14ymedio, Reinaldo Escobar, Desde Aqui, Havana, 20 December 2021 — In the dilemma of changing the model to save the country or sinking the country in order to save the model, those who rule Cuba seem to opt for the latter. That is the feeling left by the recent public statements promoting a return to Marxist-Leninist doctrine, not only in the academic environment but also in the practical application of the theory, economically, politically and socially.
If we believed to the letter what was expressed by Miguel Díaz-Canel, it could be thought that, economically, the socialist state enterprise as an expression of “social property over the means of production” will leave less and less space for the so-called “non-state forms of production.” Such that, politically, the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat will be imposed more firmly to crush the shreds of bourgeois ideology.
And, in the social sphere, there will be a growing supremacy of the mass organizations that function as a transmission mechanism between the party and the people, versus the entities of independent civil society. The return of atheism as a model of a scientific worldview of the world is not ruled out.
If that is not what comes after the return of Marxism-Leninism, it will be because those who try to make it reappear failed to pass in those subjects.
Between 1975 and 1984 I had the opportunity to participate in several postgraduate courses on Marxism-Leninism and, in particular, on political economy and dialectical and historical materialism. Some were sponsored by the Cuban Union of Journalists, others I did on my own at the University of Havana.
In the Political Economy courses that were taught in my workplace, Cuba International magazine, I was the guide, first on the political economy of capitalism and then on that of socialism. Most of my students at that time decided to live (and had to die) outside of Cuba.
If it came to me to study these subjects again, I would ask the professor how the indisputable apothegm is interpreted in Cuba today, the one that says “when the mode of production becomes a straitjacket for the development of the productive forces,” what has to change is the mode of production; if we were to get philosophical, one would demand an explanation of how it is possible that Marxism is considered both science and ideology.
I do not deny that the laws of dialectics have their charm, especially to affirm that when indicators of material poverty are accumulated quantitatively in a country, a qualitative change occurs that allows that country to be defined as miserable.
In the world we live in, where there is talk of the fourth industrial revolution, when artificial intelligence based on quantum computing threatens to leave not a single question unanswered, to appear with Marxism-Leninism as an inexhaustible source of knowledge and a master key to solve problems is, to say the least, a joke in bad taste.
Being generous with the intelligence of others you might venture that there is something hidden behind all this, but that is going too far in search of an unlikely ingenious justification.
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