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Cuba: It’s Time to Intervene in the State Itself

HAVANA TIMES — The proposal by President Miguel Díaz-Canel to resolve the deep crisis the country is going through is nothing more than another reform among all those that have failed over more than half a century. No potential foreign investor with even a basic capacity for reasoning is going to trust their money in any project where the Cuban State participates, considering how other similar enterprises have ended, because they know that the source of the problem has been precisely the presence of that State with totalitarian powers. Such can be illustrated with this phrase from Martí: “Two condors or two lambs can unite without as much danger as a condor and a lamb.”

With this formula from Díaz-Canel, nothing changes in a model that Fidel Castro himself once candidly confessed “does not even work for Cubans.” That model was finally structured with the last radical measure imposed by that State: dispossessing the last entity left to intervene in—the people themselves with their small businesses.. With that measure in 1968, the revolution came to an end, because there was no radical change left to carry out, which is what defines a revolution, and thus the Era of reforms began.

Why doesn’t this model work, and why does it require permanent assistance from external allies to counteract crises, as well as massive exoduses to relieve tensions? Because of a gigantic, uncontrollable civilian-military bureaucratic caste that administers all the fundamental means of the economy without any real interest in productivity, as a true owner would have.

If in the capitalist productive process there is a contradiction of interests between wage earners and owners, in this system they call “socialism,” and the people call “communism,” there are two: one between workers and those bureaucrats, and another between those bureaucrats and the leadership of that party/state—at most twenty or thirty high-level officials.

Therefore, the solution does not lie in carrying out yet another reform, but in a radical change—in other words, a new revolution.

The real solution would be to allow potential investors to manage enterprises without any State intervention except tax collection, and—with legislation that guarantees private property—to provide facilities for small producers, both the self-employed and farmers, in all their needs. They should be allowed a free market without price controls. Likewise, in State companies, workers should share in the profits they themselves produce and have the right to elect workers’ councils responsible for appointing their own administrators, since they will be the ones most interested in choosing the most capable people.

And the heirs of the large property owners whose assets were confiscated should receive compensation when the country’s economic conditions make it possible.

Whom should we confiscate from now? The State itself—the great confiscator. And only the people can do that. Ideally, the State would voluntarily relinquish all those enterprises, but no one believes it is capable of giving up that gigantic monopoly. Therefore, in every enterprise or workplace, workers should unite to create a council that decides who will manage it in the name of all the employees—turning proletarians into owners. This should scandalize no one, least of all leaders in exile, because this leitmotif is not mine but that of someone they themselves admired, the late Jorge Mas Canosa. I therefore hope they will support me in making that dream a reality.

If independent workers were stripped of their small properties, which forced them to become wage laborers under the State monopoly, now they should have the right to dispossess that monopoly.

A model like this would stimulate all productive forces. In it, incentives would not exist for only twenty or thirty people, as in communist regimes, nor even only for the hundreds or thousands in capitalism, but for millions—because contradictions of interest among different social sectors would no longer predominate. And in a very short time, Cuba would rise like the Phoenix, from the rubble and toward the stars.

Read more from Cuba here on Havana Times.

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