The Cuban Embargo

From Random Hipatia

It is perhaps the stupidest embargo in history. It may not be as cruel as say the Iraq embargo was to the people there, but it is clearly pointless. I have no particular love for Castro, but certainly if the U.S. government is willing to engage in active trade with and let people visit China, Burma, and a host of other countries that make Cuban political culture seem progressive, this shows hypocrisy in extreme.

However, there may be a larger issue in this to consider. The embargo and open U.S. hostility makes Castro “necessary”. As Castro became “necessary” for the Cuban revolution, the revolution itself became Castro. True democratic and self sustaining revolutionary socialism was successfully aborted. It is very likely the lifetime of the Cuban revolution will now be measured in the lifetime of Castro alone. In this respect, maybe U.S. policy is not so stupid and misguided as it often appears.

Imagine if a genuine and permanent democratic revolutionary society had been permitted to come into existence. The long term threat to capitalism is very clear. This danger was so great that, even after being exhausted from the first world war, the bloodiest war in human history to that point in time, after the Bolsheviks gained power, the major powers still choose to actively intervene and participate in as well as actively support the Russian civil war. This invasion, following the already bloody German one during the first world war itself, more than anything, aborted genuine revolution in the desperate need for the new revolutionary state to simply survive. Out of that came Lenin’s centralization of power, followed by Stalin.

Similarly, today, the Venezuelan revolution risks being sidetracked in the survival of Hugo Chavez’s government from the very real risk of external invasion. For the Venezuelan revolution to succeed, it must be capable of doing so without Chavez or the government. In that Chavez chooses to use the government as the primary means of bringing revolutionary change, even if he does so differently than how some have tried in the past, this puts those changes at risks. Ideals like workplace democracy and co-management must become widespread in Venezuelan society as a whole. So long as they remain principally part of government managed enterprises, they can too easily be reversed.

It is possible to imagine how the Venezuelan revolution could be compromised and aborted by a successor who claims to promote “reform” and “compromise” while selling out real change, someone like say Lula Da Silva did to the people of Brasil, and in much the way America’s potential socialist revolution was successfully aborted by FDR, the price for which we are paying today. Education for the poor, one of Chavez’s important achievements, could easily be subverted by such a “reformer”. After all, education is also used by capitalists, as a tool to indoctrinate future workers.

I do not expect the Cuban embargo to be lifted in the lifetime of Castro, no matter how many U.N. votes or resolutions appear against it. Lifting the embargo will be the tool to reward and finance the counter-revolutionaries when Castro is gone, when the exiles return to re-open their sugar plantations, when the rum and prostitutes flow again from Havana and the tourist resorts of the elite are re-built. I expect very little of that new wealth to ever make it to the people of Cuba.