11. The Fall of the USSR, Cuba and the World Market¶
Core Argument¶
11. The Fall of the USSR, Cuba and the World Market
The collapse of the Soviet Union inflicted a catastrophic economic shock on Cuba, which by 1989 conducted 80% of its trade with the USSR and Eastern bloc and sourced 63% of its food imports from them. This lifeline vanished almost overnight. Between 1989 and 1993, Cuban GDP fell by 40%, exports by 79%, imports by 75%, and gross investment by 61%. Severe food and fuel shortages, blackouts, and transport collapse ensued. In 1991, Russia demanded world market prices and dollar payments for trade. The Castro leadership responded with Workers’ Parliaments in 1994, in which 85% of the workforce participated, demanding action against corruption, protection of free education and healthcare, and opposition to inequality. Many demands were adopted, including Decree 149 for confiscation of illicitly obtained goods. Constitutional amendments in 1992 allowed direct election of National Assembly delegates, dropped the ban on Christians joining the party, and introduced People’s Councils to revive grassroots participation. The text argues this collapse was foreseen by Lenin and Trotsky, who warned the USSR could not survive without revolution in advanced capitalist countries.
Cuba adopted liberalising measures similar to China’s 1978 reforms: legalising small businesses for tourism, permitting private farmers, cooperatives and state farms to sell above-quota produce at free market prices, and decriminalising dollar possession. Small-scale agriculture flourished, but bureaucratic mismanagement persisted. The US responded with the 1992 Cuban Democracy Act and the 1996 Helms-Burton Act. Tourism became a major income source but reinforced a layer of better-off Cubans who looked to capitalism. Joint ventures gave foreign investors effective control despite formal ownership limits. Dependency on tourism diverted agricultural production from the population. Those with dollar access could earn in one day what a healthcare worker earned monthly, promoting individual solutions over collective ones. By 1994, GDP stabilised. The military gained economic responsibilities; GAESA, a Revolutionary Armed Forces holding company, owned forty per cent of the tourism market and monopolised remittance processing.
The chapter argues that genuine workers’ control over politics and the economy is not secondary but the necessary condition for the transition to socialism. Left criticism is not dangerous to the Revolution, but to the bureaucracy. Unity of all revolutionaries is a precondition for defending the Revolution from imperialists and the right wing, but unity alone is insufficient to further its development and prevent defeat. Revolution must involve popular control over the bureaucracy, effective exercise of popular power, and purposeful critical left thought. Most regimes that called themselves socialist in the 20th century had nothing to do with real socialism; mistaking the Stalinist model for true socialism is like mistaking the Inquisition for primitive Christianity. The socialism Cuba should strive for favours freedom and equality, points to a society of free associated workers where the free development of the individual is the condition for the development of all, and where power and property belong to all — a new world with no Caesars and no bourgeois. A revolutionary cannot settle for less.