I would like to share a personal memory that might be relevant to understanding the worsening circumstances our country is going through.
It happened that, at an enjoyable gathering of friends many years ago, I got into a conversation with a Cuban leader who always inspired in me the utmost respect and transparency. Respect and transparency that prevail, in our case, over very specific disagreements; happily demonstrating that the former are central, and the latter sometimes aren’t.
The fact is that in that festive atmosphere, I asked this person, with point-blank candor, why So-and-so and What’s-his-Name were heading this or that department, this or that institute. Hadn’t he himself appointed them? And he replied, reciprocating my respect and transparency: “Man, those positions are in very low demand.”
It was one of those moments that lingers in memory, and it still shocks me. It was a completely honest, and entirely unacceptable, answer that left me speechless.
For a while, I took the trouble to ask a few friends or acquaintances who seemed to have the necessary qualifications for those positions if they would be willing to take them on, under certain conditions. Not a single one was.
It was true, then. Those positions weren’t attractive. That seemed to me a worse symptom than ordinary corruption. How could anything ever work? Would the traditional acquisition of obscure perks perhaps be a step toward functionality?
With such a premise, any institutional battle was lost from the start, since there was a natural filter at the base, more effective than any selection process: decent and competent people generally didn’t want to hold leadership positions, at any level; and with a few exceptions, those who did didn’t last. And how long had that been the case? That seemed to explain too many things.
Now, every time I hear people clamoring for the resignation or dismissal of an official, I think silently: “They don’t know what they’re asking for; those positions are in very little demand, at least among decent and competent people.”
I have always been an enthusiastic admirer of many aspects of the Cuban Revolution’s cultural policy. Ensuring, for example, that the shelves of Cuban homes were filled with good books for several generations was simply wonderful.
It is above all in its desire to make culture accessible to everyone that the Revolution has struck me as genuinely revolutionary; that is, genuinely effective. This is not the case in preventing farmers from being legitimate owners of their lands and livestock, nor in preventing workers from being legitimate owners of the means of production.
I have never (voluntarily) studied socioeconomic issues; therefore, I caution that my opinions in this field could be superficial, at best. But since I now feel that such issues have become pressing, I would like to briefly, and with all humility and caution, share my point of view.
When the German Marxists who were exiled in the United States, Switzerland and other countries during World War II returned to their homeland, they found that it was now two countries: the GDR, socialist, and the FRG, capitalist. But these scholars and philosophers did not see Marx’s ideas reflected in the GDR or the USSR. Having studied them all their lives, the story that Marx’s ideas were the fundamental foundation of those societies could be told to anyone but themselves.
These thinkers — Mark Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and many others — known collectively as the Frankfurt School, dedicated themselves primarily to critiquing capitalism, fascism, and socialism in its Soviet form, exported to so many other countries, including Cuba, with various sub-variants. Accessing the thinking of these orthodox Marxists in our country for years was as difficult as accessing the books of free-market apologists — economists like Milton Friedman or Friedrich Hayek. Could it be that they have common ground?
The laws of economics are universal for all practical purposes, like those of any other science, regardless of who enunciates them. And any social system that seeks to ignore them (Marx certainly did not ignore them) will prove unviable in direct proportion to its stubbornness.
Ortega y Gassett said that circumstances provide us with the necessary leverage to find our true purpose. And in the realm of commercial activity, it is the laws of the market that provide the feedback essential for success. This doesn’t seem incompatible with socialism. What it does seem incompatible with is the primacy of state ownership, at least as it is known in Cuba.
The most serious and most obvious defect of the omnipresent Cuban state enterprise is that, since it is not subject to the laws of the market, its feedback system for correcting its actions ranges from poor to nonexistent. This, and nothing else, is the crux of our present misery. I don’t question the original humanist vocation of the Revolution; I only note that the impunity of its actions leads it down the path of failure, to the threshold of crime, and toward the dark side of history.
On the other hand, since almost no one can truly feel that state ownership is their own, it benefits from almost no one’s initiative. A common expression in Cuba that always grated on my ears is “private initiative.” As if there were any other! All initiative is individual, private, by nature. Therefore, anyone who opposes private initiative is simply opposing initiative. Where is a society headed that, despite its widespread lack of resources, so radically curtails its own vital force? Or whose best sons are either deemed unfit for leadership positions, or who themselves deliberately or instinctively avoid them?
At a certain point in the history of music in the 20th century, what was revolutionary consisted of composing using mathematical formulas, or using other procedures that excluded inspiration, which was seen as antiquated, unreliable, excessively romantic, or bourgeois.
It is difficult today to find the works of that musical avant-garde, or even to have heard the names of those composers, enthusiastic about their doctrine, who considered themselves revolutionaries in their time. Posterity, or rather oblivion, has been implacable with them. A part of Cuba has also died, due to a similar obfuscation, due to attachment to external formulas and neglect of its own strengths, its own gifts.
But there is always another part that struggles, that escapes all certainties, all denials, all doubts, “from the black cloud to the deep blue.”
