[NYTr] Cuba: Risks and Hopes on this New July 26th
 
Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2007 17:49:41 -0500 (CDT)


Via NY Transfer News Collective  *  All the News that Doesn't Fit
 
Progreso Weekly - Jul 26, 2007
http://www.velaccess.com/~progres1/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=70&Itemid=1

Cuba: Risks and Hopes

On the occasion of this new July 26

By Manuel Alberto Ramy

To the press, as well as to many analysts, foreign theoreticians and
Cubanologists (a profitable profession to some), practically nothing is
happening now in Cuba. At most, there is a simple substitution process
that, whether transitory or not, lacks any significance. Many
journalists who think that way write their articles mischievously,
needling the Cuban authorities to elicit a response. But they run
headlong into people who have spent half a century dealing with rogues
twice their size.

What's happening on the island is something more than a transitory or
permanent transfer of power, something more than a simple relay of the
executive post, or a transition within the high circles of government.
Of course, everything begins within those circles. Fidel Castro, the
historic leader of the Cuban process, knows that perfectly well and
therefore is beyond what's merely circumstantial and inevitable.

Both Fidel and RaC:l know that this is an operation more delicate and
transcendental than the raid on the Moncada barracks in 1953. They are
preparing the transition of power to a new generation and, logically,
they want to leave the house as orderly as possible to satisfy the
traditional views of their own generation. But they also want to leave
the windows open to the fresh breezes brought by the young people who
were formed by the very process Fidel and RaC:l led. And this
unavoidable requirement constitutes both the first risk and the new
hope.

Fidel Castro is not just taking pills and writing reflections. No one
should be so naive as to think that. "I am now doing what I must do,"
he said (more or less) in one of his reflections. He has a strategic
global vision that frames the necessary changes and their boundaries,
some of which he outlined in a recent article on youth-related topics.
Fidel also represents the balance and equilibrium of the different
forces that move inside the system.

RaC:l Castro is not a mere executor. Unquestionably, he participates in
the strategic design and also works as an engineer at the construction
site. The latter task is daunting, because he must launch and guide the
new style of work, inasmuch as Fidel's heir is (as Fidel clearly
defined it) the Party, and the Party has grown as new generations have
been born.

There will be no "Fidel-style" leadership; there will be a team
leadership. And that's already happening, as a lucid and intellectual
Cuban priest, Msgr. Carlos Manuel de CC)spedes, told our fine friend and
journalist LucC-a LC3pez Coll in a work published by IPS: a change in
style already implies a change. To Marxists, the translation is easy:
form and content constitute a dialectical unit.

If the reader is a good observer, he must have observed that every time
that RaC:l Castro (as interim president) met with foreign visitors last
year, he did so in the company of all the government and party
officials who were connected with the topic at hand. There were even
meetings where a department chief was invited to participate.

The government functions as a team; the tasks are distributed;
responsibilities are demanded; ministers are asked to manage and
account for greater rationality in plans and goals. I ask the reader to
note that the housing construction projections, which originally called
for 100,000 new houses every year, are down to 70,000 this year -- and
even that figure will be hard to achieve. The hope

More than 70 percent of all Cuban people were born after the triumph of
the Revolution in 1959 and a great many of them never lived through the
best stage of the process, in the mid-1980s. They have only lived
through the Special Period, with its penuries, difficulties and loss of
values.

But this, and no other, is the human geography of Cuba, the majority
and determining population, either as producers of goods and services
or political leaders and state officials.

This is a generation of Cubans who have received an education with
First World resources and characteristics. They handle sciences and
state-of-the-art technologies; they are people with minds prepared for
the complexity of today's realities, both domestic and international.
They are open to dialogue and, most particularly, they are very
rational.

The generation that will assume power in the foreseeable future is the
generation that has developed -- despite enormous difficulties -- the
leading sciences of the 21st Century: biotechnology and cybernetics.
When dealing with people thus prepared, you can't give them simple
answers to complex problems, challenge their rationality with dogmas or
substitute apology for information and deep analysis.

I sense that the new house under construction, or the bridge being
built for the generational transition by the founders of the Cuban
process takes into account the factor of youth -- and that factor is
key. Why do I say this? I read into the details.

The first element is the repeated call to young people -- made by both
RaC:l and Fidel -- to debate ideas and devote more time to the study of
the international and national reality than to production work. That
call is not just rhetorical; I invite you to re-read my article "Signs
and signals" (From Havana; PW, June 21, 2007).

This insistence on youth comes because this new, emerging generation
must not be directed with top-heavy commands -- not that it could be.
Instead, we need to start with dialogue, reasoning and real
participation. Any ukases would be as harmful to the transition as
corruption is. Even more so, because it would annihilate the
protagonists of the continuity in the process, which is not a carbon
copy of the past but a novel re-creation where the new people are
obliged to make their mark. In the past two sessions of the National
Assembly, the critical participation of the delegates and the search
for answers to pressing problems and explanations for pending problems
were constant, much more so than reported. That's another element that
will be enriched as never before when the accounts are settled in the
next elections.

To me, it is evident -- and this is another element -- that the Party
and the government differ in their approaches to anything that has to
do with young people and the Young Communists' Union (UJC).

I repeat my usual example: every day, the difference between Granma,
the official newspaper of the Communist Party of Cuba, and Juventud
Rebelde [Rebel Youth], the UJC daily, is greater. The information, the
topics and the research are different in each paper: as they dig into
the problems, they reflect the problems of each sector.

The new style is being forged with prudence, some might say,
maintaining Marxism as an instrument critical of the capitalist
society, which has been its traditional task, and critical of our daily
life, because it is also valuable in that regard.

There will surely be readers (especially in my back yard) who will say
that there have been contradictory statements and attitudes, calls to
advance and to halt. Of course. But has anyone seen a process as
complex as Cuba's -- a process of transition, relay, and launching of
calculated innovations -- that has developed in linear fashion from its
inception? Search the history books.

The risk

We are not living in the 1960s, when the camps were well defined and
the radicalizations generated by confrontation erased the shadings.
Perhaps at that time there was no room for shadings. Today, the enemy
is the same, but the national and international realities are more
complex; they need clarity and firmness of principle. They need
delicacy in some approaches and the skill to discern those shadings
that can help us along the long strategic road. And that road leads not
only to our consolidation but also to the international reality around
us and in close geographical proximity: Latin America.

While our Motherland has been freer since the Cuban Revolution, she has
committed herself to be part of the continental process. The necessary
domestic innovations, which will open greater vistas to the individual,
the person, the citizen, carry with them some risks; the principal risk
is naivetC), a mortal sin to revolutionaries. The only antidote is
training, team work, responsible and effective participation, and
discrepancy within the options, without paying a price for such
discrepancy.

For those who will not see, let me quote my grandmother, an exceptional
and wise woman. She used to say that life was like the flamboyC!n tree:
first the flowers, then the leaf sheaths. But those people who focus on
those two details miss the bigger picture: the tree. And that's what
many people do; they're so fascinated by the leaf sheaths and flowers
that they miss the tree. 

[Manuel Alberto Ramy is Havana bureau chief for Radio Progreso
Alternativa and editor of Progreso Semanal, the Spanish-language
version of Progreso Weekly.]
       
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