Cuba's Central Contradiction--A rejection of markets and the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production

 

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 Cuba remains caught in a web of its own making.  

Cuba's economic growth is less than 2% this year and remains 8 percentage points below pre-pandemic levels, while production in sectors such as agriculture, mining and manufacturing was further behind, Economy Minister Alejandro Gil said on Saturday.

Speaking before the country's parliament, Gil said the primary sector, which includes agriculture, mining and other basic production, was down 34.9% compared with 2019, while manufacturing was off 20%. A third sector that includes services such as tourism, communications and education was down 4.9%. . . The minister said inflation was raging at a 45% clip this year, on top of last year's 39% jump, a figure many economists say underestimates the rate as it does not adequately account for a growing informal market driven by scarcity. (Cuban economy minister says no quick fix to devastating crisis)

Yet the Cuban aversion to the market, as the incarnation of the power of the evil of its great adversary, the United States as the vanguard of markets driven liberal democracy (essay here), has created a great irony--its inability to price itself to market as it sells its territory, allegiances, and services to its newer patrons.  

Among its more interesting transactions of this kind has been the selling of its territory for the convenience of the spying of its friends and perhaps its patrons (Cuba Gains a Not-So-New Listening Post, Courtesy of China). Its value, of course, is a function of its utility in advancing Chinese interests and thwarting those of the United States in an area of significant strategic and ideological interest to the U.S. And yet what the Chinese are purchasing may be repurposed Soviet real estate already well known to virtually anyone with an internet connection. 

Anyone who’s followed intelligence history will recall that the Soviets had a listening station in Lourdes, Cuba, for almost five decades. So it’s not surprising given the long-standing relationship between China and Cuba that China would also be seeking to find another platform on which to conduct intelligence operations against the U.S. China’s interest in a Cuban intelligence platform reflects two trends. One is that across a spectrum of intelligence collection operations, China’s activity is expanding greatly. . . you have to look at Cuba as just one small data point in a vast apparatus of Chinese intelligence activities directed against the U.S. Second, Cuba reflects Chinese geopolitical goals of expansion and assiduous cultivation of governments in Latin America, Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Cuba, the Caribbean. (Chinese spies in Cuba? The problem runs deeper than that)

And thus the general contradiction of Cuba in its current stage of development.  This recalls Mao Zedong's discussion of contradiction and production.

Some people think that this is not true of certain contradictions. For instance, in the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production, the productive forces are the principal aspect; in the contradiction between theory and practice, practice is the principal aspect; in the contradiction between the economic base and the superstructure, the economic base is the principal aspect; and there is no change in their respective positions. This is the mechanical materialist conception, not the dialectical materialist conception. True, the productive forces, practice and the economic base generally play the principal and decisive role; whoever denies this is not a materialist. But it must also be admitted that in certain conditions, such aspects as the relations of production, theory and the superstructure in turn manifest themselves in the principal and decisive role. When it is impossible for the productive forces to develop without a change in the relations of production, then the change in the relations of production plays the principal and decisive role.(Mao Zedong, On Contradiction (1937).

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On the one hand Cuba's internal political-economic model is built on the basis of a fundamental rejection of the market, not just as an ideological basis for ordering but also as a tool for meeting state directed objectives.  As a matter of theory it might work, though both internal and external factors have proven to have overwhelmed theory for three quarters of a century. On the other hand, the furious cultivation of markets rejection has made it impossible for Cuba to act in its own best interests in a global order that is essentially grounded on the core principles of markets of willing consumers and producers operating under conditions of imperfect information  but perfected desire. Its own efforts to create a regional markets rejectionist system ended in ideological victories and effective operational failures (Cuba and the Construction of Alternative Global Trade Systems: Alba and Free Trade in the Americas). It is left to play the fool in international markets where it must play the role of apex capitalist. At first blush one might be tempted to see Cuba in this as the incarnation of the symbolism of the Fool in a Tarot deck.

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But ideological purity is of cold comfort to an empty belly, and it provides no pathway out of despair.  And it is when the masses are hungry and they despair, that all the ideological purity in the world will nt prevent the likely instability that follows. . . even on an island. The Cuban leadership, in this sense, and in the face of a contradiction it fails to resolve, resembles for the Hanged Man of Tarot, than the Fool. Cuba continues to avoid its central contradiction--the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production. Cuban theorists, much less its vanguard apparatus, has failed to grasp the nature of Cuba's productive forces under its ruling ideology--as distinctly constituted within the state and as the state in the global marketplace. That is, it has failed to grasp that the relations of production, in this case of the utilization of Cuba's productive forces by other states, do not constitute relations of production. In the case of Cuba's outward activities, the relations of production prevail and the instrumentalization of the market is paramount. Internally, the inverse is possible.  Between them a permeable membrane is required. The failure to grasp this contradiction produces  what can be seen as the state of the Cuban political economy. That, for the moment does not appear to be susceptible to change.  The insistence on selling itself short remains the principal tragedy of current vanguard thinking; one which even the most efficient protection of the current status quo cannot put off indefinitely. Or better put--Cuba will remain in stais as long as it suits those who make use of it.  And in the process Cuba has effectively lost what it has claimed is one of the few things it has managed to preserve since 1959--its sovereign autonomy.  Irony.