http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=146701

Why does Cuba resist…?

Pablo González Casanova / Rebelión

To Armando Hart Dávalos

One day, talking with a friend in Havana, the question came up: why does Cuba resist… now that capitalism has already reestablished itself in Russia, China and Vietnam…?

My friend’s reply was quite categorical: “Cuba is the best proof that God exists”…

Lay as I am in theological matters, I had decided to state my question with the full rigor of a scientific problem. In this respect I’d like to bring up something Martí said: “Up to what he is sure of: that is as far as man’s science can get”.

I have some answers that I’m sure of, but I need to state them so that others can help me solve a problem I’d like to put forward in scientific terms and without making any judgments.

However, the very attempt to set out my scientific problem makes me realize that my analysis is necessarily incomplete. I guess others will have to finish it. I also mention the specific circumstances leading to the victory of the 26th of July Movement in Cuba and the reasons why Cuba is still holding out, which are anything but applicable elsewhere, as they in fact belong in a particular time and a particular Island.

Since very many of the said circumstances rarely happen at all times and places, the Cuban revolutionary movement has been adamant that no one see it as an example to follow. A no-nonsense suggestion, if we keep in mind Mariátegui’s famous words in the sense that no revolution can be “a carbon copy” of another.

This doesn’t mean that everything Cuba has been through is confined to Cuba and none of it is universal in nature. On the contrary, many of Cuba’s experiences are exactly that, and as such they deserve to be explored much further.

Something else must be considered here: the major or minor role that some decisions and circumstances have played in Cuba’s victory and ensuing resistance. Trying to figure out the right variable is all but impossible, for it belongs to the realm of what mathematicians call “extremely non-linear”, their point being that the tiniest action upon it could have huge, immeasurable effects.

Cuba’s triumph is immeasurable. It’s a small country where six and a half million people lived at the beginning of the Revolution, located, as everybody knows, a few miles from the most powerful and aggressive Empire in the history of the human race.

That this small Island and its people have resisted the cruel blockade and permanent siege imposed by Washington for more than fifty years, along with endless threats, attacks, conspiracies and assassination attempts and other actions that include the first steps of an invasion through Bay of Pigs by a force funded and armed by the United States that Cuba soon defeated, is hard to understand. No less worthy of a place in our memory is the determination displayed by the Island, its government and its people in the “missile crisis” that carried nuclear blackmail to unheard-of extremes and, to leave it at that, the amazing sacrifices of the “special period” that followed the collapse of the USSR and deprived Cuba from its biggest source of income, but not the Cuban people from their resolve to keep fighting for independence and socialism, knowing full well that a sharp drop in their standard of living and levels of consumption would be the price to pay for years to come.

Such heroic deeds –and many others– compel serious consideration of the answer to the question: how to explain Cuba’s resistance?

And evoking Martí I put on the table other “true facts” equally based on scientific knowledge, among them the very legacy from Martí, who fell in combat for his people and his Homeland in 1895 when he was only 42 years old. What’s more, I will limit myself here to some of Martí’s ideas that may shed light on Cuba’s revolutionary nature and capacity to resist.

ONE: In a seemingly contradictory position, revealing of a very tight link among a way of thinking, a feeling and a discourse that nurtures radical liberalism and Marxism from the perspective of a colony and its struggle for independence, José Martí is deemed “the spirit behind the Cuban Revolution” by those who also identify themselves as Marxist-Leninists. Martí spoke of liberalism and struggle as a means to fight colonial governments and imperialism, namely a form of capitalism rebuilt on the shoulders of monopoly and bent on hogging the “colonial rent”.

As a symbol of the humanist struggles waged by radical liberalism in his day, Martí looked up to the great Enlightenment figures that Cuba had in notable Christian philosophers who pioneered late-eighteen-century Cuba’s most advanced ethical, critical and humanist currents. He thus became one of the 19th century’s greatest advocates of a secular space for questioning, dialogue, debate and consensus in Latin America and the promoter of a reflexive and poetic ability capable of understanding and describing both his and other people’s milieu.

Within the framework of Cuba’s many struggles to achieve universal expression, Martí lived in the entrails of imperialism and knew both its colonial dimension and the kind of monopoly-oriented capitalism which the working class, led by Marx, was facing up to at the time. He not only cautioned that “kneaded by the workers, a new universe is coming straight at us”; nor did he just claim that Marx “deserves to be honored for declaring himself on the side of the weak”; nor did he restrain himself, in his eulogy to the great philosopher, to the beautiful phrase “Liberty has fallen many times, but it has risen more beautiful from each descent”. He also made another appeal, still valid in our time, when he said: “Outrageous, how some men are turned into beasts for the benefit of others. And yet we must learn to cope with the outrage so that the beast is stopped before its temper flares and it becomes frightening”. (It would seem he’s talking about today’s world when he says man is being led to become a frightening beast bound to go out of control and that we’re all trying to vent our indignation).

Never did Martí say anything about class struggle and a nation’s fight for independence in cold philosophical terms, treatises, or theoretical vagrancies, but using rational, intense words that run deep and brim with passion for the “clarity” and “sincerity” that always earmarked his life and his fight for “the new life” as he voiced his “faith in human improvement” and what he called “the value of virtue”, in statements that bring together his deep-seated ardency and his concerns about how to win the struggle and reach its ultimate goal.

Martí’s rich legacy boasts a close relationship among concept, word and action. Without such a link, what he says will be hard to grasp, half understood, or totally misunderstood. This legacy, in its written and experienced version, is at once very beautiful and strong, and the bond between action and word, which he merges into each other, gives his message a whole new meaning. Whoever hears the word knows who said it and, accordingly, takes its fulfillment for granted, convinced that its message conveys true facts about what’s going on and what needs to be done to see it fulfilled. Furthermore, if the validity of the message depends as much on the messenger’s morality as on his knowledge and experience, the listener concludes that his words are in principle valid and reliable. And this mixture of moral strength to struggle and experience in how to do it is at the root of a special strong value: the confidence that channels collective action into common goals, made even stronger by the messenger’s invitation to be proved wrong by the listeners in case they have different opinions or more information…

As a source of culture rather than ideology, Martí stands out as the best incentive to fight on at the height of the ideological crisis that followed capitalism’s process of reorganization and colonization. The great victory of the neoconservatives sprang not only from this process –visible everywhere except in Cuba– but also from the elimination of the ideological struggle (as Daniel Bell wanted) and its replacement by the race for power of interest and pressure groups and corrupt and intimidating elements within the so-called “political class”. What made the ideological struggle fall through was the way all political parties, be they communist, socialist, populist, conservative or democratic, was their unprecedented endorsement as one of the same neoliberal policy of plundering and repression. And it was right then and there when the “value of virtue” and all the political and moral realism of the struggle for “the new life” became extremely significant.

In fact, that “word is action” and “virtue valuable” makes room for a redefinition and recovery of Marx’s profound thoughts and creative criticism and relates that other source of thinking and action to the culture of a people which hails the power of virtue as the basis of cooperation, trust, and historic creativeness. Martí’s life improved Marxism’s far-reaching, systematic influence. The Cuban People’s Revolutionary Party took in those who eventually founded the first communist party, some of whose heirs were among the brightest theoreticians of Latin American communism, including Julio Antonio Mella.

The Cuban Revolution’s success and remarkable capacity to resist would be inexplicable without moral values to make war and courage to fight if you want to build a world based on principles of justice and liberty that you may brush up as you go along. Martí talked about the possibility of convincing “with humble bravery and candid words” those who are valiant and respect frankness, stating that “from hidden courage grow the armies of tomorrow”. But he went further: he praised Marx as a “tireless organizer”.

Now that’s another reason that the Cuban revolution resists and wins: the myth of the guerrilla force made up of twenty brave youths who can change history has nothing to do with the “tireless organizers” who, as heads of the 26th of July Movement, led grass-roots cells in Santiago (under Frank País), Havana (originally promoted and established by Armando Hart) or the mountains and beaches (under Celia Sánchez), all of whom found and rescued the rebels from the shipwreck of the Granma yacht, including Fidel himself.

In today’s struggle, “stripped of ideologies” by U.S. imperialism with the help of Theodore Roosevelt’s carrot-and-stick policy but still in full swing, morality is as paramount to tackle corruption as courage and integrity are to curb intimidation and terror. By no means are values like bravery and uprightness the Revolution’s ace in the hole to counter corruption and betrayal; otherwise, it would have been overthrown long ago. What prevails instead is the reflexive courage and incorruptible honesty of the leaders and the vast majority of the Cuban people, who are politically, morally and militarily prepared to defend social justice and national independence through a popular amalgamation, as in a big “compound”, that rules via a huge structure of associations and groups in which dialogue, debate and consensus recognize, correct, implement and contribute to the main decisions stemmed from a social  nationwide people’s power apparatus together with their Party and government, something we find hard to understand given our usual way of doing things. And even if “the new man” is still a being full of contradictions, he is learning to keep his contradictions at bay and join the general consensus and actions agreed by most.

In other words: Cuba has been able to resist because its people know only too well what it means to lose the independence and social justice they protect as a government-and-people’s power that holds its ground and looks Imperialism’s articulate military-corporate-political machinery and its associates and subordinates right in the eye…

Cuban democracy is about the Cuban people’s awareness that if they fail to defend their own government they will lose the sovereignty and social justice they develop every day through their education, health care, housing and labor programs, albeit not without having to make some concessions like the country’s opening-up to foreign tourism with a view to collecting hard currency, some forms of private property and business deals designed to cut down on excess bureaucracy, and a limited set of reforms they revised after sounding out national opinion in a process that in this year 2012 put a stop to a few privatizing and destabilizing plans too many. On the other hand, they are yet to attach due importance to the cooperative system, especially its multifaceted category of agricultural, industrial and service enterprise known to be the brazier and school of supportive cultures and the best barrier to the individualistic culture of the free market. And speaking of contradiction, why not highlight the redoubled struggle against the kind of corruption bred by the informal economy –welcomed by some high officials who are currently facing criminal charges or serving prison sentences– as yet unable to solve such a serious problems but definitely a deterrent and a remedy to the danger they pose? Coming to terms and dealing with the unavoidable contradictions of any popular struggle to achieve independence and social justice is also part of Martí’s legacy and the reason that Cuba resists and makes progress.

That under the aforesaid circumstances the reading of the classics of emancipating thought becomes highly original and supersedes any simplistic approach to the world and global capitalism as seen from the First World is beyond question. From its experiences and perceptions, the colonial or colonized world keeps devising notions and leading their life in ways that sustain their ideological struggle for democracy, social justice, independence, and socialism. Ranking alongside Cuba among the world’s most meaningful contributions are the appeals made “from down below and to the left” by the Mayan peoples of southeast Mexico, a.k.a. the Zapatistas, against discrimination and oppression and to lose fear a fundamental epistemological element and praise human dignity and self-esteem in front of the “civic actions” of a counterinsurgent war turned into a re-colonization effort at the service of corporate capital. Also remarkable is the contribution of the native peoples descendant of the Incas and their rich “good life” philosophy, just like the experience and reflections emanating from within and outside the State in Bolivia and Venezuela, whose future will only be viable as their peoples gain more power in between one contradiction and the next and manage, in their capacity as “government-people’s power compounds”, to take a stand against the constant pressure from the corporations, the Empire, and the oligarchies.

Since for reasons of space I can’t touch upon the reorganization of the class struggle and the current fight for independence and democracy, I’ll close with another value bequeathed to us by Martí which explains Cuba’s amazing capacity to resist: the Cuban people’s educational and cultural level. I choose one of Martí’s many thoughts about education and culture: “Conversation should be taught as Socrates, from village to village, from field to field, from house to house”. Those were his words, and that’s what the Cuban Revolution has done all along, both in the Island and in Africa, Latin America, etc., except that in Cuba this conversation is used to teach and learn, ask and answer, and give and take information in villages, cities, fields, farms, factories and houses as part of a complex decision-making structure across the government-people’s command lines. On top of what Martí comes Fidel Castro’s endeavor ever since he delivered his first speeches after the triumph of the Revolution –and even before– to teach the Cubans how to rule and make the relevant decisions to do while he in turn learned how to put together a system of assorted activities and strategies with a view to the “broad-spectrum” resistance that singles out today’s Cuba, thanks to its people’s impressive involvement, as the most advanced country when it comes to the toilsome fight for national sovereignty, democracy and socialism.

These are some of the “true facts” that make it possible to understand why Cuba resists.

Thank you very much.

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Rebelión has published this article with permission from the author through a Creative Commons license and respecting his right to have it published by other sources as well.