International Critical Thought Socialism in Cuba: Debate and Socialist Renewal for the Twenty-First Century Socialism in Cuba: Debate and Socialist Renewal for the Twenty-First Century

International Critical Thought ISSN: 2159-8282 (Print) 2159-8312 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rict20 Socialism in Cuba: Debate and Socialist Renewal for the Twenty-First Century Tom G. Griffiths To cite this article: Tom G. Griffiths (2019): Socialism in Cuba: Debate and Socialist Renewal for the Twenty-First Century, International Critical Thought, DOI: 10.1080/21598282.2019.1613916 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/21598282.2019.1613916 Published online: 04 Jun 2019. Submit your article to this journal View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rict20 INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT https://doi.org/10.1080/21598282.2019.1613916 Socialism in Cuba: Debate and Socialist Renewal for the Twenty-First Century Tom G. Griffiths School of Education, University of Newcastle, Callaghan, Australia ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY Following the popular triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and declaration of its socialist character in 1961, a form of Cuban socialism has been in power. The historical trajectory of Cuban socialism in power has moved through periods of fierce independence and debate about a particular Cuban model of socialism, close and disciplined political and economic alignment with the former Soviet Union, and renewed periods of critical debate following its collapse. A constitutional commitment to building Cuban socialism was ratified in 1976, and continues in 2018, with no so-called “transition” to capitalism following the collapse of “historical socialism.” This article focuses on approaches of the Cuban state toward popular discussion and debate, and the potential for popular debate to support Cuban socialism and its legitimacy in power. Following an overview of some key historical events and cycles related to popular debate about Cuban socialism, the paper returns to contemporary events, including the 2018 presidential and National Assembly elections. The paper concludes by arguing that there are indications of expanded debate within Cuba, and a reconsideration of the role of official media in this debate, with the potential to contribute both to the ongoing development of Cuban socialism, and more broadly to debate about socialism in the twenty-first century. Received 6 April 2018 Revised 19 July 2018 Accepted 6 August 2018 KEYWORDS Cuba; twenty-first century socialism; debate; media; Miguel Díaz-Canel 1. Introduction Since 1959, or officially since 1961, a national programme to build socialism in Cuba has been underway, with varying forms of political, economic and social structures, and accompanying policies, intended to deliver this central goal. The Cuban Revolution has been subject to a huge scholarship, focused on multiple areas of public policy and governance, which continues some 59 years after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution on January 1, 1959 (some key volumes sympathetic to the Cuban Revolution include: August 2013; Lambie 2010; Kapcia 2009; Gott 2005). This work includes the predictable polarised positions for (e.g., August 2013; Lambie 2010) and against the Cuban Revolution, and arguments for and against Cuban socialism in power, and extends to those sympathetic to socialism but taking issue with Cuba’s particular forms and practices, including critiques of Soviet influence, particularly in relation to centralised economic planning, and CONTACT Tom G. Griffiths tom.griffiths@newcastle.edu.au © 2019 Chinese Academy of Social Sciences 2 T. G. GRIFFITHS associated forms of popular involvement in social and political life.1 Of course, this work extends to long-standing debates about the potential to build “socialism in one country,” about the appropriate strategies for building socialism under conditions of so-called “under-development,” and critiques of Soviet (and by association, Cuban) socialism as a deformed workers state or as state capitalism.2 Seemingly against the odds, the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) remains in power in Cuba post-1989/1991, after the collapse of “real existing socialism” in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe almost thirty years ago. The Revolution, as it is commonly referred to, and key features of Cuban socialism, prevailed throughout the resultant “special period in peacetime” with extreme economic recession and deprivations for the majority of Cubans, the disruption and inversion of social scales via economic reforms designed to gain hard currency, the ongoing system of dual currencies, the ongoing dislocation of families through migration, and the recent death of Fidel Castro. The formal and (from 1976) constitutional commitment to building Cuban socialism continues, with no official transition back to capitalism. The challenges of a small island nation advancing a socialist development project within the capitalist world-economy, and negotiating the maintenance of core components of the socialist state’s provision of universal public services, continue. This article focuses on approaches of the Cuban state toward popular discussion and debate, and the potential for popular debate to contribute to and support Cuban socialism, its development, and its legitimacy in power. I begin with a recent controversy about the role of official media. An overview of some key historical events and cycles related to questions of popular debate about Cuban socialism follows, noting periods of shifting space for such debate. The paper then returns to contemporary events, reflections on the state of popular debate in Cuba from within, and the need in 2018, and beyond, for expanded debate. This potential can contribute both to the ongoing development of socialism in Cuba, and more broadly to debate about socialism in the twenty-first century. 2. The National Journalists Union and State Media in Cuba At the June 2016 Congress of the Cuban Journalists Union (UPEC), the deputy editor of Granma, a national daily newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC), Karina Marrón, aired some strong criticisms of the state of journalism in Cuba, and concerns about social unrest. The official reporting of her intervention by UPEC cited expressed concerns about levels of apathy amongst young journalists in relation to working for the official media and joining their Union. These were attributed to such journalists receiving low wages, and not having “the authority to change things,” in contrast to working for private “where they will receive more recognition” (Gorgoy Crespo 2016). This account also reported Marrón’s warning that the collective response to such issues must avoid resorting to the “double discourse,” something that is evident in multiple aspects of revolutionary Cuba’s social and political life (for a full account see Blum 2011). A fuller account of Marrón’s intervention was posted by another Cuban journalist, José Ramírez Pantoja, to his personal blog, and subsequently reproduced by other electronic media (e.g., KOKACUB@ 2016). In this more extensive account, Marrón is reported to have referred to a “perfect storm” brewing on the island, fuelled by shortages and electricity restrictions, and warning the country could not afford a repeat of the unrest INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT 3 experienced in August 1994, when a spontaneous protest against the shortages, electricity blackouts, devalued national currency, contrasted with the relative luxury of international hotels and shops reserved for tourists with hard currency, occurred on the Malecón waterfront in Old Havana.3 Marrón reportedly added that we don’t want to see protests in the street, and without a Fidel to go out to the Malecón, or at least up to this point we haven’t had a figure in our country to show their face to this public and explain things as they are.4 Marrón’s intervention was a recent and powerful message from within Cuba of the need for the official media to change, in response to the social, political and material realities of the country, and as part of any efforts to engage with “disconnected youth” and more openly confront and debate their realities. She was critical of the UPEC itself, and by implication herself and her colleagues at the Trade Union Congress, arguing that if UPEC does not have any decision making power, if UPEC doesn’t have any fuerza, if we are left talking about the same old problems from one congress to the next, why would I want to be a member of such an organisation, why would I be interested, why would I see this as important, what am I changing, what am I transforming?5 In a quite direct way, this was a challenge to official mass organisations, and trade unions, to stop the cycle of repeatedly discussing problems without effecting change, warning that “we don’t have time to repeat this cycle.” These interventions in the UPEC conference mark another acknowledgement of the damaging effects of formalismo (public formalism) and the doble discurso (double discourse), whereby the media uncritically reports official pronouncements, and in so doing consciously presents an official version of things that does not correspond to reality, and which everyone knows does not correspond to reality. It similarly highlights the ongoing challenge to journalists, their Union, and to Party members, to address these tendencies which undermine morale and credibility of the media, and in turn the Communist Party, amongst the population. We will return to these events, and subsequent official responses, below. At this point it should be noted that Marrón’s actions, and the official (and unofficial) reporting of them and the shortcomings of the official media, is indicative of a level of openness to constructive criticism and debate within official institutions of the socialist state, and perhaps indicative of a growing level of rejection by Party members and officials of the “triumphalism” of State media. These events also mark a recent manifestation of the long-standing question for Cuban socialism in power of how to manage popular participation, debate and dissent, in the transition to socialism. 3. Leadership and Debate in Socialist Cuba Recent work by scholars like Kapcia (2009, 2014) and August (2013) offers important insight into the nature and operation of leadership in socialist Cuba, including mechanisms for popular participation and debate in policy formation and implementation. Their sympathetic accounts offer a counterweight to external characterisations of absolute power and decision-making residing in Fidel or Raul Castro (for an illustrative example see Gershman and Gutierrez [2009, 36], citing “Castro’s fierce determination to retain 4 T. G. GRIFFITHS power”), highlighting a more fluid process of inner and outer circles of high level leadership, and high levels of popular involvement in PCC Congresses, debating and proposing revisions to congress guidelines. August goes so far as to describe this as “a dialectical bond between the leadership and the people. A continual, reciprocal bottom-up and top-down process” (August 2013, 129). Kapcia characterises the trajectory of the Cuban revolution and its leadership as involving “a repetitive process of crisis, debate, decision and certainty, until the next crisis,” this process carrying “contradictory pressures and patterns of the Revolution” (Kapcia 2009, 26). This framework can account for varying degrees of openness to public debate about Cuba’s socialist project, including varying levels of the scope of debate that is publicly promoted, or at least tolerated. The result has (direct and indirect) shifts in what is seen to constitute acceptable, constructive criticism “within” the Revolution, and what crosses the line to be deemed as “against” the Revolution. This sort of characterisation invokes Fidel Castro’s well-documented intervention, meeting with intellectuals and high profile cultural figures in a series of meetings, in which he observed, “What are the rights of writers and artists, revolutionary or non-revolutionary? Within the revolution, everything; against the revolution, there are no rights” (Castro [1961] 2007, 220–21). The extended interventions by Fidel Castro at that time followed the then newly created Cuban Film Institute’s prohibition of the screening of a short, experimental documentary on Cuban nightlife, P.M., made by Sabá Cabrera Infante and Orlando Jiménez Leal. In the context of June 1961, having just overcome a United States backed invasion at the “Bay of Pigs” seeking to overthrow Fidel and the Cuban Revolution, non-tolerance for those deemed to be acting directly “against” the Revolution is understandable. Leaving aside the evaluation of whether this particular documentary film warranted such a response, Kapcia notes that for some opponents of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel’s attempted clarification came to “confirm the expectations of those outside Cuba who had long feared the stamp of Stalinism” (Kapcia 2014, 189). In contrast, while acknowledging the shifting and persistent ambiguity about clearly defining the boundaries of what was considered “within” or “against” the revolution, Kapcia argues that the intent of the message was clear, “that only those who acted against, openly and unmistakably, could not find a home inside the definition of the Revolution” (189; italics in the original). Public discussion and debate about the Cuban Revolution, and the project of building a distinctive form of Cuban socialism, was a feature of 1960s Cuba. A good sense of this rich intellectual climate is evident in an interview with Fernando Martínez Heredia (2018), who was a professor of philosophy at the University of Havana in the militant/radical years of the Revolution, from 1963 to 1971, and the founding director and editor of the independent, socialist journal Pensamiento Crítico, which was closed in 1971.6 In this extended interview Martínez Heredia recounts the depth and breadth of the political scholarship and debate in the journal, which extended to their work with students in the department of Philosophy. For example, he described the publication of a textbook for students, Lecturas de Filosofía in 1966, that included works from twenty-seven authors including “Che and Leontiev, Engels and Althusser, Amílcar Cabral and Manuel Sacristán . . . Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, Fidel, Paul Sweezy, Einstein, Gordon Childe, Meliukhin” (Martínez Heredia 2018, 71). In place of Soviet inspired courses and materials teaching “Dialectical and Historical Materialism” in the Party Schools, which were criticised by INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT 5 Martínez Heredia, the group developed and taught a course on the “History of Marxist Thought” to university students for five years, until 1971. This spirit of debate about Marxist theory and practice, and the transition to socialism, is also apparent in one of the best-known examples, the so-called “Great Debate,” conducted between 1961 and 1965, and centred on competing approaches to achieving rapid economic development in Cuba, as necessary for any transition to socialism. The debate extended to arguments for state-led capitalist development, driven by material rewards, as a necessary first stage, and counter proposals for the immediate building of socialism, with an emphasis on moral/political incentives for greater productivity and growth (see Yaffe 2012, for a recent account). The later 1960s also saw Cuba adopting and publicly advocating what Kapcia (2009) describes as a militant third-worldism. This involved public and strong criticism of the Soviet Union and its relations with third world countries. An illustrative example was Cuba’s public support for guerrilla movements in the region advocating socialist revolution, which in the case of Venezuela saw Cuba supporting guerrillas who were engaged in armed struggle against both the Venezuelan state and the pro-Soviet Venezuelan Communist Party that was pursuing a peaceful, electoral path to power. These public positions and debates were broad and deep, addressing fundamental questions about whether and how best socialist projects could be advanced within post-colonial, underdeveloped states. In some cases, this posed a direct challenge to the Soviet Union’s support for the peaceful transition to socialism such as that being advocated in Venezuela in 1967 (Guan-fu 1983; Khrushchev 1956). It was in 1967 that the Central Committee of the PCC affirmed, “we are helping and will help, whenever we are asked to do so, all the revolutionary movements that fight imperialism anywhere in the world” (quoted in Gonzalez 1974, 138). Cuban support for revolutionary movements and the advance of socialism abroad was seen as part of the project of Cuban socialism at home, and as Anderson describes, promoting continental revolution had become official government policy (Anderson 1997, 533). In the late 1960s/early 1970s, Cuba experienced an economic and social crisis, marked by the failed attempt to achieve a sugar harvest of 10 million tons in 1970. Intended to fund diversification and industrialisation of the Cuban economy, and to settle Soviet debts, the harvest provoked a massive disruption to the wider Cuban economy by relying on massive popular mobilisations of workers (and students) from across the economy. Cuba turned more decisively toward economic and political alignment with the Soviet Union, in what is described as a period of (Soviet influenced) institutionalisation of the Cuban Revolution from 1970 to 1985. Subsequent reflections from within Cuba have highlighted the negative impact on the scope and nature of public discussion and debate about the socialist project. For example, Martínez Heredia (1995, 21) observed that “Cuba submitted ideologically to the USSR, and anything that differed from this line was considered as being anti-Soviet and ideological diversionism . . . Within the currents of Marxism, it was affirmed that only the Soviet current was correct.” Writing within a renewed period of debate about Cuban socialism and its renewal/reinvention in the post-Soviet context, and informed by his historical experience noted above, Martínez Heredia described the adopted official model of Marxism-Leninism in the early 1970s as “a tragic use of the name of one of the greatest fighters for freedom and liberty in 6 T. G. GRIFFITHS the twentieth century—[being] dogmatic, impoverished, dominating, authoritarian, exclusive” (Martínez Heredia 1995, 22). The 1970–1985 period of the “institutionalisation” of the Cuban Revolution included what was subsequently described as the quinquenio gris (grey quinquennium) in Cuba, from 1971 to 1976, led by the then director of the National Cultural Council, Luis Pavón. This period of the “most Stalinist approach to culture” (Kapcia 2014, 135) was in part a defiant rejection of international criticism of Cuba, including from sections of the international Left who were protesting against the treatment of Cuban poet Herberto Padilla and the public “self-criticism” he was required to undertake in 1971 (for a discussion of the case and excerpts of Padilla’s self-criticism see INDEX 1972). In the same year, the Congress of Culture and Education set out restrictive prescriptions about multiple aspects of national cultural life, including definitions of acceptable and correct behaviour for students (see Castro 1971; MINED 1971a, 1971b). The process of mandating such prescriptions, down to the level of appropriate musical tastes and hair styles for the youth, implicitly contradicted notions of popular or radical, grass-roots participatory democracy. Moreover, the Congress explicitly defined “anti-socialist and deviant behaviour, specifically targeting homosexuality” (Kapcia 2009, 61), furthering the homophobic purge of gays from public institutions and positions of influence, which had included their being sent to UMAPs (Military Units for Agricultural Production) for re-education in 1965. This period of cultural restriction and oppression, imposed from above, ended in 1976 when Armando Hart became Minister of the newly created Ministry of Culture (Kapcia 2014, 135), and the space for intellectuals and cultural workers to undertake their work “within” the revolution shifted once again. By the time of perestroika in the Soviet Union, Cuba had developed its own reform movement under the banner of the official “rectification of errors and negative tendencies” campaign, the latter including earlier market-oriented reforms like the creation of free farmers markets (see Castro 1988). This marked an official re-assessment of Soviet models and influence, prior to its collapse, invoking a return to “the ideas and principles of Che Guevara” alongside “a drive towards a much-needed economic efficiency and streamlining” (Kapcia 2014, 154). Petras and Morley argued that the whole campaign was the result of a “major internal policy debate over how best to confront Cuba’s economic stagnation and its hard currency balance-of-payments problem” (Petras and Morley 1992, 16), and that the campaign from above against . . . some of the commonly disliked features of Cuban socialism—corruption, managerial abuses, private appropriations of public transport, and the like . . . preempted any campaign from below against the restrictive economic measures imposed by the regime (such as increases in prices, reductions in salaries, and increased costs for utilities and transport). (Petras and Morley 1992, 23) According to Kapcia, the Rectification campaign also had its roots in the Mariel boatlift of 1980 that involved “an exodus of 124,779 marielitos” (Kapcia 2009, 41; italics in the original), prompted by the crisis of dissatisfied Cubans occupying the Peruvian embassy. He concluded that the internal damage to prestige was considerable, having revealed a surprising depth of discontent, with about a million registering a desire to emigrate. This discontent then surfaced in a different context in 1985–6, when leading UJC activists began to dissent by openly INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT 7 seeking to emulate Gorbachev’s Soviet reform processes of perestroika and glasnost. (Kapcia 2009, 41) The rectification campaign was characterised as another period of more open and expanded public debate about Cuban socialism. But within this period of renewed debate, two popular Soviet magazines, Sputnik and Moscow News, which were both disseminating information about and promoting the Soviet Union’s perestroika and glasnost reforms, and had included articles critical of Cuba, were banned from sale within Cuba. An editorial from the national newspaper of the PCC, Granma, announced the decision, “[W]ith pain and bitterness we have had to confront the consequences of this confusion, of all these ideas, in young people who have been poorly informed in terms of ideology and history, a state of affairs for which we are responsible” (cited in Bengelsdorf 1994, 149).7 Terms of public debate about the Cuban path and rectification were clearly to exclude consideration of a Cuban perestroika. Actions like this are part of the ebb and flow of scope and nature of debate in Cuba about its socialist project. Critically, they reflect a lack of faith in the population, particularly the youth, to engage in wider debates like those posed by Gorbachev, and to reach the right conclusions. As the editorial about sale of the Soviet journals indicates, this extended to an acknowledged failure of the Revolution’s formal and informal education systems. The attempt to limit the terms of debate through such a direct intervention was accompanied by efforts to identify and address weaknesses in the education systems’ political and ideological preparation of students. For example, in his July 26 speech in 1986, Fidel highlighted problems with the Ministry of Education’s assessment of teachers’ work being based solely on promotion rates (from one grade to the next) achieved by their students, leading teachers to focus excessively on preparing students for exams, and spend class time covering exam materials (Castro 1988, 100). In 1987 Fidel detailed problems of “promocionismo” (excessive attention on ensuring high rates of student promotion from one grade to the next), and “facilismo,” the latter referring to the teachers preparing exams, and students for these exams, to the point that they were easy ( fácil) to pass (Castro 1988, 108).8 With respect to students’ political and ideological formation, the official response stressed the need for cadres and teachers to model desired socialist and revolutionary behaviour, morals, attitudes, and the application of Marxism-Leninism. In a speech to close the 1987 Congress of the Union of Young Communists (UJC), Fidel noted: We might have a teacher teaching Marxism, 400 hours in a semester if you like, and if they are a bad example to their students all the books and the 400 hours of Marxism-Leninism are worthless. (Castro 1988, 138) Implicit here was the critique of the “double moral” or “double discourse” noted above, whereby students, teachers, and the wider public, go through the motions of learning and repeating the official line publicly, while acting in ways and engaging in activities that contradict these as a regular part of their daily lives. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the European socialist bloc provoked a “Special Period in Peacetime” in Cuba, so-named to reflect the extreme impacts of the abrupt end to Cuba’s established economic trade with the socialist bloc, the end of preferential trade agreements with the Soviet Union, and the consequent need to trade in hard currency in the capitalist world-economy. The impacts of this period have been well 8 T. G. GRIFFITHS documented, and underpin the ongoing efforts to re-define Cuban socialism in the postSoviet context (e.g., Fernández Ríos 2014; Rodríguez 2014; Suárez Salazar 2014). As noted above, it was these extreme conditions that led to the protests of August 1994, responding to extreme shortages, regular and prolonged electricity blackouts as the state sought to equitably ration electricity across the country as the supply of Soviet oil, once guaranteed at preferential prices, ended. As work on this period has also documented, the new social and economic context of post-Soviet Cuba also inverted established socio-economic patterns by de-coupling formal education from economic opportunities. In 1993, Cuba adopted a dual currency system, first by recognising and legalising US Dollars as a second currency alongside the Cuban Peso (CUP), and then creating the Cuban Convertible Peso (CUC) as the only legal second currency, purchased at an exchange rate of 1:1 for USD, and 25:1 for CUP. This system remains in place, despite official announcements in 2013 of reforms to move toward single, unified currency (see Pérez 2014). It produced and entrenched a phenomenon whereby the work of professionals employed in the state sector, and receiving their wages in CUP, was undermined by the 25CUP:1CUC exchange rate. These conditions meant a month’s salary equated to just $20–30 CUC/USD, at a time when the majority of consumer goods were only accessible with CUC. This contributed to an inversion of social values and hierarchies as people engaged in unskilled work within or alongside the international tourism industry, for example, that was being promoted as the primary source of hard currency, were able to earn the equivalent of a month’s salary or more in a day (see for example Griffiths 2005). The post-Soviet period necessarily produced renewed debate about Cuban socialism and its future. Over time, this period saw some renewal of magazines and journals whose contents directly addressed both the historical legacy of the Soviet Union on Cuban socialism (e.g., the journal Temas, addressing questions of culture, ideology and society, which began in 1995 and continues9), and at different times, explicit debate about possible options for Cuban socialism in this period (e.g., the journal associated with the Centre of American Studies [CEA, Cuadernos de Nuestra America]). This extended to dedicated volumes by CEA researchers being published as direct interventions in debate about the post-Soviet restructuring of the Cuban economy and society (e.g., Carranza-Valdéz, Gutiérrez Urdaneta, and Monreal-González 1995). In 1993, Juan Antonio Blanco, a Cuban writer, former academic and displomat to the United Nations, founded the Centro Felix Varela to similarly promote open and constructive debate about the challenges facing the country and its socialist project (see for example Blanco 1995a, 1995b, 2003), and launched its journal Acuario. The widening of debate in the mid-1990s experienced some challenges. After publishing just eight issues, the journal Acuario was prohibited in 1996, and permission for its production has not been granted since that time.10 Under Raul Castro’s direction, the CEA was criticised and its work, structure and membership re-organised, including the editorial board of Cuadernos de Nuestra America (for a full account see Álvarez Garcia and González Núñez 2001). CEA members were relocated in other Cuban institutions, and some left the country. One of the latter, Haroldo Dilla Alfonso (2011), described the work of CEA, which was directly associated with the PCC, as the most audacious and competent centre for social studies that had existed in Cuba since 1959. He goes on to highlight the solidarity of CEA members and their defence of their work, effectively INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT 9 presenting it as “within” the Revolution by engaging in important debate, particularly in the post-Soviet context, about the future trajectory of the Cuban Revolution and Cuban socialism to ensure its survival. These historical examples of debate within Cuba about its model of socialism in practice are indicative of the cycles of crisis, debate and renewed certainty that Kapcia (2009) sets out. They highlight the shifting scope and potential for public debate within revolutionary Cuba, ranging from uncritical, formalistic, expressions of false unanimity, to processes of widespread consultation under a democratic centralist model, and instances of official efforts and interventions to provide more open space for debate and initiatives to develop from the ground up (see, for example, Domínguez et al. 2017). 4. Debate for Socialist Renewal for the Twenty-First Century The election of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela in 1998 was followed, coupled with a leftward political shift in other Latin American nations like Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay, and Nicaragua, marked a significant development in the region. Into the 2000s, government programmes explicitly set out to redefine and construct a “socialism for the twenty-first century” (Boron 2009). Like some of the critiques from within Cuba about borrowed aspects of the Soviet model, that began in the mid-1980s, this broad political initiative sought to consciously disavow the negative bureaucratic deformations and repression identified with historical socialism, and emphasise more authentic, “participatory and protagonistic” democracy as a defining feature of socialism for this century (El Troudi 2010). These developments, particularly the period of Hugo Chávez’ Presidency from 1998 until his death in March 2013, generated favourable trade relations for Cuba that included subsidised oil and petrol from Venezuela in exchange for the provision of Cuban doctors to provide health care in poor areas of Venezuela, and other health services (Anderson 2014). The regional conditions and relationships built on long-standing achievements of Cuban socialism over a range of indicators, whether public education, health care, housing, security, which set it apart from many Latin American countries, and arguably helped to legitimise the idea of socialism, or at least these features of socialism, amongst some populations in the region. For example, establishment measures like the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI) confirm exceptional results for a relatively poor country, ranked 68 out of 188 nation’s with a HDI score of 0.775, achieving results like an average life expectancy of 79.6 years, infant mortality rate of 4.0 per 1000 births, 13.9 expected years of schooling, all with a per capital Gross National Income of just $7445.11 Longstanding, heavy investments in education and health care, amounting to 12.8% and 10.6% of GDP respectively, have been acknowledged by the UN as underpinning Cuba’s steady rise in the HDI rankings (see Cuberlo 2016). These achievements arguably mean that Cuba was and remains well placed to play an active part in the renewed regional interest in socialism for the twenty-first century, and in that context to explore new opportunities for official reflection and debate within Cuba about its socialist model.12 But if Cuban socialism is to maintain and strengthen its popular legitimacy, and indeed reinvent and renew itself in a distinctively Cuban way for the challenges of the twenty-first century, and in turn contribute to the regional and global developments of twenty-first century socialism, popular participation in debate about Cuban socialism and its trajectory must be part of this process. 10 T. G. GRIFFITHS The example of Karina Marrón’s comments at the UPEC Congress, and subsequent responses to those, highlight some of the ongoing challenges needing to be addressed if the desired debate is to flourish. This particular case gained prominence in part due to the content of Marrón’s speech being published online by another Cuban journalist working for Radio Holguín, and member of UPEC, José Ramírez Pantoja, to his personal blog, without official permission from UPEC.13 By his own account, he “completely responsibly, recorded, transcribed and published what Karina Marrón said” (Ramírez Pantoja 2016). Pantoja describes how Marrón’s “contundente” (conclusive or overwhelming) intervention on June 28, 2016 was applauded by those present. However, he was reportedly instructed by a “provincial director” to remove the post of Marrón’s full speech, which he did, but it had already been reposted by various other social media (e.g., KOKACUB@ 2016). Pantoja subsequently had his internet access to his home cut, his membership with UPEC suspended, and lost his job with Radio Holguín. Appeals to the National Ethics Committee of UPEC saw a 5-year suspension confirmed, until September 16, 2021 (Ramírez Pantoja 2016). The case gained some national and international prominence as some blogs reported Pantoja had been sacked for posting an entry foreshadowing popular protests in Cuba (Donate Ochoa 2016). A high profile Uruguayan born journalist and blogger, Fernando Ravsburg, living and working in Cuba for more than 20 years, reported on the issue (Ravsburg 2016a), including an interview with Pantoja about the events (Ravsburg 2016b). Ravsburg himself subsequently received physical threats from other Cuban journalists, about which he protested and to which UPEC responded (Ravsburg 2016c). In this context, high profile Cuban scholar, revolutionary and PCC member, Estebán Morales Domínguez, a long-standing researcher of race relations in socialist Cuba (e.g., Morales Domínguez 2013), entered the debate in support of Ravsburg (Morales Domínguez 2017). Estebán Morales Domínguez is a significant public intellectual with his own history of public, internal criticism of particular aspects of Cuban socialism and processes of the PCC, undertaken within a framework of commitments to the Cuban Revolution and to the PCC’s role in the Revolution’s ongoing development. His academic and popular scholarship can be seen as indicative of an expanding space for popular debate about Cuban socialism and its future trajectory. For example, in 2010 he was suspended (and later reinstated) from the PCC after publishing a critique of corruption in Cuba which presented it as the “real counterrevolution,” and highlighted the threat it posed to the legitimacy of Cuban socialism (see Morales Domínguez 2010). That criticism built on President Raul Castro’s earlier declarations about the need to combat corruption, and his calls for Party members to speak out. More recently, in 2016 he publicly criticised the PCC for failing to distribute key documents to party members, and the wider population, for consultation and feedback prior to their consideration at the PCC Congress in April 2016, writing: I must say that I see no justification whatsoever for us committing the “grave political error” of convening a Congress without the mass of grassroots activists—which I consider to be the real party—having access to the documents to be approved by the Congress in order to discuss them. Have we given up on being a Leninist party? I am yet to hear anyone tell me that. (Morales Domínguez 2016b) INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT 11 On the specific question of the official media in Cuba, raised by Karina Marrón, Morales Domínguez recently wrote a stronger critique of the very model and approach of the official media in Cuba, identifying a Stalinist character imported from the Soviet Union: This is an epidemic that has been acknowledged and spoken about various times, because it is found in all of the provinces. We adopted a “Stalinist” model of the press, imported from the USSR in particular; I say this because I lived there, and more than 40 years later, we continue the same way. For how long will we make war on the truth and on transparency in our media? For how long will we impede revolutionary initiatives of our journalists? (Morales Domínguez 2016a) One aspect of the criticism of Marrón and Morales Domínguez is focused on Cuban ministers, bureaucrats, and officials’ failure to adequately respond to journalists, and provide information needed for journalists to fulfil their “revolutionary initiatives,” coupled with a critique of journalists who in turn uncritically accept and report what they are told without verifying information. Criticism like this was not new, as Marrón implied, and can be found in the PCC Conference of January 2012 that stressed the need to stimulate the mass media to become an effective platform for cultural expression and debate, and to offer pathways for knowledge, analysis, and the expression of opinion; develop objective and investigative journalism that can overcome self-censorship, mediocrity, bureaucratic and sugar-coated language, rhetoric, simplistic solutions, (facilismo), triumphalism, and banality. (Partido Comunista de Cuba 2012, 7) These articulations of seemingly systemic problems in the official media, coming from PCC members, activists, and official PCC documents, are detailed here to illustrate the nature and scope of the identified challenges, and to support the argument that a new period of expanded debate is underway in Cuba. These add to other evidence of a major structural shift in thinking about the media in socialist Cuba as a necessary part of the Revolution’s survival. For example, August cites the former Editor in Chief of Granma, Lazaro Barredo Medina, concluding that to “lose the credibility of the population in the press is a great danger to the Revolution and to the policy of the party” (August 2013, 134). More recent official interventions can be found, such as that expressed by the University of Havana’s Dean of the Faulty of Communication, Dr Raúl Garcia Corra. In an interview with Ismary Barcia Leyva (2017), posted on Fernando Ravsburg’s blog, the Dean observed that “journalism is at a crossroads,” and affirmed “a need to create messages that are not simply non-critical reproduction, but rather contain within them the germination of transformation.” Moreover, he confirmed that there was consensus amongst the leadership of Cuba, shared by the population, of the need for change, concluding that “the bases of our future development lie in decentralisation, in social participation, it [the paradigm] must be transformed” (cited in Barcia Leyva 2017). These considerations about the official media and its role align with other voices within Cuba calling for greater levels of popular participation in governance more broadly, as a necessary condition for the renewal of Cuban socialism in current conditions (see for example Domínguez et al. 2017). Cuban scholar Olga Fernández Ríos, for example, described “the necessary use of more democratic mechanisms, especially in the levels of popular participation in decision making,” for the “development of the socialist transition of Cuba” (Fernández Ríos 2011, 1). The sort of socialist renewal advocated by Fernández 12 T. G. GRIFFITHS Ríos calls explicitly for the “revival of political consensus and socialist hegemony” (Fernández Ríos 2014, 49) through such reforms. It would seem then that conditions are ripe for a decisive break with some long-standing practices of state media, in favour of a focus that engages the population in the pressing tasks of imagining and building a reconstructed socialism for the twenty-first century. As has been acknowledged within Cuba, such moves are clearly required if consensus for socialist hegemony in Cuba is to be maintained. This seems to require clear and unequivocal policies and practices from the PCC and Cuban State, like those expressed in 2012, to create conditions in which journalists, intellectuals, and indeed the wider population, can confidently promote and participate in such debate, with perhaps a new and broadened scope for criticism of current policy and practice “within” the Revolution. There are significant signs of such a trajectory being underway, and perhaps a decisive adjustment to the scope of acceptable criticism and debate within the Cuban Revolution. 5. Postscript: National, Provincial, and Presidential Elections 2018 On March 11, 2018, formal elections were held across Cuba to ratify lists of candidates for 605 seats in the national assembly, and 1265 seats in provincial parliaments (organs of popular power). Predictable, polarised rounds of internal (official Cuban) and external media coverage lauded the smooth democratic process and high level of public participation in the democratic process, and dismissed the exercise for failing to allow voters to choose between competing candidates, parties, programmes, etc. The 2018 elections drew particular attention given that the current President, Raul Castro, had foreshadowed in 2017 his decision to retire, and therefore not seek re-election as President. A function of the newly elected national parliament is to elect the 31-member Council of State that exercises legislative power between the bi-annual meetings of the National Assembly, which includes electing the President, Vice-Presidents, and Secretary. The Council of Ministers or Cabinet is also elected by the National Assembly. Raul’s departure was followed by other históricos, including José Ramón Machado Ventura, and Ramiro Valdés Menéndez, holding two of the four Vice-President positions in the Council of State, and Machado Ventura the deputy-secretary of the central committee of the PCC. The National Assembly voted on April 18, 2018, to elect Miguel Diaz-Canel as President of the Council of Ministers and Council of State, and so as President of the Republic of Cuba.14 Having been elected to the First Vice-President position in 2013, his election as President was widely anticipated, and well telegraphed by his presence in Cuban media during the elections for the National Assembly, being interviewed and photographed with his wife when casting his vote for the National Assembly.15 With respect to the official media, Diaz-Canel has expressed strong views about censuring access to particular electronic publications such as On Cuba16 and the black market distribution of the “weekly packet” (paquete seminal) which is a compilation of media stories, video, YouTube clips, etc., from the United States, shared for a small fee via portable hard and flash drives within Cuba (see García Martínez 2017). One clear indicator of expanded debate, leading up to and to date continuing beyond Diaz-Canel’s election, can be seen in the online publication of official Cuban media, such as the PCC’s daily newspaper, Granma, the Central Union of Cuban Workers (CTC) INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT 13 newspaper, Trabajadores, the Union of Young Communists (UJC) newspaper Juventud Rebelde, and Cubadebate.17 These official publications, and others, include space for readers to comment on stories online. Stories about the March 11, 2018 elections received hundreds of published comments, and debate amongst contributors, which the moderators found to be within the realms of constructive and acceptable debate. In one example from Granma, an official story explained how the President is elected in Cuba’s electoral system, and pointed out that the indirect election of the President is common in many countries. Subsequent interventions and discussion by readers extended to calls for specific reforms like giving the population the opportunity to ratify the National Assembly’s selection and election of the President and Council of State, or calling for a popular vote for multiple candidates for elections to the National Assembly, selected using current procedures, while others argued that the media needed to play a more positive role by putting forward new ideas rather than defending the status quo (see for example Castro Morales 2018). The 2018 election of delegates to the National Assembly produced some results that may reinforce the need for greater popular participation in Cuban socialism, including debate about its ongoing development. While these were not multi-candidate or multiparty elections, voting is not compulsory, meaning voters may express dissatisfaction by not voting, or not casting a valid vote. In addition, voters may vote once to endorse all candidates on the ballot paper provided (a block vote for all delegates for the respective area), or vote selectively for some on the list. If a single candidate receives less than 50% of the vote they are not elected, and a new candidate must be found. The participation rate in these elections was 82.9%. Of these, 4.3% of votes were blank and 1.26% invalid; 19.56% voted selectively for some candidates, and 80.44% voted for the whole list (see Redacción digital 2018). The participation rate of 82.9% remains extremely high, but continues a trend since 2008 when the participation rate was still around 97% (and over 98% in 1993 and 1998), seeing it fall to 90.88% in 2013 and now 82.9% in these historic elections.18 These examples in relation to the current transition of political leadership in Cuba can be seen to align with the view that we are witnessing a renewed period of more open debate within Cuba, including through the official media, about Cuban socialism, its structures and practices. The depth of internal debate about the role and functions of the official media, and its relationship to the growing sector of private media in Cuba, is seen here extending to an officially and unofficially acknowledged need for significant changes in the practice and content of the official Cuban media for it to play a meaningful role in this debate. As State power falls to “the representatives of the generation of the institutionalised revolution and the generation of the Special Period” (Suárez Salazar 2014, 24), without the legitimacy of being historical combatants in the Cuban Revolution, the impetus for these trends is amplified. A caveat is required, however, following the new President’s speech to the 2018 UPEC Congress (Díaz-Canel 2018). In the speech Díaz-Canel acknowledged long-standing concerns about pay and resources for journalists working for state media, but seemingly confirmed views about a more orthodox or hard-line approach. This was evident in the criticism of those claiming to be part of the new and independent electronic media in Cuba, including so-called “new revolutionaries” and those accepting scholarships to study abroad, questioning their political allegiances, and affirming that “this battle will 14 T. G. GRIFFITHS never end, between the logic of capital, egotistical and exclusionary, and our socialist, Martiana, Fidelista, generous, solidarity logic” (Díaz-Canel 2018). How the media responds, and its role develops under the new government in Cuba, as it seeks to renew the hegemony of Cuban socialism in power, will thus be keenly watched by all with an interest in socialism for this century. Notes 1. Some key volumes sympathetic to the Cuban Revolution include: August (2013), Lambie (2010), Kapcia (2009), and Gott (2005). Some work critical of the Revolution includes: Eckstein (1994), Pérez-Stable (1993). 2. For a leftist critique presenting Cuba as a form of state capitalism see Farber (2011). 3. There is limited literature about these events. The protest was said to have been sparked by rumours of free passage to the United States, and was arguably addressed by the Cuban state when, in the weeks following the protest, publicly declared it would not stop Cubans from leaving the island, leading to the Balsero phenomenon in which, according to Cuesta (2017), some 35,000 Cubans emigrated to the United States on home-made rafts, exporting dissent. 4. Marrón here is referring to Fidel Castro personally meeting protestors in 1994, his arrival leading some, according to García (2017), to switch from chanting “Down with Fidel” and “Freedom” to “Long Live Fidel.” See: https://kokacub.wordpress.com/2016/06/30/calienteintervencion-en-el-vi-pleno-nacional-de-la-upec-cuba/. 5. See: https://kokacub.wordpress.com/2016/06/30/caliente-intervencion-en-el-vi-pleno-nacionalde-la-upec-cuba/. 6. Fifty-three issues of Pensamiento Crítico were produced between February 1967 and June 1971 (see: http://www.filosofia.org/rev/pcritico.html). Martínez Heredia passed away in La Habana in 2018. 7. Bengelsdorf cites articles questioning Soviet financial support and aid for Cuba, and supporting the concept of a multi-party political system (Bengelsdorf 1994, 149). Azicri, citing Katherine Ellison, adds that reports in the Soviet press criticised Cuba’s “rectification of errors and negative tendencies,” and presented “a more critical portrait of Cuba” (Azicri 1992, 40). 8. Terms like these are difficult to translate, hence the Spanish word is used. While the term “promotionism” might make some sense for promocionismo, the word facilismo is an invented term based on the Spanish word for easy (fácil). Used in this context, it simply refers to the practice of making exams too easy for students, to ensure that they all pass. 9. See: http://www.temas.cult.cu/nosotros. 10. See: http://www.cfv.org.cu/publicaciones/pub2000.htm#01milenio. The Centro Felix Varela and its work in other spheres continues, following this prohibition, but founding Director Juan Antonio Blanco left Cuba in 1997. 11. See: http://hdr.undp.org/en/countries/profiles/CUB, and for Cuban reporting on its HDI results see Cuberlo (2016). 12. According to Domínguez (2012), the favourable trade with Venezuela allowed Cuba to defer internal economic, market-based reforms. Subsequent political setbacks, notably the postChávez pressures that the Bolivarian Revolution has experienced impacting on trade with Cuba, saw Raul Castro re-emphasise a programme of economic reforms (see for example Castro 2016). Most recently, the landslide election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico appeared to reinvigorate leftist politics in the region. 13. Pantoja’s blog continues to be published at: www.verdadecuba.blogspot.com.au. 14. See for example: http://www.granma.cu/elecciones-en-cuba-2017-2018/2018-04-19/migueldiaz-canel-asumo-la-responsabilidad-con-la-conviccion-de-que-todos-los-revolucionariosseremos-fieles-a-fidel-y-a-raul-19-04-2018-10-04-30, and for some initial official insights INTERNATIONAL CRITICAL THOUGHT 15. 16. 17. 18. 15 into the new Assembly and Council of Ministers see: http://www.granma.cu/elecciones-encuba-2017-2018/2018-04-19/minuto-a-minuto-la-continuidad-de-la-revolucion-con-unnuevo-consejo-de-estado-en-cuba. See for example: http://www.cubadebate.cu/noticias/2018/03/11/miguel-diaz-canel-aquiconstruimos-una-relacion-de-gobierno-y-pueblo/#.Wq73OmZL2f5 and http://www. granma.cu/cuba/2018-03-11/minuto-a-minuto-cuba-en-elecciones-generales-ii?page=2. See: https://oncubamagazine.com. See: www.granma.cu, www.trabajadores.cu, www.juventudrebelde.cu, and www.cubadebate. cu respectively. For detail see: https://www.idea.int/data-tools/question-countries-view/521/88/ctr. Disclosure Statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Notes on Contributor Tom G. Griffiths is an associate professor in comparative and international education at the University of Newcastle, Australia. His research is focused on the application of world-systems analysis as a framework for understanding systems of mass education and their potential contribution to the transformation of the capitalist world-system and advance of a socialist alternative. His work in relation to Cuba and Venezuela has been published in international journals, and recent volumes include: Logics of Socialist Education: Engaging with Crisis, Insecurity and Uncertainty (2013, Springer), Education in for Socialism: Historical, Current and Future Perspectives (2015, Routledge), and Mass Education, Global Capital, and the World: The Theoretical Lenses of István Mészáros and Immanuel Wallerstein (2013, Palgrave). ORCID Tom G. 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