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>From new Cuba blog "Cuba's Socialist Renewal" http://cubasocialistrenewal.blogspot.com To sign up as a follower or receive email updates click link above Here, taken from today's edition of Granma, is a report on a discussion of the Draft Economic and Social Policy Guidelines in a barrio (neighbourhood) in the eastern city of Guantanamo, not far from the infamous US naval base of the same name. For those of us trying to understand the debates and changes taking place in Cuba from the outside and from a position of solidarity, the value of this report is that it brings us down to earth from the lofty heights of theoretical debates on the meaning of socialism and how to build it, and what Cuba can learn from other experiences — vital as these debates are in Cuba and elsewhere. At the level of the local community, if this and other similar reports are anything to go by, most people's concerns are more prosaic: the price of a jar of marmalade, how much a student must pay to ride to school in a horse and coach, the clinic that has run out of cotton swabs, too few outlets selling non-rationed soap and toothpaste. The Cuban Communist Party (PCC) leadership has proposed a single agenda item for the 6th PCC Congress in April: the economy. Other important discussions and decisions will be deferred to a subsequent party conference, date to be announced, later this year. Cynics might wonder if the preoccupation with such things as marmalade and toothpaste reflects a lack of interest in debating the more strategic and theoretical issues involved in Cuba's socialist renewal, and if so, whether the PCC is somehow to blame. Aside from the fact that public debate on theoretical and strategic issues is indeed taking place in Cuba today, as I've tried to convey in other translations, this would be to forget something as basic as a bar of soap: the whole point of socialism is to satisfy the material and spiritual needs of a liberated humanity. Zooming in to the microcosmic level, to an urban community at the mountainous end of a Caribbean island subject to a US economic war — and a US naval base down the road that tortures prisoners — this means, among other things, ensuring that the Emilio Daudinot clinic in Guantanamo has a good supply of cotton swabs. The call by the PCC leadership to debate the Draft Guidelines, which run to 291 paragraphs, is aimed precisely at involving all Cubans in the process of rethinking and redefining Cuba's socialist economic model. And, as a roadmap to a reinvigorated socialist-oriented economy, the Guidelines must solve the problem of marmalade. Link to translation: http://cubasocialistrenewal.blogspot.com/2011/01/translation-debate-in-guantanamo-barrio.html ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
