The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived the Energy and Food Crisis

The Peril of Undemocratic Cuba - Reflections on the documentary "The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil"

This film was produced by a nonprofit organization called "Community Solutions," which identifies three of the greatest challenges facing the world today:

1. Climate change caused by increasing amounts of carbon dioxide released by human activity,
2. The arrival of peak oil,
3. The increasingly unequal distribution of global resource access.

The film starts from the concept of "peak oil" and then uses Cuba as a case study to illustrate the idea that "a global crisis can be changed through local awareness and action." As several interviewees in the film emphasize, the real problem is not energy or technology, but society, and the relationships between people. When we see Cuba, long subjected to U.S. economic sanctions, managing after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s to face a sudden energy shortage and social disintegration crisis, and yet somehow forging a unique path free from the control of capitalist powers to become a country with a high degree of independence and autonomy in energy and food, we cannot help but marvel and long for it.

By contrast, Taiwan, also an island nation and also threatened by great-power coercion, has long taken natural resources for granted and even destroyed them, which seems related to two factors. Given Taiwan's unique historical background, under colonial education the people of Taiwan were constantly indoctrinated with the notion that "the motherland is the mainland," and thus lost the sensitivity of an island people to limited resources.

As for the trend of global political and economic development, today's Taiwan is deeply influenced by the free-market ideology of transnational capital. (Cuba's land area is more than 3 times that of Taiwan, and its population is less than half of Taiwan's.)
"Beginning in the 1980s, through the transnationalization of capital, neoliberalism has attempted to dismantle the welfare functions of the state. Under neoliberalism, the goal of the economy is to increase profits and reward the owners of manufacturing and financial capital, while excluding the interests of the majority of the people and treating the natural world as a commodity. Such a system that accumulates wealth by consuming the poor is called 'Mammon' in biblical terms; it is not only unfaithful to God but also causes endless suffering for humanity." (Excerpted from the WARC Accra Confession)

In the film, a Cuban energy expert says that the impression of Cuba created by the U.S. mainstream media is highly biased, leading people to mistakenly think, "They have nothing, how can they survive?" He says, "Come, come see our lives for yourselves, and you will know." He gives an example: "If we say, 'Everyone, we are in trouble and need everyone to turn off the lights they are not using,' in Cuba people will say okay and then act; but in the United States, people would probably say, 'Why? I paid for it!'"

Most countries facing an economic crisis usually cut their budgets for health care, education, and so on first, but the Republic of Cuba, even during the Special Period when the energy crisis was most severe, still provided free health care and education to the entire nation. That is why their infant mortality rate (4.9 per thousand) and average life expectancy (78.3 years) are better than those of the United States (6.06 per thousand and
77.4 years respectively), while consuming only one-eighth of the energy of the United States. Cuba trains more doctors than it needs domestically, so it can send medical personnel to Third World countries and even exchange doctors for oil from Venezuela. One interviewee proudly says: Cuba, with about 2% of Latin America's population, has 11% of Latin America's scientists!

Cuba's insistence on human dignity and well-being, and its commitment to and practice of sustainable living, offer an inspiring possibility. Just as the 1959 armed revolutionary July 26 Movement, with the slogan "Build a Cuba for Cubans," successfully overthrew the regime of the U.S.-backed dictator Batista and established the Republic of Cuba, in the 1990s Cuba seemed to carry out another revolution, this time a peaceful one, peacefully overthrowing through the slogans of care, sharing, and sustainability "the culture of arbitrary and excessive consumerism, competitive greed, and the selfish mentality of the neoliberal global market system."

Cuba's success in weathering the crisis gives us a very important lesson: "Think globally, act locally." Facing global problems, each of us should, through active critical thinking, concern, participation, and action, reclaim the autonomy of the value of life.

However, the Cuban revolutionary government took power in 1959 and has since gone through 52 years of a highly centralized political system. The constitution stipulates that the Communist Party of Cuba is the country's only legal political party and prohibits the existence of any other political organization, so there are many political prisoners. The Cuban government has been accused countless times by human rights watch groups of disregarding human rights through abuse, imprisonment, unfair trials, and illegal executions. In 2008, the number of journalists imprisoned in Cuba ranked second in the world (first was the People's Republic of China); internet use is limited to specific locations and is subject to monitoring and censorship; political dissidents are not only arrested and imprisoned, and according to Human Rights Watch reports, the living conditions of both political prisoners and ordinary prisoners in Cuba are below health standards.

So behind the highly idealized socialist image presented in this film is actually the sacrifice of individuals' basic rights, including freedom of speech, association, privacy, movement, and due process of law. Cuba's model of merging party and state has produced a large group of mid-level cadres who control the main lifelines of the national economy and forcefully block changes to the privileges they enjoy. Their wages are insufficient to maintain a standard of living they and their families can be proud of, and they often skirt the law, with 90% of their actual income coming from the black market, commissions, and bribes.

Although in 1993 the Cuban government began some market-oriented reforms, legalizing the U.S. dollar, opening free markets, and allowing more than 150 types of businesses to be operated legally by the self-employed, Cuba's economy still lacks vitality, state-owned enterprises are inefficient, and large amounts of labor and land resources sit idle. The rationing system has also placed a serious fiscal burden on the government.

Will Cuba follow the self-employment model of China and Vietnam, first letting a small group of people get rich and then driving economic development, and carry out market-oriented reforms while opening to the outside world? Will Cuba compromise with the U.S.-style free market? Is it possible for an authoritarian regime to achieve sustainable development as Faith Morgan, the director of this documentary, says? The answer is no. To ignore Castro's 48 years of dictatorial abuse of power and disrespect for democracy merely because of his anti-American-imperialism or his progressive social welfare policies in education and health care is to miss by a hair and be off by a thousand miles.

The root of the problem is that "the regime that decides national resource planning and allocation," if it does not do the source well, will always leave you picking up what others throw away, a drop in the bucket, with misplaced attention. It is like the central government shouting "save energy and reduce carbon" while insisting on promoting many high-energy-consuming and highly polluting industries: the people planting trees will never keep up with the speed at which the government and conglomerates cut them down. The state apparatus (the executive, police, military, legislature, and judiciary) is the executor of "national land resource planning and allocation." Without a sound democratic system to supervise the state apparatus, the entire environmental resource base will continue to suffer enormous damage from "improper policies and resource allocation."

I once thought Cuba's Castro was an unprecedented hero, a small shrimp fighting a giant whale, but once a country loses normal party politics and freedom of speech, even with Cuba's vaunted centralized democracy, even with "grassroots deputies to the National Assembly of People's Power nominated by individuals rather than parties," it is still impossible to produce the true universal value - democracy.

Because: anyone with even a little knowledge of politics knows that candidates are very hard to produce. Without resources and connections, how could one become a candidate, and once a candidate, how could one have a chance to be elected? Without parties, it is very hard to become a candidate, and once a candidate, it is even harder to be elected. That is how Cuba is: whoever is chosen, it is always the same old group. That is why Castro was re-elected general secretary and president for 48 consecutive years. Looking at the world today, he was the most professional (with 48 years of governing experience), and being accomplished in both civil and military affairs, no one was more outstanding than him, but this is not the true universal value - democracy.

What exactly is democracy? Democracy is listening to suffering and "handing it over." Only when basic human rights are protected does public power have legitimacy. In a constitutional democracy, there is no tyranny of majority rule, because basic human rights are ten thousand times more sacred than public power. No one may violate basic human rights, and public power even more so may not violate basic human rights.

The process of democracy is restoration; it is respecting each person's autonomy and ownership, and together finding procedures to solve problems. It is not simple (because it has been distorted), and also the simplest (because it is the purest); it is the clearest (because human nature is clearest), and also the deepest (because human nature is deepest). To practice the ultimate universal value - true democracy - is to listen to suffering and "hand it over." It is very hard, but worth defending for generation after generation.