Cuba’s Caribbean Marxism: Essays on Ideology, Government, Society, and Economy in the Post Fidel Castro Era

First published 2018

by Little Sir Press, State College PA, USA 16803

Contact us at  LittleSirPress@gmail.com.

© Larry Catá Backer; Foreword © Flora Sapio

Please cite this publication as:

Backer, Larry Catá (2018), Cuba’s Caribbean Marxism:  Essays on Ideology, Government, Society, and Economy in the Post Fidel Castro Era, State College, PA: Little Sir Press.

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Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Name: Backer, Larry Catá, author.

Title: Cuba’s Caribbean Marxism: Essays on Ideology, Government, Society, and Economy in the Post Fidel Castro Era/ Larry Catá Backer.

Description:  Paperback edition | State College, PA: Little Sir Press, 2018 | Includes bibliographic references and glossary.

Identifiers: LCCN  2018912515  | ISBN 978-1-949943-00-9 (paperback)

Subjects: LSCH: Political Science—Marxism—Latin America—Cuba

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018912515

ISBN: 978-1-949943-00-9 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-949943-01-6 (ebk)

Typeset in Iowan Old Style 

Printed in China.

Dedication

This work is dedicated to my muse Donna Marie, whose sometimes patient engagement with ideas always narrowed the impossible and drew out the best in the possible. 

__________

The book was written with great appreciation to the members of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy, on whose Board of Directors I have served since 2016. An organization long dedicated to rigorous study of Cuba and the Cuban diaspora and open to all views, its members and meetings have by their example over the years sparked thinking about many of the issues that found their way into this text.

Foreword:

Reflections on Cuba’s Caribbean Marxism

Flora Sapio

Caminante, son tus huellas

el camino, y nada más;

caminante, no hay camino:

se hace camino al andar.

(Caminante, no Hay Camino, 1912 Antonio Machado) [Wanderer, your footsteps are the road, and nothing else; Wayfarer, there is no route: one makes a path by going.]

The general consensus about Cuba suggests how the Caribbean Island is a secondary actor in the skirmishes of global politics. Cuba is not endowed with those features that can make a state internationally powerful, in a traditional or in a modern sense. Cuba doesn’t have a large territory, a numerous population, or a strong army. Neither it is a hub of global supply chains, finance, physical or digital infrastructure.

Yet Cuba constantly rises to the limelight of global interest. This simple fact suggests that there might be a differential between the weight that is attributed to Cuba, and the objective value of Cuba in globalization. The mere possibility of such a discrepancy ought to immediately induce an attempt to understand Cuba for what it is, rather than for how it is represented. An attempt to understand why and how the Island continues to play a role well above what one would expect has to start by discarding the uses to which Cuba is put in domestic policy, and focusing on the Island’s ideological structures.  Specific dynamics in the economy, government and society of Cuba may be of interest in their own respect, yet only knowledge of Cuban ideology allows to understand post-Castro reforms in a way that benefits the observer.

Cuba’s Caribbean Marxism is a book about the broader ideology behind a decade of reforms in Cuba’s domestic governance. Those who decide to undertake the long journey through the twelve chapters of this book will get a privileged insight into how the seemingly arcane words of ideology manifest in Cuba’s government, economics, society, and in Cuba’s role in globalization. At the end of this journey, they will be one step closer to understanding Cuba on its own terms.

Writing that failure to understand Cuba will result in the loss of significant opportunities – for states, enterprises and individuals – might seem closer to an empty sales pitch than to an intellectual reflection.

But, to paraphrase Backer, the different meaning we attribute to any of the objects we observe can point us either to Truth or to Lie. Backer illustrates this difficult point in his discussion of Cuba’s constitutional reform. He uses a material artifact – a Nkisi – as an example of how imposing our own ideas on any object can drive us away from Truth, as Truth is proved by facts. A Nkisi is just a wooden sculpture – and objects cannot speak to inform us of what they are. So a Nkisi, or any other object, can be only understood through the meaning we give to it.

By contrast, governance systems can and do speak. They speak through their ideology, the documents outlining the goals of that ideology, and the reforms enacted in the attempt to translate ideology into tangible facts. By speaking about themselves, governance systems inform us of what they are. Yet the words used to speak ideology are not always listened to, and much less understood for what they mean. Uninspiring and dull, they have the two opposite effects of distancing the listener, or inducing her to repeat those words for the sake of ease.

In either of these cases, one would miss the very governance system one purports to understand, and reveal much more about one’s own interest, and perception of the world, than about Cuba as it is.

The choice to take a distance from the tediousness of ‘ideology-speak’ by subjecting this form of speech to mockery or ridicule would relegate Cuba within the province of now dismantled Marxist-Leninist systems. A valuable lesson one learns from reading Cuba’s Caribbean Marxism is that Cuba may have no interest in ‘converting’ observers to the allegedly higher truth of its own breed of Marxism. All forms of discretionary power thrive on information asymmetries. The most severe information failures occur when statements meaningful to those who make them are ignored, quickly dismissed as unimportant by the listener, or understood to mean what the observer wants to hear. It is then than discretionary power enjoys the real possibility to distribute benefits and costs as it sees fit.

At times, the choice to degrade ideology might be premised on a will to validate a certain set of pre-existing beliefs and scenarios. One of the scenarios most readily accepted by the public, and hence worth projecting, is the one under which Cuba will eventually transform into a system paying lip service (at least) to the principles of ‘exogenous democracy’. The projection of this and similar scenarios can benefit their proponents regardless of what will ‘happen on the ground’ in Cuba. In the absence of Cuba’s democratization, further analyses may be required to understand why no one of the projected scenarios materialized. Should a political transformation occur, further analyses may be required to design and implement methodologies to measure and evaluate the performance of Cuba and its elites.

The decision to repeat the words of Cuban ideology, rather than dismiss them, can ironically be premised on a similar will, and yield similar outcomes. Thirty years ago, the existence of studies in ‘comparative Communism’ was sufficient to avoid conflating Cuba with any idealized version of ‘global’ Marxism-Leninism. Obscure as they may have been, analyses of ‘comparative Communism’ had the merits to prove how different types of Marxist-Leninism existed in each one of the countries of the former Soviet Bloc. A body of knowledge existed, to enable differentiated attitudes and responses to different systems, rather than the lumping all Marxist-Leninist systems under the same label.

This body of knowledge now seems to be largely ignored. For someone with an academic background in the study of China, Vietnam, or North Korea, no temptation is more enticing than considering Cuba as a Caribbean late-comer to Asian Marxism-Leninism. How easy, and how deceitfully rewarding would such an intellectual move be.

From an epistemic point of view, very little or no effort would be required to earn any knowledge about the specific ideology that has shaped Cuba, its state, its economy, and its society.  To make sense of what from the outside looks as a very familiar-yet-different cauldron of races, mechanisms, ideas, words and institutions, the observer would not need to walk outside the door of her cognitive structures. Any of the tropes normally employed in analyses of China, Vietnam or even North Korea may be conveniently recycled in the study of things Cuban.

So as outside advocates of a democratic transition would eagerly slap any of the available  labels on the Island, comparatists may choose to frame Cuba either as China’s little sister, a New Vietnam, or even the North Korea of the Caribbean. The inclusion of Cuba within categories constructed by the observer would, of course, not guarantee that Cuba would conform to the reform path of any Asian governance system. Those interested in knowing how and why Cuba will undergo a different path of transition will find the answer in Cuba’s Caribbean Marxism. Its twelve chapters should not be read as the history of ten years of attempts to catch-up with economically more prosperous Marxist-Leninist regimes, but as the history of efforts to forge a new path there where no road exists. Therefore, readers should not automatically assume that a ‘first-level cooperative’ existing in Cuba today can be analogized to the ‘first-level cooperatives’ established in China in the 1950s. The names of these and other public entities analyzed in the book may be familiar to academics with a background in China studies. Yet, Cuba’s decision to create these entities is a prelude to a different reform path.

Caribbean Marxism is Marxism as developed by leaders of the Cuban revolution, and by those who have inherited the difficult task of governance reforms. It is an adaptation of the classical tenets of European Marxism to the concrete circumstances of Cuba. A feature common to the constitutions of most Communist Parties – both existing and defunct - is a Preamble where the ruling Communist Party states what it is, and describes how its founders adapted classical European ‘dogma’ to their local context, when they experienced that the European recipe for Revolution did not work in the Caribbean or in Asia.

Each and every distortion in how we observe an object is eventually produced by how we choose to position ourselves in relation to that object. Such an effect does not merely involve institutional observers, or academics specialized in the study of Marxist-Leninist systems as China, Vietnam, and North-Korea.

Cuba’s Caribbean Marxism subtly points out how the vulnerability of Cuba’s reform process lies more on the reliance of certain tropes, than in any real lack of capability by its officials and its people in forging a path for themselves. Nothing is easier than capturing Cuba – or any other country – within any of the existing discursive tropes. When this operation is performed from outside the Cuban border, it has negligible or no effects on domestic processes. Another precious insight one obtains from the book is that Cuba filters, selects and compartmentalizes all that it comes in touch with through a complex set of cognitive, cultural and institutional mechanisms that reducing to an ‘insider/outsider’ distinction would be simplistic.

At the same time, no tropes are more harmful than the tropes one creates for oneself.

Cuba’s Caribbean Marxism comments on what Backer calls the embargo mentality. I have very little to add to his discussion of the effects the embargo mentality. What is rather striking is observing scenes similar to those one might witness in Havana, and hearing a similar range of opinions there where one would expect sacrifice to be paid off by all of the material rewards markets should deliver to their followers.

In truth, pure markets of the kind of those theorized by Adam Smith do not exist. They are an aspirational ideal not dissimilar from the abolition of social classes. While the abolition of social classes calls for the intervention of a vanguard, the realization of a perfect market calls for a varying degree of involvement by the state. Just as Caribbean Marxism is the adaptation of a specific political philosophy to Cuba, variants of the Market existing in the most diverse countries inevitably entail the intervention (to different degrees, in different forms, and through different means) of ruling parties, through the support of their national governments.

Flora Sapio

Coalition for Peace & Ethics USA

University of Naples, Italy

––––––––

Preface and Acknowledgements

Thanks

As is common in undertakings of this sort, it took many people to make this book possible. I have relied on the kindness of my colleagues in the United States, Cuba, and elsewhere for their patience in listening as I developed ideas that eventually found their way into these chapters. The work was particularly challenging because it required bridging research and conceptual practices the divide China and Cuba, as well as finding a means of avoiding coloring that analysis with the presumptions of Western liberal democratic systems.  It was thus that the core focus started with ideology and served as a means of more rigorously approaching the materials. To that end, conversations with China and Cuba specialists as well as with those working generally on political theory and globalization became an essential part of the many years long path from conception to the book that follows. 

My research assistants played an essential role in that process of developing ideas and preparing the text. Among them, special thanks to Penn State Law and International Affairs students Angelo Mancini (J.D. Penn State 2017); Keren Wang (M.I.A. 2007, Ph.D. Penn State 2018); Shan Gao (LL.M. 2011; S.J.D. Penn State, 2017); Shaoming Zhu (S.J.D. Penn State 2017); Rodrigo A. Alas (Penn State 2012); Shin Kit Wong (J.D. Penn State 2007); Martin Sirakov (M.I.S. Penn State 2012); Sandra Del Pillar (J.D. Penn State 2011); Joseph Henry (J.D. Penn State 2013); Matt Kita (J.D. Penn State 2010); and Robbie Contreras (J.D. Penn State 2010) for their excellent work on the essays that make up this book.  Lastly, Miaoqiang Dai (M.I.A. Penn State expected 2019) was especially helpful in getting the work ready for publication as well as for help with the cover artwork and the many tasks necessary to move from ideas to a work in print. 

Special thanks as well to the colleagues and members of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy. A very diverse group of economists, social scientists, lawyers, and others with deep experience about Cuba, the ASCE has served as quite fertile ground for developing and testing ideas.  Their annual conferences have proven to be one of the few venues available in the United States where a broad cross section of Cubans from within the Island and in the diaspora could meet and exchange views. That is a very rare thing in an area of study known more for the fierce defense of political divisions, especially among intellectuals. Among ASCE members, special thanks to Jorge Pérez López, for his friendship and conversation.

Acknowledgements

A number of chapters are substantially derived from presentations that have been made in prior years and then distributed in the proceedings of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy.  These include all of the following, used here with permission.

The Global Economy and Cuba: Stasis and Hard Choices, in Papers and Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE) 28:—(forthcoming 2018).

The Algorithms of Ideology in Economic Planning: A Critical Look at Cuba’s Economic and Social Development Plan 2030, in Papers and Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE) 27:115-136 (2017) (ISBN 978-0-9831360-7-1).

Embracing a 21st Century Planning Marxism Model: The Cuban Communist Party Confronts Crisis, Challenge and Change in its 7th Congress, in Papers and Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE) 26:188-208 (2016) (ISBN 978-0-9831360-6-4). 

The Military, Ideological Frameworks and Familial Marxism: A Comment on Jung-Chul Lee, A Lesson From Cuba’s Party-Military Relations and a Tale of Two Front Lines in North Korea," in Papers and Proceedings of the Twenty-fifth Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE) 25:165-171 (2015) (ISBN 978-0-9831360-5-7)..

Global Corporate Social Responsibility(GCSR) Standards With Cuban Characteristics: What Normalization Means for Transnational Enterprise Activity in Cuba, in Papers and Proceedings of the Twenty-fifth Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE) 25:234-247 (2015) (ISBN 978-0-9831360-5-7).

The Cuban Communist Party and the Future of Course of Ideological Reform in Cuba, in Papers and Proceedings of the Twenty-fourth Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE) 24:72-88 (2014) (ISBN 978-0-9831360-4-6).

The Problem of Labor and the Construction of Socialism in Cuba: On Contradictions in the Reform of Cuba’s Regulations For Private Labor Cooperatives, in Papers and Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE) 23:110-132 (2013) (ISBN 978-0-9831360-4-6).

"The Proletarian Corporation: Organizing Cuban Economic Enterprises in the Wake of the Lineamientos—Property Rights Between Corporations, Cooperatives and Globalization," in Papers and Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE) 22:212-236 (2012).

Order, Discipline and Exigency: Cuba's 6th Party Congress, the Lineamientos (Guidelines) and Structural Change In Education, Sport and Culture?," in Papers and Proceedings of the Twenty-First Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE) 21:148-170 (2011). 

"Globalization and the Socialist Multinational: Cuba and ALBA’s Grannacional Projects at the Intersection of Business and Human Rights," in Cuba in Transition: Papers and Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE) 20:230-252 (2010).

Globalizing Cuba:  ALBA and the Construction of Socialist Global Trade Systems, in Proceedings of the 19th Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE) 19:195-219 (2009); available http://www.ascecuba.org/publications/proceedings/volume19/pdfs/backermolina.pdf.

Cuba and the Development of the Odious Debt Doctrine, in Proceedings of the 18th Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy (ASCE) 18:98-118 (2008), available http://www.ascecuba.org/publications/proceedings/volume18/pdfs/backer.pdf. 

Several of these shorter works were thereafter extensively revised and expanded.  Fuller treatment of some of the ideas developed here might be found in the following work:

The Cuban Communist Party at the Cusp of Change, in Reforming Communism: Cuba in a Comparative Perspective (Scott Morgenstern and Jorge Pérez López, eds. University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming 2017).

Globalization and the Socialist Multinational: Cuba at the Intersection of Business and Human Rights, in Handbook on Contemporary Cuba: Economy, Civil Society, and Globalization 287-299 (Mauricio A. Font and Carlos Riobó, eds., New York: CUNY/Paradigm Press, 2013).

The Cuban Communist Party at the Center of Political and Economic Reform: Current Status and Future Reform, Northwestern Interdisciplinary Law Review 8:71-129 (2015).

The Cooperative as Proletarian Corporation: Property Rights Between Corporation, Cooperatives and Globalization In Cuba, Northwestern Journal of International Law and Business 33:527-618 (2013).

Cuba And The Construction Of Alternative Global Trade Systems: ALBA And Free Trade In The Americas, University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law 31(3):679-752 (2010) (with Augusto Molina Roman).

Cuba and the Development of Odious Debt Doctrine in an Age of Financial Crisis, Transnational Dispute Management Journal 6:1 (Jan. 2009).

Additional work on Cuba that may be of interest includes the following:

From Hatuey to Che: Indigenous Cuba Without Indians and the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, American Indian Law Review 33(1):201-238 (2008-2009).

Ideologies of Globalization and Sovereign Debt:  Cuba and the IMF. Penn State International Law Review 24:497-561 (2006).

Cuban Corporate Governance at the Crossroads: Cuban Marxism, Private Economic Collectives, and Free Market Globalism, Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems 14(2): 337-418 (2004).

Other Books by the Author

Elements of Law and the United States Legal System (Carolina Academic Press (forthcoming 2019). ISBN: 978-1-61163-927-8 • e-ISBN: 978-1-61163-984-1.

Law and Religion: Cases, Materials, and Readings (3rd ed., West Academic Publishing, 2015) (with Frank S. Ravitch). ISBN 13: 9780314284075. Teacher’s Manual to Law and Religion: Cases, Materials, and Readings, (3rd ed.; West Academic Publishing 2015)(with Frank S. Ravitch). ISBN: 9780314284143

Lawyers Making Meaning:  The Semiotics of Law in Legal Education II (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013) (with Jan M. Broekman) ISBN 978-94-007-5457-7; ISBN 978-94-007-5458-4 (eBk).

Comparative Corporate Law: United States, European Union, China and Japan (Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 2002) ISBN 0-89089-526-0; LCCN 2001088034.

Editor:

Signs In Law, A Source Book - The Semiotics of Law in Legal Education III (Jan M. Broekman and Larry Catá Backer, eds., Dordrecht, Neth: Springer, 2014) (e-book ISBN 978-3-319-09837-1; hardback ISBN 978-3-319-09836-4).

Harmonizing Law in an Era of Globalization:  Convergence, Divergence, Resistance (Durham, N.C.: Carolina Academic Press, 2007) ISBN 0-89089-585-6 (editor and contributor).

Read More on the Author’s Blog

Law at the End of the Day https://lcbackerblog.blogspot.com

List of Terms and Abbreviations

ALBA or ALBA–TCP: Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América (  Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America); or Alianza   Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América – Tratado de Comercio de los   Pueblos (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – Peoples'   Trade Treaty), an intergovernmental organization promoting the social,   political and economic integration of the countries of Latin America and   the Caribbean along Socialist lines.

ATCA or ATA: The Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) of 1789 grants jurisdiction to   US Federal Courts over any civil action by an alien for a tort only,   committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United   States.

CPC: Communist Party of China (中国共产党; Pinyin: Zhōngguó Gòngchǎndǎng.

Conceptualización: Conceptualización del modelo económico y social Cubano de desarrollo   socialista [Conceptualization of the Cuban economic and social model for   Socialist development] adopted by the PCC and the Cuban National   Assembly 2016-2017.

EG: Empresas granncionales are entities created to carry out the economic and trade   activity organized through PGs in ALBA states.

FANTU: Foro Antitotalitario Unido [The United Anti-Totalitarian Forum], a non-  state sector civil organization I Cuba.

FAR: Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias, Cuba’s military forces.

Grannacionales: In ALBA states the forms for organizing joint state activities with   economic, social and political dimensions to further ALBA objectives.

IFI: International financial institutions, usually including the International   Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group.

Ley 118: Contemporary Cuban regulation of inbound foreign investment.

Lineamientos: Lineamientos de la política económica y social del partido y la Revolución,   [Guidelines for the political economy and society of the Party and the   Revolution] adopted by the PCC 18 April 2011 and revised and adopted   in 2017.

Nkisi: spirits, or an object that a spirit inhabits

Nganga: sometimes a religious container or the practitioner or intermediary who   works with or through that receptacle.

OECD Guidelines for MNEs: Organization for Economic Cooperation and   Development, Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises (Paris, 2011); an   influential framework of principles and standards touching on corporate   economic activity. 

PCC: Partido Comunista Cubano (Cuban Communist Party).

PG: Proyectos grannacionales s are the structuring element for reorganization of key   sectors of state activity around which state-to-state activity is   contemplated in ALBA states.

PLA: Chinese People’s Liberation Army (中国人民解放军), the national armed   forces of China. 

PNDES: Plan national de desarrollo económico y social hasta 2030: Propuesta de vision de   la nación, ejes y sectores estratégicos [National Plan for economic and social   development through 2030; proposal for a national vision, strategic hubs   and sectors] adopted by the PCC and the Cuban National Assembly   2016-2017.

Raúl Castro Ruz: Revolutionary leader, brother of Fidel Castro and since 2011   First Secretary of the PCC.

Fidel Castro Ruz: Prime Minister of Cuba from 1959 to 1976, President from   1976 to 2008., and First Secretary f the PCC through 2011. Died 2016.

UNGP: United Nations Guiding Principles for Business and Human Rights endorsed by the U.N. Human Rights Council in 2011.

––––––––

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Introduction

This book is about ideology.  Ideology is the conceptual foundation for the individual and societal self-constitution. Ideology is the fiat lux (Genesis 1:3) of human organization, of self-awareness translatable into the organization of self and the self’s relations with others, and the development of systems for their orderly operation. It is the constitution of the basic taboos and compulsions that produce self-awareness and the referents from which the world can be known—and ordered. Ideology is the way in which objects are signified, and the way these can be made to point to truth or to lie.

The theory and practice of ideology is usually of relevance in the margins of the study of law, politics, economics and the like.  It is sometimes understood as after the fact posturing or rationalization of little intrinsic value except perhaps to students of propaganda.  It is sometimes assumed that ‘nobody believes it;’ ideology is also said to be used and consumed but never embedded in the way people or institutions think or operate. This book will suggest that ideology quite consciously delimits but also makes possible the development of the principles through which individuals and communities can understand the world around.  That fundamental understanding, made possible within the basic premises for ordering the world that constitutes ideology, is the essential understanding the sufficiency of which makes possible the ordering of social, political and economic lives and institutions, from and around these basic building block premises. 

This book is also more particularly about Cuba. Cuba serves as an ongoing living experiment in the possibilities of molding individuals and the society along the lines suggested by application of a quite explicit set of grounding principles. Is it possible to view the world solely from a very specific set of premises—in this case derived from European Marxist-Leninism and forged in the context of the socio-political effort of a small state to protect an autonomy from a powerful neighbor expressed as fundamental differences in social, economic, political and cultural organization? In the striving for that answer lies sometimes profound insights into the way that the interaction of ideology and social organization produces quite specific and sometimes predictable approaches to organization and protection of belief systems and their expression through self-disciplining institutions—even in the face of sometimes overwhelming external threat (or the blandishments of substantial material riches). Since 1959, the Cuban experiment with its own increasingly unique brand of Marxism-Leninism has been undertaken with extraordinary transparency. Like other important ideology producing states—the United States, China, and the European Union, Cuba has made it easy to examine the arc of inter-relationship between the development of ideology and the efforts, only sometimes successful, to embed that ideology in the operations of the institutions of Cuban politics, economics, culture, and international relations.

The essays that comprise the twelve chapters of this book are drawn from a decade and more of thinking about Cuban ideology and its application in the wake of the passing of Fidel Castro, the charismatic founder of what these essays identify as Caribbean Marxism. Many of the chapters were first presented at a number of annual conferences of the Association for the Study of the Cuban Economy,  a non-profit, non-political organization incorporated in the state of Maryland in 1990 affiliated with the American Economic Association and the Allied Social Sciences Association of the United States. Together, these essays consider the arc of Cuban development during a crucial period from the effective assumption of power by Raúl Castro to the beginnings of efforts to prepare for the conclusion of the period of Cuban history dominated by the generation that brought to success the 1959 Revolution that ushered in the current socio-political system. 

The book is divided into twelve chapters, including this one. They are informally divided into two parts. The first seven chapters develop the conceptual framework for understanding Caribbean Marxism as a theory and the challenges that theory poses in the face of reform necessitated by changes in historical condition.  Chapters 2 and 3 develop the baselines of Caribbean Marxism as to its normative principles (Chapter 2) and its organizational structures (Chapter 3). Chapter 4 then considers the role and principles of reform within those structures. Chapters 5 and 6 consider the way that reform has altered basic theoretical premises (Chapter 5), and the principles through which economic activity is conceptualized and organized (Chapter 6). Lastly, Chapter 7 takes Caribbean Marxism outward by examining the way it sees itself in the world and in shaping global discourse in the context of sovereign finance and its political ramifications.

The book shifts focus in Chapters 8 through 12. Where Chapters 1 though 7 examine Caribbean Marxism in more abstract terms, Chapters 8 through 12 focus on the concrete manifestation of these abstract structures in several key areas—economic organization of the private sector, trade and investment, and lastly the project of constitutional reform.  Chapters 8 and 9 consider the labor cooperative as a specific example of the way that ideology shapes reform, and constrains implementation.  Chapters 10 and 11 turn to the outward expression of Caribbean Marxism.  If Chapter 10 considers the projection of Caribbean Marxism outward, Chapter 11 considers the projection inward of global standards to Cuban economic activity. Chapter 12 ends this collection of essays by return to where they started—in an examination of the way that ideology shapes the core organization of the administrative state itself. Its focus specifically is the 2018 Cuban Constitutional reform initiative, through which ideology is incarnated in the organs of state.

Chapter 1

Pearl of the Caribbean and Mother of Marxism

Cuba has always managed to punch above its weight. Since the discovery of America, Cuba has been the coveted bride, the treasure sought by the magnates of the time. Back in the days when, in Tordesillas, the New World was divided into Spanish and Portuguese property, the Pearl of the Caribbean already enjoyed privileged treatment (Guevara 2015). That privilege was born both of the geography of empire when Cuba served as the gateway to Spain’s colonial empire in the Western Hemisphere.  Havana served as a critical port in the operation of the Spanish Empire. Yet, even as the Spanish imperial system collapsed, and with it Cuba’s role within it, Cuba location appeared to ensure it an important place modern geopolitics even as the locus of global power shifted elsewhere from Spain. Cuba remains an important gateway to the Caribbean region, and the soft underbelly of the United States. Cuba’s prominence is not limited to geography.  Its arts and letters have had a global impact, its political philosophy has been influential at least in Latin America, and its now fairly ancient and quite public animosity to the United States has propelled it onto the world stage as a proxy (and target) for state and global actors who have constituted Cuba a metaphor for resistance to dominant power.

1.1 Cuban Transformations Since European Discovery

But this external and quite influential face of Cuba—the face that is what foreigners recognize—has an internal dimension that is less often considered. Cuba has tended to look inwards with the same intensity it has sought to project itself outward in the world. Cuba has also served as a national experiment in revolutionary transformation.  While one tends to understand this only in terms of the great changes sought to be naturalized in Cuban society and culture since 1959, taking a longer view reveals that Cuba has undergone these quite profound and very public revolutionary transformations more than once. One can identify three great transformations.

The first and most profound was that undertaken in the wake of the Spanish conquest and colonization in the 15th century.  This transformation was centered on the evolution of a model for colonization and imperium that resulted in the eventual eradication of much of the vibrant Taino culture that had been dominant on the Island before the conquest. It was brutal enough to provoke reaction even among the Island’s conquerors (de las Cases 1552 (English edition (1689)) though not enough to prevent its completion.  Out of that epoch appeared the first of Cuba’s heroes—Hatuey—and the beginning of cultures of resistance to invasion and conquest (Backer 2009). 

The second involved the transformation of Cuba from Spanish colony to semi state.  This transformation had its origins in the 18th century but was crystalized in the writing produced during the 19th century, and especially those of José Martí. His essays, and especially Nuestra América [Our America] (Martí 1891) have profoundly affected thinking not only in Cuba but also in many parts of Latin America.  It remains a potent signifier of transformation, in the sense of giving transformation in the context of Latin America premise, form, and objective.

El continente descoyuntado durante tres siglos por un mando que negaba el derecho del hombre al ejercicio de su razón, entró, desatendiendo o desoyendo a los ignorantes que lo habían ayudado a redimirse, en un gobierno que tenía por base la razón; la razón de todos en las cosas de todos, y no la razón universitaria de uno sobre la razón campestre de otros. El problema de la independencia no era el cambio de formas, sino el cambio de espíritu. [Deformed by three centuries of a rule that denied men the right to exercise their reason, and overlooking or refusing to listen to the ignorant masses that helped it redeem itself, the continent entered into new kind of government based on reason— which should have meant the reason of all directed towards things of concern to all, and not the university-schooled reason of the few imposed upon the rustic reason of others. The problem with independence was not the change in form, but the change in spirit.] (Martí 1891)

This second transformation, like the first, is bound up with a maturing awareness of differences between Cuba and its surroundings. Drawing from those differences, Cuban intellectuals produced a set of markers that came to understand such differences fundamental, ineradicable, and natural (Backer 2009). 

The last transformation, and the one best known today, is that of the period of revolutionary transformation that emerged in the wake of the revolution of 1959 and its subsequent turn toward Marxism-Leninism after the establishment of the contemporary Cuban Communist Party (Partido Comunista Cubano (PCC) after 1959.  This last transformation sought to build on a specific reading of the prior two transformations.  These now served as the precursors to and the foundations of what the PCC argued was the inevitable culmination of a sovereign, nationalist and culturally autonomous Marxist state. That transformation, as well, was to be offered as a model for other states in Latin America and the developing world.

With this last transformation Cuba sought to project its ideological approaches outward, and quite aggressively, as the only possible means of combatting the colonialism, imperialism and hegemonism that they saw built into the patterns of international organization and the relations among states in the post-colonial era. 

Each of these built on the other quite self-consciously.  Each remains connected both to the structures of internal transformation and to its external projection in globally influential ways (Backer 2009). Internal transformation and external influence, then, mark Cuba’s relation to itself.  Those internal transformations also define the scope and character of Cuba’s relation to the rest of the world—as developing state, as a thought leader, as a source of instability, and as the center of resistance to the liberal ideals that shaped the structures of economic globalization.  Cuba continues to serve as a means through which the world sees itself and sometimes judges what it sees.  It offers both a glimpse backwards toward what might have been the trajectory of European Marxist-Leninist development, even as it marches relentlessly forward toward a world of its own making. And the Cuban people, as they have for the last half millennium, continue to bear the scares of both internal transformation and its international consequences. Cuban voices continue to play a significant role in shaping international discourse, and in developing theories of state organization that continue to tempt mimicry, at least in part, other states. 

Understanding Cuba, then, helps the rest of the world to understand itself.  Cuba reflects and distills many currents of development, especially among developing states that have remained in the background for over half a century. Cuban ideological development raises a very sharply focused mirror onto the construction of a global order to which Cuba is both a stranger and a participant at the margins. The translation of ideology into statecraft, into macro-economic policy and governmental operations exposes both the difficulties and constraints inherent in fundamental choices among political ideologies.  More importantly, it also reveals why it is that Cuba remains both a difficult subject, and a tremendous challenge for embedding into the global order created around it. While its ideological position and the implementation choices it has made use many of the same words and concepts that are used elsewhere, they acquire a sometimes substantial difference of meaning when used in Cuba or in the West. Concepts like markets, private sector activity, democratic engagement, the role of labor, the role of the PCC, for example, are operationalized within the Cuban experiment in ways that are not necessarily compatible with their understanding elsewhere.  It may be useful, then, to consider more deeply the principles that shape these internal experiments and their outward projections.

These essays seek to do exactly that, but in a very specific way.  Together, they focus on the last great Cuban transformation—its now three quarters of a century march toward a variant of Marxist-Leninist state organization with a very specific and quite well-developed ideological core.  I call this guiding ideology Caribbean Marxism. Caribbean Marxism, as developed over the next eleven chapters, described a variant of both Marxism and Leninism that has suited the Cuban Communist Party as it has sought to establish itself from out of the military victory that preceded its creation.  For these purposes I distinguish between Marxism and Leninism.  As used in the essays, Marxism references the substantive, normative elements of the socio-political and economic project of building a communist society. Leninism, in contrast, references the political philosophy and principles of governance through which political authority may be vested in a vanguard party charged with the responsibility of guiding society toward and protecting that society against deviations from the goal of establishing this communist society. The former are theories of social organization, the latter are the principles of political organization necessary to develop and preserve the normative objectives for which government is constituted and political power used (see, e.g., Kołakowski 2005.).

In ideals, Caribbean Marxism is largely the descendant of classical orthodox European Soviet Marxism and Leninism as it developed in the form of late Soviet Stalinism. In operation, it is the expression of a Post Second World War Leninist East German model adapted to the conditions of the Western Hemisphere tropics.  But it is also an expression of a porous Marxism and Leninism, open to the possibilities of radical transformation away from the approaches of European models.  Caribbean Marxism has shown itself to be at least a little open to Asian variations of the model. And most importantly, perhaps, it can be understood as the development of a Marxism and a Leninism created under the shadow of, and with a sense of constant threat from the United States, the most successful free market Western liberal state to emerge from the Second World War. Caribbean Marxism, then, is both proactive in its focus on naturalization within a Latin and American context; but it is also reactive in the sense that it is built with substantial defensive capabilities against the ideological projections of the free market democratic West. Caribbean Marxism is at once both isolationist (protecting its systemic uniqueness against foreign corruption) and also aggressively globalist as it has sought to adapt its internal systems to guide its external relations—especially in the region (Backer and Molina 2010). 

Collectively, these essays have as their object to better understand Cuban self-conceptions built around an ideological core that has been taking shape in quite pronounced ways since the incapacity of Fidel Castro and the assumption by his brother, Raúl, of effective and then formal control of the PCC and government after 2006.  At the core of the essays is ideology.  Ideology has always been treated pejoratively in the West, with the sort of dismissal one once encountered among early Christians with respect to the mythologies of the pagans they sought to persecute into extinction.  And yet, a feel for Cuban ideology is essential in order to understand the forms and trajectories of the last great post-1959 Cuban transformation, as well as for its impact on the world.  That impact will be felt both in the context of Cuban external relations, and in the context of inward projections of outsider investment and socio-political agendas. These ideologies are critical to an understanding of the possibilities and limits of the normalization of Cuban political relations with the U.S., as well as of the possibilities of Cuban integration in the global economy.  It speaks to the contexts in which Cuba will face tremendous challenges in conforming to global expectations of economic responsibilities (especially with respect to human rights).  And it also speaks to the great difficulties of adjusting an economic system founded on a core rejection of the market either as regulator or as tool of macro-economic policy to the expectations and practices of a global order that has centered its governance and operational regimes on markets. 

Caribbean Marxism provides a excellent example of the way that an ideology can operate on the construction of both the idea of the state and the expression of that idea in its institutions.  The long Cuban experiment in the reconstruction of social organization, of the individual within it, to align with a developing ideological conceptual system evidences both the power of ideology to shape, as well as to constrain, the way individuals and societies can see the world around them, and respond to what they see.  Through the development of the ideology that is Caribbean Marxism, its application to the construction of state and society, and to the way it provides the conceptual tools to understand and respond to challenges and opportunities, one experiences the profound effects of ideology on the construction of reality. 

Caribbean Marxism provides a nicely self-contained system through which a faith could be premised, taboos developed, and meaning imposed in self-referencing ways (Eco 1976, pp. 15-16). Caribbean Marxism provides an opportunity to dissect the scientific morals of Cuban society (Nietzsche 1966 (1886)).  This book will attempt to go beyond what Nietzsche described as the good and evil the study of which constituted the science of morals.  In the chapters that follow the reader will be invited to move beyond a scholarly variation of the common faith in the prevalent morality; a new means of expression for this faith; and thus just another fact within a particular morality (Nietzsche 1966 (1886), ¶ 186, p. 98).

1.2 Organization of the Chapters that Follow

The book is divided into twelve (12) chapters, including this one. They are informally divided into two parts. The first 7 chapters develop the conceptual framework for understanding Caribbean Marxism as a theory and the challenges that theory poses in the face of reform necessitated by changes in historical condition. 

Chapter 2 centers the focus of the essays that follow on ideology as a system of ideas and ideals that forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy. It helps us better be able to think like a Cuban in the sense that it captures the framing premises within which Cuban officials at any rate, view and understand the world. Ideology, then, is used for our purposes here as the lens through which reality is processed and understood. More importantly, it is also the way in which social conditions, and relations with the outside world are understood, and the way in which the quality of threats assessed.  Ideology supplies the language that organizes social, political and economic life.  It is also the means by which Cuban officials can distinguish between themselves and others and between right and wrong and good and bad. The object is to explore the way that Caribbean Marxism develops notions both of its fundamental normative objectives (Marxism) and its operational principles (Leninism). More importantly, it seeks to move this ideology and its principles to the center of any discussion about Cuba.  That is, the chapter's principal goal is to show that Cuban policy, and their practical expression, is impossible to understand except from the lens of the ideological principles through which Cuban decision makers see and respond to the world. 

If ideology is the doorway through which one can more accurately understand Cuba, the key to opening that door lies in a better understanding of the context in which Leninism itself acquires Cuban characteristics. Chapter 3, then, considers the principles, embedded in the Cuban experience, through which the PCC is organized and operates.  Its principal goal is to consider what makes Cuban Leninism different from other Leninist organizations. It would be easy enough to contrast Caribbean Marxist-Leninism with that of China.  But the Chapter suggests that North Korea rather than China, provides the better comparative vantage point.  To that end it contrasts the move toward a form of monarchical Leninism in Korea (where the vanguard is systemically tied to the legitimacy of rule by the founding family) to what the chapter describes as Cuba’s praetorian Leninism. Cuba’s Communist Party was established by the military organization that secured the overthrow of the last pre-Communist regime in Cuba. It was the military establishment that constructed the Party, and that produced both its organization, and established its relationship to the original vanguard—the tight knit group of guerrillas who secured victory. That relationship was cemented by family ties—the leader of the revolution that survived the initial post-Revolutionary years, Fidel Castro, became the first secretary of the PCC, and his brother, Raúl, assumed command of the military establishment. 

Chapters 2 and 3 establish a baseline of sorts for considering the structural and ideological changes within Cuba entitled under the leadership of Raúl Castro.  Together, they sketch out the characteristics of Caribbean Marxism by reference to its own unique identifiers. These included important defensive characteristics of an ideology built to protect its integrity against attack from the United States, while at the same time seeking to naturalize the outlook and practices of Eastern European Marxism of the middle of the 20th Century to the realities of a Latin American island-state in the tropics. The island itself provides a useful staging for this development. Principal among its characteristics is the idea that markets are inherently corrupting.  They might be tolerated in the way that the lumpenproletariat is tolerated—a reserve force of economic activity to cushion shocks and unexpected trauma to the nice scientific ordering of a centrally planned economy managed by and through the ministries and overseen by the military or PCC apparatus. Caribbean Marxism tolerates markets if they are placed at the periphery, or can be understood as experiments (and temporary), and are heavily overseen by the state—through the civil or military apparatus.

Caribbean Marxism is thus to some extent shaped by its geography.  An island is easier to isolate, and its borders more difficult to penetrate without conscious effort. Yet islands are also infinitely porous. That porosity is augmented by technology—where the penetration is meant to project ideas and images into the island. At the same time an island makes for a great staging area for outward engagement—that, if nothing else appears to have been the lesson of the Spanish colonial period. Both notions permeate Caribbean Marxism.  Its ideology, and the organization of its Leninist apparatus, reflects the need to protect against penetration of the island, in virtually every sense, without the guidance of the Leninist vanguard. The people and institutions of the island must be protected against the foreigner. To this end Caribbean Leninism is built on the premise of the need to interpose the PCC or the military at virtually every juncture of substantial contact between the people and foreigners that involve economic and political activity. At the same time, the island, understood as the unified state itself. The vanguard and its institutions is well suited to engage vigorously with other actors in global politics, economics and other matters in arenas beyond the island. 

It is from this baseline that Chapter 4 considers one of the most well known and extensive projects for