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I recently shared the program for the 2024 Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy. It will be held at Florida International University (Miami, Florida), 18-20 October 2024. The conference will be co-sponsored by FIU’s Cuban Research Institute. During two-and-a-half days, scholars and professionals present papers and participate in roundtable discussions (Details here).
In this post I share the discussion draft of my presentation at the conference. It is entitled "Cuba—The Art and Theory of a Stable State of Misery: Ideology, Economic Policy, and Popular Discipline." My object was to consider ways of approaching the following questions:
Might it be possible to describe the current state of Cuba as an effort to perfect a stable state of misery? Can one better understand the core premises of its political-economic model as pointing to the perfection of administrative apparatus that oversees this state of misery? Can what to outsiders appears to be a state of wretchedness be instead understood from the inside as the fulfillment of a vision of social relations that relies for its ordering on maintaining just enough wretchedness to divert popular attention from the political (and its ruling apparatus) to the business of surviving; a set of social relations en el que lo principal es resolver (in which the principal objective is to solve, to fix, or to overcome the immediate challenges of finding enough to eat and to live well enough)? And might that stability of misery be a condition that suits the rest of the world, which contributes to the maintenance of this implementation of the moral judgments embedded in the Cuban political-economic model?
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Though these questions have special resonance for Cuba in its current state of historical development, there is much here that might inform conditions in other developing states. The abstract provides a little more detail:
These elements are woven together through twelve vignettes-- vignettes that are both in search of a theoretical framework and that also suggest its form. The first three weave together the moral order foundations supporting the construction of a robust and stable state of misery, and its transposition to political ideology and its response to and identification of its inverse (and enemy). The second set of five vignettes spotlight key aspects of the way that theory finds its way into the constitution of the policy frameworks through which the state fulfills what it has determined is the best form of application of the principles that make Cuban Marxist Leninism itself and in the actions of foreign states that collude in the enterprise. The last four vignettes add the dialectical element to the system. The contemporary forms of that engagement manifested after COVID with the 11 July 2021 protests. But more than that, the dialectic merges protests as a form of dialectic conversation with the (and perhaps measured by) the willingness of the state apparatus to widen or narrow the aperture of toleration of the non-state sector.Abstract: The general default position of much commentary on the State of Cuba’s political model tends to be premised on an assumption of instability in need of repair. For decades some of the most creative minds on the planet have devoted tremendous amount of creative capital on solutions to the Cuban problem. This contribution suggests that what appears to be a state of instability and flux is actually becoming a stable state of misery. That stable state, in turn, suggests that control can be maintained as much on the basis of a premise of prosperity as it can on the basis of a reality of misery just challenging enough to keep a population really well managed and the political system reasonably well ordered. It is to consideration of hints about the nature and character of this stable state that this essay is directed. These hints are organized in three parts. The first, the ideological element, considers the way that that morality of consumerism developed over the decades by Fidel Castro and incorporated into the organic documents of the Cuban political economic model helped shape an approach to the role of material goods in a “revolutionary” society in ways that made collective misery—at some level—both tolerable and strategically useful. The second looks to the political-economic element. That is, it considers the ways in which the underlying consumerist morality of the political-economic model finds expression in the practices and policies of the State apparatus guided by the Party and its own governance apparatus. The contribution considers this from the interests of three significant groups with substantial engagement with Cuba. The first include states and other foreign lenders. The second includes the apparatus of the Cuban state itself and the elaboration of a dual character economy. And the third touches on Cuba’s projection into the world, especially in the shadow of its quite useful relationship with the United States The third then considers the utility of periodic popular explosion as the disciplinary factor for gauging the limits of misery tolerable by the body politic. This inverts the usual discourse of popular protest as a means of governance rather than in its more usual construction as some sort of pre-revolutionary signaling of the end of the current hegemony of the political-economic model that has shaped Cuban governance since the mid-1970s.
Comments and engagements always welcome. The discussion draft may be accessed here (SSRN). The Abstract, table of contents and introduction follow below.
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Cuba and the Constitution of a Stable State of Misery: Ideology, Economic Policy, and Popular Discipline
Larry Catá Backer
W. Richard and Mary Eshelman Faculty Scholar; Professor of Law and International Affairs
Pennsylvania State University
239 Lewis Katz Building
University Park, PA 16802
1.814.863.3640 (direct)
lcb11@psu.edu
Paper presented for the panel, Social and Cultural Consequences of Cuba’s Economic Path?, 2024 Annual Conference of the Association for the study of the Cuban Economy (Miami, FL 19 October 20204)
Abstract: The general default position of much commentary on the State of Cuba’s political model tends to be premised on an assumption of instability in need of repair. For decades some of the most creative minds on the planet have devoted tremendous amount of creative capital on solutions to the Cuban problem. This contribution suggests that what appears to be a state of instability and flux is actually becoming a stable state of misery. That stable state, in turn, suggests that control can be maintained as much on the basis of a premise of prosperity as it can on the basis of a reality of misery just challenging enough to keep a population really well managed and the political system reasonably well ordered. It is to consideration of hints about the nature and character of this stable state that this essay is directed. These hints are organized in three parts. The first, the ideological element, considers the way that that morality of consumerism developed over the decades by Fidel Castro and incorporated into the organic documents of the Cuban political economic model helped shape an approach to the role of material goods in a “revolutionary” society in ways that made collective misery—at some level—both tolerable and strategically useful. The second looks to the political-economic element. That is, it considers the ways in which the underlying consumerist morality of the political-economic model finds expression in the practices and policies of the State apparatus guided by the Party and its own governance apparatus. The contribution considers this from the interests of three significant groups with substantial engagement with Cuba. The first include states and other foreign lenders. The second includes the apparatus of the Cuban state itself and the elaboration of a dual character economy. And the third touches on Cuba’s projection into the world, especially in the shadow of its quite useful relationship with the United States The third then considers the utility of periodic popular explosion as the disciplinary factor for gauging the limits of misery tolerable by the body politic. This inverts the usual discourse of popular protest as a means of governance rather than in its more usual construction as some sort of pre-revolutionary signaling of the end of the current hegemony of the political-economic model that has shaped Cuban governance since the mid-1970s.
Contents:
1. Introduction
2. The Ideological Element
2.1 Vignette 1: Fidel’s Refrigerators.
2.2. Vignette 2: The State Ideology in the Shadow of Consumption and Globalization.
2.3 Vignette 3: Fidel’s “Children” and the Institutionalization of Ideologies of Misery.
3. The Political-Economic Element
3.1 Vignette 4: The Phoenix of Stability From out of Disaster
3.2 Vignette 5: The Governance of Misery
3.3 Vignette 6: Welcome to the Hunger Games and Global Lenders
3.4 Vignette 7: The Hunger Games Part 2—The Spy-Friends Edition. Ç
3.5 Vignette 8: The Hunger Games Part 3—The ‘You’ve Got a Friend in Me’ Edition
4. Popular explosion as the Disciplinary Factor
4.1 Vignette 9: The Edges of Misery and the Misery of the Edges--11 July 2021
4.2. Vignette 10; Even Protests can be a Leninist Instrument.
4.3 Vignette 11: The Toleration f the Intolerable and the Search for a Stable State.
4.4. Vignette 12: The Swingling Pendulum.
5. Conclusion
1. Introduction
The usual approach to states of misery is to invoke its more ancient meaning—a state of grievous affliction or a condition of external unhappiness.[1] But in its Spanish or more precisely Latin sense of miseria, one also understands it to invoke states of wretchedness brought on, perhaps, by extreme poverty.[2] But its overtones are also usefully recalled: a reference to an object of little value (to others), or to the misfortunes that themselves produce a state of misery. Lastly, it suggests the quality of the person who themselves are in the state of misery—qualities of meanness or in its modern forms, of miserliness.[3] States of misery can be transitory, with respect to a particular state of being that may pass either because outside circumstances turn for the better or because the miserable person undertakes some sort of active measures to change the state of their condition. But it also suggests that a state of misery may be a stable one—one that reflects characteristics of approaches to the material world that rejects the operational baseline principles that drives the rest of the world. It suggests, in effect, an underlying set f moral judgments about materiality and the material aspirations of a society the development of which is directed toward some other moral good, and which tolerates no opposition to this vision by individuals or groups.
Might it be possible to describe the current state of Cuba as an effort to perfect a stable state of misery? Can one better understand the core premises of its political-economic model as pointing to the perfection of administrative apparatus that oversees this state of misery? Can what to outsiders appears to be a state of wretchedness be instead understood from the inside as the fulfillment of a vision of social relations that relies for its ordering on maintaining just enough wretchedness to divert popular attention from the political (and its ruling apparatus) to the business of surviving; a set of social relations en el que lo principal es resolver (in which the principal objective is to solve, to fix, or to overcome the immediate challenges of finding enough to eat and to live well enough)? And might that stability of misery be a condition that suits the rest of the world, which contributes to the maintenance of this implementation of the moral judgments embedded in the Cuban political-economic model?
These are questions that are worth asking. The stability of the Cuban state and its apparatus has confounded experts, political figures and others for decades. The certainty that the Cuban Marxist-Leninist State, heavily dependent on the Soviet Union would fall with the collapse of its principal patron never came to pass.[4] And yet that “special” period[5] appeared to have the opposite effect. It set into practice the conditions under which the state apparatus (and its ideological project) could not just survive, but thrive, in an environment of misery.[6] It was to the navigation of that stability and misery that the apparatus eventually appeared to dedicate itself by drawing on the moral implications of the political-economic model, and by colluding with internal and external actors to supply it with just enough support to maintain just enough misery that would keep the population busy but would not effectively threaten the stability of the state. From the perspective of global economic principles and expectations, all this this goes against reason, that is the rationality of collective behaviors that are grounded in its own ideologies of welfare maximization. Applied to Cuba, as thirty years of analysis from the members of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy attests—over and over—Cuba ought not to have been able to survive in its current form.[7] And yet it has.[8]
This, of course, is just conjecture. Answers of the sort that academics are found of (as well as the political actors who consume academic “truth” as hard objects on which political choices can be sustained (or appear to be sustained)) are considerably more difficult to obtain with any degree of certainty. It may be possible to extract hints within the ideologies and practices of key actors. These may lead, eventually, to a better understanding of the condition of Cuba and the basis for its stability, even in the face of its state of misery, or perhaps precisely because of the willingness of its apparatus to maintain that state. It is to those ends, to the extraction and consideration of these hints in ideology and action, that this essay is directed.
These hints are organized in three parts. The first, the ideological element, considers the way that that morality of consumerism [9]developed over the decades by Fidel Castro and incorporated into the organic documents of the Cuban political economic model helped shape an approach to the role of material goods in a “revolutionary” society in ways that made collective misery—at some level—both tolerable and strategically useful.
The second looks to the political-economic element. That is , it considers the ways in which the underlying consumerist morality of the political-economic model finds expression in the practices and policies of the State apparatus guided by the Party and its own governance apparatus. The contribution considers this from the interests of three significant groups with substantial engagement with Cuba: (1) states and other foreign lenders colluding with the maintenance of the state of misery; (2) the apparatus of the Cuban state itself and the elaboration of a dual character economy that fulfills the aspirations of the ideological element of the state; and (3) Cuba’s projection of itself, or at least its self-perception into the world, especially in the shadow of its quite useful relationship with the United States, especially in the form of the narrative projections of ALBA.
The third then considers the utility of periodic popular explosion as the disciplinary factor for gauging the limits of misery tolerable by the body politic. This inverts the usual discourse of popular protest as a means of governance rather than in its more usual construction as some sort of pre-revolutionary signaling of the end of the current hegemony of the political-economic model that has shaped Cuban governance since the mid-1970s.
The parts are woven together through a series of twelve vignettes—vignettes that are both in search of a theoretical framework and that also suggest its form. The first three weave together the moral order foundations supporting the construction of a robust and stable state of misery, and its transposition to political ideology and its response to and identification of its inverse (and enemy). This sets up the theoretical context, one grounded in a determination to engage in a robust inverted mimesis of the enemy. The second set of five vignettes distill the phenomenology of this theoretic inverted mimesis. That is they spotlight key aspects of the way that theory finds its way into the constitution of the policy frameworks through which the state fulfills what it has determined is the best form of application of the principles that make Cuban Marxist Leninism itself. This touches not just on the construction and operation of its apparatus, but also on the way in which Cuba’s friends and enemies collude to ensure the operational plausibility of a stable state of misery. The last four vignettes add the dialectical element to the system. A dialectical element, of course, is essential to the conceptualization of a Marxist-Leninist system (it must move forward and must move forward in a precisely defined direction). Here the dialectical element is somewhat unique in a Marxist-Leninist framework—through the engagement with periodic mass explosions. The contemporary forms of that engagement manifested after COVID with the 11 July 2021 protests. But more than that, the dialectic merges protests as a form of dialectic conversation with the (and perhaps measured by) the willingness of the state apparatus to widen or narrow the aperture of toleration of the non-state sector. That, in turn, is a function of the willingness of the state to ignore the unofficial sector. The four elements—apparatus, mass protest, non-state sector regulation, and toleration of the unofficial economy, then serve as the experiential reality of the operation of stability in misery.
The object is then quite straightforward: to begin to develop a basis for understanding the cognitive basis for the stubborn resistance of the Cuban elites to the reforms that seem both inevitable and unavoidable by outsiders, especially among economists and political scientists and their disciples. The answer appears as straightforward: that starting from a quite different (and to non-Cuban specialists, absurd) set of core premises through which the world and their role in it is rationalized, these elites necessarily perceive what is rational to others as the supreme threat to political, moral, and social order. To preserve it they are quite willing to sustain a state of misery, at least until they can move forward (whatever that means). The irony, of course, is that the very elements that condemn the Cuban position as fundamentally and dangerously irrational, are also those who have facilitated its continued existence through programs of subsidies and stabilization programs.
[1] Etymology Online, Misery, available [https://www.etymonline.com/word/misery], last accessed 20 September 2024.
[2] Cambridge Dictionary Online, Miseria, available [https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/spanish-english/miseria], last accessed 20 September 2024.
[3] Ibid.
[4] For a discussion of the nature of the Soviet Union's economic support of Cuba until the early 1990s, see, e.g., Carmelo Mesa-Lago, The Cuban Economy in 1999-2001: Evaluation of Performance and Debate on the Future, in 11 CUBA IN TRANSITION 1, 4 (2001).
[5] The literature is extensive, Consider the essays in Ariana Hernandez-Reguat (ed), Cuba in the Special Period: Culture and Ideology in the 1990s (NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009=;
[6] Miguel Pina e. Cunha* and Rita Campos e. Cunha, ‘The role of mediatory myths in sustaining ideology: the case of Cuba
after the ‘special period,’ (2008) 14(3) Culture and Organization 207-223 (“(1) debates on business and society are
ideological in nature, and (2) ideology is often naturalized, therefore imposing theoretical lenses that narrow the debate on possible alternatives” Ibid., p. 208).
[7] See essays, Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy, Annual Proceedings 1991-2023, available [https://www.ascecuba.org/annual-proceedings], last accessed 1 October 2024.
[8] For a taste, see, Cynthia Benzing, ‘Cuba: Is the “Special Period” Really Over?,’ (2005) 11 International Advances n Economic Research 69-82.
[9] Anne Meneley, Consumerism, (2018) 47 Annual Review of Anthropology 117-132 (“review contemporary anthropological work on consumerism in relation to five topics: (a) excess, (b) waste, (c) connectivity, (d )fair-ish trade, and (e) the semiotics of self-fashioning.” Ibid., 118)
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