00:00 Dave Kellaway: …for the book, and it's well worth buying and reading. And then I was going to show the links to Cuba and then talk a bit more about the Cuban situation. So I think I'll make four or five points about the book. First, I think what's good is that on the one hand Jeff, if you like, criticises those people like Rory Carroll, the Guardian journalist, who denies any real gains being made by the Venezuelan people, and any real positive aspects of Chávez [?] at all, and he skewers him in the book — there's a really good passage where he takes him on — and dissection.
00:31 And on the other hand there's also, you know, something politically, the whole of the book is against [?] any sort of uncritical support of these governments. And even in this country you can see those groups like Socialist Action or the Morning Star or some of the solidarity campaigns take a very uncritical view of the processes that took place in the last period. For example, when the constitutional coup took place in Brazil they correctly condemned that, but it didn't actually make any analysis of the unpopularity, the problem for the PT. So it's like they tended to just look at it in terms of a sort of campism. It's like they didn't take into account the fact you have [class relations?], the working masses in the countryside and in the towns [?], the national bourgeoisies [?] and also imperialism. What tends to happen in some of their analyses is that they just look at these contradictions [?] of all-powerful American imperialism and the governments, and it's the wrong way of looking. I think it's quite good in the book that that's stressed [?].
01:32 And I think it's also interesting to link this discussion about what's happening in Latin America to the debate we're having at the moment about the international situation and whether there's — what was the nature of any offensive by the right wing, is there a shift internationally. There's obviously an offensive internationally by the right, but it's not all finished; there's a polarisation, as we've seen in Brazil, Argentina recently, with big demonstrations.
02:02 The other good thing about the book is there's lots of facts and figures. You need to have proper data when you discuss with people, trying to win them over, not just having good ideas — a lot of very useful sources and facts. But at the same time they're located within an overall theoretical framework, which I think is very important. So Jeff mentioned the question of compensatory states, but also he talks about extractive capitalism, and I think that there's a good link-up there with the work that Naomi Klein does in the ecological field [?] and climate, that's right, and that's an important concept that we don't necessarily use much in this country, but it's important for understanding elsewhere in the world.
02:33 Also this idea of passive revolution, transformismo, that's important as well. He talks about some of these Gramsci ideas, yeah, about the idea of a passive revolution, the idea, in other words, that you can have changes that have conservative aspects and transformatory aspects at the same time, and one can win over the other. I think that's an important idea, which we could possibly use here as well.
03:04 But one in particular I liked a lot, I think which could be plugged into more for people [?], is this idea based on some of the analysis of the Peruvian Marxist Mariátegui, which is this idea about the utopian socialist dialectic between the past and the future — was looking at some of the forms of communalism that existed in the indigenous cultures, and linking this with the idea of a socialist future. I think it's a very positive way of looking at it. It gets over this problem of the, if you like, economistic, evolutionist, industrialist approach of traditional Marxism. I think that's very important. And also this idea of the logic of accumulation by dispossession — all important concepts, all these things that were looked at in the book.
03:34 And I also like the fact that all this stuff was linked to some living people, and in the book there's two very good pen pictures, if you like, of activist leaders, of one called Macas in Ecuador, another guy called Quispe [?] in Bolivia. I think it's very good, really, in that bit of the book, to see the real flesh and blood of people struggling in these movements, and what they did and the political choices they made — not just a sort of fan-club typing, but looking at the choices they made.
04:04 And finally I think it's quite useful for students, this book, because in universities, I know, they tend to give you all sorts of readings by sociologists who give a certain — and economists who give a certain analysis of the Latin American situation, and Jeff takes that on [?] very clearly and goes in detail through some of these analyses and shows where they're limited and not helpful.
04:37 OK, also populism [?], and the thing about which I think links in with the debates in Spain as well, because there's this whole part in the book where he looks at some — the guy who wrote the book on Chávez, [Charlie?], and he talked a lot about "the people" and using that as the concept, and just as with some of the analysis by Íñigo Errejón in Podemos, they use the idea as a [?]… and it's also often very woolly and not really very helpful in the end. I think that's quite interesting in the book.
05:09 But moving on to Cuba. And what's interesting — Cuba, I've been there three times now in the last ten years, and we went in September. And if you go to see Che's monument in Santa Clara, which is a really inspiring monument, a huge monument on the hill outside Santa Clara with a huge statue, and a quite interesting museum in there — just beside, massive posters, massive [?] buildings all about Chávez. So in the Cuban view [?] Chávez is more or less at the same level as Che, you know, and that's interesting. It shows you the way they see all these movements in Latin America as being positive for them.
05:41 And also if you look at Granma, a regular thing on Chávez, a regular sort of feature about Chávez's thinking. Because you've got to understand that these leaders were inspired by Cuba. It wasn't an accident. If it hadn't been there, you can ask yourself how far these leaders might have gone. I mean, they probably would have gone anyway, but, you know, I mean, they themselves say they were inspired by Fidel and the revolution. And of course, quite correctly — and it would be [sectarian?] and stupid for Cuba not to welcome these progressive — even if some of these governments weren't so left, it was correct from their point of view, for the survival of the Cuban Revolution, to welcome these changes.
06:12 And of course the oil deals with the Venezuelan government in particular were important to Cuba [?]: basically they sent their doctors to these places and in exchange got deals on oil. And literally the lights would have gone out in Cuba without the Venezuelan oil. In fact the lights are going out at night in Cuba because there's a crisis with Venezuelan oil — I just read a piece in Granma or in [?] one of the blogs that talked about that recently. Because after the fall of the Berlin Wall in '89 there was a Special Period, and it is remarkable actually that Cuba survived, because if you look at the record of all the East European states, most collapsed into gangster capitalism. That didn't happen in Cuba. It was a terrible period; people were literally hungry, you know, very, very poor, died in that period. And so [?] people getting through that and having the possibility of getting help from Venezuela, that's very, very important indeed.
07:14 And of course now they're talking about a perfect storm economically in Cuba developing in the next six months because of these problems of the fall in the commodity prices and the cutting of the oil from Venezuela, because Venezuela itself [?] has got problems in providing oil to other people. [inaudible]
07:45 What's interesting is the way the Cubans themselves see this cycle in Latin America, because the other day in Granma there was an article by the culture minister where he talks about the glorious moment of the left in Latin America, in "our America", with these movements, OK. And it talks about Evo Morales, Correa, Chávez [?], Daniel Ortega — a bit more debatable — and the formation of ALBA, the fact that that enabled them to override the American free trade thing, the ALCA. And then it looks at Néstor Kirchner and everybody else, and also the [Workers' Party?], the Brazilian PT. And he says this converted Latin America into a pole of attraction.
08:47 And he then goes on to critique those people who see a pendulum [?] swinging from the left back to the right, and he says it's [?]… this is all wrong [?], because it doesn't work — history doesn't work by pendulum swings. And then he goes on to talk about how women, men and peoples make history, and that we have to get over this demoralisation, we have to have our ideas [?] and fight for them to change this round. It's interesting that it's a sort of moralistic half-recognition of problems, but without really providing any analysis one way or the other about the reality, about those governments and what to do now. And this is very typical of Cuban ways of approaching these problems. There's no real analysis [?] you know.
09:51 So if you look at Cuba today, obviously its political situation starts from a different place, because Cuba's a non-capitalist society, what we might call a transitional society. It's certainly not capitalist, in my opinion. And it's quite different to the governments of Maduro or Morales [?] and so forth. In Cuba there's real total control by the state [and?] party, whereas in these other countries the governments are in government but they don't really have power, in the sense of control of the means of production, as is the case in Cuba. So there are different problems and different cycles involved.
10:24 OK, I think if you look at Cuba today it has got huge problems economically. I mean, in terms of [?] food production, there are different figures, between fifty and sixty, seventy per cent of food is imported. And if you go to Cuba what you notice is an awful lot of land that is lying fallow. There's this whole problem with this marabú, this shrub stuff, growing everywhere in Cuba because the land hasn't been cultivated enough. There's this huge problem. And if you go to Havana, go outside the tourist areas, you'll see that the state of housing is very bad indeed. And of course the big problem is very low wages, in particular in the state sector, and what you've got is low productivity.
10:55 And the other major, major problem which overrides everything else is that with the booming tourism, and remittances from people working abroad, there's a large number of dollars coming over. And in Cuba people with dollars are relatively well off, because if you look at it, if you're a person who owns a bed-and-breakfast — and there's been a huge development of bed-and-breakfasts in the last few years — in one night the tourist pays twenty-five dollars a room, but you don't get paid in a month twenty-five dollars. So you see the scale of differences, and that creates tremendous tension.
11:58 And if you — also you talk to teachers in particular who stop being teachers, become guides and guide you around, or taxi drivers who used to be professionals, they will tell you it's very, very difficult, very difficult without having access to tourists. And so the big problem is how you can actually move forward on this. And the Cubans are discussing this, and one thing they're doing is trying to move away from a total state-controlled economy, and they're right on this. I think we shouldn't be sectarian or stupid about this. It's stupid to have every single area of the economy controlled by the state. Small-scale production, small businesses are perfectly compatible with a movement also maintaining the possibility of further moving [?] to socialism. Sam Farber's work on Cuba, I think, explains that quite well. You do need some of that. I mean, you know, a situation with all the hairdressers as state employees, or all the electricians, all the plumbers, it's ridiculous really.
12:30 But of course that move to more self-employed people has caused problems, because not everybody can work properly as a self-employed person if the logistics in the economy don't work either. And we talked to a few people — remember in the taxi, in our car one time, one of the carpenters who gave us a lift [?], he would drive around 100 kilometres to get some wood, because the problem was the state still controlled the supply of wood. So you can become a carpenter but you're still tied in to the relatively inefficient state procedures for providing all this stuff. That was a big problem. So that's one of the issues.
13:34 So it's correct to open up, but the problem obviously is how do you manage this system so you control the development of the new business people. Because we met one person in our bed-and-breakfast who, unlike [?] most of the times we went before, already owned two or three bed-and-breakfasts through his family, because what happens, you use your cousin to buy another one, and you get the situation where it's not a family that is running it, but people are employed by the family who run the bed-and-breakfasts. That's the development. So there's a real development there.
14:05 The other problem with the remittances is that it has a moral aspect [?] too. Somebody said to us as well, the problem is all these people just live off the money they get from Cuba — from the States — and that's not good for [?] your traditional [?] work ethic and sense of community, you know; you're sort of separate from these. And that's another problem. OK, so the government — the government has said they want to unify the economy, unify the currencies, so that there won't be two currencies. But it's quite hard to see how you do that without a big increase in productivity and reorganisation.
14:36 Another problem for the economy is the big size of the non-productive apparatus — the fact that because of the blockade, because of the original American threat [?], there's grown up a huge state apparatus, police, the army and all that, essentially it's not productive, you know, and that's a problem. How do you shift that? And also you get the impression — when we talked to people — they don't work very long weeks, these people [?]… And of course that's the other problem, the fact the wages are so low, both in the countryside and also in the towns. Because, for example, we talked to a few farmers who produce coffee. The problem was the price the government gave them for their coffee was so low they had no incentive to increase production.
15:07 And of course the people at the top [?] will always tell you that "the government pretends to pay us and we pretend to work", and that's true as well. And there's also a petty corruption that exists in the economy, which isn't the same as the high-level corruption in these places, but it's a corruption of nicking, nicking bits and pieces from your work. It's like pilfering [?]. You go to any hotel — we went to a hotel recently and there was no mint for the mojitos in the bar. It means — obviously what happened is the guy could take the mint [?] to sell to the local bars. It's absolute classic. And [?] how do you overcome those problems?
15:39 But anyway [?], just a last word on the debates going on in Cuba, because it's important to understand there are more and more debates going on in Cuba. And I was surprised, looking on the internet recently, and found some of the [?] articles about this. There is a debate going on. There's the social democratic positions on the shift, the transition. There are people, clearly — I guess that's probably a key sector of the leadership — who want a Chinese- or Vietnam-type [?] transition. There was a piece the other day in Granma talking about a visit, finally, of one of the army chiefs to Vietnam, and he said in this that "your experience in Vietnam is very important to [?] our economy". So that's a clear [?]…
16:40 There's also left positions — critical [?] ones like Pedro Campos, who writes for [?]…, and other new bloggers who put forward a socialist or Marxist opposition inside Cuba as well. So there's a range. The problem is how much weight these small forces have in relation to the weight of the central core leadership and their control over the population, and hold in terms of monopoly of the means of expression. And that's the key. That's why I think for us we have to be in solidarity with the Cuban revolution, against the blockade — to call for the end of the blockade [?] — but also in favour of socialist democracy, advancing democracy, because otherwise even economic reforms can be sold…
---