Robert Buddan
Cuba intends to transform its prisons into schools on an initiative of Fidel Castro. Many of us associate Fidel's Cuba with repression, imprisonment and the violation of human rights. But Cuba is rethinking its whole concept of 'prison'.
Prison, that institutionalised form of 'unfreedom', excludes people from society, and Cuba believes the best form of rehabilitation and restorative justice is to include prisoners into the culture to make them fit and proper human beings to resume their place in society. A revolution is marked by revolutionary ideas and this is a revolutionary idea of justice.
Cuba's Minister of Culture, Abel Prieto, says that education, culture and sports are tools in the emancipation and development of human beings. Prieto is a fan of the late Beatle, John Lennon, and has erected a statue of Lennon in Cuba (and who Cubans call a Marxist-Lennonist). He listens to music closely and was inspired by a leading Cuban singer-songwriter's idea of taking art to prisoners in Cuba.
Education, sports and health are being relied on to achieve the objective of freedom from disease. They are all free in Cuba, and Cuba has health professionals in the remote parts of more than 70 countries. Years ago, Fidel and Ché were trying to export the Revolution by armed struggle. Now the fruits of the Revolution are being exported through health and other forms of international assistance that poor countries welcome.
MESSAGE OF JUSTICE, PEACE
Castro
The secretary of state for the Vatican just happened to have been visiting Cuba around the time Fidel resigned. His mass in Havana was broadcast live on television. He was able to deliver his message of justice and peace, truth and liberty, fraternity and love to every Cuban who wanted to hear. Fidel himself had invited Pope John Paul 11 who visited Cuba in 1998, and invited him again in 2005, an invitation that the new Pope promises to fulfil soon. Cuba is to erect a monument to John Paul in the near future. Yet, we hear that Fidel's Cuba is an atheistic society that represses people for their religious beliefs and that only the dogma of communism is allowed.
Cuba's GDP, by its own measure, has increased by 42 per cent just since 2004. This has virtually made up the economic loss from the disruption of trade with the Soviet Union and eastern bloc. The Economic Commission for Latin America ranked Cuba's economic performance in the region at third in 2007.
Its growth rate in 2007 was higher than the average for the region despite the US embargo. But we are told that the 'magic of the marketplace' produces efficiency and socialist economies are doomed to fail. Despite the embargo Cuba still manages to be 37th among the US trading partners.
The Constitutional and Judicial Commission, the Attorney General and President of the Supreme Court have reported on plans to combat corruption and drug-related crimes. The plan is to strengthen procedures for prosecuting individuals for criminal activities in government offices and businesses. Courts will implement measures to improve the quality of legal procedures, improve the professionalism of judges, and apply technology to case management. According to the western version, communists simply haul off anybody they don't like to jail. There is no procedural justice in Cuba.
Cuba's new National Assembly (Parliament) elected on January 20 tells us something about Cuba's democracy. Nearly two-thirds were elected for the first time so that the turnover rate was much greater than that of the US Congress. The assembly is more socially representative than that of the American Congress. Women make up 43 per cent of the members, an increase of seven per cent. The number of those between 18 and 30 also increased from 23 to 36. Workers, farmers, students, professionals, journalists, artists and sportspersons make up more than 50 per cent. Thirty-six per cent are blacks or of mixed race. Seventy-eight per cent are university educated. But we are told that Cuba is a dictatorship of one man.
TWO FREEDOMS
These seemingly unrelated aspects of Cuban society say something about what Fidel has left. He has left a concept of freedom different than that of liberal democracy. The Cuban concept is of collective freedom where social, economic and cultural rights are given greater priority in providing the basic needs of the population. The United States and Europe like to say that Cuba is not a free country but their concept of freedom is a different one. It is based on individual freedom where civil and political rights are given greater priority in providing market-based competitive choices for the population.
In their own ways, the United States and Europe, and the liberal democracies of the Caribbean are much freer than the revolutionary socialist democracy of Cuba. But there is more equity and less human poverty in Cuba. The differences between the two 'freedoms' are not unlike the differences within Christianity itself over which there have been and continue to be wars, persecution and prejudice.
What the differences have done is allow us to contrast and compare and make us see the weaknesses of our own societies - the values, priorities, and myths upon which we sustain them. We see what objectives can be achieved by other means, like those tried in Cuba. But we also see the weaknesses of the Cuban model. Cuba is in the midst of a great experiment in adjusting its system to make governing more efficient, reforming the economy to raise salaries and living standards, detecting and punishing corruption, and addressing freedom for new social values such as greater tolerance for homosexuals, removing racial prejudices and discrimination, and expressing greater intolerance of the bureaucracy. But it wants to do it its way and at its pace.
THE RIGHT TO DEVELOPMENT
What Fidel's Cuba, and indeed, a variety of socialisms in the Third World, have done is to raise the level of importance now given to social, economic and cultural rights to at least equal the importance given to political and civil rights. A great turning point in the human rights debate came when the United Nations virtually unanimously accepted a declaration on the right to development in 1986. People did not just have a right to be free but a right to development. The right to development basically argues that a blind man, a victimised woman, an abandoned child, a cashless worker, and an uneducated person could not be equally free to enjoy liberties of speech, association, assembly and so on with their opposites.
As Nelson Mandela put it, poverty is a denial of human rights. The right to development has subsequently produced the Millennium Development Goals challenging countries to achieve precisely much of what Fidel's Cuba has achieved while choosing their own ways of doing so, much as Cuba says it should be left to do. The UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights has pointed out that Cuba is now moving closer to the UN's concept of the right to development and will sign international agreements on civil and political rights and on economic, social and cultural rights.
Fidel's Cuba has shown us that every society does not have to be the same and that they can be legitimate even while they are different. Fidel's successor, Raul, accepts that the revolution demands that Cubans question everything they do in order to improve on them and should never believe that what they have done is perfect.
Robert Buddan lectures in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona. Email: Robert.Buddan@uwimona.edu.jm.
