How to visit a socialist country by Richard Levins

Sympathizers with the Cuban process, as well as anticommunist leftists, sometimes carry a clipboard and grade sheet so that they can grade Cuba for health care, sexism, racism, pollution, homophobia, elections, number of political parties, a free press, strikes, or whatever else is on their minds. In the end, depending on the grade point average Cuba accumulates, they can decide if Cuba "is"or "is not" socialist (or whether socialism is or is not a good thing). Then they write praise or denunciations when they get home.

  Socialism is not a thing but a process, the process by which the working classes of the city and countryside and their allies seize the reins of society to satisfy their shared needs. Through a telescope, we get a glimpse of the world-historic significance of the first efforts to replace not only capitalism but also all class society by a more generous, just, and sustainable way of life. That is, we are trying to overcome a ten-thousand-year detour during which our species adopted agriculture, deforested much of the planet, grew in numbers, and extended our life span and knowledge and destructive capacity, divided into classes so that we were no longer a "we," and expanded our productive capacity to the point where we can dispense with classes and become a "we" again.

in a society that isolates people from each other, the remedy for despair is shopping. People who have experienced poverty sometimes find safety in accumulating things. And the capitalist imperative to expand leads to gigantic sales efforts to promote those feelings while inventing new ways for people to get into debt. All of these dimensions feed into consumerism.

But for socialism, a rising standard of living is not unlimited consumption of energy and matter. Rather, it centers on a rising quality of life. Therefore, we see a large fraction of the national product in Cuba going into social consumption, health, education, culture, sports, and the environment, even though, in the short run, this may slow down growth and prolong frustrating shortages.

This is one of the inevitable contradictions revolutionaries face. Building socialism is far more complicated and sometimes painful than we imagined, and often a frustrating as well as an inspiring process. The art of it all is to recognize the defects of socialism as both inevitable and unacceptable, to analyze their sources, and to discover ways to struggle against them as part of the revolutionary process, rather than as the justification for abandoning that struggle.