[Marxism] On Patrick Bond's comments on Zuma, the ANC, and related matters

[Patrick Bond]

Walter Lippmann wrote:
> Since Bond is a public figure in South Africa, 
Not at all, I'm a mere backroom academic.

> I'd be delighted to,
> post his comments on Cuba 

Right then, they're below, from a 2003 visit.

> and its relationship with South Africa, the
> South African relationship with Cuba, South Africa's opposition to
> the U.S. blockade, and any other Cuba-related facts and opinions he
> has.  

Walter, what *concrete* steps has SA taken to use its not insignificant 
power - e.g. UN Security Council chair this year - to help Cuba?

I've just finished a book manuscript yesterday, coedited with Ashwin 
Desai, where we take a tough look at Pretoria's top-down diplomacy, 
which is indeed sometimes charactertised by 'talk left' from time to 
time, often covering the 'walk right'. The frankly inconsequential 
relationship with Cuba has mainly a myth-making impact, linking the ANC 
to an earlier time when it was a genuinely anti-imperialist force 
(having now become subimperialist). But the SA state hasn't had any 
impact whatsoever, I'd suggest, compared, say, to the group Friends of 
Cuba (a grassroots SACP-related organisation run by Father Michael 
Lapsley, who lost his hands in an apartheid regime's letterbomb), which 
does occasionally get publicity for the Five, the blockade and other 
issues. (Would be happy to send the 'script - Foreign Policy, Bottom-Up 
- to anyone who wants.)

> Bond's in a much, much better position to know and to write
> authoritatively on these areas, since he is there on the ground in 
> South Africa, were he to choose to do so. 
There's just not that much to say, except that talk-left diplomacy is 
invariably used to disguise much more conservative realpolitik agendas. 
Take the issue of the blockade; why doesn't SA - after 13.5 years of 
freedom - do something to break through and dramatically expand its own 
provision of goods and services to Cuba? This is still a huge potential 
area of progress, but SA's capitalist interests are simply incompatible 
with increasing trade to/from Cuba.

> Bond might find himself
> saying something FAVORABLE about some actions of the South African
> government. 

The doctors were a great boon but there are really so few, given the 50 
million population we have, most of whom are desperately underserved. 
It's not to be ungrateful, it's just a relatively tiny proportion of the 
health service, and the programme has apparently stagnated. Here's a 
report from a high-level Cuba-SA summit meeting in Pretoria last month: 
"both countries agreed to continue the level of co-operation with the 
current number of Cuban professionals in South Africa, without an 
increase in numbers or replacements, with the exception of the 24 
professors already approved to work for the Faculty of Medicine of 
Walter Sisulu University. In addition to the already approved 
scholarships for Under-graduates, both South Africa and Cuba have agreed 
to explore further co-operation in the new programme to train medical 
doctors at community level in South Africa." All great stuff, but a drop 
in the ocean.

As for SA's larger geopolitical agenda, talk left is easy. In fact, it 
helps enormously when it comes to confusing constituencies over matters 
like relations with Israel, the Myanmar junta, Mugabe, the Swazi 
aristocracy, and arms customers ranging from Bush/Blair (at the outset 
of the Iraq War) to practically every other serious dictatorship.

> I get some material from time to time both in the Cuban
> and in the mainstream South African media, and some from the South
> African CP, but nothing from people like Patrick Bond. Perhaps that
> is because his political agenda focuses mainly on attacking the ANC?
>   
Well, the agenda I have, personally (based on my own limitations), is 
largely about contestation of primitive accumulation, neoliberalism and 
retrograde social policies, whether in SA or the continent or the world. 
So the pleasing yet frankly insignificant relationship between SA and 
Cuba is not high on the priority list. I wish that wasn't so, of course, 
because then some other fictions about Cuba's water could be sorted out 
too.

***

Cuba Dares

May 30, 2003
By Patrick Bond
ZNet Commentary

Any visitor initially experiencing Cuba might easily deduce that growing
pressures make the continuation of the revolution and social progress
untenable.

The contradictions scream out. After rounding a corner leading from one
drab Old Havana street with its decayed concrete and flaked walls,
suddenly a gentrified square emerges with restored architecture, fresh
paint and a United Colors of Benetton shop. Dollars rule, and tourism is
not cheap. But the next street is back to peso-denominated urban grit.
Then, not far away, a tacky shopping mall sells sweatshop products from
Indonesia for dollars.

Lessons that a self-proclaimed socialist society might provide the South
African left were reason enough for Trevor Ngwane, David Masondo and me
to trek from Johannesburg earlier this month. We were also intrigued by
a four-day conference on 'The Work of Karl Marx and the Challenges of
the 21st Century', sponsored by the government's Institute of
Philosophy, an economists' association and the trade union federation.

The most poignant moment may have been at the harbour, after the
intellectual arguments faded into the night, when Ngwane pulled the
trumpet he'd brought from Soweto--always a fixture at our
demonstrations--and pointed it out towards the sea. Another horn sounded
nearby, and Ngwane was quickly joined by a Cuban musician.

While language barriers made communication difficult, the trumpets told
their stories. Ngwane's salary as a township anti-privatisation
organiser is measly, but enough to pay for the couple of beers that,
purchased at a medium-range hotel nearby, would have consumed a third of
his new friend's monthly salary (US$9) as a music teacher.

Holding tight to a 44-year old revolution amidst capitalist merchant
encirclement, and facing down the deprivation of minor luxuries are hard
enough. Although the extent of basic-needs decommodification is
inspiring, the last few months have added all manner of geopolitical
problems, not least the ebb and flow of Washington's intervention
threat. The May 20 statement on Cuba by George W. Bush, who was joined
at the White House by rightwing Miami-based exiles, was anticipated to
ratchet up sanctions and travel restrictions.

It did not, for now at least. Whether because of Middle East
distractions or opposition emerging from US businesses who are opening
new trade routes, including a roaring $150 million in US food exports to
Cuba, Bush held fire. (But for context, even loony-right Wall Street
Journal editorialists have recently called for an end to the US economic
blockade.)

Washington's expulsion of 14 Cuban diplomats a few days earlier, threats
to prosecute US citizens traveling to Cuba, and public association with
the Miami thugs, together may have helped him save face on the right.
But president Fidel Castro's longevity and personal popularity will
continue to present an infuriating target for the neoconservative clique
in the Pentagon.

These quirks also help explain the appearance of at least four
international internet sign-on statements over the past weeks. Two from
the centre-left and autonomists/anarchists chide Castro; one originating
in Mexico and another from the Marx conference commit to defending Cuba
against imperialism.

So if not in practice, at least in theory, the ruthless critique of
capitalism and search for routes to socialism were on the conference
agenda. The most heated debates unfolded around the global situation and
the state of the Cuban economy.

President Fidel Castro made three appearances. He defended--in several
hour-long interventions--the crackdown on US-funded dissidents and
execution of three hijackers, as well as cracking jokes about the
'reptiles' and 'bandits' populating Latin American politics.

But he also made a strong bid for an alliance with those global justice
movements which, perhaps astutely, remain so wary of contemporary state
politics. Terribly disappointed by the World Social Forum's decision to
move in 2004 from Porto Alegre to Mumbai, Castro asked an international
WSF leader, 'Is India about to be swallowed?!' He had apparently
harboured hope of welcoming tens of thousands of delegates to Havana
next January, an idea which perhaps at some point the WSF will be
sufficiently mature and self-confident to entertain.

Castro did, however, provide a vision--again, maybe merely a romantic
hope--that one day radical Third World governments will be so strong,
coherent and foresighted that they will seek real alliances with radical
movements. His message: 'These are FIGHTERS, and that's what we must
call them. They won at Seattle. At Quebec, they forced the FTAA into a
fortified position. It was more than a demonstration, it was an insurgency.'

If Castro and Che Guevara holed up in the mountains perfecting their
surgical foci theory of agrarian-based revolution, entirely different
circumstances seemed to have inspired Castro during the conference: 'The
leaders of the world must now meet inside a bunker. They had to meet on
a ship in Italy, and on a mountain in Canada. They needed police
barriers in Davos, in peaceful Switzerland. The most important thing is
that the fighters have created a real fear. The IMF and World Bank
cannot meet properly.'

Even if the G8, WTO and IMF/Bank officials must gather in fortresses
these days, the dominance of neoliberalism has made its mark even on
Cuba. Castro was, indeed, humble and self-critical about the country's
economic failings and turned to ask a leading Havana economist, in a
good-natured harangue that continued for hours: 'So we poisoned
socialism?' It was more a statement than a question.

As another example, the South African bureaucrat in charge of water,
Mike Muller, posted a comment to a progressive listserve last Saturday
with this slippery argument: 'You should know that Cuba has two
concession contracts with Agbar--a subsidiary of Lyonnaise--one for
approximately 50% of Havana. I believe it would be useful for critics of
privatisation to consider the Cuban case and the background to their
decision to choose this route in order to develop a better understanding
of the challenges that face PUBLIC service providers in all countries.'

In the past, Muller's boss, SA Communist Party national executive
committee member and water minister Ronnie Kasrils, has also cited
Havana as a justification for promoting 'public-private partnerships' at
home.

What, then, is the 'background', and how does it compare to South
Africa? Really, Pretoria officials dare not make these sorts of comparisons:

* Cuba has the commanding heights of their economy firmly under state
control.

(In contrast, South Africa has been part-privatising our main
state-owned assets ever since the dying days of apartheid: electricity
this year, telecommunications in 1997 and via a NY Stock Market listing
three months ago, the transport sector throughout, several long-term
water concessions dating to the early 1990s, the main iron/steel firm in
1989; and the results have been uniformly disastrous in terms of job
cuts and disconnections of service to low-income people.)

* Cuba has had a policy of egalitarianism, albeit under recent threat by
dollarisation, but nevertheless based upon a grassroots-driven,
revolutionary imposition of new social policies that, from the outset,
eradicated the kind of inequality pervasive in the Third World.

(In contrast, since the ANC government took power in South Africa, black
households have become much poorer--a 19% loss of income from
1995-2000--and white households 15% wealthier, according to even
government statistics; which reflects an elite clique's imposition of
neoliberal macroeconomic and microdevelopment policies, including water
until the 2000 cholera outbreak became a national scandal.)

* Cuba's water-system regulations are extremely rigorous.

(In contrast, our SA regulations are so pathetic that the world's
biggest water firms have screwed up water provision in small towns--like
Dolphin Coast, Nkonkobe and Nelspruit--which were meant to be model
private participation pilot projects but which in reality failed
miserably, leading in Nkonkobe to Suez being tossed out entirely, in
Dolphin Coast to Saur insisting on a contract rewrite to assure higher
profits, and in Nelspruit to Biwater potentially withdrawing in coming
weeks because of such high levels of consumer dissatisfaction; all of
this without any supportive pro-municipal interventions from Pretoria,
especially Muller, the de facto national regulator.)

* Cuba's state finances are desperate for a logical reason: the
decades-old US embargo forced the economy into dependency upon the East
Bloc, and when neoliberalism and changes in regimes there forced an end
to trade and barter arrangements in 1991-93, Cuba suffered a 75% loss of
export earnings.

(In contrast, after anti-apartheid sanctions were lifted in a
newly-liberated SA, our economy 'benefitted' from a dramatic increase in
export earnings, but at the same time, Pretoria's proud record of
financial liberalisation--specifically, the 1995 relaxation of most
exchange controls and the 1998-99 permission granted for the biggest SA
firms to relocate their financial hqs to London--led to massive capital
flight, i.e., not economic bleeding caused by factors beyond control as
in Cuba, but instead, ideologically-driven financial suicide.)

* Cuba's water-system finances are also desperate, because
cross-subsidisation from the big water users (e.g., cane fields and
forestry) would really adversely affect their scarce inflows of hard
currency, so the possibilities for harmonising the social aspects of the
hydrological cycle are quite limited.

(In contrast, in SA, water apartheid remains as severe as any in the
world, and Muller's water department has not yet moved to discipline the
hedonistic users of water--especially timber plantations, white farmers,
corporate mines and white suburban households--with far higher water
prices, that would then allow the state to cross-subsidise water for the
masses; and moreover, Pretoria is happy to spend US$5 billion on
offensive high-tech weaponry at a time cholera and diarrhoea run rampant
due to lack of clean water.)

* Notwithstanding terrible poverty across the society in general due to
the export collapse, Cuba's own investment in water engineers and the
health sector is the highest of any Third World country, and is
reflected, for example, in an extremely low level of full-blown AIDS,
especially related to water-borne diseases.

(In contrast, Pretoria's reluctance to treat people who are HIV+ remains
so durable that the most respected health researchers and doctors
regularly refer to the health minister and president as 'genocidal'; and
meanwhile, many of our 600+ AIDS deaths each day occur because Muller's
dirty water causes opportunistic infections.)

* Cuba does not disconnect people from their water supplies.

(In contrast, even after millions of water disconnections and the worst
recorded cholera epidemic in SA's history, there are still municipal
officials like the man in Durban who brags about disconnecting water
supplies to 1,000 people in his jurisdiction every day, notwithstanding
periodic cholera outbreaks and persistent diarrhoea problems in Durban's
black townships.)

That's why, to Ngwane, Masondo and me, Cuba left such an excellent
impression. Also, though he raves didactically for hours on end, Castro
is a far superior radical nationalist leader than the mediocre,
repressive crew at the helm of African states, and in his late 70's
still retains an extraordinary grasp of detail.

The conference was also inspiring. It included a revitalising exchange
between several hundred Cuban marxists and more than 100 international
scholars and activists mainly of the independent-left, such as Samir
Amin, Fred Bienefeld, Liudmila Boulavka, Simon Clarke, Francois Houtart,
Diane Flaherty, Barbara Foley, Marta Harnecker, David Kotz, Michael
Lebowitz and Istvan Meszaros.

Controversies raged over the use of phrases such as Nazi-fascism (a
Castro favourite) to describe the US Empire, and whether, as Amin
suggested, it is feasible to posit 'the construction of a large front,
composed of all the forces that could be in opposition.' That idea,
Clarke replied, was a 'fantasy,' as genuine international
anti-imperialism would arise only, following the classic maxim, after
'each working class first settled accounts with their own (national)
bourgeoisies.'

But none of the participants objected to a final 'Communique of
Solidarity' that observed how Cuba's 'achievements and hopes for a
better world are threatened by a power based in inequality, force and
war... and we reaffirm our solidarity with the Cuban people and their
revolution'.