle to construct socialism as he wanted...
...Because transforming the economy in a way that has never been undertaken by any country related to Cuba is an enormous challenge...
...Afterwards, the revolution committed very serious errors...
...But those of us who are of a certain age realize that to return to the Cuba of those years would be to return to point zero...
...it should be conceived of as a party of the nation...
...Clearly all of us are in a moral crisis in this country...
...Cuba has the right conditions for development...
...It's simply the nature of capital...
...These people are hysterical, recalcitrant...
...First, there are those who favor giving the market a more active role in the economy, in the distribution of both resources and information...
...Here there can't be a perestroika like in the Soviet Union, first of all because there wasn't Stalinism here...
...Cuba needs a mixed economy, in which private capital and investment do certain things that the state cannot do or does badly...
...Our ancestors struggled for many of these values since the nineteenth century and even during the age of capitalism in Cuba...
...A number of new institutions need to be developed as well...
...This new type of Cuban is a sort of anachronism...
...The earlier form of political participation-and the notions that underlay it-is becoming historically less relevant...
...The mood of the population-if I had to use one word to characterize it-is one of expectancy...
...There are currently three fundamental poles in the economic debate...
...We have to take special care of the youth in general...
...against the revolution, nothing...
...People have to be allowed to develop more personal initiatives to improve the economy...
...But within three months, he will have learned how to repair it...
...eople in Cuba are no longer debating whether we should confront the current crisis with ideological or economic measures, but rather what kind of economic measures should be taken...
...I am for changes...
...I believe that you have to overcome deficiencies in the present system of political participation through continuity...
...I'm talking about the new busi- nessmen who manage the joint ventures...
...Then there are those-many of them young people-who think that the solution to the country's problems is a complete return to capitalism...
...He is the director of the Felix Varela Center, and the author of Tercer Milenio: Una vision alternativa de la posmodernidad...
...It's an acceptable future in human and social terms, without the anachronistic great injustices of the underdeveloped world, without great poverty, without great prostitution, without great misery, without great social inequalities...
...You go into the street and meet a 40-year-old man here who studied mechanics in Prague...
...The people in Miami use any hint of criticism or discontent to say that socialism doesn't work...
...And they often give critical and negative opinions...
...It's difficult to establish social consensus right now because we don't know what the future will consist of...
...Yet how are we going to achieve this firm unity in times of crisis if not through a debate that arrives at conclusions and renews each social base of the project...
...They shared with her their views of the country's future and their assessments of the need for economic and political reforms...
...We are not going to agree-only on some points...
...The recent economic reforms have profoundly altered the physiognomy of the classes in this country...
...Congress...
...Many female professionals have had to give up their jobs in order to dedicate themselves to solving the urgent problems at home...
...I don't believe that this is bad...
...The few prostitutes whom I know from my neighborhood are young women who have professions, but don't have access to dollars in their work...
...I think we've made it through the worst...
...If we don't allow this diversity of opinion to express itself, one day the tumors will explode as they did in the Soviet Union, and then it will be too late to do anything...
...They have grown up in a very convulsive era, without a strong frame of reference...
...I believe that this new type of socialism can be created with equanimity, in measured steps...
...Immediately, the Soviet Union filled this vacuum...
...Nobody knows...
...There is no reason why the socialist project shouldn't be attractive because they are workers, they are people who live off their labor or the labor of their family...
...This group is opposed to forms of Cuban private property and to the state's loss of control over the economy...
...He is the coauthor of Cuba: La restructuraci6n de la economia: notas para un debate...
...Every Cuban can give his or her opinion about anything anywhere...
...0 Gerardo GonzAlez is an economist at the Center for the Study of the Americas (CEA...
...New forms of popular participation-such as the Workers' Parliaments and the Popular Councilshave appeared...
...And yet, that great majority have had the fellow-feeling to contribute to the survival of Cubans on the island...
...With its infrastructure, strong communication routes, 90% electrification and an educated population, this country can intensely develop in very little time...
...The only realistic solution is to create a legal framework that allows these people to take care of themselves by finding a niche in the local market...
...In other cases, women are often the first to be laid off or demoted...
...I am an optimist...
...I believe in the revolution, if the revolution is possible...
...and a girl dressed in a string bikini...
...How are we going to retake what is truly valuable from the project and at the same time make it economically viable...
...You cannot unify everyone in such an artificial way, because in the heart of the left, you and I think differently...
...How many Cubans in the United States support the Helms-Burton bill...
...The present generations didn't, of course...
...What are we going to do about it...
...Cuban men and women have to be more robust, more self-sufficient...
...I think that it is the only viable kind of society right now...
...Debate in the last two sessions in our National Assembly has been qualitatively different and superior to that of previous sessions...
...Consequently, the old slogans are not only inadequate but these young people will reject them...
...Where are all of these changes going to lead...
...We have made advances in women's rights that other countries are still struggling to attain...
...Not only from an economic point of view, but also from a social and political one, this is a truly complicated undertaking...
...I am so optimistic that perhaps you could call me a neoidealist...
...I don't have a clear idea what it is...
...Women, however, have never been adequately repre- sented in the country's leadership circles...
...We have to make the socialist project attractive to those working on their own as well as to the small farmer...
...The United States could faciliate these changes through a more open, civil, tolerant policy...
...But at the same time, I realize that a large part of the population can't afford the prices in the market...
...But if you offer that to a Cuban, he'll say to you, "okay, when do I begin...
...You have an ideological platform, suppositions and an orientation that are different from mine...
...We experienced all the problems that other countries sometimes experienced later on...
...Don't think that the institutions are lacking...
...The political system has been adapting to this new reality...
...We can't blame anyone...
...This will put to the test the cohesion and political agility of the Communist Party...
...Luis Guti6rrez, Pedro Monreil and I-we are all economists at the Center for the Study of the Americas (CEA)-have written a book which sets out our economic proposal...
...That child has her legacy...
...I think we should experiment with different forms of private property which don't necessarily have to be forms of individual property...
...But it's impossible to enforce laws in the home...
...I don't understand these Cubans...
...That paradigm-reflected in the traditional mass organizations such as the Committees in Defense of the Revolution (CDRs), the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC), and the Union of Communist Youth (UJC)-was built by the experience of the Cuban people in the first years of the revolution when solidarity took precedence above all else...
...Nonetheless, I think it is something that has to be put on the table...
...In the economic realm, we should not focus on autono- my, self-reliance, the isolation of Cuba from the rest of the world...
...Over the next two years, between 100,000 and 200,000 people at least will be laid off from the state sector...
...There's no reason for it not to be an open-ended future of ideas, polemical debates, and social opening...
...VOL XXIX, No 2 SEPT/OCT 1995 4 23REPORT ON CUBA The political system has to reflect these social, class, professional and generational changes...
...it would retain the capacity to represent the interests of the country when dealing with foreign capital...
...Cuba must go from one model of socialism to another model of socialism...
...Even if a catastrophe were to occur, Cuba would never take the same path that it has gone down once before...
...We envision a decentralized market economy with a high level of state participation...
...Civil society should participate not exclusively in the execution of tasks determined by the government, but in the formulation of state policies...
...But I don't believe in futile sacrifices...
...With its proximity to the United States, Cuba is also privileged as a tourist destination...
...single opinion, no...
...If the changes were abrupt, it would be catastrophic...
...While that particular division still holds true todaythose against the revolution continue to vote with their rafts-what it means to be "for the revolution" has become a great deal more complex and diverse in recent years...
...The Party will have to learn what it really means to be a political party...
...I see that as very difficult and dangerous...
...Even if we still have a consensus in favor of the revolution, we shouldn't be confident that it will always be that way...
...We propose a fundamental transformation of the Cuban economy without giving up its socialist essence...
...Cuba has already made great sacrifices to maintain the ideal of progress and of the left in power...
...The older generation in Miami wants to reclaim its old space and rebuild Cuban society as it was at the time when they abandoned the island...
...It's not by chance that 26 NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 26REPORT ON CUBA democracies such as Switzerland and Sweden are much more developed...
...Sacrifices are called for when you really have a good chance of achieving your objective...
...We cannot underestimate the significance of not only the balsero crisis last summer, but also the large anti-government demonstration that took place on August 5 of that year...
...One has adventures of all types-political, amorous, and so on...
...Cuban socialism didn't invent them...
...But I believe that no country can live divided...
...A rupture is always possible, but I don't think it is necessary...
...But I have the sense that countries are like living organisms, like human experiences...
...They should not simply be administrative apparatuses that see if the bread arrived at the bakery or the lights are broken...
...They are asking why it is taking so long to apply the measures, why these particular measures and not others, why these first and not those...
...Could this sector come to constitute the nucleus of a new class...
...This group also wants to open the economy to private Cuban capital and make it more decentralized...
...I don't think the problem is that we need various parties, but rather we need the confrontation of ideas...
...If you ask my personal opinion, not shared by many, I would prefer to see this expansion of national private enterprise assume cooperative forms, rather than be individual or family units...
...That is why our ideology is subversive...
...Unfortunately, the life of Cuban women has become much harder in this period of crisis because machismo still reigns in this country...
...Keeping these principles in mind, foreign capital should expand and become more closely linked to other sectors of the Cuban economy...
...This is not the result of any conspiracy, nor is it something strange...
...I don't mean to say that I renounce the revolution...
...Fortunately in some sectors, the government has begun to see the problem and is trying to find a solution...
...The Cuban people are really tired...
...As a general rule, political institutions reflect the political ideas, the state of political relations, and the style of political leadership of the era when they were founded...
...As an artist and as a woman, I am also troubled by the reemergence of the use of images of women as a tourist attraction...
...We have to create a new type of socialism...
...We are living in a world that is becoming ever more interdependent, more horizontally integrated, more compact...
...Except for these, everything else in the economic and political realms is negotiable...
...We have to be careful, however, that we don't save the Cuban economy but lose Cuban socialism in the process...
...A part of the VOL XXIX, No 2 SEPT/OCT 1995 7MMME1 29REPORT ON CUBA resources that these cooperatives generate, for instance, could be reinvested in the communities where they are located...
...I have talked with VOL XXIX, No 2 SE PT/OcT 199525 VOL XXIX, No 2 SEPT/OCT 1995 25REPORT ON CUBA many people in Miami...
...Now, with the proliferation of new economic actors, the state needs to work out a mechanism to track income in order to establish adequate forms of taxation...
...Some intellectuals have reoriented themselves to the new economic ventures, although to a certain degree, the presence of foreign capital has made the Cuban intelligentsia a bit unnecessary since this investment already comes with technology and know-how...
...For that, I'm hopeful...
...Now the question is: Where will we find the resources to do this...
...Finally, the urban petty bourgeoisie is experiencing a sort of renaissance--a logical development because that sector is closely related to the self-employed sector which is also expanding...
...The ball is now in their court...
...It becomes more and more difficult to engage in this sort of debate because within the state of siege we are under, a paranoia develops...
...I believe that this mysterious capitalist egotism and possessiveness is one of the negative features of Cuban identity...
...The convergence of the interests of the individual and society was so self-evident that no revolutionary questioned it...
...The decade of the 1960s for us was fundamentally an era of unity of the Cuban people...
...They say the world's sages sent an economic specialist here one day, and people told him that the Cuban revolution has only three problems: breakfast, lunch and dinner...
...But nobody wants to accept the tie...
...I would use a broader concept that would include cooperative forms of property ownership...
...Right now this generation has a lot of economic power, a lot of decision-making power, a lot of power to influence public opinion in the community...
...They need to be able to master their skills better and not depend so much on the state...
...You have to recycle this man because if you show him a new North American car, his eyes widen in fear...
...The old Leninist socialism failed...
...If we don't struggle for such a future, the alternative is very simple...
...What we don't have is a clear recognition on the part of the government that a debate must take place within them...
...We don't depend upon the United States or the Soviet Union...
...All of these have to do with two very important things: self-determination and sovereignty...
...To live with the psychological pressure-not to mention the economic and political pressure--of doing without water, lights, transportation is tremendous...
...The only thing that guarantees the permanence of the revolutionary project with all the modifications is a high degree of unity with respect to the project...
...These values date from the era of Jos6 Martf...
...The definition of that future is not the work of four big intelligent heads around a table, but the work of the entire population...
...In fact, I think this reflects progress...
...Julio Carranza is an econo- mist and deputy director of the Center for the Study of the Americas...
...And the guy will work harder than anyone...
...A new type of Cuban has emerged: the new rich man with his beeper, who is full of him- self and in bad taste...
...Institutionalization has Humberto Solds is a film director whose movies include Lucia, Cecilia and Amada...
...The conflict with the United States resulted in that country breaking its ties with us and applying an economic embargo...
...We cannot be the salve for humanity's conscience...
...We have to struggle to improve them...
...But I think that changes have to be introduced very slowly so that people can assimilate them...
...citizenship in order to get ready to come here to recover the apartments and cars they owned 36 years ago, their small businesses that no longer exist...
...The Party must facilitate an internal debate that allows different opinVOL XXIX, No 2 SEPT/OcT 1995 27 15i= VOL XXIX, No 2 SEPT/OCT 1995 27REPORT ON CUBA ions to be reflected...
...that's why they don't understand...
...He has done research on Caribbean economic problems and Cuba's integration in the region...
...With reason, of course, because if this fracture occurs, anything could happen...
...Nobody wants to go back to there...
...0 he revolution is a form of resistance, but one that is very costly...
...The people in Miami are too emotionally involved...
...Without doubt, the peasant has also changed because his or her production is now stimulated by the free farmers' markets and because state farms are being turned into cooperatives...
...This component is so fundamental that the day it disappears, it won't make sense to talk of revolution anymore...
...All of that has disappeared...
...The Party shouldn't display a false unanimity because we know that this unanimity doesn't exist, neither at the level of the party nor in society in general...
...There is a fundamental coincidence between the changes that the government is carrying out and the way we conceive of economic reform in our book...
...blockade and the people in Miami, the leadership is.most afraid of disunity, of fracture...
...I don't know...
...The economic problems are the people's primary obsession...
...You can't expect the revolutionary spirit that existed into the 1980s not to flag in the context of the new economic structures that incorporate many elements of the market economy, and the sale of most items in a currency that is not the national currency and that most people don't possess...
...Development is the sine qua non of political stability...
...In recent years, the Cuban community abroad has played a very powerful role in the economy on the island...
...These are being corrected, but as they say, it is always easier to destroy something than to build it...
...Even though foreign capital constitutes an indispensible component of the process of rebuilding the Cuban economy, in the long run it is not going to provide the resources needed to overhaul the economy...
...State and private enterprises alike would operate according to a market dynamic that would demand a high level of efficiency and profit...
...At this moment, the vacuum has opened up once again...
...It's unfair...
...You have to live in the present, and believe that the revolutionary project will be rebuilt at some other point in time...
...I believe that the problem is how to manage a large number of relationships so that Cuba does not depend upon one country alone...
...Before the crisis, women had achieved very high professional levels...
...The following excerpts were chosen to give a flavor of the internal debate taking place within Cuba at this most critical of moments...
...That made the revolution...
...Of course, this is politically dangerous...
...But I do know that the way that we originally conceived of it, the way that popular ideology assimilated it is no longer possible, because that presupposed the existence of a rearguard-the socialist camp in general and the Soviet Union in particular-which guaranteed trade, investment flows, and national security...
...The forces of production have to be liberated much more...
...Jos6 Marti-whose thought founded this nationconsidered that in times of war you had to create the Cuban Revolutionary Party...
...We need to be aware of that so that the state in its relations with foreign capital can manage this relationship in the interests of the country...
...She is the director of several documentaries on Cuban women...
...I think that this process of improving upon already existing structures is the way to go...
...The objective of economic reform is to create the conditions to make the Cuban revolution viable in a much more complex international context and with a much more diversified society than before...
...An undeniable process of individuation is now taking place in Cuban society...
...Cuba suffered a great deal during the years of the republic [1902-58...
...If you tell a North American worker, "I'll pay you this much," he'll probably tell you to go to hell because he doesn't work for such a low salary...
...There have to be big changes in the economy...
...This would entail a reform of the state enterprises and an unprecedented diversification of the forms of property ownership...
...I believe that there is sufficient ideological tolerance...
...The world outside must take a very flexible view of what is happening in Cuba...
...There would simply not be extreme poverty and extreme wealth...
...This economic reality has very painful implications for the attempt to preserve a pristine, immaculate ideal...
...Though no longer the only actor, the state would continue managing the largest, most important commercial sector of the country...
...I say to them: we are resisting, but my god, don't ask of people what they cannot give...
...People say: "I need to know if the state is going to be sufficiently organized and efficient to provide these products at acceptable prices...
...A new managerial class has emerged that operates in the joint ventures between the Cuban state and foreign capital...
...They simply need to be modified to reflect the new form of political activity...
...We need a government which at all levels is sensitive to the public debate...
...A fundamental principle of this economic strategy is the preservation of a social-welfare state...
...In the current context, Cuba has to be much more enterprising in introducing more daring economic reforms...
...But at the same time, the state would have a regulatory role...
...Cubans do not want to accept values that they have already rejected...
...I have the impression that the majority of Cuban Americans-those without great economic power-are perceptive enough to propose reunification within a very mature framework...
...I believe, however, that in the long run it should be a true social democracy...
...Certain strategic enterprises, however, would continue to be owned and managed by the state...
...In the United States, the immense majority of Cubans don't want a dialogue...
...Publicity posters now depict a palm tree, rum...
...This reflects a willingness to rebuild...
...The Cuban people have paid over many years, and they have done it with pleasure, love and enthusiasm...
...They want a project of social justice...
...There have been special campaigns, for example, to encourage nurses to go back to work after many abandoned their jobs to deal with problems in their households...
...We have to keep in mind that Cuba is in a battle against time, and time is against us...
...In the long run, the solution to Cuba's problems will have a lot to do with national unification between Cubans on the island and those in the United States...
...The traditional mass organizations are renovating themselves as well...
...But don't expect of them what they cannot give...
...For example, we have never had a female public-health minister even though 70% of the workers in the health-care sector are women...
...Here there was the highest level of consumerism...
Vol. 29 • September 1995 • No. 2
