On Cuba's Collectivized Economy

(Letter)

7 October 2005

Dear Comrades:

The article “Feds: Hands Off ILA!” in WV No. 854 (16 September) wrongly states that the International Longshoremen’s Association represents dock workers in Montreal. This used to be the case, however several years ago Montreal dock workers, along with those in Quebec City and other smaller ports in Quebec, reorganized as locals of the Syndicat Canadien de la Fonction Publique.

In the same issue, the article “Bush Bans Cuban Medical Aid” states that “since 1991-92,” the Cuban regime “has increasingly opened up the country to imperialist economic penetration.” This was indeed the case following the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union and through the 1990s, as the Castro bureaucracy sought to restart a devastated economy through foreign investment from, and joint ventures with, European and Canadian corporations. At the same time, individual dollar holdings were legalized, leading, as the article states, to growing inequalities among the population.

More recently, however, following a modest economic recovery, the regime has moved to curtail imperialist holdings, as well as small-scale private businesses on the island. An article by the Chicago Tribune’s Havana correspondent (24 June), for example, notes how “Cuban officials have closed scores of foreign businesses that were welcomed here a decade ago to bail out the nation’s faltering economy.” It adds that “about a half-dozen of the more than 350 foreign firms once based in Cuba’s duty-free zones are still operating.” From 2002 to 2004, the number of joint ventures decreased from about 400 to about 300, while Cuba’s Foreign Investment and Economic Cooperation Ministry projects that another 67 will be closed this year. Meanwhile the government has taken the dollar out of circulation, tightened controls over state enterprises doing business with foreigners, and sought to reduce dependence on imperialist investment through enacting significant new trade deals with Venezuela and China.

All this has not put an end to imperialist economic penetration, which is still significant in the tourism, nickel and telecommunications industries, or to the significant inequalities on the island. But to imply that Trotskyists should oppose all imperialist investment, joint ventures, etc. in Cuba or any other bureaucratically deformed workers state would be very wrong. With the collapse of the USSR, deals with European and Canadian capitalists are often the only means for Cuba—a resource-poor country that has faced a decades-long U.S. economic embargo—to access modern technology and develop new economic sectors. In extremis, opposition to such investment would amount to a program of nationalist economic autarky, guaranteeing that the population remains mired in poverty.

Our opposition to the Castro bureaucracy fundamentally flows from its nationalist political program of “socialism in one country.” The article rightly concludes that a proletarian political revolution based on a perspective of international extension of the revolution is the only ultimate means to defend and expand the gains of the Cuban Revolution. Rather than fight to win the working masses in Latin America and beyond to the fight for socialist revolution, the Cuban bureaucracy has long fostered illusions in “progressive” bourgeois regimes, from Allende in Chile in the early 1970s to Chávez in Venezuela today. Meanwhile the regime’s bureaucratic monopoly on political power has undermined the consciousness of the Cuban working class while producing economic distortions and inefficiencies. Our perspective is a centrally planned economy based on workers democracy. That said, it is important to be accurate about developments in the Cuban economy today.

Comradely,
John Masters