New Book Explores Cuba's Revolution
Roger Annis
September 21, 2004

Cuba: A Revolution in Motion, by Isaac Saney, Fernwood Press and Zed Press, 240 pages, $19.95.

How was it possible for poor and beleaguered Cuba to win twice as many Olympic medals as Canada?

Why was Cuba able to send more than 10 000 volunteer medical personnel to bring free health care to Venezuelan working people, when the Canadian government's contribution was limited to sending "observers" seeking to undermine Venezuelan sovereignty?

How has Cuba been able to expand educational and social services, when these fields are experiencing sharp cutbacks in Canada?

According to Isaac Saney, the resilience and creativity of the Cuban revolution is rooted in the vitality of its democratic institutions. He has written an informed and well-researched overview of social, political and economic policy in Cuba over the past 15 years, titled Cuba: A Revolution in Motion. It is a good introduction to the politics and achievements of Cuba’s socialist revolution.

The author is a lecturer at Dalhousie University and Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia and has traveled extensively in Cuba. He is active in NSCuba, an organization that has organized important solidarity projects for Cuba for many years now.

After a brief review of Cuba’s 1959 revolution, the book launches into an analysis of the Cuban economy following the collapse of trading relations with the Soviet Union and the other countries of Eastern Europe at the close of the 1980s. Beginning in 1990, Cuba’s economy suffered a greater relative contraction than that of the capitalist countries during the Great Depression of the 1930’s.

Saney details the creative and decisive measures taken by the Cuban government and population to confront the extraordinary difficulties the country faced in those years, a period the Cuban people call the “Special Period.” As a result of that effort, a turnaround in the economy began in 1994, and progress since then has been slow and steady.

As Saney details, the measures used in Cuba to confront the economic crisis were vastly different than those employed elsewhere in Latin America in countries facing economic difficulty. He writes, “While throughout Latin America, rural poverty and unemployment have increased, and inequality has grown, Cuban government policies and measures have increased production and facilitated economic growth ‘but not at the cost of wealth for a few and misery for the majority.’”

The second chapter, “Governance in Cuba,” seeks to explain how the turnaround was possible. “At the center of the ‘Cuban miracle’ of survival,” the author argues, “is the island’s political system. As Fidel Castro observed in 1996…the miracle that was ‘worked was not economic but political.’ ” The chapter gives a lengthy description of the history and development of the institutions of revolutionary democracy in Cuba and the vital role they played in mobilizing the country’s ingenuity and resources to confront the collapse.

The key to the success of these institutions is the massive participation of the Cuban people in the political process, Saney argues. “Cuban participatory socialist democracy can be considered a movement towards the 'parliamentarization of society,' a movement, as Fidel Castro stated ... that ‘gives viability to what is most important and essential, which is public participation in fundamental issues.’”

The structures of Cuba's “People's Power” do, indeed, resemble a participatory version of the parliamentary system in capitalist democracies. But other, more fundamental aspects of Cuban democracy have no counterpart in capitalist countries -- the leadership role of a revolutionary party, the Communist of Cuba; popular control over the army, police and other state institutions; the role of neighborhood committees; the structured power of trade unions; and, above all, the fact that corporate power has been eliminated in industry and agriculture and replaced by workers’ control. Many of these achievements are detailed in the book.

The institutions and principles described in the book have come into play most recently in Cuba’s sugar industry. The Cuban government has undertaken a radical reduction in the industry, in response to declining markets and prices for Cuban sugar on the world market. The number of workers in the industry has been reduced by one quarter, from some 420 000 to 300 000. These workers have been offered education and retraining, and they will be paid their salaries during this time. Their future salaries will never be less than what they would earn if still employed in the sugar industry. And all this has been achieved not primarily through government generosity, but through the initiatives, experiments, and decisions of the sugar workers themselves (The Militant, February 9, 2004).

Saney provides an informed rebuttal to the false claims of widespread human rights abuses in Cuba. Other chapters in the book explore how Cuba has fought the legacy of racial discrimination it inherited in 1959, how the criminal justice system works, and the history of relations between Cuba and the United States.

One notable absence in the book’s survey of Cuba’s revolution is the place of Ernesto Che Guevara. There are only a few brief references to him in the text, and although the book contains an extensive bibliography, there is no reference to Guevara’s voluminous speeches and writings. Guevara was, of course, a central figure in Cuba’s 1959 revolution and during the formative years of the 1960’s when the socialist revolution unfolded. In particular, he was one of the chief architects of the economic policy that guided the socialist transformation, advocating a course radically different from that followed in the Soviet Union. His influence is evident in Cuba's present course.

The reader will find an in-depth survey of Guevara’s political thought, and its connection to economic policy, in Carlos Tablada’s Che Guevara: Economics and Politics in the Transition to Socialism, published in English in 1989 by Pathfinder Press.

As I read through the book, I was struck by the contrast between Cuba's course and the economic and social catastrophe that has overtaken the countries of the former Soviet Union. Why did Cuba struggle to defend its socialist revolution, in the teeth of fierce imperialist opposition, while other countries heretofore calling themselves “socialist” have moved to dismantle collective property forms in industry and agriculture and are turning back to embrace the capitalist viper?

Cuba's successful resistance stands as an example and inspiration to working people in Russia and around the world. But even today, the U.S., Canada, and other capitalist powers are redoubling their attacks on Cuba. Saney's book should serve to convince many thinking readers to redouble efforts to defend the embattled Cuban people.

Roger Annis is co-editor of the Socialist Voice website and email list.

From the archives: Seven Oaks interview with Isaac Saney, by Derrick O’Keefe (June 14, 2004)

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