CUBA: Not One Step Backwards for Socialist System

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Jun 27 2002 (IPS) - “A step backwards? Not even to gain momentum!” goes a popular saying in Cuba that illustrates the spirit of the National Assembly, which concluded a campaign aimed at consecrating this Caribbean island nation’s socialist system.

The National Assembly (parliament) voted unanimously late Wednesday in favour of a constitutional reform that made socialism an “irrevocable” part of the Cuban constitution. Cubans were given three days off to enable them to watch the special parliamentary session in live broadcasts.

The government maintains that any capitalist-style reform would be “a return to the past,” and to “a worse way of life” than the one Cubans have experienced since the Jan 1, 1959 triumph of the revolution headed by President Fidel Castro. The government declared itself socialist two years later.

But Cuba’s political system will not stand in the way of “perfecting” socialism or searching for a “superior” system, Castro stated Wednesday night.

The reform approved by the legislature blocked a key dissident initiative, the Varela Project, making it unconstitutional, said Manuel Cuesta Morúa, secretary-general of the Democratic Socialist Current, an internal opposition group.

The Varela Project was a petition drive that gathered 11,000 signatures that were submitted to parliament by illegal dissident groups in May.

The Varela Project was seeking a plebiscite on questions like freedom of expression, association and the press, free enterprise, an amnesty for political prisoners, and the calling of general elections under new electoral rules. It took its name from a Roman Catholic priest who was one of Cuba’s independence heroes.

Cuesta Morúa, who believes the opposition must “be more realistic when it comes to proposing changes,” underscored to IPS the contradiction between the “non-retroactive nature of laws” and the possibility that Wednesday’s amendments would invalidate the previous opposition initiative.

The Varela Project has been ignored until now by parliament, and the government says the organisations that sponsored it were on the U.S. government’s payroll.

“Cuba will never return to capitalism,” states the text of the reform approved by parliament. “The response that this Assembly gives today indicates what we will do when the generation that carried out the revolution and the command of it today, when the generation of Fidel, of Raúl (Castro, minister of defence), are no longer with us,” said Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque.

Pérez Roque was refuting the idea, widespread both within and outside of Cuba, of the “biological end” of the Cuban revolution that would be ushered in by the deaths of Fidel, 75, and Raúl, 71, his brother and designated successor.

The amendments passed Wednesday also stated that “economic, diplomatic and political relations with any other state will never be negotiated under aggression, threat or coercion from a foreign power” – an allusion to the United States.

Of a total of 601 members of Cuba’s single-chamber parliament, 559 took part in the special session, and over 150 made speeches during the three days that it lasted.

The constitutional reform that declared the socialist regime “irrevocable” was proposed earlier this month by government- affiliated neighbourhood organisations that staged a petition drive which, according to the government, collected the signatures of more than eight million people – or over 99 percent of registered voters.

The government-monopolised press estimated that nine million people – out of a total population of 11.2 million – participated on Jun 12 in marches held in the main cities to back the constitutional reform and to protest recent calls for democratic and free-market reforms in Cuba by the U.S. government of George W. Bush.

An academic consulted by IPS, who wished to remain anonymous, noted that the ongoing conflict with the United States “defines the course of Cuba’s internal policies.”

During the three-day special parliamentary session, no lawmaker even mentioned the Varela Project. However, the majority of speakers did refer to Bush and his “initiative for a new Cuba”, presented on May 20.

Besides lambasting Castro, Bush conditioned the lifting of the four-decade embargo against Cuba on political and economic reforms here.

Castro’s address focused on relations between Havana and Washington, and on the “subversive” activities of U.S. diplomats on the island. He warned that the U.S. Interests Section in Cuba might be closed down if U.S. officials there continue to support dissident groups in Cuba.

For example, U.S. diplomats distributed hundreds of shortwave radios on the island to enable people to listen to the U.S. government’s Radio Marti, which is broadcast by fervently anti- Castro Cuban exiles.

The Cuban government also warned that it may abandon the bilateral accords signed by Washington and Havana to stem illegal emigration in the wake of a 1994 exodus to Florida. In the agreements, the U.S. government promised to grant a minimum number of visas to Cubans wishing to emigrate.