"Cuba in the Era of Olokun: From the 8th Congress of the Cuban Communist Party to the July 11th Protest Movement and the Future of the Cuban Political-Economic Model" Presentation at the 31st Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy

 

 

The semiotics of the narratives of political economy are understudied. That is understandable--the principles around which  the realities of political economy are critical elements to the coherent organization of a collective and its meaning universe.  That enhances a collective's ability to both discipline its members and naturalize a particular meaning universe that itself serves by its use as a declaration of allegiance to the collective itself.  It also serves to distinguish one collective from another--separated not by language but by the way in which reality is conceptualized and used to mold a collective, its self-consciousness, and its approach to the identification and resolution of challenges.  

It was that that in mind that I presented an analysis of  contradiction that was the 8th Congress of the Cuban Communist Party (Partido Comunista Cubano, PCC)) and the eruption of mass protests by the Cuban proletariat on 11 July 2021. The presentation, entitles Cuba in the Era of Olokun: From the 8th Congress of the Cuban Communist Party to the July 11th Protest Movement and the Future of the Cuban Political-Economic Model, focused on an examination of the arc of ideological development of the PCC in an era of mounting crisis from its 5th to its 8th PCC Congress and its almost inevitable confrontation with its own shortcoming in the form of the proletariat eruption that occurred months after the triumph of Cuban vanguardism celebrated in the 98th Congress. It speaks to the fundamental contradiction of contemporary Caribbean Marxism--the growing distance between the needs of the masses and the ideological line of the vanguard. Tough the example focuses on its Marxist Leninist expression in a small Caribbean state, there are lessons here for all states practicing vanguardism in one form or another, all of which are now  (in this historical stage) finding themselves confronted by this contradiction.

The focus of the presentation was on an examination of the way the people and collectives think and believe about what is or must be true; not what is true but what is believed to be true.  That process of meaning making tends to provide an analytical structure through which collectives can understand the world and order it to align with their collective principles about the ordering, forms, and expression of reality (of what must be true as a function of the principles used to extract the "truth" of things). More specifically, it considers the construction of truth in the forms of what are taken to be the inevitable an unalterable premises that give form to narratives of political economy as norm systems, as communication, as political tools, and as taboo systems (for identifying friends and enemies--patriots and traitors, believers and infidels). It focuses as well on the new technologies of the production of these narratives and their deployment as means of self discipline as as a n an organization of objectives for the projection of normative power out (e.g. communist or liberal democratic internationalism). These new technologies are expressed through social media, as well as on the bodies of the masses on the streets, and the nomenklatura (in Leninist and liberal democratic systems) in conclave in their ceremonial spaces.  It then suggested that the response has a transnational and Leninist character--one that suggested the contextually relevant ways in which the Cuban vanguard followed the Hong Kong playbook in meeting the challenge of mass protests.  But the differences are telling as well.  It leaves the question unresolved: how does a Leninist vanguard deal with proletarian violence? Mere suppression leaves the question of Leninist authority hanging.  Failure to respond puts in question the vanguard's authority.  And both leave open a space where outsiders can undermine the domestic political order.  This is not merely a Marxist Leninist problem: the election of 2016 and perhaps that of 2020 suggest the same issue in large liberal democratic states like the US.

The PowerPoint of the presentation follow. It may be accessed HERE.