Comrades and Investors: The Uncertain Transition in Cuba

Abstract

The process of liberalization and economic adjustment in Cuba differs from other similar processes elsewhere in Latin America not only for the reasons referred to earlier, but because what has happened in Cuba is not simply an adjustment to an existing standard capitalist mode of operation but a radical restructuring of the political economy, the forms of social regulation and cultural-ideological production. This is a qualitative transformation of profound significance; the slow commercial colonization of socialized areas of the economy has posed challenges at many levels to the most central of all political questions - the distribution of power. If we take as axiomatic the fact that a combination of militant anti-imperialism and the provision of free social services does not amount to socialism, we are left with a question as to the real depth of these systemic changes: first, at the social (and more specifically the class) level and, second, at the level of the rearticulation of the whole of political life. It is central to this writer's thinking that the reforms are producing a recomposition of social classes as a consequence of the emergence of a technocratic-entrepreneurial bloc, and that that process is to the detriment of the popular classes. This tendency towards the restoration of capitalism in the country (in the name of socialism and under the direction of the Communist Party) is not inevitable. Therefore a second central idea informing this essay is that alternative paths exist that would permit the maintenance of socialism, and that they are inseparable from the articulation of the Cuban revolutionary agenda with an alternative left project at the international level. This would imply a major renovation of the political system in the direction of genuine popular power.