In a recent podcast, Helen Yaffe’s claims about the virtues of Cuban democracy paint a one-sided picture of the amount of choice available to Cubans. One can praise aspects of the Cuban system at the social level, historic foreign policy (Angola etc) and so on, denounce the US and its blockade, but there’s no need to make exaggerated claims about Cuban democracy.
As she acknowledges, people are elected based on their personal virtues, their record (service in Angola, helping the community) etc., or from being selected representatives of state-led transmission belt organizations like the trade unions, student organizations etc. It is a process completely empty of any political contestation, except perhaps in a very limited way, within the framework of allowed dissent (although dissent is really too strong a word). No one who stands in an election can present an alternative policy platform from the government in either specifics or fundamentals.
Someone said in a previous episode Cuba had a democratic system that was republican but not liberal. This is credulous. Cuba is at best a consultative democracy, with heavy emphasis on the consultative aspect over actual democratic control. In my opinion, it is pretty bad to use the word democracy to describe a system when party members in the one-party system cannot advocate any policies in contradiction to the leaders the government, and electors cannot say elect a socialist running on an independent platform to office at any level or – shock, horror – who might happen to be a member of another political party.
If part of the Cosmonaut project is a reassessment of the relationship of the socialist project towards republicanism, then the word democracy has to mean something and not just be used as a plaything, a mere label without any substantive content to be applied to this or that state you happen to like, regardless of how close to or not it is to the established republican-democratic and socialist criteria.
Comradely,
Victor Osprey, writer and socialist from Australia
