Why Cuba?

We thought it important to explain why we are so keen to support Cuba, a small Latin American country, usually described by the media in one dimensional terms as 'one of the last remaining communist countries' – or worse - as a dictatorship.

For us, however, Cuba sets an example that is unique. It demonstrates that there can be an alternative to the ‘common sense’ of rule by the market (neoliberalism – where everything has its price, where competition is valued above co-operation, where life is reduced to a kaleidoscope of consumer choices).

Cuba has the best public education system in Latin America. It has the only public health service – one with some similarities to our National Health Service, but with a greater emphasis on primary health care, which is integrated (through the family doctor model) into the fabric of community life, and where the idea of having to wait for a necessary operation is alien.

Cuba is poor – partly because of the 40 years of economic blockade by the USA, but also because of its position as a dependent post colonial primary production economy within a fundamentally unjust system of world trade. It has struggled to overcome this, and indeed its present rate of economic growth at 6% is greater than the rest of Latin America (compare once relatively wealthy Argentina, now in a severe recession, with civil unrest, strikes, and mass emigration). Yet the visitor to Cuba is struck by the lack of gross inequality. While Guatemala and Brasil have nearly as great inequalities within their populations as there are in the world as a whole, in Cuba there is little difference – the last United Nations Human Development Report described Cuba as one of the few developing countries that have abolished poverty. Surgeons and engineers live side by side with factory workers dockers, transport workers and teachers, with the same standard of housing, health care, access to education for their children, and similar income levels. When, in the early 1990s, there were food shortages following the collapse of Cuba’s trade with the former soviet bloc, a system of rationing meant that nobody starved, and the most vulnerable were prioritised. As a Cuban slogan says

200 million children in the world sleep in the street: not one of them is Cuban. Cuba organises its government in a different way from the representative democracies – as Rousseau pointed out, the British think they are free, because once every few years they have the chance of casting a vote - and the rest of the time they take little part in politics. Cuba follows a different model - one of direct democracy, through the system of poder popular - people's power. Representatives to municipal, provincial, and national assemblies are recallable They do not need to be members of the Communist party. The people are actively involved in their community affairs through a variety of institutions - the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution, the Federation of Cuban Women, the unions, and so on. It is true, that there is only one political party, and there is restriction of dissent - but that is at present seen as the cost of protecting the social rights of the Cuban people, in the face of sustained aggression from the USA (and lesser interference from governments such as ours, which also want to overthrow the socialist system, if through more subtle means).

Cuba also shares what resources it has. It sends teams of health workers to other third world countries (for example many Cuban doctors are working in rural South Africa), and it is not unusual for people from poor countries to be invited to Cuba for medical treatment unavailable to them elsewhere. Cuba supported the struggle of the Angolan people against South African invasion - winning a decisive battle that was the turning point in the struggle against apartheid. In Havana, medical students from poor communities in the third world (and the United States) study freely - while in the School of the Americas in the USA police from Latin American countries learn methods of repression.

Cuba is no Utopia - there are many things wrong - but where else is there a system that serves first the interests of the ordinary people - the workers, the elderly, the children? Cuba shows us a that a different way is possible: it gives us images of what a just society might look like.

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