Cuba continues to undergo an economic, political, and social crisis as a result of the stagnation in collectivization, generated by the full bureaucratic state control over society, the means of production and surplus labor, and of the permanent and criminal imperialist siege.
Nonetheless, great cultural, scientific, and technical transformations have been carried out, which have created conditions to develop new socialist relations of production. However, in the majority, Cubans are frustrated, alienated, and hopeless and the new generations don't feel the same commitment as the previous ones.
To protect the Revolution requires progressing from statism to socialism. Otherwise, the growing contradiction between the state property schemes, the poorly-paid wage labor and the centralization of decisions and distribution of surplus value (aspects of the relations of production) on one hand, and the scientific, cultural, and technical level reached by Cuban workers and the means of production (fundamental elements of the productive forces) on the other, will deepen; the struggle over the control of surplus value will grow between the workers and the all-owning and deciding bureaucratic state, which appropriates it in order to use it in the ways it sees fit and limits its true control by its real owners; and there will be a deepening of economic difficulties, disinterest and rejection with the danger of a full capitalist restoration which for Cuba would be annexation, the absorption of its culture and an incalculable disaster for the nation and for the international revolutionary movement.
In order to save the people, the Country, and the Revolution a new participatory and democratic socialism is required, capable of offering constructive solutions to those contradictions, to put human beings--not the state--at the center of the national life, to revitalize the revolutionary spirit of manual and intellectual workers, to reactivate the worker-peasant (or farmer) alliance, to regain the confidence of the people, to win over the youth, to develop the economy, to improve life, to destroy the domestic and foreign basis of the enemy blockade and to make a more effective contribution to the socialist rebirth occurring in Latin America.
Cuban SPD is a group of people inside Cuba devoted to these aims - and this ZGroup is a place to discuss and explore ideas for relevance in Cuba and beyond.
Barbara Garson is the author of Money Makes the World Go Around: One investor Tracks her Cash Thr... more
Barbara Garson is the author of Money Makes the World Go Around: One investor Tracks her Cash Through the Global Economy, Penguin, NY 2002. In this book investor Garson puts part of her book advance into Franklin Templeton`s Mutual Shares Fund. That`s how she became a part owner of the French based water company Suez Lyonnaise.
