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| Cuba Parliament Building (in Havana) in the background under refurbishment in 2014. Photo by N.V Rakhale |
My fascination
with Communism
Ever since my
days at university where I was introduced to the ideology of Communism, I’ve been
fascinated by the impact of communism on the every-day lives of the people who
live in countries where the government of the day follows this ideology. Essentially
communism is a social system where all resources in society are controlled by
the state and shared equally among members of society by the state. In a
communist society, there are no classes, everyone is equal, in every way. Equal
in terms of the size of houses they live in, equal in terms of the wages they
receive from the state for their labour. Furthermore, all members of society in
a communist system receive free and equal access to services provided by
the state, such as education, health care, water and sanitation, among others.
Indeed, in most cases, a communist state even supplements the citizens’ food
requirements with rationed food.
The South
Africa I grew up in, up to my early twenties, was characterised by apartheid
where one group, the White monitory was deemed to be superior to another group
of people, the Blacks (including the Coloureds, the Indians and the Chinese)
majority were deemed to be inferior. This apartheid system created a South
Africa that had a definite class system both among the Whites and among the
Blacks. I guess my fascination with communism could have be sparked by a curiosity
to discover how people could co-exist and survive in a class-less society, a
society which was very much unlike the South Africa of my youth. In my later
years I came to understand that communism did not turnout in reality as it was envisaged
on paper and that in most communist countries there was indeed a class system, characterised
by those who belonged to the ruling class and those who belonged to the working
class. However, despite and perhaps because of my understanding of the failures
of communism, I remained and still remain fascinated by Communism.
The end of my
fascination with Communism
This fascination
led me to pay a visit to Cuba in August of 2014. I’m particularly reminded of my visit to Cuba by the
recent passing of the former President of Cuba, Fidel Castro. What I found in
Cuba was a country which seemed to be stuck in the past. I got a clear sense
that life for the people of Cuba had not changed much since the years when Fidel
Castro came into power in the late 1950’s and introduced Communism. I found
that most of the vehicles on the Streets of Havana and elsewhere in Cuba were old
American cars from the 1950’s. I found that there were virtually no new
buildings, all buildings including the hotel I stayed in looked like they were untouched
since Fidel Castro came into power and there were many buildings which were
left in ruins. I later discovered that most hotels in Cuba were state-owned and
some were partnerships between the state
and foreign multinational companies. I found that connecting to South Africa on
my phone was a painful experience because of the very slow data speeds on the
single, state-run cellular network. I found the food in the hotels and restaurants
to be of poor quality as this was
limited to basic staples such as chicken and cheap cuts of pork, and red meat was
only available in limited supply and where it was available it was usually very
cheap cuts. I later discovered that the state had a hand directly or indirectly
even in the restaurant industry. What was interesting is that while Cuba is an
island surrounded by the sea, restaurants offered very little in terms of
sea-food on their menu’s. I found the visits to Cigar-making factories, which
were all state-owned and to the tobacco farms interesting. I later learnt that tobacco
farmers were only allowed to sell their harvest to the state for cigar-making and
the little tobacco harvest which the farmers kept for themselves was purely for
private use as they were not allowed to sell it for profit.
True to the ideology of Communism, the state seemed
to play a central role in almost every aspect of Cuban life, I doubt that
things changed much since my visit in 2014 and things certainly would not have changed
at all since the death of Fidel Castro a few days ago.
While my visit
to Cuba was very interesting, I was very relieved to leave the country to come
back home to South Africa. Now that I have seen first-hand the impact of a communist
system on the daily lives of the people who live under it, my fascination is no
longer with understanding the impact of the system, my fascination now is with
how long it is going to take for those who live under this system (in Cuba and elsewhere)
to revolt and rise up against their communist states.
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