We Are Cuba – How a Revolutionary People Have Survived a Post-Soviet World

By Helen Yaffe

Yale University Press - 2020

Reviewed by Steve Halpern

Before I look at Helen Yaffe’s wonderful book, I think it is important to look at our current reality to place this book in context.

Today, the United States has become the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thousands are losing their lives, and there are severe shortages of medical supplies. There is a 30% unemployment rate and people are being left on their own to figure out how to survive. How could this be happening in the most affluent nation in the world?

First, we can say, that without a doubt, the U.S. government had warnings, years ago, that this pandemic was bound to happen. Dr. Michael T. Osterholm published his book Deadliest Enemy – Our War Against Killer Germs in 2017. In his book, Dr. Osterholm not only predicted the inevitability of the pandemic, he also reported on the global supply network that would make the United States vulnerable to supply shortages during a pandemic. Dr. Osterholm’s book was one of several books warning of the pandemic we are now experiencing.

How did the United States government respond to this information? They voted to fund a project to build the F-15 fighter bomber that would cost $1.5 trillion. After the government became aware that thousands of people in this country were becoming infected with COVID-19, what did they do?

They had a unanimous vote to give corporations trillions of dollars in a government bailout. While the pro-capitalist news media reported on some aspects of this unfolding story, they have routinely supported military funding, as well as corporate bailouts.

Reading these sentences, we might get the idea that the government and the press are made up of a bunch of stark-raving lunatics. However, when we take a closer look at what is happening, we see that these seemingly criminal policies are routine in the political economic system of capitalism.

Today the international capitalist system is based on finance. Whenever we pay for any commodity, we are also paying for interest on loans to banks. This means that banks depend on a flow of obscene amounts of money for their survival. When most of the economy stopped due to the pandemic, the flow of money to banks also stopped. Without that continuous flow of money, banks will be in the position where they will need to close their doors. This could mean that basic financial transactions would all come into question.

So, while the policies of the government appear to be sheer madness, this reality explains why politicians argue that these same policies are absolutely necessary. Understanding this reality, we might appreciate Dr. Helen Yaffe’s new book, We Are Cuba – How a Revolutionary People Have Survived a Post-Soviet World.

Dr. Yaffe is a Visiting Fellow at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. During the mid 1990s, Yaffe was eighteen years old and lived in Cuba with her sister. These were the years of considerable shortages on the island. The considerable support Cuba had been receiving from the Soviet Union was over. So, from that perspective, Dr. Yaffe was able to see the how the Cuban people transformed themselves to deal with this crisis. Just as Fidel Castro was the leader of the 1959 Revolution, Fidel also led Cuba in this new transformation.

Reading this book, I began to think that the events of the 1990s signaled a Second Cuban Revolution. However, when we look at Cuban history, we realize that the independence struggle started in the year 1868 with the revolutionary movement against Spain. So, perhaps it might be more accurate to say that the events of the 1990s were a culmination of over 150 years of Cuban revolutionary history.

The economics of Ernesto Che Guevara

When the world began to see the full impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States predicted that the revolutionary government of Cuba would also collapse. Clearly, the last thirty years of history has proven the C.I.A.’s prediction to be nothing more than a fantasy. The question that Dr. Yaffe’s book begins to answer is: How did Cuba survive for those thirty years?

We can begin to look at this question from the economic writings of Ernesto Che Guevara when he was the Minister of Cuban Industries. Before Dr. Yaffe wrote this book, she wrote an entire book on Che’s economic ideas.

Che rejected the economics of the Soviet Union, that developed from the time of Joseph Stalin, who organized to murder the entire leadership of the Russian Revolution. That decentralized approach encouraged individual enterprises to produce, and received economic incentives based on quantities of production.

Che argued that this “hybrid” system used capitalist methods but lacked the efficiency of capitalist production. The efficiency of capitalism is based on the routine coercion of the working class that produces all wealth. Workers understand that the kind of democracy we see is the, “do it their way, or hit the highway” style of democracy.

Che’s Budgetary Finance System centralized the control of the economy with the government. Workers were motivated by seeing that socialist planning was superior to the capitalist dog-eat-dog system. The government would use its power to determine the needs of society, and organize production accordingly.

Because Cuba had a single crop economy, initially the idea was to increase the production of sugar to gain more funding for the economy. That effort failed. Then, the priority was to strengthen relations with the Soviet Union.

So, for years thousands of Cuban students trained in the Soviet Union or in Eastern Block countries. Cuba had a huge number of Soviet made gasoline powered tractors used for tilling the land. There were also massive quantities of fertilizer used for sugar production. Because of the Cuba-Soviet relationship, for several years the Cuban people had relatively comfortable lives. This relationship ended with the collapse of the Soviet block.

So, given that 80% of Cuban trade collapsed with the end of the Soviet Union, this was why the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States predicted the fall of the Cuban revolutionary government. Therefore, new measures needed to be adapted. The Cuban leadership began to return to the economic methods promoted by Ernesto Che Guevara.

The Special Period

In the United States there are routine downturns in the economy. Today, we are living through one. When this happens, workers can lose our jobs, our health insurance, or our homes. Then, there is the humiliating experience of spending day after day looking for a job. Parents need to do all this, while attempting to create a positive atmosphere for their children. Then, when a worker finally finds a job, they are oftentimes motivated to work all the overtime they can, losing even more contact with their families. 

On July 26, 1989 Fidel Castro gave a speech in Agramonte Square in Camaguay. He argued that even if the USSR collapsed and the United States prevented all imports to Cuba, the Cuban people would continue to resist. Why was Fidel so confident of these words?

Before the Revolution, many people who lived in Cuba lacked direct access to running water, electricity, health care, and education. Today, those conditions affect literally hundreds of millions of people throughout the world.

In 1987 I was a member of a brigade that worked to build a day care center outside of the town of Matagalpa in Nicaragua. There, I witnessed the living conditions that much of the world experiences. A worker testified that he never saw an electric light bulb before the Sandinista Revolution. During the three weeks that I lived in this area, three children died of easily preventable diseases. In the world, the United Nations reported that about 30,000 children die every day due to preventable diseases.

Michael Parenti visited Cuba shortly after the revolution. He asked a farmer in a remote area of the island: Why did he support the revolution? The farmer answered that before the revolution, when someone became ill, they needed to transport the patient for two days to gain access to medical care. After the revolution, the government organized to build a health care center in the village where this farmer lived. These are some of the reasons why Fidel Castro was confident that the Cuban people would resist any efforts to reimpose capitalism on the island.

So, with the collapse of the USSR, the masses of Cuban people experienced a significant deterioration in their standard of living. The embargo by the United States government greatly exacerbated the crisis.

One response to the crisis was to legalize the dollar. This became necessary because of the power of the United States economy in the world. This meant that Cubans who had families living in the United States would have access to money and commodities that would be unavailable to most Cubans.

All these measures meant that most Cubans lost a few pounds of weight during those years. Ironically, in spite of these hardships, the infant mortality rate went down, and the years of life expectancy went up during these same years. The percentage of people who suffered from the disease diabetes also decreased.

The crisis in Cuba became so sharp that many decided to leave the island. However, the confidence people had in the revolution gave most people the determination to remain in their homeland and struggle against the difficult conditions they faced.

Agriculture

Before we look at Cuban policies with respect to agriculture, we might look at the reality faced by farmers in the United States. Before the current pandemic, about one out of every ten people in this country didn’t have enough food to eat. Today the unemployment rate has shot up to 30%. Yet, farmers are destroying food because many restaurants have closed. While food is being destroyed, the numbers of people who are lack in food security has increased.

As corporate farmers have dominated the production of food, many small farmers have been driven off the land. While small farmers find it difficult to make their farms profitable, they only receive a tiny percentage of the price supermarkets receive for those same fruits, vegetables, meats, and dairy products. 

Before the 1990s, most of the income Cuba received came from sugar, where tractors and large amounts of fertilizer were used. Because of the special period, all this changed.

Many of the farms that produced sugar closed because they could not compete on the international market. This is because sugar cane workers in other parts of the world routinely live in abject poverty, and are exposed to the instability of the capitalist market.

Responding to this crisis, the Cuban government gave large tracts of land to agricultural cooperatives that benefitted directly from the sale of food. Individual Cubans also received land where they could produce their own food. Cubans also organized to produce food in urban gardens.

However, all these measures were insufficient to fulfill all of Cuba’s needs for food. The facts are that large scale farming requires significant capital investment. Therefore, in many cases it was less expensive to import food rather than to produce that food in Cuba.

Cuban Social Workers

In the United States a large percentage of the population lives in poverty, while a tiny percentage lives in opulence. There are dramatic disparities with respect to health care, education, housing, and access to virtually all commodities.

Because of this reality, the news media reports on the, “school to prison pipeline.” Because of the astronomical costs of education, many young people view access to a university education an impossible dream.

I used to have a union job in a factory. Many of those jobs were automated or have moved to nations where the wages are between $1 and $10 per day. One day while working at that job, there was an article in the newspaper about the prevailing wages of people who sold illegal drugs. Those wages were roughly the same as the wages I was being paid. That job was one of the millions of manufacturing jobs that were eliminated in the United States.    

During the special period, there many were Cubans who lived under very difficult conditions. The government organized People’s Councils to identify those who were at risk. The government also made sure that no school or hospital was ever closed.

Before the Revolution of 1959, many women worked as prostitutes because this was the only way for them to earn a living. After the Revolution, the Cuban Federation of Women organized those women to become nurses. Many of those women transformed themselves into living a new life.

During the Special Period, some Cuban women also became prostitutes. Again, the Cuban government worked to give these women useful trades and integrate them into the economy. One of those jobs was to become social workers.

Many Cuban men and women faced difficult circumstances during the Special Period. Normally, the students with the best high school scores were the ones who went on a University education. However, in those years, the Universities opened their doors to at risk young people. They studied several liberal arts courses, and then worked to integrate more young people into this system.

Fidel Castro argued that he wasn’t interested in statistics that showed how Cubans might be doing better. He argued that when even one person experienced extremely difficult conditions, this was unacceptable. He encouraged social workers to find everyone who was at risk, and determine the specific needs of each person. Then the government would do its best to alleviate those conditions.

During those years, there were shortages of gasoline. Some Cubans were hording the gasoline in an effort to turn a profit. Many Cuban social workers monitored the use of gasoline to prevent illegal hording.

Energy Production

The first method of mass transit in the United States was by railcar. This continues to be the most fuel-efficient method of transportation. In spite of this fact, the government organized to spend trillions of dollars to build roads, bridges, tunnels, and interstate highways. These efforts were about promoting the profit drive of all the corporations related to automotive production.

As a result of those policies, today the cost of cars, insurance, gasoline, and maintenance of those vehicles has skyrocketed. Not having a car in the United States means many aspects of your life are restricted.

While most Cubans do not have cars, their attitude towards energy production is completely different. The Cuban government realized that considerable amounts of money could be saved by giving the Cuban people energy efficient appliances.

Therefore, Cubans received Chinese rice cookers and convection ovens. Cuban families also upgraded their light bulbs from incandescent, to fluorescent, to LED. Because of the centralized nature of the economy, these changes actually saved money.

Cubans also utilized renewable energy. The primary source of this energy is solar power. Many Cubans like to take about three showers every day. Much of the hot water for those showers comes from solar power. Some of these solar panels were made in China, and Cuba has also become a major supplier. 

The Cubans also use the waist in sugar production, known as bagasse, as a source of fuel. Cuba also has an evasive weed known as marabú. These plants cover about 18% of the Cuban landscape. Marabú is also being used as a source of fuel. Cuba also has a factory that converts plastics into material that is used for construction and furniture.

Clearly Cuban energy needs continue to be a problem. However, Helen Yaffe’s book gives a nice outline of how Cuba is using every method at its disposal to deal with this problem.

Health Care

The United States spends more money on health care, per person, than any other nation in the world. Yet, during the past thirty years, about 400,000 hospital beds were eliminated.

In order to receive medical care in this country, patients need to be insured by one of the many private insurance companies. None of the workers in those insurance companies directly care for patients. Insurance companies merely move money from one place to another. Because these corporations are motivated by profit, they are all obsessed with cutting costs and minimizing health care.

In Cuba things are different. Even during the most difficult years, no Cuban hospital closed. However, funding for those hospitals did decrease. Cuban doctors needed to come up with new ways of treating diseases.

They did this by working to encourage lifestyle changes that would be healthier. Because meat products were not as available, and there were more community gardens, Cubans started eating more fruits and vegetables.

Because the drugs marketed by pharmaceutical corporations are expensive, Cuban doctors made routine visits to their patients, and gave suggestions that would lead to a healthier lifestyle.

This was especially effective with pregnant women. Cuban women and children get routine medical checkups. This doesn’t happen for all women in the United States. As a result, today Cuba has a lower infant mortality rate than the United States. This is in spite of the fact that doctors in Cuba have much fewer technical resources.

Today, Cuban doctors and medical students are going door-to-door checking on Cuban residents for symptoms of COVID-19. When a resident has the symptoms of the pandemic, they are transferred to a location where they are tested. If they test positive, they are quarantined for two weeks. If necessary, they are treated for the disease. This kind of care is unthinkable in the for-profit health care system of the United States.   

Many doctors and nurses from other countries come to the United States because the salaries here are higher. Critics of this trend have labelled it as a “brain drain” from underdeveloped nations. This means that less developed nations spend considerable resources to train doctors, only to see them leave the homeland for more money.

The U.S. government has promoted a Medical Parole Program to attract Cuban doctors who might be attracted to the higher salaries in the United States. Less than ten percent of the Cuban doctors took advantage of that program.

In their effort to promote this program, the U.S. government has labelled Cuban doctors who treat patients all over the world as victims of state sponsored “human trafficking.” This charge is not only insulting to Cuban doctors, but also to the millions of patients who they have treated. Even the New York Times ran an editorial critical of the U.S. charge against Cuba of human trafficking.

Cuban doctors have been training doctors from some of the poorest nations in the world. Most of these doctors continue to practice in their homeland. As a result, some of the least affluent patients are receiving health care.

Thousands of Cuban doctors have also travelled to over one-hundred nations in the world in the sixty years since the Revolution. During those numerous missions, Cuban doctors treated millions of patients who otherwise would not have had medical care. In the United States the priorities are the exact opposite. Here, the least affluent patients oftentimes receive less than adequate care if they receive any care at all.

Scientific Research

Much of the pharmaceutical research in the United States is funded by the government. When a drug company sees a potential drug that might be profitable, they take over that research in hopes that a new drug can be patented. If this new drug comes to market, drug companies routinely charge astronomical prices for that drug. This is how the drug companies have become so profitable. They use some of those profits in massive advertising campaigns that we routinely see on the television.

Because of the astronomical prices of commercial drugs, as well as the U.S. embargo against Cuba, the Cuban government supported efforts to develop their own pharmaceutical research. The U.S. research into new drugs is commercially motivated.

In the treatment of cancer, doctors routinely prescribe radiation or chemotherapy. While this treatment can be effective, chemotherapy can also kill healthy cells, and at times, even causes the death of a patient.   

On the other hand, Cuban pharmaceutical research has been largely about finding ways to teach an individual’s immunological system to fight infections. This research began with a visit by U.S. oncologist Randolph Clark Lee. Dr. Lee convinced Fidel Castro that his interferon research might be effective in treating disease by stimulating the immunological system.

The Cubans began an intensive program to develop an interferon treatment. When the Cuban researchers finally came up with their own interferon, about 340,000 Cubans were infected in the potentially fatal disease of dengue. The Cuban interferon treatment proved to be effective in treating those infected with dengue.

Today, the Cuban interferon drug Alpha-2B has been shown to be effective in preventing COVID-19 patients from developing pneumonia. Cuba manufactures massive quantities of this drug in China. Nations around the world are discovering that Alpha 2B is effective. Because of the U.S. trade embargo, COVID-19 patients might be dying because the government refuses to import Alpha-2B.

Democracy

In the United States politicians and media pundits routinely argue that we live in a “democracy.” This argument is based on the fact that most people living in the United States have the right to mark-up ballots in voting booths one day every year.

The news media gives a massive amount of publicity to candidates in the Democratic and Republican Parties who are ardent supporters of the capitalist system. Those candidates who support socialist politics are routinely ignored by the media. As a result, most people don’t know the names of the socialist candidates who are running for office. While Bernie Sanders claims to support the idea of socialism, his actions indicate that he is completely tied to the capitalist political economic system.

Because of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Cuban people needed to make some difficult decisions. So, the government organized a national discussion about a new constitution. These discussions complemented the routine discussions Cubans have about the issues they face.

Government officials are not only members of the Cuban Communist Party, but consist of all those who have shown that they are effective in resolving problems. Because of this reality, campaigning for offices in the government is illegal. People living in their communities understand who are the most effective people organizing the functioning of the community.

Dr. Yaffe has an entire chapter of her book dedicated to the history of the United States government’s embargo against Cuba. She argues that the Cuban people have responded to that history by effectively writing a “rulebook on resiliency.”

With the current pandemic, the world is seeing the unmasking of the capitalist system. People who have power are demanding that workers risk our lives, so they can continue to maximize profits on their investments. However, the downturn in the economy will, no doubt, have consequences that are difficult to predict.

Dr. Helen Yaffe’s book gives clear evidence that there is an alternative. If humanity were to utilize the tremendous productive forces for human needs and not for profit, the world would be a profoundly better place. The Cuban example gives us good reason to believe that idea is not an impossible dream, but a real possibility.