Jobs in Cuba

Here is an interesting analysis of the recent announcement from Cuba that 500,00o state workers would be losing their jobs and moved to self-employment and cooperatives. I found this section of the Q&A article to be quite illuminating:

The Media largely describes what is taking place in Cuba as a turn to capitalism–away from socialism. But is that accurate–to describe what has existed in Cuba for the past 50 years as socialism?

I HAVE always maintained that what existed in Cuba had nothing to do with socialism. But unfortunately, large sections of the left have confused state ownership with socialism.

When we talk about socialism, we should be talking about rural and urban workers–and their class allies, like the peasantry–running society together. That has never existed in Cuba.

It is true that for long periods of time, the regime was popular because it was able to deliver significant improvements in standards of living for the poorest people–and it provided a great deal of social mobility, which is something that is sometimes underplayed in terms of the popular support for the Cuban regime. Just in terms of the massive emigration of the petty bourgeoisie, the big bourgeoisie and professionals from Cuba, that alone allowed for a great number of people to take over those jobs.

But the point is that socialism, in our view, is not state ownership of the economy–because the question then is: Who controls the state? Certainly, working people in Cuba don’t control the state. Rather, it is a bureaucracy, organized around the Cuban Communist Party, that does.

So it isn’t socialism that is being replaced. A bureaucratic state ruling class has decided to incorporate as a very junior partner in the economy a newly created petty bourgeoisie–some of whom will be successful, and may become a new group of private capitalists, which has not really existed in Cuba since the 1960s.

So the bureaucracy will share power with this new group–economic power, at any rate–and a situation like China may eventually develop. But there is also the question of political power, and the central bureaucracy isn’t going to share power with newly minted capitalists unless they totally assimilate into the ruling bureaucracy. But this has also happened in China–you have capitalists joining the Communist Party and becoming a part of it.