Cuba Winning the 'Battle of Ideas'


By Gloria La Riva --

Cuba is doing more than just surviving the U.S. economic blockade and
the difficult legacy of the post-Soviet era. The Cuban revolution-the
people and its leadership-has been actively engaged in a strategy for
the last six years known as the "Battle of Ideas" to strengthen the
socialist revolution.

Cuba's economy is expanding and returning to socialist norms of
production.
Photo: Bill Hackwell

Among the latest efforts in the Battle of Ideas is a massive investment
in health, education and cultural development as well as a revival of
socialist economic methods. In addition, there is a major effort to
combat corruption and theft of social property.

Underlying the battle is the Cuban economy's accelerating growth.
This growth has enabled the Cuban state to increase its role in the
economy, for example in socialist norms of distribution, to benefit the
workers as opposed to the small-scale entrepreneurs who gained
immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Revival of socialist methods

Before its destruction in 1991, the Soviet Union provided essential
economic support for the Cuban revolution. After 1991, Cuba was faced
with severe shortages and economic disruptions. In the desperate
struggle for sheer survival, the Cuban leadership was forced to resort
to capitalist-style stimuli of the economy. But President Fidel Castro
and other Cuban Communists always looked forward to the day when such
reforms would cease to be a driving force of economic development.

That day has come.

Cuba's gross domestic product grew 5 percent in 2004. The tourist
industry grew by 7 percent.

This year, it is estimated that Cuba's economy will grow by 9
percent. Unemployment has been reduced to a mere 1.9 percent.

With every economic gain, all relevant institutions are engaged in
calculating how to reassert socialist economic measures, rather than
the capitalist-oriented methods of recent times.

Beginning with a surprise notice to the world last May that the U.S.
dollar would no longer be accepted as currency, a series of banking
measures gave Cuba's currency new strength.

Cuban bank account holders have voluntarily reduced their dollar
holdings by 57 percent. Savings of the Cuban convertible peso grew
threefold, and the national peso savings grew by 35 percent.

In the 1990s, the Cuban government had to implement income-generating
reforms during the severe economic downturn in the wake of the Soviet
Union's collapse. Those included private employment, foreign
investment, development of international tourism, remittances from
families abroad, the introduction of the U.S. dollar and allowing
unrestricted farmers' markets.

The government and Cuban Communist Party made clear that the reforms
were not building socialism per se, but were concessions aimed at
reviving the economy in order to preserve socialist gains until such a
time in the future when the country could return to the "building of
socialism."

On July 26, 1993, on the cusp of those economic changes, Cuban
President Fidel Castro gave a major speech to explain this turn.

"We have to search for hard currency income, through different means
we are doing that. [A] measure towards that objective is an opening to
foreign capital investments. ... We who were so doctrinaire and who
fought so against foreign capital investment, see it now as an urgent
necessity, with the disappearance of the socialist camp, from which we
received factories, credits, a ton of things and from which we receive
nothing now, not from a now non-existent socialist camp nor a Soviet
Union. Nor do we receive anything from international financial
institutions, which are all absolutely dominated by the United States.

"Now our country has a primary task, as we have defined it: ... Today
we have to save the Homeland, the Revolution and the gains of socialism
which is the same as defending the right to continue building it in the
future."

Today, Cuba's party-along with the mass organizations of workers,
women and youth-is guiding the society towards the strengthening of
socialism as the economy recovers.

Youth brigades fight corruption

Cuban President Fidel Castro has recently raised a thought-provoking
question to the Cuban people: whether the Cuban revolution can be
defeated internally from failure to guard against privilege and
bourgeois influence.

"We have seen how heroic revolutions in great countries fell or
collapsed precisely because of corruption, bureaucracy, lack of
consciousness, bad methods of working with the masses and other
failures," Castro said in a Dec. 6 rally to commemorate the sixth
anniversary of the Battle of Ideas' launching.

The youth of Cuba are playing a principal role in the revolutionary
renewal. Leagues of tens of thousands of newly graduated medical
workers, art instructors and social workers are engaging all of Cuban
society to strengthen socialist consciousness.

A Cuban social worker helps fight corruption.
Photo: Pastor Batista Valdes/Granma

For instance, social workers-a new occupation requiring specialized
training and a college degree-are organized into youth brigades to
help people requiring assistance in resolving their problems. From the
time they were first started in 2000, there are now 28,000 graduates of
the social workers schools, along with another 7,000 currently studying
in the schools.

The role of these youth organizations is to actively engage with people
in their neighborhoods and homes, to survey and document the
demographics of the population. They learn the specific issues facing
each individual and family, especially in the poorer segments of the
population, whether retirees, the unemployed, single mothers or
children neglected by their parents. Then they help solve the problems
at hand.

A recent national door-to-door survey by the social workers showed that
37,000 retirees were living alone and in need of personal attention. It
led the government to decide that pensions were too low for seniors.
Pensions were increased for all seniors, and 100 social programs were
instituted.

Now the social workers are engaged in a new campaign: fighting against
the theft of critical energy resources. Gasoline was being pilfered
through bribes at gas stations, resulting in loss of state income for
social spending. But exactly how much was not known.

Then on Oct. 10, in an innovative move, 10,444 social workers were
dispatched to the gas stations of Havana and the provinces. The youth
pumped the gasoline at 2,000 stations for weeks. They accompanied each
delivery truck and monitored the refineries, keeping close watch on the
precious fuel.

With the youth present, employees could not sell the fuel "under the
table." In two months of vigilance, the country's income from
gasoline sales more than doubled. The government is now instituting
changes to keep closer control of the gasoline.

The social workers have become very popular. Coming primarily from
working-class backgrounds, the young workers are seen as defending the
interests of the people against the "new rich."

"Just how many ways of stealing do we have in this country?"
President Castro asked students at University of Havana on Nov. 17.
"Why is it that we read every day in the opinion polls that people
are asking about when the 'kids' are coming to the dollar stores,
to the drugstores, or to all the other places? Everyone is full of
admiration for these 'kids,' I mean the social workers, who came
out of economically disadvantaged environments and are now highly
prepared and trained."

Castro: Don't let the revolution fall apart

He explained one of the lessons that must be drawn from the collapse of
the Soviet Union: that internal negligence can help lead to the
disintegration of the revolution.

"I believe that the experience of that first socialist State, a State
that should have been fixed and not destroyed, was a bitter one,"
Castro explained. "You may be sure that we have thought many times
about that incredible phenomenon where one of the mightiest powers in
the world disintegrated the way it did; for this was a power that had
matched the strength of the other super-power and had paid with the
lives of more than 20 million of her people in the battle against
fascism.

"Is it that revolutions are doomed to fall apart, or that human
beings cause revolutions to fall apart? Can either humanity or society
prevent revolutions from collapsing? I could immediately add to this
another question: Do you believe that this revolutionary socialist
process can fall apart, or not?" (Exclamations of: "No!!")
"Have you ever given that some thought? Have you ever deeply
reflected about it?

"Were you aware of all these inequalities that I have been talking
about? Were you aware of certain generalized habits? Did you know that
there are people who earn forty or fifty times the amount that one of
those [Cuban] doctors over there in the mountains of Guatemala ...
earns in one month? It could be in other faraway reaches of Africa, or
at an altitude of thousands of meters, in the Himalayas, saving lives
and earning 5 percent or 10 percent of what one of those dirty little
crooks earns, selling gasoline to the new rich, diverting resources
from the ports in trucks and by the ton-load."

In addition to saving gasoline, an extensive program of replacing
energy-sapping appliances like refrigerators and light bulbs is
underway throughout the whole population. Small-scale private
entrepreneurs like owners of the 12-seat "paladares" restaurants
and others in self-employment will have to pay higher rates of
electricity than workers.

The driving principle is that workers and retired workers must now be
given priority as the bulwark of the socialist revolution.

During his Nov. 17 University of Havana speech, Castro commented on the
60th anniversary of his life as a revolutionary and the outlook of
Cuba's revolution:

"Those who work and produce will receive more, and they will be able
to buy more; those who worked for decades will receive more and will
have more. The country will have much more, but it will never be a
consumer society. It will be a society of knowledge, of culture, of the
most extraordinary human development imaginable, development in art,
culture, science but not for chemical weapons, with a breadth of
liberty that no one will be able to dismantle.

In another speech on Oct. 28, Castro said, "What those thousands of
social workers, which are only a small, active part of the social
workers we have, are doing is fighting to achieve Cuba's economic
invulnerability, and the principle they are striving to make a reality
is the principle of giving the most to those who work, to those who
receive a salary or a pension as workers in factories, professionals,
teachers, doctors, workers in any walk of life. Yes, those should be
the ones who benefit the most."

Socialist consciousness

One fundamental difference between socialism and capitalism is that
socialism must develop through consciousness and solidarity of the
people-especially in an imperialist-dominated world.

Capitalist ideology still dominates and influences the working class
and less class-conscious elements within the socialist countries.
Societies like the United States may seem at first glance to be
superior, with vast displays of wealth and unlimited advertising. But
basic needs like education, health, housing, and jobs are increasingly
unmet for tens of millions of people.

Former Eastern European countries and large parts of Soviet society
were influenced by the siren song of capitalism in the 1980s. Cuba was
expected to go the way of the socialist camp.

It was revolutionary consciousness, communist ideology and the
conviction of the Cuban people and its leaders to defend socialism no
matter the cost, which enabled Cuba to weather the anti-communist
storm.

Cuba has emerged as a powerhouse of socialism, despite blockade,
shortages and U.S. aggression.

The ability of the Cuban revolution to examine and solve the problems
of the most vulnerable in society, to critique the shortcomings and
fight privilege, are hallmarks that will guarantee its survival.

Articles may be reprinted with credit to Socialism and Liberation
magazine.


Reprinted from the Socialism and Liberation Magazine Web Site
www.socialismandliberation.org/mag

Published by the Party for Socialism and Liberation
National offices: SF: (415) 821-6171 DC: (202) 543-4900
E-mail: info@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
www.socialismandliberation.org/PSLsite

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