Cuban travelogue—Cuba’s system examined—“Coop farm, Rock and Roll music, The cult of personality”—Part 3

By SJ Otto

This is a continuation of the articles I have been working on since my return to the US.

As it was explained to me, at the top of the Cuban socialist structure, the government owns the large corporate companies. Some of these government companies combine with foreign investment, so technically the foreign parts of these corporations are privately owned. There are farm coops. We visited one of those while I was in Cuba. Coops were found to work better than government owned farms. So the government decided to go with the coops. At the bottom, there are some smaller businesses and some farms that are privately owned.

So we went to a cooperative farm in the province of Cienfuegos. The farm grew Corn, fruit and coconuts. They also had cattle and other farm animals including chickens and other foul. We were allowed to do about 30 minutes of farm work. Some of the group did some planting of coconut trees, some worked with milking cows, I was with some caravanistas who planted corn. For us to do that work was almost a joke. Most of us never worked on a farm before. I have worked for an outfit that planted trees in people’s yards. That was probably as close to what we were doing as actual farm work. When I worked for the tree planting outfit, I had gone through heat exhaustion so I have never been able to work out in the hot sun since. But they made it extra easy for us, so we could all do the work. I’m sure it was all just symbolic work. Many of us are old farts could never handle real farm work. I suppose the young people could have done the work.

We were told that the government tells the cooperative how much they want the coop to plant. The leaders of the coop have a lot of autonomy to decide what they want to plant.

The coop presented us with noon day meal. We had roasted pig, all kinds of fruit that was grown locally. We each got a piece of coconut that had plenty of coconut milk in it that we could drink. It was an overwhelming good feast.

Rock music

As we traveled through Havana, we came across the park that had a statue of John Lennon and right next to it was a place called El Submarino Amarillo (The yellow submarine). We didn’t get around to going to this place. It advertises itself as a restaurant. I was told they focus on rock music, what they all called “oldies.” An ad for the place said they focus on rock music from the 60s and 70s.

I did some research and from Wikipedia, I was able to see that “Fidel Castro banned rock music in 1961, for being a corrupt North American influence that didn’t belong in the new communist Cuba; a position that ironically was in contradiction with the own liberal vision of Karl Marx with respect to the arts and culture; not to mention that the international rock groups had embraced in general a leftist ideology by then.”

There are those who claim that revolution without rock music just “aint a good thing.”

Not to worry. That ban was never really enforced and today there is no ban on rock music at all. People can listen to oldies rock music at that restaurant and they can listen to any rock music they want. There are local groups of rock musicians. I was not able to make such connections. If I ever return I will focus on that. There have been smart ass conservative pundits who laughed when the Cuban government honored the band Santana, which was originally headed by Carlos Santana. Some obnoxious right-wing pundit joked that that group was banned from the Cuban public. Of course he was full of shit. Santana’s music was available to the Cuban public. And Santana was a Hispanic group with roots in Mexico and with styles from Cuba.

Last, but not least- The Cult of personality

While Cuba is a Marxist-Leninist country, they have focused a lot on the Cuban heroes of the revolution. Besides Fidel Castro, they have made heroes of Ernesto "Ché" Guevara and José Martí. Their pictures and statues appeared throughout our trip. Some of the people I was with on the caravan said they saw some posters with Lenin on them. I didn’t notice them. But there were lots of statues and posters of Fidel, Ché and Marti. Marti is a national hero he was to some extent pre-Marxist-Leninist. Fidel just died a few years ago and he was a genuine cult of personality. There are plenty of reasons why this society has made a hero of Ché. He took a direct part in the revolutionary struggle to bring Cuba’s government to power. He had a long history of taking part in battles in Africa and South America. After his death he became a symbol of revolution through-out Latin America, Europe and the US. He was a very dynamic personality and it is not surprising that Cuba would make a hero of him.

From my own political point of view, I do not favor “the cult of personality.” In the case of Cuba it does not seem like a vary big problem. One interesting note is that Fidel said that he did not want buildings and institutions to be named after him after he died. So he himself was not entirely happy with a cult of personality.

In many ways it can be dismissed in Cuba. The only reason for bringing it up is in revolutionary tradition in other parts of the world, and maybe here, eventually—There will also be a later discussions of my observations of Cuba with those who have criticism on both the left and right.

There is more to come folks!

To be continued=>