Ten years ago, a young Journalism graduate submitted this question, along with an extensive questionnaire, to a group of political leaders, academicians, magazine editors, intellectuals, People’s Power representatives, and published their answers in a symposium titled “Doing socialist politics.”
Days before the magazine was launched with the symposium, an independent media anticipated it in its peculiar informative style: “a chronicle [sic] on how to do politics in a country where there are no parties and where the scarce citizen participation is limited to inconsequential topics is especially striking.”
Since this medium never reviewed the content of that symposium, which it crucified beforehand, and above all since those answers are still worthwhile ten years later, I would like to evoke some of them, and comment on them in passing.
“Dissent is not only legitimate, but necessary,” declared a cultural leader and deputy. She added, however, that “in our conditions the ‘loyal opposition’ seems like an antinomy to me. Because the opposition is truly so if it shows a certain level of organization, if it constitutes an alternative to the established powers.”
She reasoned then that if, for example, a revolutionary opposed the existence of small private enterprises, arguing that changes in ownership “expand the asymmetry in the relations between employees and employers,” he was not really “an opponent, but only from someone who disagrees.” In other words, this difference was just a minor disagreement, which did not contradict “the essence of the socialist project.”
Viewed as a political platform that is organically demarcated, and that challenges the hegemony of an established power to the point of representing an “alternative,” that is, another different power and another path, the loyal opposition was not very different from the opposition per se.
That difference was established by a youth leader, when she said that “in Cuba we still do not know of that [loyal] opposition, because the people financed by a foreign government to overthrow the Revolution” were not.
Marking that qualitative distinction, however, she “did not rule out any formula for more socialism,” admitting that it could exist, as part of “the dialectic of the process for the perfection of the system.”
The other interviewees approached the question by beginning to discern what the loyal opposition was not.
A popular educator drew that line in the “points [that] do not enter into negotiation” between an opposition with “antagonistic visions and agendas,” and one based on “reconcilable differences, with common goals.” Around these differences in means, reconcilable, but different, he located the “loyal opposition.”
“An opposition that allies itself with foreign powers harmful to national interests, with organic links with national and foreign entities in charge of promoting subversion, that does not take care of the country’s sovereignty or social harmony would not be loyal,” postulated the editor of a catholic magazine.
Along the same lines, a jurist and university professor established as a condition of the “loyal opposition” compliance with “the law of all, that it does not attempt through intolerance to demand tolerance from the State, that it does not use flags of exclusive and inhumane ideologies, that it respect public order and the regulations that we have given ourselves in democracy.” In contrast, this characterization to some extent portrayed the opposition per se.
All respondents identified dissent as a necessity of socialism.
“Without dissent there is no democracy, without democracy there is no socialism,” stated the popular educator. “I believe in the legitimacy of opinion trends, in the diversity of alternatives to choose the path towards a previously agreed upon goal,” the deputy stated. “A dissent among revolutionaries is very necessary as a basis for development. In Cuba it seems that there never was one, which is not true,” pointed out the youth leader.
Among those interviewed, the editor of the Catholic magazine, a jurist himself, was the one who explicitly advocated for a “loyal opposition” capable of “grouping together and constituting their particular political machines, to work in favor of achieving their agendas.”
What made it loyal, according to him, even in a multi-party order, were its particular political limits, to “improve the system established by consensus and not to liquidate it, which in the case of Cuba is defined as socialist.” As long as society ratifies “its preference for the socialist option and defines what socialism it wishes to build” in a democratic manner, it was implied that “those who have other ideological preferences accept it with humility, without ceasing to contribute their criteria and projects, although made available for the interests of the people. This way we could enjoy a socialism that integrates ideological diversity.”
For the academic jurist, things were less simple, since dissent had many faces: “in politics there are those who dissent from their loyalty to national history, to the symbols of nationality, to simple people, to the values of culture, to a specific political group, to an idea of the country, and whoever feels loyal only to their project.” From that approach, loyalty was possible in a context of dissent as “loyalty to the rule of law.”
As expected, the question of “loyalty-to-what” was at the center of these various approaches.
“It can be understood as loyalty to the power structures, to the institutions and to those who head them,” commented the popular educator. However, fundamental loyalty, for him, referred to “the principles of social equity, personal and national dignity, sovereignty, socialization of power, the economy and happiness; loyalty to the power of the people.” Loyalty to the institutions (“political forms”) was only valid as long as they “enforced those principles.”
Finally, the person who adopted the concept of “loyal opposition” in the most determined and unconditional way was a constituency delegate from a poor neighborhood in Havana.
“We have to give possibilities to that type of [loyal] opposition; those who do not agree with things done poorly and who can propose how to resolve them…. There has to be a counterpart. If it is in good faith, opposing things that do not work helps improve the socialist system. Today it is more common to see people who do not agree with a proposal, a report, a distribution, a piece of legislation. Sometimes we criticize those who tell the truth, and we consider that they have political problems, but what these people want is to see results. We cannot continue ‘understanding everything’ː solutions have to appear.”
Up to this point it is evident that what is significant about the “loyal opposition” is not the little word, but the problems it raises, especially around the structure of consensus, participation, socialist democracy and the construction of alternatives, in the midst of a complex transition towards a new social and economic order, which also requires a different political process.
If someone thinks that this concept is inseparable from “bourgeois multipartyism,” and has nothing to do with the history of socialist struggles, I suggest reviewing the practice of the Bolsheviks in their initial years, before Stalinism. In particular, the rules of internal democracy and access to the Party press, from before 1917, and until 1921.
In the internal spaces of that party, currents such as the Workers’ Opposition and the Democratic Centralists played a main role in denouncing bureaucratization and the strengthening of ties with the workers, even when in those circumstances of external and internal harassment by a powerful counterrevolution, the failure of the other European revolutions and the adoption of the dictatorship of the proletariat, were prohibited. And we already know what happened just three years later, with the death of Lenin and the rise of Stalin, with Bolshevik democracy.
Finally, it would be worth looking more closely at the history of the Cuban Revolution itself.
To what extent were the differences between organizations form part of our own historical socialist experience? Parties with very different ideological origins, which allied themselves around a revolutionary platform and an agenda of radical reforms, maintained as an alliance during the most turbulent two years and seven months of the Revolution, thanks to the unitary sense of their leadership, and the role that Fidel Castro had in their strategic coupling.
Although there were not insignificant differences and knots of opposition between them, these organizations were able to coordinately confront the defense of the Revolution in the face of the greatest escalation of aggression that the United States was capable of.
It would be difficult to exaggerate the weight that the total war unleashed on the young Revolution by its enemies had to accelerate and deepen the process of radicalization and, very particularly, to put the internal unity of each organization under tension and force the fusion of all of them into one. single bloc. The history of the 1960s cannot be reconstructed or understood if we ignore the differences that existed within that bloc, before and after adopting the name of the Communist Party of Cuba, nor without appreciating the key role of Fidel as an arbiter of those discrepancies. Nor without noticing how these circumstances determined the centralization and verticality of the Party, despite the recurring calls to remain linked to the interests and desires of the people, and to prick up one’s ear to the what was happening.
These are all the more reasons, one might say, to defend that unity, not only political, but also organic, that managed to be maintained despite the everything, because it responded to a greater cause: the defense of national sovereignty that was threatened, and never sufficiently forever guaranteed, assured, sealed.
Of course, it is not about throwing overboard that unity or anything that has been achieved, much less the defense of national sovereignty; but to appreciate it in the midst of its serious current tensions, to think about it politically in the context of a society that is not that of the 1960s or 1980s, nor does it have the more homogeneous consensus that that leadership aroused.
If in today’s world the challenges of social exclusion and abuses of power cause the discredit of party systems and established institutions, it is not because democracy lacks meaning. If the “economic battle” is represented as crucial in the midst of the crisis we are suffering here and now, it is not because it can be fought without resorting to bold and heterodox policies, like those of the founding fathers.
In any case, unlike electricity or soybean oil, tourism or foreign exchange, the generation of participation and the production of a sense of belonging, the promotion of a climate of freedom that takes advantage of talent and creativity, are not hindered by the blockade nor do they depend on choosing a good neighbor on the other shore.
If the cause lay in the Soviet model or the cultural war, it would come from somewhere else. Instead, to paraphrase the Phantom of the Opera, it is rather here, “inside our minds.”
