CUBA: COMMUNISM KILLS THE BODY BUT CAPITALISM ROTS THE SOUL

by Lucas Eidolon

I know it's incredibly popular right now to hop on the "Cuba Libre" train but personally, I'm very skeptical on whether the protests in Cuba are a genuine reflection of a popular uprising or another astroturfed project funded by American intelligence. 

It's for this reason that I'm actually leaning more on the side towards the Cuban government, not because I'm any friend of communism (heaven forbid!), but because Cuba is and remains one of the last few sovereign states that is not a member of the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank and, politics aside, I'm sure this fact alone has irritated many of the corporate plutocrats who operate behind the scenes of the governments of the West who would be very eager to see that small island nation incorporated into the global network of international finance. 

If, hypothetically, the communist regime in Cuba were overthrown, either by a popular revolution or, which is rather more likely, American interference, one of two things would happen:

1. The new democratic government would be almost certainly be reliant on Western, or more to the point American, political and economic support, which means it would immediately become subservient to those same powers that manipulate those same governments. Thus, even though Cuba would have joined the ranks of the "democratic" nations, it would have lost whatever political sovereignty it had as its currency becomes integrated into the matrix of liquid finance capital.
2. Cuba would experience a short lived economic boom as the country is opened up for foreign investment. In the short term, this would mean that a plucky minority of quick thinking Cubans would be able to get rich by selling off property to foreign investors or by opening up private businesses catering to tourists. This would elevate the country's standard of living, but only for a few, while the rest of the country would remain impoverished not having been able to capitalize on the boom economy that Cuba would experience. 

Thus, for the vast majority of Cubans, nothing would have changed and arguably their lives would have been made comparatively worse as state assets and whole tracts of public and private land are inevitably bought up by foreign investors for development. Regardless, the Western press will hail this as an achievement of capitalism's success, because a marginal minority of Cubans would have obtained a middle class standard of living which would not have been possible under the communist regime. 

Cuba is not a dictatorship, and certainly not a dictatorship of the Stalinist kind that I'm sure stupid conservatives fed on a diet of PragerU videos must imagine it to be. However, it is a single-party state, and by definition rather than by practice, Cuba remains an authoritarian socialist republic. That being said, authoritarian states, for all their flaws, are very good at resisting the subversive influence of finance-capital, which, I would say, is far more ruinous than any form of authoritarianism. 

"Communism may kill the body, but capitalism rots the soul," as the saying goes. And indeed, despite being a Left-wing single-party state, the Communist Party of Cuba remains far more "nationalistic" than many of its conservative party contemporaries in the liberal democratic states owned by finance-capitalism who are virtually helpless to prevent their own native populations from being ethnographically displaced by migrant colonists.

The struggle today is not between Left and Right, but between nationalism and globalism, as Donald Trump once so adequately put it. And indeed, it doesn't matter if it's Right-wing nationalism or Left-wing nationalism that challenges the perfidious reign of capital, so long as it is nationalism. For all its flaws, I'm sure the inner circle of Communist Party of Cuba truly believes it's operating in the best interest of the Cuban people, even if the actual results have been less than satisfactory over the decades since the Cuban revolution first began. 

Lukas Eidolon is the Managing Editor of The Warden Post.