Cuba: Reforms to State Capitalism

The National Assembly of Cuba received in July 2018 the draft of the new constitution in which emphasizes the establishment the respect of private property, maintaining the right of inheritance of land and recognizing foreign investment. As well as emphasizing in the text of the constitution that the word “communism” will no longer appear.

The Communist Party of Cuba is coming out of the closet.

The constitutional referendum was held on February 24, 2019. Voters were asked whether they approved of a new constitution. The reforms were approved, with 91% of valid votes cast in favor.

Of course, this reform is only in the constitutional wording, because the Cuban revolution was never socialist and Cuba has never been a location for transnational investment. That isolation has been amplified as a geopolitical strategy for the economic bloc maintained by the USA.

The exporting of health services and literacy have been affected recently for the crisis of one of its main customers: the Venezuelan government. Like with the crisis of the USSR in the 80s, the economic crisis of Venezuela has a deceitful negative on the Cuban economy. The Cuban Government tries to rearrange itself to the new situation.

This reform of the constitution of Cuba will bring nothing new. Only adjusting the process or adjustments to the  search of collecting of investors of capital and of access to the international market. As is proper of the opportunists, of these false socialists, we observe confirmations “we are facing a total reform in the framework of the principles that establish socialism” said Homero Acosta, secretary of the state council, to show before the members of parliament the changes that are expected to carry forward in the constitution and for whom Cuba is expected to be “a socialist state of rights”. But so sorry are they to recognize the “objective existence of the law of the market”.

The State Capitalism in Cuba is necessary to grow fiscal income for taxes on private entrepreneurs; necessary to vitalize the demand for goods of investment by private companies (national or transnational) and increase the penetration of foreign investment. This explains the path being taken towards the elimination of subsidies on the prices of products and services and the elimination of the Ration Card, towards monetary reunification and currency devaluation. Private mercantile activities that have remained hidden or buried in the Cuban economy are flourishing with increasing force. This is what some Cuban opportunists have called “the passage to a new, more functional type of socialism”. It is pending the detachment that the State will have to make of broken and unviable companies that have been for decades “white elephants”, technologically backward and with products out of all competitiveness in the international markets.

Some opportunists of the so-called “left” will begin to see in these changes as the “return of capitalism to Cuba”; but the truth is that capitalism never left Cuba; the accumulation of capital was centralized by the State and nothing more than that; however, it has nothing to do with the socialism which Cuba has been propagandized so much in the international arena.

Today the Cuban bourgeois government only reforms its State Capitalism and its economic policies try to adjust to the effects of the world crisis of capitalism. Faced with a salary equivalent to 20 dollars a month and pensions of 10 dollars a month, the demands of the salaried workers will have to take shape and, sooner rather than later, be transformed into a political struggle. In Cuba, as in the rest of the world, the proletariat will have to rediscover its historical revolutionary objectives and resume the class struggle.