Photo: Blog Comunistas

Via Comunistas

Yesterday, Saturday, May 6, there were popular protests in the municipality of Caimanera, Guantanamo, Cuba. About 500 people took to the streets and went to the municipal headquarters of the Communist Party, basically demanding food – a basic human need. Caimanera is a municipality located in one of the most economically depressed provinces. Caimanera also has the great peculiarity of having on its territory the US military installation of the Guantanamo Naval Base. This unique condition has led the Cuban government to try to offer a better offer on the ration card compared to the rest of the country. However, the protest makes it clear that the economic crisis has hit hard and Caimanera is in a similar critical situation as the rest of Guantanamo. At the same time, to understand yesterday’s protests, a political aspect to remember is that Caimanera was among the three municipalities with the highest abstention rate in the last legislative elections.

The day before the Caimanera protests, the May Day parade was held, which was postponed by the Cuban government due to alleged “climatic instability.” However, the Caimanera protests demonstrated that one of the real reasons the Cuban government postponed the May First parade was fear of popular protests. Thus, with the exception of pandemic years, May Day 2023 was the first time in Cuba since the triumph of the Revolution that the classic International Working Class Day parade was suspended.

It is shocking that just one day after the bureaucracy’s May Day rally, there was a spontaneous protest against the government that managed to mobilize almost a thousand people. This exposes the political fragility of the ruling bureaucracy and the falsity of its discourse: the protests in Caimanera were not contained by those who marched on May Day, but repressed by the military and the police.

The protests in Caimanera begin the cycle of demonstrations against the government in 2023.

After the heavily repressed popular explosion of July 11, 2021, Cuba experienced continuous spontaneous protests that last year began on July 14 in the municipality of Los Palacios, Pinar del Rio province. After the protests in Los Palacios – a municipality plunged into total precariousness – similar events continued in different provinces, reaching the point that by August there was practically one anti-government demonstration per week. The peak of the protests in 2022 occurred when, on September 29, demonstrations broke out in Havana, with street blockades in the most precarious neighborhoods, even preventing a train from entering the Cuban capital. The protests in the capital lasted until the beginning of October, dying out with the same spontaneity with which they began.

Thus ended a cycle of protests that will resurface in 2023 with strength in the summer and early fall. The fact that electricity consumption increases in the summer causes blackouts, a situation that extends into the tropical autumn. This is a spark that was instrumental in the protests of August 5, 1994, July 11, 2021, and the chain of demonstrations from July to early October 2022. In addition to food shortages and rising food prices, the immediate trigger for the 2022 protests were the prolonged power outages, some of which lasted up to twelve hours. The popularly known “blackouts” hit the precarious neighborhoods hardest, but not the areas where the mansions of the ruling bureaucracy and rising bourgeoisie are concentrated.

This year, the Cuban government, in order to alleviate the looming energy crisis and its consequences, has allocated a significant amount of scarce fuel to maintain the thermoelectric power plants. This is occurring in the midst of a deep fuel supply crisis because Cuba’s trading partners have failed to deliver oil, gasoline and gas. In other words, come summer, the Cuban government will be forced to prioritize transportation or electricity – a strategy that is already being employed.

What is striking about the protests in Caimanera is that this time it was not necessary to reach the critical point generated by the long blackouts. It was food shortages that caused the explosion in Caimanera, something that can be seen in one of its main slogans: “food”. The food shortage in Cuba is getting worse and worse, becoming almost impossible to imagine from the outside.

A very important aspect to take into account is that the rise of the national bourgeoisie, directly stimulated by the bureaucracy in power, is taking place in the service sector. The private economic sector has become hegemonic in gastronomy and is expanding more and more in the sale of food, causing the stocking of basic products of the Cuban diet, such as rice, oil, bread and eggs, with meat having an almost prohibitive price. The shortages and price speculation are occurring in a working class that is seeing the purchasing power of its salary fall more and more. According to official statistics, the average wage in Cuba, at the current dollar exchange rate, was equivalent to $21.

As the Cuban government reduces the food supply, it hands over gastronomy to the bourgeoisie. Most of the supplies are taken from the state-owned restaurants, bars and snack bars, giving its workers the “opportunity” to turn their workplaces into their own businesses. Not surprisingly, with an average salary of $21 per month, the workers in these workplaces do not have the capital to run the restaurant, bar, or cafeteria on their own. The typical rich person comes along and proposes to the local government to turn the establishment into a private company. Although it is not really the origin of the bourgeoisie that matters, but the fact that it is bourgeois itself, it is noteworthy that the bidding for these state-owned facilities is not done in a public way, the decision on who should hand over the state property is made according to the convenience of the neo-capitalist bureaucracy. The result of this policy is to worsen the living conditions of the working class: a growing bourgeoisie in the food sector only leads to speculation on prices that are already unaffordable for a working class family. Once again, it is clear that only working class control over the means of production is the only way to the direct benefit of the working class.

The Cuban ruling bureaucracy, which used to be proud of the progress of food production or industrialization, publishing the results in the press, now, on a monthly basis, reports the growth of capitalist enterprises under the euphemism of MSMEs.

The Cuban ruling bureaucracy is moving decisively towards capitalist restoration by implementing the Sino-Vietnamese model, that is, continuing in power as a nominally communist party, running a capitalist economy. If the transition to capitalism implies, in all cases, a shock politics, in the Cuban case it is worse, because it was accompanied by a deep economic crisis caused, in large part, by external factors. The war in Russia – a country on which Cuba is economically dependent – caused increases in international prices, with a severe impact on food and fuel. As a result, the Cuban economy, shaken after two years of pandemic, with a serious drop in tourism – its main economic activity – has not had the chance to recover and have a positive impact on the living conditions of the working class. On the contrary: the living conditions of the Cuban working class are deteriorating more and more. This, added to the bad decisions of the Cuban government and the restoration of capitalism, causes a calamitous scenario for the working class, which is plunged into food shortages and rising prices, only surpassed by the economic crisis of the 1990s – produced by the fall of the Soviet Union.

The advance of political apathy and anti-communism

Paradoxically, the propaganda of the Cuban bureaucracy has helped the youth grow in political apathy and aversion to any socialist expression. Young people, especially those born after 1995 – and more strongly since 2000 – have seen from early adulthood, and many from adolescence and childhood, a country that is only regressing economically and where the achievements of socialism are being dismantled. Those born after 1995 were only 11 years old when Fidel Castro left power in 2006 and approximately 14 years old when Raúl Castro began the process of liberal reforms. In line with the rising capitalist economic reforms, socialism is being dismantled and political propaganda is becoming increasingly bureaucratized and foreign to most young people. It is in the interest of the Cuban bureaucracy to have a youth, if not loyal to it, at least completely alienated from politics. As a result, Cuban youth, guided by the reactionary common sense that takes hold in times of crisis and advancing capitalism, see “socialism” as an inept and chaotic economic system that generates scarcity and impoverishment. In reality, young Cubans are seeing only a mediocre prologue of underdeveloped capitalism. Unable to carry out a successful capitalism and faced with the resulting popular discontent, the Cuban ruling bureaucracy has increased repression and censorship. Through this policy, it caused broad sectors of the youth to see socialism not only as an economically unviable system, but also as inherently authoritarian and undemocratic.

In light of this, anti-communist counterrevolutionary groups find fertile ground – counterrevolution is defined as the broad social and political spectrum formed by all organizations, institutions, and individuals who are in favor of the restoration of capitalism and therefore against any attempt at revolution. These organizations and their ideology are presented as the alternative to the Cuban system. Although these organizations are extremely weak, their anti-communist discourse, fertile in the common sense of the precarious sectors, causes right-wing slogans to be imposed in the popular protests against the Cuban bureaucracy. Added to this is the momentary impossibility that there is no real socialist alternative. In view of this, those who participate in legitimate protests find themselves armed only with anti-communist slogans that give political cover to popular demands. For this reason, in the Caimanera protests, anti-communist slogans prevailed. This does not mean that those who participated in the protests were anti-communists, but that these workers did not have a socialist proposal as a political instrument to confront the ruling bureaucracy.

At the same time, state repression makes it very difficult to organize a militant socialist proposal. The strength of the Cuban state is so strong that its repression does not require the physical disappearance of opponents, torture and extrajudicial executions. In the state-owned workplaces, any dissent is isolated by the administration and the CCP. This increases workers’ fear of reprisals, and so they try to distance themselves from anyone who opposes the ruling bureaucracy.

The outright ban on other organizations, the impossibility of disseminating critical political propaganda in physical form, of legally meeting to articulate independent proposals, or of open criticism by the press – journalists in the critical private press are exposed to heavy pressure and harassment from the repressive mechanisms of the state – means that any attempt at socialist struggle against the Cuban ruling bureaucracy occurs in a scenario of semi-clandestinity. On the other hand, the decades of political bureaucratization have demobilized the Cuban working class, causing the growth of apathy and fear of any proposed opposition.

To a large extent, this is one of the main reasons for the spontaneity of the popular protests that have been taking place in Cuba since July 11, 2021. The fear of organizing causes those who participate in the protests to join them only at the cathartic moment of the demonstration, diluted in the protection offered by the masses. Afterwards, the vast majority of protesters fail to organize, and the police indiscriminately detain the participants who stand out in the protest or randomly detain anyone they can identify on video.

On this occasion, the protests were treated with the same pattern as in 2022: the authorities initially showed dialogue, but then gave way to repression. At the same time, the practice of cutting off the Internet on a national level was repeated, which was not done immediately, but progressively. In this way, communication is hampered and it is not known at a national level that protests are taking place. Although the right to demonstrate is included in the 2019 Constitution, no legislation has been implemented. Thus, any protest in public space is criminalized and repressed.

Possible Consequences

A social explosion of similar magnitude to that of July 11 – or greater – is a latent fact of which the ruling bureaucracy is aware, but, consistent with its ideology, the Cuban government does not know how to prevent it, seeing only repression as a response.

At the same time, the fall of the Cuban government as a result of a popular rebellion would provoke either a military coup, installing a government of right-wing generals, which would immediately apply capitalist restoration, or the triumph of an anti-communist dictatorship controlled by the United States and the current internal counterrevolution. However, this does not mean that the Cuban critical left should confront or deny the popular protests: quite the contrary. Socialist militancy must be there, alongside the precarious sectors, exercising the right to protest. The main duty of the Cuban critical left is the difficult task of reversing the hegemony that the right has over popular discontent.

So far, no neo-Stalinist system has been overcome by a socialist revolution. All, in one way or another, have given way to capitalism. In cases of popular rebellions, as in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Albania or Hungary, with the most violent and radical event in Romania, the fall of the ruling bureaucracy led to the establishment of a ruthless neoliberal capitalism. Unfortunately, even in the face of these facts, a considerable sector of Cuban youth is determined to take on a neoliberal scenario, hoping that times of plenty will come after that. “Nothing can be worse than this,” is a phrase circulating among Cuban youth who consider it impossible for Cuba to exist with a greater economic crisis and a worse government, while applauding the growth of the private economy.

It is in this completely adverse scenario that Cuban revolutionary Marxism has to struggle. Spontaneity only gives way to the triumph of reformism or reaction. Revolutions without a revolutionary organization – or a front of revolutionary organizations – are not a revolution, but a popular rebellion. Even the Russia of 1917 is an example of this: the fall of the Tsar was brought about by spontaneous protests mobilized by famine and war. It was not the Bolsheviks who came to power, but the social reformists led by Kerensky and company. Cuba needs the building of a revolutionary Marxist party to take over the leadership of the working class. Just as the first attempt to build socialism occurred in Cuba, perhaps the first socialist revolution to overthrow neo-Stalinism will occur in Cuba.

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