Radio Havana Cuba

Notes on the Revolution / Column 8

September 20, 2019

The Party, the state, and the people in Cuba

By Charles McKelvey

On September 11, the Cuban head of state, Miguel Díaz-Canel, appeared on national television to announce a shortage of diesel fuel, to explain the reasons for the shortage, to announce the measures to be taken, and to call upon the people to support the measures and to support one another, for the good of the nation. He also said that the measures had been debated and recommended by the Communist Party of Cuba, and that the call was coming from both the Party and the government.

During this past week, the people have overwhelmingly responded to the call of the Party and the government. The great majority patiently have endured long waits at bus stops, and many drivers have been helping with transportation, without asking for compensation. In homes and places of work, the people have been making sacrifices, such that the government was able to announce that its goals for the national reduction of energy consumption are being attained. It is not the first time that the great majority of people have responded to the call of the Party and the Revolutionary Government. Indeed, there are numerous examples of it. And it occurs because, in Cuba, a revolutionary people has been formed.

How is a revolutionary people formed? Few members of the Party would have difficulty answering the question. The Cuban people have been taught to be a revolutionary people by Fidel.

Charismatic leadership is common in human history and in the modern world. Among the colonized peoples of the modern world-system, anti-colonial social movements emerged everywhere, and charismatic leaders were lifted up. In fact, charismatic leaders are necessary, because the structures of domination are complex, and the necessary political response so difficult to discern, that there emerges a multitude of concepts and strategies. Only a person with an exceptional capacity to understand and to explain can forge the necessary unity. These necessary charismatic leaders are known to popular consciousness: Ho Chi Minh, Mao, Sukarno, Nasser, Nkrumah, Nyerere, Allende, Chávez, and Evo, to name some.

Most of the anti-colonial revolutions were not able to maintain themselves in political power for a sustained period of time, in the face of the attacks of powerful actors. On the other hand, when a revolution sustains itself in power, as it has in Cuba, the charismatic leader has time to teach and to form a revolutionary leadership and a revolutionary people.

The charismatic leader educates simultaneously the members of the Party and the people. But there is a distinction between the two. Party members form the vanguard, and are those of the people who are the most committed, who have developed the most mature understanding, and who demonstrate leadership qualities. As the vanguard party develops, its members increasingly acquire the understanding and political intelligence of the charismatic leader, so that it becomes the institutionalization of charismatic authority, able to lead the people in the revolutionary project and to call on them to sacrifice. The people also internalize the teachings of the charismatic leader, but less so than the vanguard.

In the case of Cuba, the continually evolving pedagogical relation between Fidel and the people was not disturbed by the poisonous presence of a national bourgeoisie promoting imperialist interests. During 1959 and 1960, Fidel called upon the national bourgeoisie to remake itself as an independent national bourgeoisie, not subordinate to U.S. interests, and to participate in the revolutionary process. But the national bourgeoisie abandoned the country to participate in the U.S.-directed counterrevolutionary project. Although the flight of the Cuban national bourgeoisie was detrimental for the social and economic development of the nation, it did have the positive consequence of making less complicated the formation of a national consensus in accordance with the interests and needs of the majority and the requirements of universal moral principles and scientific knowledge.

As the revolutionary process evolves, it must institutionalize the relation between the Party and the people. In the case of Cuba, this was done in 1976, when the Revolution created structures of popular power, in which the Party leads and educates, but the people decide. In an electoral process not distorted by the divisive presence of political parties seeking political power, the people decide who will be their deputies in the National Assembly, and the deputies decide who the head of state and the ministers will be.

In the Cuban structures of popular power, insofar as the people hold party members in high regard, party members will be well represented among the deputies of the National Assembly, and among the ministers of the government. This has happened it Cuba since 1976, but it is not predetermined. It depends on the people. When the will of the people results in the election, for the most part, of party members to the legislative, executive, and judicial functions of the state, there will be a functional, positive relation between the government and the Party. Nonetheless, the government and the Party remain distinct, each with its particular functions.

The Cuban political process, with its defined relations among the state, the Party, and the people, was firmly established by September 11, when the President of the Council of State called upon the people to make sacrifices to defend their nation and their socialist project, noting that the call was also being made by the Party. In subsequent days, the mass organizations of workers, small farmers, and women, which are independent of the state and the Party, also called upon the people to support the measures of the government. And the people affirmed their support in their daily comportment, responding with solidarity to the national call.

The Cuban process of a dynamic relation among the state, the Party, and the people is not well understood outside of Cuba. It should be observed more carefully. It evolved from the revolutionary practice of the Cuban people, just as the structures of representative democracies evolved in revolutionary practices in other nations in an earlier historic moment. In the present global situation of sustained crisis and conflict, Cuba is demonstrating political stability, maintained on a foundation of popular consensus. Meanwhile, many representative democracies are demonstrating that their structures are generating confusion and division among their peoples.

This is Charles McKelvey, reflecting on the unfolding global popular socialist revolution forged by our peoples in defense of humanity.