Authors: Dervla Murphy
Very slowly we traversed a wide plain, shimmering in the heat, its
cane-fields
eventually replaced by treeless pastureland where Brahmin cattle mingled with fine herds of multi-coloured goats. Passing Dos Rios I saluted Martí’s ghost and wondered why such an intelligent man behaved so stupidly on meeting a small posse of Spaniards. Impulsively he charged them (wearing his black frock-coat and bowtie!) and was shot through the neck, becoming the war’s first casualty. As a poet and philosopher, untrained for the battlefield, he should have stayed with the rearguard.
Soon after joining the Santiago-Bayamo road at Jiguani we met the ambulance, then picked up three more hitch-hikers. At Bayamo bus station I invited Diego to have a farewell Hatuey in the hidden peso bar where we heard that no buses left for Manzanillo on a Saturday. However, a
colectivo
was just then filling up and for CP3 I could have a seat.
More canefields separate Bayamo from the coast but on this newly repaired road our speed did something to relieve the asphyxiating midday heat. Beside me sat Alejandro, a stunningly handsome mulatto who spoke fluent if erratic English and described himself as a wind-power aficionado. An engineer, he was working on the construction of a windpark near Holguin and he urged me to take out my notebook and spread the gospel. Soon six 180-foot windmills would be generating 1,800 megawatts annually, saving Cuba about US$136,000 in oil at current prices. Using French technology, these windmills are designed to be quickly disassembled as hurricanes approach.
Showing admirable devotion to civic duty, Alejandro was going home to Manzanillo to vote next day. On discovering my interest in the election he generously offered to be my guide and interpreter; we would meet on Parque Cespedes at 9.00 a.m.
By the late 1980s increasing public discontent with over-centralisation had prompted Fidel and his advisors to institute certain reforms. In 1992 a major constitutional change enhanced Poder Popular (people’s power) by establishing a new electoral system allowing the direct election of all members of the provincial and national assemblies. (Municipal assembly members had always been directly elected.) This adjustment has been so successful that voter turnout is now high enough to provoke incredulous sneers among those to whom the Cubans’ highly developed sense of community is incomprehensible.
Because voting is not compulsory in Cuba the 1993 election was widely regarded as a referendum on Castroism. Miami’s hard-liners ran a Radio Marti campaign, thousands of hours long, urging Cubans to boycott the election. One of their most prominent allies was Florida’s then governor, Lawton Chiles, who broadcast frequently, exhorting the Cubans to spoil their votes or stay at home. (Picture the reaction were a Cuban politician to urge US citizens to boycott an election – which almost half of them do anyway, having lost faith in their own version of democracy.) When Havana launched a counter-campaign, calling for a big turnout, Miami accused them of ‘distorting the democratic process’ and continued confidently to forecast ‘fifty per cent spoiled or blank’.
On 24 February 1993 over a hundred journalists from twenty-one countries, and numerous foreign visitors, were free to observe both the voting and the counting. No one, anywhere, accused anyone of fraud. Support for Castroism came from eighty-eight per cent of the electorate, ninety-nine per cent of whom had voted – and this despite multiple external misfortunes and internal misjudgements having reduced the island to near-starvation point. Beyond doubt, the government had a renewed mandate. This was recognised even by Elizardo Sanchez, then President of the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation and one of the government’s best-known resident
opponents
. Five years later, after the 1998 election, he again acknowledged ‘the renovation of the mandates and the legitimacy of the government’. In 2003 he made no comment when a ninety-seven per cent voter turnout gave Castroism ninety-one per cent support.
When Bush II rants on about ‘liberating Cuba from the Communist tyranny of one-party rule’ he is riding the wrong horse. The ideal of single-party rule, symbolising national unity, derives from Martí’s thinking and is therefore respected by Cubans as no Soviet imposition would be. Martí’s Cuban Revolutionary Party healed many of the wounds caused by faction fighting among Cuba’s ‘rebels’ and also united the island’s
revolutionaries
with their exiled supporters in the US and elsewhere.
After his exile in Spain, Martí lived for seven years in the US, working as a political journalist and studying US democracy. He had this to write in 1885:
Capitalists, in exchange for laws that are favourable to their undertakings, support the party that offers those laws … Both parties govern equally abusively wherever they govern, for both are slices of the same people; since upon no major question do they differ, but are divided equally … Elections are quite costly. The capitalists and large companies help the needy candidates with their campaign expenses; once the candidates are elected, they pay with their slavish vote for the money laid out in advance.
By the 1880s multi-party politics was already distrusted in Cuba as a device used by the Spaniards to weaken the revolutionary movement. Nowadays the system is distrusted because US intervention (already planned and funded, as Caleb McCarry repeatedly informs us) could only return Cuba to the era when the US embassy selected candidates for all elections, assisted by special envoys sent from Washington. Caleb McCarry is not the first of his kind; several US Mafia leaders then living in Havana influenced the choice of candidates as no Cuban citizen could do. There is enough gruesome evidence strewn around the globe to prove the undesirability of importing US-style democracy-cum-free-marketeering.
The common assumption that ‘the Red threat’ ignited US hatred for ‘Castro’s Revolution’ is wholly false. Two years before Fidel defined the Revolution as ‘Socialist’, and before the new Cuba had even established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, President Eisenhower signed the Pluto Plan, authorising the CIA to destabilise Cuba. Quite simply, Washington saw the island as US property – now stolen. In 1963 Robert Scheer and Maurice Zeitlin wrote:
The tragic course of US-Cuba relations has been encouraged and accelerated by the US government’s foreign policy towards Cuba. That policy acted both to change political attitudes among the Cuban leaders
and to increase the probability that men already holding Communist or pro-Soviet beliefs would move into positions of influence and power within the revolutionary movement.
The Revolution’s first year saw an extraordinary upsurge of popular energy as control of workplaces and neighbourhoods was secured, without violence, by the ordinary people. Interim town councils replaced the
batistianos
. Every aspect of public life was quickly and bloodlessly
transformed
, something that could not possibly have been done without the support of the majority. Incredulously the world watched as Fidel and his
compañeros
issued one thousand five hundred (or so) laws and decrees in the first nine months of 1959 and formed a well-trained armed militia, ignoring the US State Department’s increasingly angry shouts and the recall of the US ambassador. Never before in Latin America had a new government got away with calmly and methodically implementing its nationalist/reformist programme in opposition to US interests. Within eighteen months the old political parties had faded away, not repressed or intimidated but having accepted their irrelevance; the arrival of the
barbudos
really had marked a popular revolution, immune to civil
disturbances
or faction fighting. Meanwhile outsiders continued to expect the
barbudos
to be overthrown but at the Bay of Pigs those to whom that task had been delegated were themselves defeated – a victory which sealed the Revolution’s triumph, filling the Cubans with pride, confidence and gratitude towards their leaders.
For several years Revolution-speak was innocent of tedious Communist formulae. The Movement’s anti-oligarchic and popular character was emphasised but without mention of the proletariat or the working-class, per se. Fidel made it clear on 12 March 1959 that if the rich and privileged abandoned their privileges their contribution to the new Cuba would be much appreciated. ‘The privileged will not be executed but privileges will be.’ He warned the rich not to try to evade revolutionary measures through bribery and corruption. ‘I ask everyone to make a sacrifice, to continue making a sacrifice for the country through this creative effort, because the Revolution doesn’t preach hatred, the Revolution preaches justice … ’ Two days later Fidel’s little brother, the twenty-eight-year-old Raúl, echoed him – ‘To those who in miniscule numbers are against the Revolution, we tell them in good faith – because in principle we don’t wish evil for
anyone
– we make a patriotic appeal to them to adjust to the new situation, to adapt to the brilliant process which began on the First of January.’ In June
Fidel pointed out that those attempting to light the class fuse were the counter-revolutionaries. Addressing more than one thousand members of the Havana Bar Association, he demanded, ‘What do they want? To provoke class war? To incite class hatred when it is our wish that the Revolution should be seen as the work of the whole nation?’ Many in that audience heeded him and became essential props of a process that needed a whole flock of legal eagles to oversee its legitimate development.
Fidel has repeatedly been accused of hyper-duplicity because in March 1959 he spoke of elections within the next two years or so, when the new regime had settled down – while allegedly he was planning to consolidate his dictatorship. In a TV interview he replied to US journalists, ‘We are favourable to elections, but elections that will really respect the people’s will, by means of procedures which put an end to political machinations’. He spoke of the need for genuine democracy rather than elections. ‘The government now is at the service of the people, not of political cliques or oligarchies. We have democracy today, for the first time in our history. What is really odd is that those who have no popular support talk about elections.’ Unsurprisingly, given the people’s memories of past elections, a June opinion poll, run by
Bohemia
magazine, showed sixty per cent against elections and ninety per cent in favour of their new government. Most Cubans clearly saw the difference between liberal multi-party democracy and their new revolutionary democracy. Hence their reaction to the First Havana Declaration, approved by more than a million people assembled in the Plaza de la Revolucion on 2 September 1960. Hostile historians dismiss this event as ‘mob rule’ or ‘crowd hysteria’, quoting no more than a phrase or two. In part, Fidel said:
Close to the monument and the memory of José Martí, in Cuba, free territory of America, the people, in the full exercise of the inalienable powers that proceed from the true exercise of the sovereignty expressed in the direct, universal and public suffrage, has constituted itself in a National General Assembly.
The National General Assembly of the People of Cuba expresses its conviction that democracy cannot consist only in an electoral vote, which is almost always fictitious and handled by big landholders and professional politicians, but in the rights of citizens to decide, as this Assembly of the People is now doing, their own destiny. Moreover, democracy will only exist in Latin America when its people are really free to choose, when the humble people are not reduced – by hunger,
social inequality, illiteracy and the judicial system – to the most
degrading
impotence. In short, the National General Assembly of the People of Cuba proclaims before America:
The right of peasants to the land; the right of workers to the fruit of their work; the right of children to education; the right of sick people to medical and hospital attention; the right of youth to work; the right of students to free, experimental and scientific education; the right of Negroes and Indians to ‘the full dignity of man’; the right of women to civil, social and political equality; the right of the aged to a secure old age; the right of states to nationalise imperialist monopolies, thus rescuing their wealth and national resources …
Those hostile historians who jeer at ‘crowd hysteria’ fail to see the connection between that Plaza de la Revolucion Assembly and its Latin American background as elucidated by Professor D. L. Raby:
The idea of the people taking up arms to achieve liberation is central to Latin American political culture, and it by no means excludes other forms of struggle and participation. It is intimately linked to the concept of popular sovereignty, that sovereignty really does reside in the people as a whole and not in the propertied classes or in any hereditary group or privileged institution. The people, moreover, constitute themselves as political actors by collective mobilisation, not merely by passive reception of media messages or individualised voting. The secret ballot is undoubtedly regarded as essential, but as inadequate unless
accompanied
by mass organisation and mobilisation … Hence the resonance of the term ‘revolution’ tends to be positive, unlike in contemporary Europe or North America where it has come to be associated with irrational violence or dogmatic sectarianism. For the same reasons, ‘democracy’ in Latin America is popularly associated with collective rights and popular power, and not just repressive institutions and liberal pluralism.
Considering the functions of the provincial assemblies and the National Assembly, Isaac Saney has written:
The goal of achieving unity and consensus is central. The unanimous votes that occur are not indicative of a rubber-stamp mentality but of a consensus that is arrived at through extensive and intensive discussion, dialogue and debate that precedes the final vote in the National
Assembly
: the end-point of a long, conscientious and sometimes arduous
process … A critical aspect of the Cuban political system is the
integration
of a variety of mass organisations into political activity. No new policy or legislation can be adopted or contemplated until the appropriate organisation or association representing the sector of society that would be directly affected has been consulted.
Castroist democracy has gradually evolved into something quite original, by means of various constitutional adjustments, and Arnold August
describes
Electoral Law No. 72 as ‘At first sight … an incomprehensible labyrinth’. I do not intend to lead you there; suffice to say that the municipal elections are by far the most democratic. The Cuban municipality is like no other and not at all what the term suggests to our ears – a city authority. It may be part of a large city but according to Article 102 of the Constitution:
The municipality is the local society having, to all legal effects, a juridical personality. It is politically organised according to law, covering a surface area that is determined by the necessary economic and social relations of its population, and with the capacity to meet the minimum local needs.
Down on the ground (an important place) Cubans elected to run their municipality do a lot of serious decision-making. Delegates are elected for two and a half years, provincial assembly and National Assembly delegates for five years. Sixteen is the voting age, for all Cubans except convicts and those declared mentally disabled by a court. Any citizen over sixteen may be elected at municipal and provincial levels though delegates to the National Assembly must be over eighteen. No organisation is allowed to nominate a municipal candidate but any individual can nominate any other individual on the voters’ list for that constituency. Approximately fifty per cent of National Assembly delegates, from whom the Council of State is chosen, start out as municipal delegates. The National Electoral Commission has no legal link with the state and candidates for any of the assemblies are ineligible to serve on it. Electoral Commissions must be established at least three months before polling days, voter registration being one of their main responsibilities. An unusual feature of Cuba’s election season is the vast body of volunteers who for nine months devote much time and energy to ensuring orderly and efficient polling days and vote-counting.