[NYTr] An interview with Cuban intellectual Aurelio Alonso

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Progreso Weekly - Oct 11, 2007
http://progreso-weekly.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=189&Itemid=1

Dateline Havana

‘Less fearful of letting people make money’

An interview with intellectual Aurelio Alonso

By Manuel Alberto Ramy

To Aurelio Alonso, the Cuban reality has been marked not only by the
permanent hostility of the U.S. administrations "that have hampered the
normal development of changes within" but also by the alternatives open
to the island by the processes taking place in Latin America.

"Without these two elements, you couldn't understand today's Cuba," the
sociologist tells me on a Saturday afternoon, through the smoke of a
cigar "of the type sold through the ration card."

Alonso, 67, average height, rosy-cheeked, with shrewd eyes not hidden
by his glasses, is the deputy director of the magazine Casa de las
Américas. This man, who from his speech and manners could be described
as a thinking Everyman, occupies a special place in Cuba's intellectual
world, the author of a long list of books, articles, essays and
lectures. In the 1960s, he was a member of the advisory board of the
famous and controversial magazine Pensamiento Crítico (Critical
Thought.)

In between cups of coffee, I interview him.

MANUEL ALBERTO RAMY: What are the main problems faced at present by the
Cuban population?

AURELIO ALONSO: Beginning in 2004, the macroeconomy begins to recover
with some impetus, with acceptable growth. But, due to the
deterioration suffered in the 1990s, the recovery is very slow.

The macroeconomic improvement achieved by the country still is not felt
by the population. Food, housing and transportation are the weaknesses
that place us in the indices of poverty, though not among the
indicators of the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank.

Here, you can't measure values by saying that the average Cuban earns
US$40 a month, because we don't pay for education, health care,
funerals or income tax. Even the amount we pay for a divorce is so
little it's laughable. The Cuban people don't live under the same
stress as someone in the United States who earns $40,000 a year but has
to worry about spending one third of his salary on the mortgage for his
home and if he can't pay it he's out on the street.

Here, the problems are different. However, if you don't take into
account the real benefits we get and consider food, transportation and
housing, it is evident that the population lives in a high context of
deterioration.

RAMY: Raúl Castro's speech on July 26, in which he announced (but did
not define) some structural changes, has been described by many as very
critical of our reality. What is your opinion?

ALONSO: What's important is not whether it was critical of others or
self-critical. It opened the possibility of doing different things that
either never occurred to us or we couldn't do yesterday.

In agriculture, we had two visions: one, that identified agriculture as
a subsistence economy; another, that identified family farm production
-- the private producer -- with small business and therefore demonized
it.

However, most of what the population consumes is not what the
state-owned property produces. I remember the creation in the 1990s of
the Basic Units of Cooperative Production (UBPCs), which, among other
things, sought decentralization, but they were so limited in their
abilities that they left no room for the peasant. They did not provide
sufficient incentives to become what we had hoped they would.

I think that when Raúl talks about structural changes he's thinking
that the country must procure an effective agricultural sector, even if
it doesn't supply 100 percent of the needs but only 70 or 80 percent of
what we consume.

RAMY: Are effective cooperatives a way to solve the problem of food?

ALONSO: Raúl is not launching a program -- yet. He has issued a call
and announced a disposition. He is announcing that the country's
political leadership is not unwilling to make the changes that seem to
be necessary and timely to increase production and productivity. I
think he is referring to the world of agricultural production and its
relation to the industrial and service sectors.

RAMY: Will it be necessary to give producers other incentives?

ALONSO: Historically, there has never been an incentive device to
produce the foods we want. In my opinion, it would be worthwhile to
tell a family: "Look, here you have 10 hectares. Work the land however
you wish. Whatever you produce, you sell in the market; or you deliver
a minimal portion to the state." The family should not invest all its
productive effort for the benefit of the state.

In the end, we should be less fearful of letting people make money. If
you give people the space to live better and to triple what they give
to society, hey, they should live better.

I remember that Che, the great promoter of moral stimuli, once said
that it is not possible to expect a superior form of stimulus from a
population that's starving. In other words, society must first satisfy
its basic needs.

RAMY: You have just mentioned the market. Speculating on the possible
changes, what role do you think the market should play?

ALONSO: That's a question for which nobody today has an answer. What
everybody will tell you is that the market must play a role. I believe
that, too.

Marx never proposed the possibility of crushing the market. Marx
proposed the possibility of a society that surpasses the market. You
can't issue four decrees, expropriate 20,000 small businesses and
abolish the market.

The vision of a possible socialism also includes the existence (albeit
transitory) of a market controlled by a state that is increasingly
democratic, where the citizen participates more effectively and where
the Assembly of the People's Power, which meets only twice a year,
deals with the country's needs.

Whenever we see that the market makes contributions that are not
outrageous, why not adopt them? And if possible surpass them, because
that's the time to go beyond the market.

RAMY: As a journalist, I have recently heard two constant themes among
the population and on the Internet, such as the forum-debates. One is
the effective participation of the citizen, as a greater form of
socialist democracy; the other, entrepreneurial self-management, as the
magnification of socialism. What can you tell me about that?

ALONSO: I don't think that self-management as a concept is
reprehensible or cannot be included within a scheme of socialization.
The problem is that self-management failed in Yugoslavia because it was
adopted with a Stalinist methodology and style. In other words, there
was self-managerial dogmatism.

I don't favor a self-managerial model. I favor the concept where we
must think about what's the greatest level of participation from the
grassroots structures. We have a serious problem in our People's Power
system.

RAMY: What is that?

ALONSO: The municipalities have no power to decide anything; they have
no budget. We have been unable to find mechanisms of decentralization
that lead us to joint ventures, to an increase in small ownerships, to
a more flexible view of the economy. We have been unable to
decentralize economic devices. Everything emerges from the State's main
budget and trickles down.

That's no good. We have to make space for the municipalities to create
their own resources, handle them and even impose municipal taxes upon
private enterprises that operate within them. The same with the
provincial governments.

                              ***

Indisputably, Aurelio Alonso continues to be the profound Marxist, the
often-irreverent revolutionary (irreverence being a Cuban
characteristic), the same entertaining and charming talker I met years
ago after one of his lectures. I chat with him every time we share some
time together.

We could have talked a lot longer (and in fact we went beyond a simple
interview), steeped in the aroma of coffee and tobacco, discussing not
only Cuba but also the current situation in Latin America. His opinion,
which I share, is that "the Bush administration's aggressiveness might
grow, because what's happening in the Middle East could be replicated
in our own region, specifically in Venezuela." But that's a subject for
another story.

I prefer to let my readers weigh Alonso's opinions about facets of our
reality.

[Manuel Alberto Ramy is Havana bureau chief for Radio Progreso
Alternativa and editor of Progreso Semanal, the Spanish-language
version of Progreso Weekly. ]