Re: Cuban pride

Fri, 30 Jan 1998 15:52:36 -0800 (PST)
Dennis R Redmond (dredmond@gladstone.uoregon.edu)

On Fri, 30 Jan 1998, Richard K. Moore wrote:

> >From what we've been learning on the list, it would seem that the primary
> difference is that Cuba is democratic and Singapore is not. In fact I
> can't think of another example of democracy other than Cuba.

Think a little harder. To paraphrase Brecht, woe to the socialism which
needs national-revolutionary heroes. Lee Kuan Yew, incidentally, started
out as an avowed socialist in the Fifties, only to change tack on seizing
power in 1959, but he certainly learned a lot about taming market forces
and the importance of mobilizing capital by the public sector for
long-term development. My own feeling is that the US embargo and
declaration of war on revolutionary Cuba forced the Revolution to go
autarkic; if something similar had happened to Singapore, then the
People's Action Party might well have been forced into autarky as well.
Singapore would have ended up like the Czech Republic or Lithuania: hardly
poor, globally speaking, but still a dependent semi-periphery.

The point is that the socialisms of the 21st century must begin to draw on
BOTH experiences -- the success of the Singaporeans in standing up to the
Wall Street hegemony and creating a nation-state and a national economy
out of thin air, as well as the local organizing and Third World political
solidarities of the Cuban revolution. Possibly China will be the vast
crucible in which some sort of synthesis between economic and political
mobilization will be able to happen; or maybe the new semi-peripheries of
the Eurostate will lead the way.

-- Dennis