I have begun reading the first of two books about the Cuban economy that have been written fairly recently. They are collections of articles by Cuban economists and Americans who might be described as Cubanologists like Carmelo Mesa-Lago (originally from Cuba) whose anti-Communism is a bit more nuanced than what you find in the academy (Mesa-Lago is quoted frequently by the state caps.)
In the first book, there’s a long and very instructive article by Brian Pollitt, a British economist who has been studying sugar production in Cuba for 30 years. I will be reporting on it when I begin a series of posts about the Cuban economy, but will say at this point that it makes an observation that reminds me of the problems of the Nicaraguan economy under the FSLN, namely that structural changes in the rural sector that are intended to benefit the poor frequently have unintended consequences:
George Vickers pointed these contradictions out in an article in the June 1990 “NACLA Report on the Americas” entitled “A Spider’s Web.” He noted that the Agrarian Reform provided a reduction in rents, greater access to credit and improved prices for basic grains. This meant that small peasants had no economic pressure on them to do the backbreaking work of harvesting export crops on large farms. Even when wages increased on these large farms, the campesino avoided picking cotton on the large farms. Who could blame them?
full: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/state_and_revolution/nicaragua.htm
In a nutshell, something similar has happened in Cuba. Pollitt points out that there’s been a big drop in sugar production because rural workers cannot be pressured into cutting cane through manual labor. After the end of Soviet aid, there’s been a crisis in the sugar industry because of a failure to replace aging machinery in the sugar fields. There are still many sugar fields that can be harvested but only by hand. Like Nicaragua, there is a problem getting people liberated from an oppressive plantation economy to do the kind of work that they once did.
I just spotted an article by Pollitt on MRZine this morning that might explore these questions. I strongly recommend a read:
http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/pollitt061010.html
This story on the one hand reminds me of all the diatribes you used to read about in the 70′s & 80′s about how unproductive Soviet workers were vis-a-vis their Western counterparts and on the other hand the guide in the Copper Queen Mine Tour in Bisbee, AZ who explained that around the turn of the century they used mules to haul up the ore but after their births on farms the mules had to live their entire lives below ground because if they ever got out to breathe the fresh air and see the light again they could never get the mules to return below.
Comment by Karl Friedrich — October 7, 2010 @ 2:04 pm
Thanks for the link. I’ll take a look at the article and if I have anything useful to add to what Pollit writes, I’l do that.
On first glance I notice that the word ALBA is missing from this massive discussion, yet ALBA is an important element in the Cuban economic scenario. It’s a system of bartering rather than buying and selling and the Cuban leadership is hopeful that it can moderate the effects of the world capitalist market and its fluctuations. The development of the Sucre as a monetary instrument (electronic) is part of the concept.
As Trotsky pointed out so long ago, you cannot build socialism in a single country, and he was speaking about a single country which covered one sixth of the world’s surface. That’s even less possible in a tiny country with a mere eleven million people. By socialism I’m referring to a society with a higher productivity of labor than has been achieved under capitalism. A lot more socialism revolution and socialist economic development would be needed for socialiam – in that precisely-defined sense – to be achievable in a small country like Cuba.
On a general level, however, to write meaningfully about Cuba, Fidel’s November 17, 2005 speech at the University of Havana ought to be kept in mind. There really are no simple solutions as so many people with magic wands and magical solutions would like to think. As Fidel put it:
I have an infinite number of examples of many things that couldn’t be resolved by those who called themselves theoreticians, blanketing themselves from head to toe in the books of Marx, Engels, Lenin and many others.
That was why I commented that one of our greatest mistakes at the beginning of, and often during, the Revolution was believing that someone knew how to build socialism.
http://www.walterlippmann.com/fc-11-17-2005.html
Comment by Walter Lippmann — October 7, 2010 @ 4:15 pm
what would interest me most about Cuba is how exactly decisions are made. So, in which ways are Cuban workers able to influence the state’s decisions regarding economic planing? who decided to go down the road of re-capitalization?
I’m not sure that is really necessary. In the West today, a lot of people work in jobs that would be basicially useless in a society without profit motives. i think less than 15% still work in manufacturing or agriculture. in most non-western countries, people still use work-intensive farming methods
without much machinery – even in China.
If you could split up the useful labour, it would be possible to work under 20 hours a week and still produce more goods than today for the underdeveloped parts of the world. perhaps we couldn’t have as many private cars or McMansions…
Comment by PfromGermany — October 8, 2010 @ 8:18 am
The point about the 20hr. week is a good one but the anarchy of capitalism is doing a good job of culling the demand for McMansions and without credit & the prospect of bankrupted automakers as well as declining wages and rising fuel prices workers won’t even be able to afford private cars.
Comment by Karl Friedrich — October 8, 2010 @ 1:21 pm
I was refering to a planned economy
looks like the Cuban CP consists of well under 10% of the population of Cuba, and only 1/3 workers…
Comment by PfromGermany — October 8, 2010 @ 4:43 pm