“Sales + Economy + Efficiency = Revolution”? Dollarization, Consumer Capitalism, and Popular Responses in Special Period Cuba
In the entranceway of the shopping complex Tienda Carlos Tercero in Central Havana, a sign announces, “En el nuevo milenio, venta + economía + eficiencia = revolución” (“In the New Millennium, Sales + Economy + Efficiency = Revolution”). Another sign inside reads “Juntos para defender lo nuestro” (“Together to defend what is ours”) and is credited to Cuba’s largest trading company and the firm that runs the shopping complex.1 These signs, in a place that seems only to represent the inequality brought about by the legalization of the dollar in 1993 and to exhort long-demonized mercantilism and consumerism, appear as poignant examples of how desperately those managing the Cuban economy and its propaganda machine wish to hold on to the rhetoric of the Cuban revolution in spite of the increasing marketization of the economy and growing social and economic inequality. Well-known revolutionary slogans such as Patria o Muerte! (Fatherland or Death!), Hazlo por Cuba! (Do it for Cuba!), and Vencerémos! (We will Overcome!) still remain on the walls in the streets of Havana and throughout the island, but new slogans have been invented to try to link current developments to the revolutionary tradition.
While the signs at Carlos Tercero and other shopping complexes could simply be dismissed as bad advertising in a country that spent thirty years trying to rid itself of capitalist elements — and did so fairly successfully — few dispute that post-Soviet Cuba, or what is known as “special period” Cuba,2 is a place of contradictions that the leadership has had a hard time smoothing over. What is disputable, however, is how new and particular to Cuba these contradictions are, how they function, and to what end. Taking these contradictions at face value or trying to reconcile them too quickly fails to grasp how Cuban socialist ideology continues to be transformed, not only by the government, but by Cubans in other spheres of society.
Capturing the Contradictions in Images and the Danger of Juxtaposition
Official socialist rhetoric in Cuba often appears to be mocked by daily life. Street hustlers wear T-shirts condemning the blockade or urging the return of Elián while they work in the illegal economy and hope to meet a foreigner who will take them out of the country. Decaying buildings in the colonial section of Havana sit alongside new hotels, beyond whose lobbies Cubans are frequently not allowed to pass. A billboard with peeling paint reading “Tenemos y tendremos socialismo” (“We have and we will have socialism”) appears next to a neon sign for Havanatur, a state-run tourist agency that caters to foreigners with hard currency. It is not difficult to find images that appear to display the contradictions between daily life in Cuba and official socialist rhetoric.
It is partially because Cuba continues to make its social-welfare goals explicit that it is judged so harshly. All economic systems have justifying ideologies that do not match reality. Capitalism, too, has failed to come through on all its promises, yet capitalist ideology, as Marx pointed out, presents the particular interests of capital in the form of the universal good and natural laws.3 Capitalism thus escapes the kind of scrutiny given to socialist economies, which privilege socialwelfare goals over purely market-driven considerations, at least at the level of political rhetoric and ideology. The Cuban government’s practice of making clear its ideological commitments makes it particularly vulnerable to images that juxtapose revolutionary slogans to the Cuban reality.
These images capture certain difficult realities of the Cuban situation that demand attention. However, they are often taken as proof of what was already assumed about the possibilities of socialism and alternative projects in general, rather than as a point of departure for further examination of the issues they raise.
Anthropologist Paul Ryer has pointed to the dangers of these kinds of images of Cuba in the pages of Public Culture ( Ryer 2000). He uses two images as examples. One is a photo of a decrepit wall on which the slogan “Socialism or Death” appears in faded paint. Another is a picture on the book jacket of an American journalist’s account of special period Cuba.4 This picture features a woman, perhaps a prostitute, in high heels and a spandex suit with the design of the American flag on it. According to Ryer, both images “too easily map onto Western complacencies regarding the inevitability of capitalism and the futility of alternative ideologies or resistant practices” (2000: 499). As Ryer points out, such a complacent reading of the images means that history and politics drop out entirely. The images are used to illustrate a position that is already preserved.
Outside Cuba, journalists and academics have used these images in their accounts of the ways in which the populace has improvised to make a living after the 1991 termination of the Soviet trading bloc (the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, or CMEA) and the consequent changes in Cuban economic policy. These writers often emphasize the clash between Cuban socialist ideology, on the one hand, and government economic policy and daily life, on the other.5 They say that the government’s use of the market reflects the hypocrisy and impracticality of Cuban socialist ideology and that the existence of the informal economy, including the black market, and increasing socioeconomic inequality prove its utter failure to translate that ideology into daily life. The position these accounts help to preserve is that Cuban socialist ideology can only exist as dogma imposed by the leadership and that most Cubans reject that ideology.
Cuban popular reactions to recent economic policy, however, suggest that although the economy is in crisis, a robust ideology remains. Popular expressions of discontent incorporate such implicit principles of Cuban socialism as unity, equality, and nationalism in their complaints about its shortcomings. Frustration with the failure of socialist principles to manifest themselves in daily life does not necessarily indicate a lack of faith in socialist ideology or lead to the conclusion that it can survive only as dogma imposed by the leadership. Rather, popular reactions — particularly those represented through art — provide evidence of a continued desire to navigate the principles of Cuban socialism, taking into account both the nation’s revolutionary tradition and the challenges of a post-Soviet world. Such responses, however, are silenced by narratives that take tensions between socialist rhetoric and daily life at face value.
Enlisting the Angel of History
For German social theorist Walter Benjamin, images had valuable critical and revolutionary potential as a challenge to the myth of progress, which political ideologies on both the Right and the Left used to justify programs regardless of the effects on those groups the programs claimed to be benefiting. Benjamin’s points of reference were Stalinism and the ideologies opposing it, but this myth continues to operate today. International lending institutions insist that economic development be defined in terms of macroeconomic growth, but such growth often comes at the greatest cost to the poorest populations of countries. The myth operates in Cuba when the government continues to insist that labor unions and other independent organizations representing the interests of workers, darker-skinned Cubans, women, and farmers, to name a few, are superfluous to the socialist revolution made in their name. In both cases, one measure of progress occludes another measure of equal importance, and the voices of those actually affected by these policies drop out. Apparently opposing ideologies produce similar results.
Benjamin criticized the notion of history as progress because he believed it served as a code word for the continuation of existing power relations despite technological change. Precisely because “things ‘just keep on going,’ ” progress is, in reality, catastrophe ( Benjamin 1989: 64). The chain of events known as history is, in fact, one enormous catastrophe, which appears as wreckage piling higher and higher into the sky as time moves forward. Benjamin’s angel of history sees the wreckage and “would like to stay, awaken the dead and make whole what has been smashed,” yet the strong wind of progress pushes him forward into a “future to which his back is turned” (1968: 257 – 58). The wind is difficult to resist, for it tells us that what we have was the only possible outcome. It denies that things could have been otherwise. It paralyzes political agency by making all change seem futile in the face of history’s incontrovertible movement. Benjamin’s angel of history is useful for discussions of post-Soviet Cuba because his framework provides a way of navigating between the acceptance of the cheap shots that Ryer critiques and blind apology for all that the Cuban government does.
In the place of universal history, Benjamin places a brand of historical materialism that sees the present in transition and not as some final culmination of the past. The historical materialist, Benjamin’s angel of history, is one who “blast[s] open the continuum of history” ( Benjamin 1968: 262). Before one can construct an alternative to the status quo, one must stop the flow of events, by showing the world through dialectical images that juxtapose what progress claims to provide and what it in reality produces.
According to Benjamin, a useful dialectical image is one that “puts the trash to use” by bringing into the present that which has been discarded and ignored (1989: 47). This involves not a change in criteria and the object of inquiry, but rather “a shift of point of view” (46). It means looking at the ways in which “things” that have lost their use value and become alienated from themselves take on different meanings through time. The task of the dialectical materialist is to catch “dialectics at a standstill,” at this point of undifferentiation, in an image that makes the past clear and knowable (49). “Thinking,” argues Benjamin, “involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well” (1968: 262). Dialectical images should cause the viewer to pause and rethink rather than to affirm what one already believed. During these pauses, one can reexamine not just the present but also the past and what could have been.
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Notes
Special thanks go to Susan Buck-Morss, Deirdre de la Cruz, Maria Cristina García, Karen Graubart, and Barbara Lynch for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay. Thanks also go to the editorial committee of Public Culture. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Latin American Studies Association 2004 Congress and at the Symposium “Cuba Today: Continuity and Change since the ‘Período Especial’ ” at the Bildner Center of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
- This corporation is CIMEX (Corporación Importadora y Exportadora, S.A.).
- Fidel Castro introduced the phrase “special period in time of peace” in 1990, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and it has been used to describe the particularly difficult years between 1990 and 1996, but the question of when and if this “special period” ended is the subject of much discussion.
- Capitalist ideology holds that the market takes on a life of its own independent of political agendas and yet, ultimately, it benefits all (as illustrated by Adam Smith’s invisible hand).
- The blurb on the jacket of the book, titled Waiting for Fidel ( Hunt 1998), captures the tone of the book: “This time he sets his sights on Cuba, where crumbling but elegant facades overlook shady street activities, where vintage Ford Fairlanes rumble past Soviet Ladas in the fast lanes of eerily deserted boulevards, and where an aging Fidel Castro is struggling to maintain his grip on a population yearning for aire libre, or at least Air Jordans.”
- For instance, a 2001 New York Times article editorialized: “Though billboards proclaim ‘Victorious in the New Millennium’ and Fidel Castro still clings to the revolutionary ideals of an earlier generation, the unending scramble to make ends meet and the voices in the streets tell another story” ( Gonzalez 2001: 8).