Editor's note: Interviewed here are Elena Mora and John Bachtell, members of the National Board of the Communist Party USA and who traveled in late May to Cuba for celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the Cuban revolution. There, they met with representatives of the Communist Party of Cuba and leaders of various cultural and social institutions. PA: Could you talk briefly about why you went to Cuba?
ELENA MORA: John and I were lucky enough to be invited to spend a week in Cuba. The purpose of it was really just to get a sense of what is going on there now, and to meet with people from a lot of different organizations who are responsible for different areas of Cuban life, culture, and education. We also visited some clinics, and we talked to a lot of people on the street. We had a little free time and walked around a lot. Essentially we went to Cuba to get a sense of how Cuban socialism is doing.
JOHN BACHTELL: There was an official invitation by the Communist Party of Cuba, which not only reflects the long history of relations between our two parties, but also a tremendous amount of involvement in solidarity work that we have undertaken all these years.
PA: One issue that must have come up in your meetings there, and which remains a stumbling block for better relations between the US and Cuba, is the blockade. President Obama has so far resisted calls to end the blockade completely but has taken steps to open a dialog. How has this been received in Cuba?
BACHTELL: There was, I think, a bit of skepticism on the part of the Cubans we spoke with, as you can imagine after 50 years of the blockade. But they do see real steps and real openings, and they are willing to engage with the Obama administration on a whole number of levels. This process, which is much broader than anything we have seen prior to this point, reflects, on the one hand, changes in the real situation in the Americas, including the fact that Cuba is no longer as isolated at all. In fact, it is United States policy which has really been isolated globally and also in this region. This was reflected in the acclamation vote to re-accept Cuba in the Organization of American States. But it also reflects the attitude of large commercial interests in the United States, who see the potential markets in Cuba and want a change, but have really been iced out of a lot of this trade over the last few decades, beginning with the agricultural sector, but it also includes the tourism sector and others. This is reflected in the number of bills that are now pending in Congress to build on the steps the Obama administration has taken, including doing away completely with the travel restrictions and ending the Helms-Burton legislation, which has really crippled trade up until this point. We are optimistic that this process of change is going to continue, and that it’s ultimately going to lead to an end to the blockade.
PA: One issue that Cuba has taken seriously is the environment and sustainable development. Could you talk about that?
BACHTELL: The biggest practice they have implemented is that their entire agricultural sector is now based on organically-grown foods. You can trace this change back to the reality they were confronted with after the collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries. Cuba relied almost totally on the socialist community of states for their trade, and had modeled their agricultural production on a system of highly-centralized state farms. Then, when socialism collapsed, almost overnight they were forced to adopt a totally new method of agricultural production. They had also, at the same time, come to the conclusion that these big farms were also rather inefficient. But they also had a long history of agricultural cooperatives in the country, and so they began breaking these big state farms up into smaller cooperatives. They also went overnight to the use of cattle, oxen and horses, because they had no gas for their tractors and couldn’t any longer import chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Therefore they went to all-natural means of fertilizing, including composting, animal manure, and using natural means to control pests. For example, the cooperative we visited, which is on the outskirts of Havana, is a big producer of fruit, pork and milk. Everything is organically grown and no pesticides are used.
The Cuban method of production has now become internationally recognized. For example, when we were in Cuba there was an international conference on sustainable agriculture. There were hundreds of guests from around the world, including about 16 folks from the United States who were there to study it. It is really an amazing story, that they have been able to successfully develop all of these organically-grown foodstuffs. They also say that once this special period that they are engaged in now is over, they are not going back to an industrialized form of agricultural production.
MORA: I would add two things. In preparation for our trip we did a little reading, and there was an interesting article in the National Geographic about the marine eco-system around Cuba. It is said to be the most pristine, cleanest, and most protected in the whole Caribbean. They weren’t able to develop tourism as much as they wanted to, and they are now doing that, but they are clearly doing it in a different way from other countries, which were just driven by the dollar being king, or whatever the tourist currency was. In Cuba they have an attitude about nature that we heard expressed in many places, not just on the cooperative farm but in many different places, an attitude and an understanding that in this world today you just can’t ignore protecting the environment as you develop. For example, in the meeting we had with a representative from the University of Havana Department of Economics, she talked about the need for protecting the environment, and in our meeting with a leader of the Cuban Party, he also talked about the many crises facing the world, including the environmental crisis, especially the hurricanes that hit them last year. It is now pretty much understood that the severity and frequency of hurricanes in recent years is related to climate change. In Cuba they recognize the need to develop while protecting the environment, and that is pretty impressive. They realize that they have to develop as quickly as they can because they are an underdeveloped country, but they are serious about handling that kind of contradiction – the need to develop but also to do it in a way that does not damage the environment.
BACHTELL: They are also in the process of building a large wind farm on the southern coast of the country.
MORA: That’s right – and they have also undertaken in the past few years a big public campaign for energy conservation. This is another good example where it was a product of necessity. They still struggle with importing fuel and the cost of that, so they are campaigning with posters and advertisements. We saw several commercials on television about the issue of conserving energy and not wasting it. This again, I think, indicates how some of these things are forced by development and forced by necessity, but at the same time they are undertaking it in a conscious way, knowing that the environmental issues are ones that aren’t going to go away, and that socialism has to develop by taking into account protecting the environment.
PA: There are big cultural changes taking place in Cuba, as well, over issues like race, gender and sexuality. How important have these issues become there?
MORA: One of the meetings we knew we were going to have – we asked for it actually, because a previous delegation had met with a interesting Cuban institution known as CENESEX (the National Center for Sexual Education). It is a research center, and they provide classes and training for people. They also do general public education, all around issues of sexuality. The people whom we met and talked with were just so comfortable and open and enthusiastic about the process in Cuba of overcoming male supremacist attitudes (the “machista” culture, as they call it) and negative attitudes about homosexuality and women. They are doing this similarly to every other thing they do. There is just this enthusiasm and confidence and also, I would say, knowing that things take time and patience. They have organized debates that take place in movie theaters before they show a movie. They had a celebration of the United Nations Year of the Struggle Against Homophobia. They had a whole festival around that. They are tackling issues of sexuality with a public education campaign, but also with real practical help to people, resources, job training, classes, etc. They put a lot of emphasis on peer counseling in relation to issues of human sexuality. We also asked them about sex-change operations and issues of transsexuality, and they said that they are helping the Cuban Parliament rewrite some sections of the family code, which is part of the legal system, around some of these issues. When this rewriting is finished, which should be soon, those who want to have a sex-change operation will not only be able to get one, but it will be free. Everything about it will be free, which struck me as such an obvious difference between our two societies. Of course, you could say, well up until recently they had a very negative attitude about gender issues and sexuality issues, but here they are, they have struggled through it and come into the modern world about these questions, and now, because they have socialism, once they came to the conclusion that this is just part of life, this is the way human beings are – a spectrum of sexualities – they are going to provide what people need, which is what their healthcare system does, it provides what people need.
BACHTELL: Cuban is an incredibly racially diverse society. The Afro-Cubans were, of course, tremendously discriminated against before the Revolution, but they have also recognized that the struggle against racism is not an automatic struggle, but something which takes many years to really change how people think and their consciousness, in a similar way to what Elena was describing about changes in attitudes regarding sexuality. They also say that they couldn’t do anything without the Revolution, without the working class being in power and being able to initiate many changes in terms of education and so on. They call it a revolution within a revolution, that is, they struggle around ideology and consciousness. They gave us a number of examples. Maybe 20 years ago now, there was a big discussion which took place in the cultural field, particularly among filmmakers, about the roles that Afro-Cuban actors and actresses were being given. They were very critical about the kinds of roles, and that began changing. As a result, Afro-Cubans are now depicted entirely differently than they were a couple of decades ago, and there are many more prominent Afro-Cuban actors and film directors. The same thing has happened in the field of dance. At one time, there was this stereotype that Afro-Cubans weren’t cut out for classical ballet. Fidel famously challenged people’s thinking during that period and said show me the proof, the scientific proof, and no one could come up with any proof. So as a result that has also changed. Now these fields are completely open to Afro-Cuban children and dance is very integrated. These are examples of how Cuban society has changed and really dealt with the whole issue of racism by tackling it and changing people’s perceptions about race.
PA: You mentioned that you were able to visit health care facilities on your trip. Cuba is renowned for its ability to provide quality health care for its people despite being a poor country, while this is something the US, the richest country in the world, continues to struggle with. What’s the difference?
MORA: You know, it’s interesting, thinking about the perceptions of Cuba these days. I would say there is still the perception, in fact I am sure it is quite widespread, that it is undemocratic, that it’s a dictatorship, those kinds of issues. But there is also the perception that it is poor. That is kind of the new curse or onus that socialist societies have – that everybody is poor. I was thinking about that in Cuba. While it is true there are scarcities, the scarcities are spread around and shared. So there are scarcities – there are all kinds of economic problems; people have to struggle for some basic things. But they also share and spread the wealth. For example, education is completely free.
I was looking at some statistics on the cost of education in the United States the other day. Actually I don’t know why I even looked, since I have a college-aged son who is paying $26,000 a year to go to a public university. In Cuba the cost of education is free. The cost of medical care is also completely free, and rents are just nominal. The rents people pay are symbolic. I think it is an issue of choices, society’s choices. It’s obvious that the choice that Cuban society, and Cuban socialism, has made is for providing certain basic things, hugely important basic things, to everyone, and that includes health care, it includes education, and it includes more than that, although it includes those in a big way. These things were always, from the early days of the revolution, considered basic human needs that the revolution was committed to providing, things like health care and education.
The health care front goes way beyond the fact that everybody has health care for free. Cuba has taken health care to new heights, and they have done this in two ways. One is that that they now essentially export doctors. Not in a way that other third world countries do, where people leave those countries to go somewhere else because they cannot afford to live in their own country and practice medicine. Cuba has thousands of doctors, now more than 10,000, I think, who are working in other countries in underserved communities, in Venezuela, for instance, and in much of the developing world. They have so many doctors trained that not only do they take care of their own people’s health, but they provide health care around the world. They have also taken that another step – they are training doctors from those countries.
We visited the Latin American Medical School, which was a highlight of the trip for us. It is just a beautiful, amazing institution that has already trained 20,000 doctors. They have students from 39 different countries, and they are giving them a medical education that is completely free. I also did a little research on that, and 87 percent of medical students who graduate from medical school in the United States are in debt, and of them something like 75 percent have a debt of $100,000 or more. And the amount of debt is going up, not down. So the difference both in how Cuba provides medical care to people, but also how they view the providing of medical care, it’s just like night and day; it is just amazing.
They also have developed a pharmaceutical industry that has done some very innovative research, including – and again this is related to what John was saying about organic farming – developing herbal remedies, which many people in our country are interested in. They have done some careful scientific research and testing of herbal remedies, again partly out of necessity. They have also developed a pharmaceutical industry and actually export pharmaceuticals. It’s one of their top exports. It’s just like night and day; it’s a another world – because that’s their priority.
PA: How has the shift in Latin American politics generally in a progressive direction impacted the US-Cuba dynamic?
BACHTELL: I think there are huge, and really, at this point, irreversible changes that are taking place in the balance of forces, not only in North and South America, but also globally. The fact is that Cuba is no longer isolated internationally. It is actually US policy toward Cuba that has been isolated, and that speaks volumes about the direction of these developments, including the new economic trade blocs that are being established, most prominently the ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas) trade bloc, which is really replacing a lot of the relationships that have heretofore governed economic relations in this hemisphere. These are new realities that US imperialism has to contend with. The days of the superpower, the single superpower, are over with, and the United States now has to adjust to this new reality. That is also a big part of what is driving the changes the Obama administration is now beginning to make, because the Obama administration recognizes these new realities. It is trying to accommodate them and adjust its policies to better fit these new realities.
MORA: We get a sense, not just because of this visit, but I think generally, that there is a lot of excitement, not just in Cuba but in all of Latin America, about the direction things have gone, things that people probably would just not have thought possible not that long ago, such as developments among the various countries around trade and other institutions, and the new relationships that are growing. You sense a feeling of pride that Latin America is now in a sense leading the way toward a better way of organizing society and overcoming some of the huge problems that humanity faces. We think this is a new moment.
