In 2006 Ricardo invited me to Havana for a week of talks about the American New Left. The times were strange. After forty-five years in power, Fidel was gravely ill after a risky intestinal surgery, and had handed over the reins of power to Raúl, permanently as it turned out. George Bush’s special commission was rolling out its latest plan to force regime change on Cuba and appoint a coordinator of the coming “transition” away from Fidel’s rule, along the lines of Paul Bremer’s mad plan to occupy and privatize Iraq. As far as I could see, Cubans were calm. Skateboards were being introduced. Hip-hop was the craze. Venezuelan tankers floated in Havana Harbor. Ricardo, who was supposed to be running the National Assembly, instead was transcribing hours of interviews with me, as well as holding discussions with an old guard of Cuban intellectuals, and meetings with the Communist Party’s youth newspaper. Ricardo never told me why it was important to conduct some twenty-five hours of interviews that week. At the time he was listed by US Cuba Watchers l as either third or fourth in the line of succession to power in Cuba.
Looking back now, I believe Ricardo may have been sharing the opportunity to rethink Marxism and weighing the chances that another New Left might be on the horizon in the form of the antiglobalization and pro-democracy movements. Six years later, in 2013, I emailed him these questions which he answered more or less succinctly:
When we spoke in 2006, were you thinking about participatory democracy as it might apply to Cuba’s political system?
RICARDO: Yes, I think we were talking, among other things, about participatory democracy in 2006.
Do you agree with Marta Harnecker and others who say that electoral democracy finally became a real option for the Latin American Left after Venezuela and other Latin American parties were elected to power?
RICARDO: I agree that electoral democracy has become an option for the Left, as has been shown by recent developments. This is the result of long years of struggle, including the time of the guerrillas, the successful resistance of the Cuban people, and the relative decline of US imperialist hegemony in Latin America and the world. But there have been some setbacks also, and attempts to restore dictatorships cannot be excluded. I want to add that I do not accept the notion, however, that democracy equals an electoral party system—with one, two, or however many parties—alone. Empowering people must go far beyond elections.
Capitalism and democracy are contradictory and antagonistic terms. Socialism, if it is genuine, should imply participatory democracy.
Hans Kelsen1 was not a Marxist or a left-wing militant. He was one of the most important legal minds who strongly criticized “representative democracy” as a farce, following closely on Rousseau’s thinking. He found the answer with the original concept of the workers’ soviets [councils] in Russia, which he defined as spreading the democratic process to a “parliamentarization of society.” This he thought was the ideal way to overcome the contradiction between representative democracy and direct democracy.
Do you believe that greater democracy in Cuba will be possible only when the embargo is lifted and when the United States officially abandons regime change? That’s my view.
RICARDO: Yes. It is obviously a very difficult task to develop a democratic system under conditions of economic and political warfare. Our mambises2 learned that long ago. It should also be said that only when the United States abandons its imperial policies and nature will the American people be in a position to initiate a process of [further] democratization of their own society.
The problem is to agree on what “greater democracy” means. If in the Cuban case that means to evolve toward a system closer to the American version of “democracy,” then by abandoning the embargo and its aggressive policies the United States would have achieved its original goal. That has been the dream of liberals in your country.
I believe in greater democracy everywhere, and to be very frank and candid, that is needed especially in the United States. And democratization means overcoming capitalism and establishing some sort of socialism as Joseph Schumpeter forecast would happen in the United States.
Originally the socialist ideal was not associated with a nationalist project but had a more universal aim a nd motivation. Remember the split of the Second International around World War I. Later came the “socialism in one country” thesis and Stalin’s claim that such a socialism fit the model. Then the Cold War, the arms race and the threat of mutually assured destruction with the Bomb, which closed the possibilities of creative thinking and reduced the alternatives to the dominant models of each bloc.
So the end of the Soviet model opens new possibilities for socialism. The roots of the socialist ideals—equality, solidarity, freedom—go back to long before the steam engine. They came by way of figures and movements that included Jesus, Rousseau, the Jacobins, the Indians, the maroon communities, our mambises, etc.
With the corporate neoliberal trend now backfiring, for the first time in Latin America we are seeing social movements that would have been condemned by the old guard Left. Like catechists, the old guard followed their Book. The problem has always been thinking about a model. Socialism, almost by definition, should not have a single model, but contain something coming from the will of the people according to their own authentic traditions. Except for the indigenous communal traditions, you will not find a “socialist” tradition in Latin America. It developed in Europe.
You need a definition of socialism. Just being the reverse of capitalism is too narrow. Does it have other roots than in Europe and Marx? For example, with Christianity you have communal and solidarity traditions long before Karl Marx. Traditions of working together and sharing benefits were here long before Columbus discovered America. We don’t have a different source of socialism based in a pre-Columbian tradition. That’s why Mariátegui spent a lot of time studying the pre-Hispanics, the Incas. He found some elements of collectivism. Those Indians shared the ownership of the land for generations, for example. Some Marxists were critical of him because the Incas had an Inca. The Indians here in Cuba have disappeared.3 You can’t really refer to a Taíno tradition. But in these countries that tradition is more important than the 1848 Revolution in Paris! So leaders like Evo have a tremendous advantage.
On the one hand, the dissolution of the USSR was the biggest blow my country ever suffered. No one would say it was salutary. But someday historians will ask what would have happened to us if the Soviets hadn’t disappeared. It would have been what Mills predicted, a bureaucratic convergence.4 In the East, state capitalism; in the West, market mechanisms of capitalism.
I was invited to speak in 2006 at an international gathering of intellectuals on Marxism, here in Havana. I don’t know if it’s because I am an intruder on this specialty, not a professional philosopher, you know, I quote you, you quote me, that sort of thing. I used to be a philosopher in a university. Then I became a diplomat. Because of the way I lived, I did not have enough time to concentrate on matters of philosophy. I would have liked to devote more time to them, but if you are president of the National Assembly you cannot imagine how many hours there are spent reading and attending meetings on issues you might not feel interested in. Now I feel relief.
The paper I gave was not written against anyone in particular, but maybe it was written to everybody. From a Cuban or Latin American perspective, what happened was this. Marx was a genius, a guy who did what he did, I really don’t think he could have imagined what would happen with his writings. He would be surprised. The first problem is that his theory that inspired so many people started in Europe, but was extended to Latin America because of the number of European immigrants who came here bringing it with them.
I don’t have the tradition of other comrades who believed in the Soviet Union. I had a very limited experience there, mainly in foreign policy. Knowing some Soviet comrades at the UN, I had a very depressing image of what that kind of socialism was all about. Bureaucratic and dogmatic. I experienced what Che had reported in speeches long before. It became difficult to see a difference between Eastern and Western Europe. Just bureaucrats representing a state interest. What surprised me was the way they disappeared like a leaf in the wind.
The speech Ricardo gave at the conference in 2006 is titled “Marx After Marxism, The Global Fight for Immigrant Rights in a Neoliberal Economy.” More than anything I was reading at the time, it explained and predicted the new New Left model that he envisioned arising to confront neoliberalism’s ascendant moment. What should be appreciated about the text is that Ricardo was still the president of the Cuban National Assembly, a leader and diplomatic face of the Cuban Revolution to the world. The speech is not the renunciation of Marxism and the communist model demanded by the Right, and even by most liberals in the West. But neither could it have drawn much support from orthodox communist cadres anywhere. It was philosophical, diplomatic, elegant, and prophetic.
Ricardo opened with the same distinction he made in our many interviews, and in a voice I found not unlike the Port Huron Statement, which we had offered as a “living document.” Here is how Ricardo began his speech that day in 2006:
I take as a starting point the warning, not always heeded, of Rosa Luxemburg: “The work Capital, of Marx . . . is not gospel in which we are given Revealed Truth, set in stone and eternal, but an endless flow of suggestions.” Self-critical reflection is called for on our side.
He goes on to say that corporate globalization is entering a new phase of triumphalism that masks its inner weaknesses and contains “new, unsuspected possibilities for revolutionary action.” The most important of these are seen in the swell of confrontations against neoliberalism then (in 2006) sweeping the world, from Latin America to antiglobalization protests in Seattle. “For the first time, anticapitalist malaise is manifested, simultaneously and everywhere, in advanced countries and among those left behind and is not limited to the proletariat and other exploited sectors.” Ricardo names “those that demand the preservation of the environment, or work for the rights of women and discriminated people and those excluded because of gender, ethnicity, or religion.” In a key passage, Ricardo redefines the class struggle in a way that bears close reading:
A diverse group, multicolor, in which there is no shortage of contradictions and paradoxes, grows in front of the dominant system. It is not yet the rainbow that announces the end of the storm. Spontaneity characterizes it; it needs articulation and coherence that need to be stimulated without sectarianism, without being carried away with wildness. The great challenge of revolutionaries, of communists, is to define our part, the place that we should occupy in the battle. For that, we need a theory.
The world has changed since Marx developed his theory. Alarcón points out, for example, that every twenty-five years global population growth adds in one generation the total number that lived on earth when Marx was writing. “Irreversible climate change” is already upon us, due to capital’s devouring of resources. Equally important:
The third world penetrates the first. The latter needs the former and at the same time rejects it. In Europe and North America [the third world] appears to be an undesirable protagonist, a mute guest that demands its rights. The US Congress continues discussing what to do with those who number at least eleven million people—that is, the size of the Cuban population—the so-called undocumented—searching for formulas that allow for them to continue to be exploited while access to that society is closed.
These observations, made in 2006 during the first moments of the so-called antiglobalization movement, and one year after an historically unprecedented one million immigrants gathered to demand their rights in Los Angeles, were extremely prescient, creatively turning certain elements of Marxist orthodoxy upside down. Whereas in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Marxism, the undocumented, the lumpen, the unemployables were defined as a threat to the wage standards and protections of industrial workers, in this new twenty-first-century scenario, the third world immigrants were seen as “penetrating” the North and changing the nature and composition of the working class itself. It was true, Ricardo noted, that the new immigrants still represented a pressure to lower wages and were a stimulant to right-wing xenophobia. But capitalism itself had invited them as cheap laborers, and they weren’t going home. In addition, few if any American workers thought of themselves as members of Lenin’s worker “aristocracy” living happily above the underclass either; they were being threatened by the outsourcing of their jobs to maquiladoras in the third world while at the same time immigrants were being pulled into the deindustrialized low-wage service economy of the United States.
We saw them both converge, united, in Seattle, both forces opposing neoliberal globalization.6 One must help them to converge. To struggle also so that the antiwar and antiglobalization movements flow into the same great stream and that all those discriminated against, all the marginalized, be included. That is the main duty of revolutionaries today. It is the way to create a better world. It is the road to take in advancing toward socialism. To achieve socialism in this century there must be “heroic creation,” one that is authentic, independent, and therefore diverse and unique.
It seemed as if the New Left that attracted us in 1960 was beginning all over again. Spontaneous uprisings and social movements were challenging the status quo, with the key difference of having a broad electoral mandate everywhere in Latin America. Was the time of the dictators over? Could neoliberalism—with its ideological claim that no alternatives were possible—offer enough concessions to alleviate the popular anger? Could a Barack Obama change the global mood toward the United States, and become a multiracial face of the old empire or a president creating real openings for the future? Would unrelenting greed plus America’s unconscious assumption of entitlement toward Latin America continue to unite the continent toward independence and integration? At home, would the issue of immigrant rights be the spearhead of a broad new civil rights and labor movements led perhaps by the Dreamers movement, a reminder of the early Freedom Riders? Would Ricardo’s prediction of the third world’s “penetration” into the first world come true, assuring a new popular majority of Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans, women, and LGBT activists that could be mobilized inside and alongside the traditional labor movement in a new majority coalition against rampant inequalities in the United States? The demography alone pointed toward a permanent progressive majority. And as of December 2014 Obama had taken bold executive action to protect about five million new immigrants from deportation while removing most restrictions on Cubans becoming more able to influence America from within. The number of undocumented people in America was about eleven million, the same as the number of unrecognized Cubans ninety miles away. The result of his two executive orders—one on the undocumented, the other on Cuba—will enlarge a Latino diaspora and enrich America’s multicultural character.
It remains to be seen what happens, but on one point Ricardo has been adamant since our interviews in 2006: that reform is possible and desirable. The use of the word “reform” may at first seem utterly prosaic in the context of American politics, but coming from a Cuban revolutionary it deserves careful reflection. First, “reform” was the doctrine of the social-democratic rivals of the Marxists in the twentieth century. The term “reformist,” even today, is dismissed by most radicals and anarchists—who are a strong force in Latin America and throughout the antiglobalization and environmental networks—as an approach that only reinforces the mass illusion that meaningful change is possible within a capitalist democracy. Reform is precisely what Ricardo spoke of that day in 2006:
I will go farther. I do not believe that capitalism cannot be reformed. The Great Society in your country is an example. The most important task of the Latin American left is to reelect President Lula in Brazil. Notwithstanding his faults, if Lula is defeated, all of Latin America will be worse off.
Perhaps the Cuban Revolution itself was entering a state of reform, a “stage” its founders once believed they could bypass.
I was in Porto Alegre for the historic meeting of the World Social Forum in January 2003 where Brazil’s newly-elected president Lula spoke to a large crowd unaccustomed to supporting politicians. The scene was an extraordinary one, with well over one hundred thousand people participating and networking, at least twelve thousand of them said by the organizers to be from around the world. The city of Porto Alegre itself was then an experimental laboratory for participatory democratic budgeting, a model city watched with interest in other countries. I visited agrarian cooperatives that had originated with seizures and defense of vacant lands by a militant peasants’ union, Via Campesina (Way of the Peasant).
Lula’s Workers Party arose as a parliamentary arm of these social movements, but electoral politics at the Forum was itself a contentious issue. Many if not most of the delegates there believed that electoral politics sapped the vitality and coopted movements from civil society. Lula took up the challenge directly, announcing that he intended to fly from Porto Alegre straight to Davos, Switzerland, to the snow-covered retreat of the World Economic Forum, an invitation-only gathering of the financial and corporate elite. Since Porto Alegre had been constituted as the counterpoint to Davos, many were stunned at Lula’s decision to attend both. There was nothing wrong, he argued, with challenging the bankers in their lair. And he promised the throng that day that while change would come in small steps only, that in eight years people might be surprised by all that he predicted would be accomplished.
As it turned out, Lula did achieve a kind of grand bargain, committing to pay Brazil’s debts to the international financial institutions and strengthening Brazilian state capitalism while also establishing a “Great Society” for the poor, resulting in a huge reduction of poverty and an expansion of education and jobs. Lula’s key reform was the bolsa familia (family allowance), a grant to millions of poor families made on the condition that they send their children to school and receive vaccinations. The redirection of national income stimulates consumption and purchasing power, though without a radical redistribution of power and wealth. Under Lula and Brazil’s Workers Party, the Left gained ground in local and state elections. Modest progress was made in legitimizing the land reform. Lula indeed spoke up in Davos and other global forums in favor of taxing financial capital and weapons sales to fund social programs. He denounced the 2008 Wall Street Crash as resulting from the “irrational behavior of some people that are white [and] blue eyed. Before the crisis they looked like they knew everything about economics, and they have demonstrated they know nothing about economics.”7 His strategy, as described by one of his Brazilian advisers to me, was to avoid an “ideological confrontation” with the United States, preferring instead to drive the hardest bargains possible. For a moment, he became President Obama’s favorite politician in the world, illustrated by such presidential accolades as “Here’s my man, right there” and “Love this guy,”8 and a global advocate for peaceful resolution of conflicts beyond Latin America, such as the in Middle East. When he was listed by Western pundits as the leader of Latin America’s “good Left” versus Cuba, Venezuela and the “bad Left” in the region, he refused to succumb to the game of divide and conquer.
While there were clear differences between Cuba, Venezuela and Brazil, Lula acted as if they were all part of a single and newly emerging Latin American bloc. He accepted Brazil’s huge corporate sector as fundamental to his national development strategy, not simply as rivals in a class struggle over wages. He was, in short, in favor of state capitalism, social democracy, and an independent and democratic Brazil where the country’s poor—over half the population—were assured wages above poverty levels, health care, and schools for their children. Where Lula performed poorly, as in protecting the Amazon rainforest from destruction, new social movements and elected officials entered the field of politics hoping to tip the balance in their direction. This was a huge improvement over the military dictatorship that had imprisoned Lula, then a trade union leader, in the seventies. His was a government that could not have happened without social movements, liberation theology, rainforest campaigners, Afro-Brazilians, and landless peasants. But it was also a country with a powerful business sector, moving through the kind of “national democratic” phase of struggle that good Leninists, anarchists, and original Fidelistas traditionally opposed as co-optive corporate capitalism. The difference in Brazil and the rest of Latin America in the nineties was that the new nationalist elites were largely anti-imperialists wanting to control their own manifest destinies in a time when US global power was beginning to wane. One key example is Brazil’s projected role in Cuba’s mega-development at the one-billion-dollar container port of Mariel, designed to facilitate Cuba’s position as a hub in trade with Latin America and East Asia.
By any measure, Brazil—and most of Latin America—represented in the nineties a region of economic and social progress while most countries on other continents stagnated or were devastated by military conflicts. Ricardo was correct in his estimate of Lula. Like his successor, Dilma Rousseff, an ex-guerrilla who’d suffered torture, Lula was not an ideological soul-mate with Hugo Chávez, but both were kindred Latino spirits on nationalist paths to a new multipolar world. Cuba was becoming integrated fully into this new Latin America, constructing a counterbalancing power that opened up creative new ways—economic, political, and diplomatic—to make the Yankee listen.
What began as an effort in 1960 by the United States to isolate Cuba was ending in 2014 with a complete reversal, an America isolated in the world when it came to Cuba. The 2013 UN General Assembly vote to lift the US embargo was 188-2, with only Israel supporting the United States. No one—not even America’s dependable regional allies like Mexico and Colombia—agrees with the White House on its nonrecognition and embargo policies.
One symbol of Cuba’s stature in the world came at the December 2013 funeral of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, where Raúl Castro and Barack Obama were among five leaders chosen to speak. A courteous, globally televised handshake occurred between the two leaders, much to the consternation of the diminishing Cuba lobby. It is said that during the six-second handshake Raúl leaned toward Obama to say, “Mr. President, I am Castro.” Under US law, the president is forbidden to “recognize” the Cuban government as long as either Fidel or Raúl Castro is in power.
President Obama simply smiled.
The long vision and diplomatic skills of Ricardo Alarcón have been indispensible to this gradual transformation of Cuba’s place in the world to one of recognition and respect. He is too experienced, however, to think the struggle is over for good.
RICARDO:Nothing can be predicted, as your Vietnamese friend said. In the eighties, for example, they talked about the “Japanese Miracle,” but now the Asian tigers don’t play the role that was predicted. Today everything seems to be going in the direction of Latin American integration independent of American rule, but you don’t know. It appears this will be in Cuba’s favor, in allowing the necessary space to develop. I would hesitate to anticipate. But change is here. The 1961 Alliance for Progress promised $20 billion over ten years, and now China spends as much in one country. Latin America is becoming an exceptional place. When Latin American leaders meet with European leaders, the Europeans ask for help now. Cuba has very strong links with the main countries. Dilma and Lula both are close friends. What is missed by foreign analysts is that some countries are counted as US friends, but they are no longer dependent on the United States. They are trading partners, no more. Now there are not only [Cuban] embassies in Brasília and Havana, but Brazil is the strategic investor in the super-port being built at Mariel.9 Havana Harbor will be for tourism. Mariel will be the seaport. The reason is the expansion of the Panama Canal. The big containers can’t enter our harbor. We spent lots of effort bringing cargo through Jamaica to Cuba, but now we will have the economic zone at Mariel. The Brazilians are very active. Lula loves soybean harvesting, for example. What this means is that it’s not just support from the leftist president and the Workers Party, but you also have the Brazilian business community involved. In the past, we used to have a lot of blah, blah, blah, but it wasn’t very concrete. Now everywhere you see a different approach for the first time. We are more or less moving like the Europeans were moving a few decades ago, toward integration. We’ll see.
This involves capitalist production, and to deny it is absurd. In the good old days some thought there was only one form of socialism with strong state control over all the economic activities. You will see people competing, the seeds of capitalism being planted, but also you have to face the realities and adapt them to the social goals you establish for yourself. In Latin America in the seventies it was normal for the state to play an active role in the economy, before Pinochet and neoliberalism. Now most countries in Latin America have the state regulating different aspects of the economy, and that’s our case. We admit foreign investment, even 100 percent ownership, but the key is our approval.10 It’s an open market but with certain state norms and regulations.
[Sen. Jesse] Helms actually was trying to close every door to international capitalist influence [in the name of anticommunism], it was really crazy. He wanted to close any possibility of foreign investment in Cuba with threats against anybody “trafficking” with expropriated property—that included the entire Cuban economy. If Helms-Burton had been successful, the Cuban state would have been the only investor in Cuba. Also by strengthening and expanding the sanctions against trade with Cuba, Helms-Burton created more obstacles to implementing within Cuba the very changes that were in themselves promoting new economic actors like private farms and restaurants.11
The future for Cuba and the United States may be uncertain. But one thing that is certain is that our past policy of containment and isolation has failed completely. Cuba is a fully integrated partner in the new Latin America. How the United States will adjust is the main question for the future.