Cuba is likely to suffer from bad advice and the illusions of classical Marxism. There is a simple way to move into the future while saving the socialist foundation…
This is a useful article but is still stuck, as with the Cubans in the fallacies of original marxism:
We must return to the teachings of Lenin and Trotsky. A workers’ state, as Lenin described in his classical text, The State and Revolution, is but a quasi-state that immediately begins to dissolve, as it represents the dictatorship of the majority over the minority. Thus, Lenin proposed a series of basic rules inspired by the lessons of the Paris Commune: the election and recall of all public officials, that no public office has a higher wage than that of a skilled worker, the people in arms instead of a standing army etc.
It might help to forget Lenin, Trotsky and bolshevism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, etc…etc.. As for the Paris Commune, it was a near miraculous moment but it cannot easily resolve the full set of requirements for a post capitalist system.
The needless dilemma suffered by Cuba reflects the flaws in the original conception of marxism of the stages of production: it unwittingly strengthens the process of reversal because of the inability to create a postcapitalist economy. The idea that socialism and communism can’t have a market is the original fallacy of the Marx world. But that market can’t be based on private property: capital and resources must be a part of a Commons. That is different from state capitalism.
Here our conception of (ecological) democratic market neo-communism can help to balance the false contradictions created by a misleading original theory.
Cuba has a golden opportunity to the job right because it has accomplished the task of expropriation.To throw that away would be a great misfortune. But the resolution is not state capitalism but the creation of a Commons and a new set of democratic and economic institutions. Further, democracy must enter and blend with communism.
Planing can coexist with a neo-communism market sphere which also interact with the larger global economy without being blackmailed by exterior capital.
Our DMNC model can avail of this foundation and yet introduce markets in our special sense. It could have a robust economy under a communist umbrella. It ca also be an ecological experiment, introduce Chavez style Communes and/or workers’ cooperatives.
It would be a pity to simply drift into the same failed ‘reform’ that has been the curse of Russia. Here the Vietnamese model is simply not adequate to the case.
After Donald Trump came into office, Washington’s position on the Cuban Revolution has become ever-more belligerent, in a radical change of policy from that followed by President Obama.
Source: Cuba: Trump’s threats, constitutional reform and the economic situation
1848+: The End(s) of History 