“FOR us, like Venezuela and Nicaragua, it is clear that the siege is being tightened,” stated Raúl Castro this July 26, in Santiago de Cuba. The First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba thus summarized the international panorama created by U.S. policies characterized by “disrespect, aggression, interventionism, and crude manipulation of the historical truth.”
Raúl spoke during the commemoration of the 65th anniversary of the 1953 assault on the island’s second most important military garrison, in an effort to overthrow the dictator who enjoyed the support of the United States and did good business with that country’s mafia. John F. Kennedy saw it this way during his election campaign for the Presidency of the United States: “Perhaps (the) most disastrous of our failures, was the decision to give stature and support to one of the most bloody and repressive dictatorships in the long history of Latin American repression. Fulgencio Batista murdered 20,000 Cubans in 7 years - a greater proportion of the Cuban population than the proportion of Americans who died in both World Wars… Administration spokesmen publicly praised Batista - hailed him as a staunch ally and a good friend - at a time when Batista was murdering thousands, destroying the last vestiges of freedom, and stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from the Cuban people…”
However, this continuing hegemonic narrative presents the Cuban government as a dictatorship that put an end to the prosperous democracy that reigned on the island until 1959. A part of this story recognizes Batista’s bloody character only to legitimize what existed before, but the words of the President assassinated in a shadowy fashion in Dallas are not very amenable to this view of reality: “In 1953 the average Cuban family had an income of $6 a week. Fifteen to twenty percent of the labor force was chronically unemployed. Only a third of the homes in the island even had running water, and in the years which preceded the Castro revolution this abysmal standard of living was driven still lower as population expansion out-distanced economic growth.”
The truth is that the elected governments that preceded Batista where characterized by corruption, gangsterism, sell-out politics, assassinations of trade union leaders, despite the 1940 Constitution with its advanced conceptions for the era, to a large degree promoted by the six Communist constituent assembly members, but never implemented.
The Constitution condemned vast landholdings and proposed regulating monopolies in commerce, industry, and agriculture, but according to Kennedy, at the time of the Revolution’s triumph, “U.S. companies owned about 40 percent of Cuban sugar lands - almost all the cattle ranches - 90 percent of the mines and mineral concessions - 80 percent of the utilities - and practically all the oil industry - and supplied two-thirds of Cuba's imports.”
Interviewed by journalist Rosa Miriam Elizalde, the Communist Cuban intellectual Fernando Martínez Heredia described the situation prior to the coup by General Fulgencio Batista (1901-1973) this way: “When I was a boy, bourgeois democracy in Cuba governed very well, better than in many countries, and moreover an effort was being made to have the national budget approved by Congress. The President of the Republic had a Prime Minister, debates were broadcast on radio, new television got into politics, as well. (There was) freedom of expression in the Cuban neocolonial bourgeois republic - it was not a pseudo-republic. Freedom of expression was fairly broad then. Why? Because it served capitalist domination in Cuba. So everyone could say whatever they liked, but things continued essentially without change. That’s why, at a certain moment, all political parties favored a land reform, but only with the political-military victory of the revolutionaries could the land reform be carried out. This is a historical experience.”
Cuba’s Socialist Constitution of 1976, as opposed to that of 1940, was debated by the people and approved in a referendum. Leading its writers was Blas Roca, one of those Communist constituents, who was then the Party’s secretary general. He told journalist Ciro Bianchi, “In the constituent assembly, we were able to participate with six delegates, a minimal representation in the group of 76 that the Assembly included. Nonetheless, the party played an important role there, because we presented a problem and obliged the body to vote. You had to say “yes” or “no” to the eight-hour work day, the 44-hour week; you had to say “yes” or “no” to a series of progressive measures like the distribution of land to campesinos, paid vacation, the right to education, the condemnation of racial discrimination. Since those who were there would later be candidates for Representative or Senator, they had to profess support for these measures to avoid alienating the electorate.
If these issues had not been put to a vote, those people would have made lovely speeches, they would have spoken loudly about the homeland and its heroes, but nothing more would have happened, Thanks to this, some advanced precepts were included in the 1940 Constitution. Of course, they were mocked later; of course they did nothing to put them into effect; of course the elimination of vast landholdings was not even attempted, but at least there was a legal program to fight for and to put pressure on the country, including representatives of other parties.”
By 1976, Cuba had already lived through 17 years of the U.S. blockade and aggression, while changing the conditions Kennedy had described so well as a candidate and later wanted to return to as President, but this did not prevent the Cuban Revolution from achieving - through broad debate - consensus on a new Constitution and the socialist institutionalization of the country, legitimized with the support of 97% of the electorate.
At critical moments, Cuba has always responded with more democracy. At the beginning of the 1990s, the country was heading into the worst economic juncture in its history, facing the impact of losing 75% of its foreign trade and a 34% drop in its GDP, as a result of the disappearance of its commercial relations with the USSR and Eastern Europe, to which Washington opportunistically reacted with a tightening of the blockade.
The Call to the Fourth Party Congress was discussed in thousands of meetings held not only by Party branches, but in all workplaces and schools, as well. Shortly thereafter, faced with the inescapable necessity, the 1993 National Assembly agreed on financial cutbacks and tens of thousands of Workers’ Parliaments were convoked to debate the changes. These forums were held over subsequent months to consider the proposals, and measures were not implemented until the popular discussion was concluded in May of 1994, and several of the adjustments originally considered by the Assembly were abandoned as a result of objections from workers.
In 2007, when the impact of Fidel’s illness created uncertainty beyond Cuba’s borders, and the task began of continuing the Revolution without its founder leading the government, amidst threats from the U.S. administration of George W. Bush, discussions of the speech Raúl delivered July 26 in the city of Camagüey were held across the entire country. Proposals made laid the basis for elaborating the Economic and Social Policy Guidelines that were later submitted to the Sixth Party Congress and now - renovated during a similar debate prior to the Seventh Congress - guide the Cuban government’s work. The same occurred with the Conceptualization of the Cuban Economic and Social Model, one of the foundations of the proposed Constitution now under discussion since August 13.
Is Cuban democracy perfectible? It is, and one way to do so is through the consultation underway, without exclusions, which has opened space for the participation of Cubans living abroad, as well. Faced with critical situations, dictatorships respond with more repression; revolutions respond with more democracy, as occurred in Venezuela with the Constituent Assembly that put an end to the violence there overnight.
Try and tell U.S. citizens that they can directly nominate candidates to assemblies from which their representatives in Congress will emerge, without the intervention of money. Or the Spanish that they have the right to be consulted regarding what the Popular Party and the Socialist Workers’ Party agreed to in 2014, modifying the Constitution to comply with the anti-democratic European Central Bank, without citizen approval, and cutting social spending.
“We have been obliged to construct a parliament in a trench,” said poet Cintio Vitier, years ago. And Cuba persists in giving a voice to the majorities disregarded in the new School of the Americas.
