• Submitted by: manso
• Editorial Articles
• 11 / 01 / 2010

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Behind the New Economic Measures in Cuba: Advancing the Revolution in the Concrete World Situation of Today. Genesis of the Cuban Economic Crisis. By Ike Nahem. The legacy of Che.

Cuba needs capital in the form of advanced technology and the financing of means of production in order to industrialize, digitalize, build and rebuild its railroads, bridges, aqueducts, water systems, electrical grid, and other infrastructure and also create myriad light industrial project that can produce quality consumer items for the Cuban people and for the tourism industry.

Cuba also needs to modernize and render more rigorous and transparent its accounting methods, which suffer especially from bureaucratism as Fidel Castro stressed in his University of Havana speech. This was a central theme in the economic writings and methods of Che Guevara in the early years of the Cuban Revolution.

Central to the development of the Cuban economic and financial system as it developed under siege from US imperialism has been political and moral appeals to working people and revolutionary-minded intellectuals to defend their revolution and state power. This is particularly identified with the figure of Che Guevara and his writings on the "new socialist man and women," moral and material incentives, voluntary labor, and revolutionary internationalism. One example of this precious legacy is in the Cuban medical and educational internationalist missions around the world and the Latin American School of Medicine in Havana.

This will continue within the new orientation and the new drive to raise productivity, living standards, technological advances in the modes of production, industrialization, and increased production of materials for housing and other pressing needs. Moral incentives - as formulated and practiced by Che Guevara were always promoted as part and parcel of hard work, raising productivity, strict control and accounting of resources, application of the most modern technology, absolutely minimum bureaucratism, and integrity, honesty, and personal sacrifice at the center of everything.

No change in Cuban socialist internationalism

If the new economic policies announced in Cuba indicated a subjective embrace of the capitalist market and capitalist methods on the part of Cuba's communist leadership then this would be reflected in a shift toward renunciation of revolutionary struggle and accommodation with imperialism, that is the movement of Cuban foreign policy to the right.

There is of course no evidence of this whatsoever. Neither is there any signal whatsoever that Washington, under the Obama Administration, has any perspective of ending US sanctions and normalizing relations with the island. Washington continues its goal of subverting and eliminating the socialist revolution and workers state in Cuba.

The revolutionary government of Cuba continues to expect, look for, and, above all, politically be in active solidarity and promotion of new upsurges and victories of workers and peasants power anywhere in the world. It is a government, true to the legacy of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, which has tied its fate ultimately to the oppressed and exploited overwhelming majority of humanity.

Ike Nahem is the coordinator of Cuba Solidarity New York (cubasolidarityny@...) a member of the National Network on Cuba, and a founder of the New York-New Jersey July 26 Coalition. Nahem is an Amtrak Locomotive Engineer and member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, a division of the Teamsters Union. These are his personal political opinions.

Source: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/message/118659