Conceptualising Cuban socialism
By Helen Yaffe
June 19, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Helen Yaffe's blog — On 1 June 2017, an extraordinary session
of Cuba’s National Assembly of Peoples’ Power approved important
documents which define the character, objectives and strategy of Cuban
socialism into the post-Castro era. Since 2011, a programme of
‘updating’ the Cuban economic and social system has been underway, and
these documents aim to establish the parameters within which those
developments will take place. Helen Yaffe reports.
Such measures are imperative given the
greater space being opened up for market relations: private ownership
and business, self-employment and foreign investment. Establishing
social welfare and national development priorities will be essential to
prevent market forces asserting a capitalist logic over Cuban
development. Raul Castro will step down as President of the Council of
State in February 2018,[1]
and the Cuban leadership is working to strengthen the institutional
basis of socialism to help safeguard its future when Cuba is no longer
led by the ‘historic generation’ who carried out the Revolution.The National Assembly is the highest
decision-making body in Cuba, with half of its 614 delegates voted up
from Municipal and Provincial Assemblies, and the other half
representing the mass, grassroots organisations. The documents approved
are: Conceptualisation of the Economic and Social Model of Cuban
Socialist Development (Conceptualisation) and the Guidelines of the
Social and Economic Policy of the Party and the Revolution (the
Guidelines). There was also discussion about a third key document, Basis
for the Plan of Economic and Social Development up till 2030: Vision of
the Nation, Axes and Strategic Sectors (Plan 2030).All three documents have been through a
collective process of writing, analysis, modification and approval:
consensus building practices which strengthen unity and commitment to
socialist development. President Raul Castro described them as ‘the most
studied, discussed and rediscussed documents in the history of the
Revolution’. That is indicative of their importance.The GuidelinesIn 2007 the Cuban government created
forums for everyone in the country to contribute to a ‘Great Debate’
about Cuba’s socio-economic problems and to suggest concrete solutions.
Subsequently, the draft Guidelines were compiled, with proposals to
address the issues raised. These were circulated for six months of
public consultation prior to the 6th Congress of the Cuban Communist
Party (CCP) in April 2011. After nearly nine million Cubans, out of a
population of 11.2 million, debated the draft, 68% of the Guidelines
were modified. The redrafted document returned to the National Assembly
for further discussion, modification and approval. This formidable
democratic process legitimised the Guidelines, which serve as the
template for ‘updating the Cuban model’ to improve economic efficiency
and productive capacity within a socialist framework. Numerous measures
have been introduced since 2011 which implement the decisions they
endorse. The Guidelines were updated again following the 7th Congress of
the CCP in April 2016 for the 2016-2021 period.Following the April 2016 CCP Congress,
the Conceptualisation and the Plan 2030 documents have been through a
similar, though more selective, process of debate involving 1,600,000
Cubans in 47,000 meetings. These include members of the CCP and its
youth wing, the Union of Young Communists (UJC), and representatives of
the organisations of the masses and other sectors. On 19 May 2017, the
three documents were approved by the Central Committee of the CCP.
Further discussions took place in work commissions prior to the
Assembly. A total of 208,161 changes were proposed. Consequently, 92% of
the original Conceptualisation document was modified.Essentially these documents define the character of Cuban socialism: where it is going and how it will get there.[2] The three essential pillars of the ‘updated’ economic model are:1) Consolidation of the socialist state
in its economic (enterprise), political (organs of peoples’ power and
workers’ representation) and social (socialist welfare and cohesion)
aspects.2) The introduction of a diversity of non-state forms of management and ownership.3) The primacy of planning which ‘takes into account’ the functioning of the market.Conceptualisation – where is it going?Cuban academics and government
specialists worked on the Conceptualisation document for four years
before it was presented to the CCP Congress in 2016. It is the first
document to formally attempt to ‘conceptualise’ Cuba’s socialist system.
It combines the theoretical base and essential characteristics of the
economic and social model ‘to which we aspire’ as a result of the
process of updating the system.It is not concerned with how Cuba’s
economic and social model is updated, that is, the concrete measures to
be taken and policies introduced to achieve the objectives. It presents
the main changes necessary in order to ‘consolidate and advance the
principles of our socialism and construct a sovereign, independent,
socialist, democratic, prosperous and sustainable socialism’. The order
in which these descriptors appear does not change throughout the
document. Sovereignty and independence are the only viable frameworks
within which the other principles are deemed feasible. As Fidel asserted
in 1998 during the Special Period: ‘Right now, we are basically
defending the sovereignty and independence of our country and the
achievements of socialism. If we can build a little bit of socialism we
do it, but mainly we want to improve what we have done, to achieve
excellence.’ Real ‘sovereignty’ means control over national resources
and that denotes resistance to multinational corporations, finance
capital and allied political interests which have stripped independence
from underdeveloped nations.In the introduction, the
Conceptualisation document highlights the Cuban feat of surviving the
collapse of the Soviet bloc in the early 1990s, the gradual recuperation
under the difficult conditions imposed by the US blockade,[3] international uncertainty and internal problems that have prevented
social and economic development taking place at the required pace. It
recognises Cuba’s structural problems, the result of economic
underdevelopment. The principal problems outlined are: the imbalance
between the availability and need for hard currency; the offer and
supply of products and services; technological obsolescence; under-use
and inefficiency of the productive base, infrastructure and the
investment process. It flags up economic and social differences between
Cubans which are not based on their work – arising from differential
access to hard currency and inherited advantages – and the erosion of
values, manifestations of corruption, crime, indiscipline and other
forms of social marginalisation. It also lists the strengths perceived
to facilitate the updating process, such as: unity and youth, majority
support, universal social provision, strength of values, diverse and
active civil society, potential economic capacity, and international
prestige.The strategic objective is to promote
and consolidate a prosperous and sustainable socialist society. The
first chapter concerns ‘the principles of our socialism that sustain the
Model’. These are: dignity, equality, and full human freedoms; the
leading role of the CCP (a vanguard party, Martiana,[4]
Marxist); socialist democracy based on the sovereign power of the
people; the socialist state as the guarantor of freedom, independence,
sovereignty, people’s participation and control, rights, and laws, and
the people’s socialist ownership of the fundamental means of production,
as the main form of national economic and socio-economic system based
on the real power of the workers and communal ownership via the state.Chapter two on ‘ownership of the means
of production’, notes that: ‘Property relations are determinants of any
socio-economic system, given that the dominant form of ownership
conditions the relations of production, distribution, exchange and
consumption, that includes the appropriation of wealth.’ This is an
essential point; property ownership is not a merely ‘economic’ fact, but
has an impact on the reproduction of social relations, consciousness,
class and ideology.Chapter three discusses ‘planned
management of the economy’, asserting that: ‘The planning (management)
system takes into account the presence of market relations, regulating
the action of those laws and limiting the space for their operation,
such that the laws of the market do not exert a leading role in the
Model.’ It explains that: ‘The objective existence of the market is
determined by the level of development of the productive forces, the
heterogeneity of forms of ownership and management, the social division
of labour in the national sphere and of our foreign trade.’ In
revolutionary Cuba, there has always been recognition of the survival of
market relations, expressions of the operation of the law of value.
Indeed this was the principal theme addressed in the Great Debate,
initiated by Che Guevara in the early 1960s.[5]
These documents formally confirm the existence of small and medium
private businesses in Cuba. This is a precondition for the introduction
of urgently needed legislation to regulate and control them.Chapter four on ‘social policy’ states
that the increased wealth created will be fairly distributed, listing
economic and social rights but also referring to the importance of work
as the source of welfare and prosperity. The ‘final considerations’
stress the importance of debate, the exchange of ideas, communication
strategies, and ‘other actions that contribute to modifying obsolete
conceptions and practices that constitute the main obstacle to updating
the Model’. It asserts the role of the CCP in driving and controlling
the updating process.Plan 2030 – how will it get there?Framed as the principal tool to achieve
the objectives set out in the Conceptualisation document, the Plan 2030
document aims to ‘consolidate socialist planning as governing and
defining in the national economic management system’. The document deals
with 23 ‘guiding principles and central themes for elaborating the
national plan of social and economic development’. The Plan, it states,
needs to confront difficulties in every sphere and must be an exercise
in participative construction that guarantees consensus to achieve the
‘vision of the nation 2030’: a ‘sovereign, independent, socialist,
democratic, prosperous and sustainable’ Cuba.The six ‘strategic areas’ outlined are:
- effective, socialist government and social integration;
- productive transformation and international insertion;
- infrastructure;
- human potential – science, technology and innovation;
- natural resources and the environment;
- human development, justice and equity.
Each of these is divided into lists of
general and specific objectives. However, like the Conceptualisation
document there are no details about what policies will be formulated to
achieve these objectives and how they may be implemented.The final section defines the ‘strategic economic sectors’ as those which:
- represent a significant proportion of economic activity;
- produce and export value added;
- positively affect the balance of payments;
- allow development of the productive sector and productive chains;
- promote the internal market;
- generate productive employment;
- connect with new international technology paradigms;
- remove logistical and infrastructural restraints;
- contribute to sovereignty and national security;
- promote environmental sustainability.
The actual sectors proposed as strategic
are: construction; electro energy; telecommunications; transport,
storage and trade logistics; logistics for network and hydraulic
installations; tourism, including marine and nautical tourism;
professional services, especially medical; non-sugar agro-industry and
foodstuffs; pharmaceuticals, biotechnology and biomedical production;
sugar-related agro-industry and derivatives; and light industry.The participative process behind the
compilation of these documents serves to forge consensus and commitment
to the collective process of building socialism in Cuba. The real test,
however, will emerge in the practice of formulating, implementing and
enforcing the policies required to achieve their aims. In practice, how
can market forces be both encouraged, as a means of increasing
employment and enterprise, and constrained, which is imperative to
maintain the dominance of non-exploitative social-relations? These are
the difficult challenges facing Cuban socialism.Helen Yaffe is author of Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution published by Palgrave Macmillan, 2009 and a Fellow in the Economic History Department at the London School of Economics. Notes[1] He is expected to remain First Secretary of the CCP, possibly until 2021.[2] This summary is based on the first publicly
circulated drafts, as the updated version had not been issued at the
time of writing.[3] The US blockade is only mentioned a handful of
times; a clear refutation of those who accuse the Cuban government of
using the blockade as an ‘excuse’ for mismanagement and economic
failure.[4] Following the ideas, actions and legacy of Cuban national independence hero José Martí.[5] See Helen Yaffe, Che Guevara and the Great Debate, Past and Present
