New book on Celia Sanchez — key Cuban revolutionary leader

Scan page 10

10 SOCIALIST ACTION JULY 2013 Nancy Stout, “One Day In December:

Celia Sanchez and the Cuban Revolu­ tion.” Forward By Alice Walker.

The oppression of women worldwide has drastically limited the way we have learned history. Usually we have been left out of the story, as if half the population were not present, did not exist, did not contribute to the flow of events!

The story of the Cuban Revolution has pretty much been the same. The world all knows of Fidel, Che, Frank Pais, and Camillo Cienfuegos. In “One Day in De­ cember,” we finally learn of the key role that a woman, Celia Sanchez, played in launching the war, in winning the war, and in facilitating the new government in Cuba.

Celia was from a large family, the daugh­ ter of a doctor who after his wife’s death, preferred that his family live alongside the mill workers rather than in a more pres­ tigious neighborhood. After the untimely ... Economy (continued from page 6: “Marxism is uniquely qualified to give an in-depth analysis of”)

how big or small they were. In this age of late 20thcentury and 21st-century globalization, the IMF inter­ venes, as it has all over the globe in “Third World” na­ tions. (And now it is even participating in bailouts of “First World” economies in Europe).

The scheme is always the same: in exchange for bail­ out money, the IMF (and now the European Union and the eurozone) imposes draconian cuts in social and educational spending, lowered wages, massive lay­ offs, and the privatization of public infrastructure and numerous public services in order that the indebted nation will balance its budget and pay off its debts to mostly rich foreign investors.

Falling rate of profit Now, back to the real economy of goods and services:

It is here that Marxist political economy sheds light on what has transpired since the 1970s. As mentioned before, there were more foreign products showing up in the U.S., such as VW bugs and vans in the 1960s. In the ’70s the trend accelerated. You had Datsuns (now called Nissans) and Toyotas in greater numbers. Ditto German cars like BMWs and Mercedes. There were also numerous retail discount outlets such as Kohl’s, K-Mart, Walmart, and Target whose stocks eventu­ ally became predominantly foreign—especially Third World foreign—as the decades wore on.

The cost of increasing competition in the real global economy means capitalists buying more and more high priced technology in order to increase produc­ tivity, which adds tremendously to overhead costs.

This doesn’t even necessarily open new markets; it just allows you to compete with other countries pro­ ducing the same exportable goods and services.

It is very important to realize that “capital goods”— factory machinery, other technology involved in goods and services production, gigantic ships for transport of goods and people, airplanes for the same purpose, the buildings in which goods production takes place, skyscrapers and other buildings to house offices, and trains, buses, and large trucks to also transport peo­ ple and goods—these are the most colossally expen­ death of her young sweetheart, Celia de­ voted herself to personal growth, commu­ nity charity work, and following her own interests. At the same time she meticulous­ ly supported her father.

This is a pattern that later served her well as she applied it to her relationship with Fidel. Remarkably, for a Cuban woman in the 1950s, she knew how to work with and interact among powerful men; at the same time, she almost naturally assumed leadership.

Her experience in running her father’s medical office, personally greeting all of his patients over the years, and her inter­ est in community and serving less advan­ taged people, prepared her for taking on the responsibility of developing support networks, military units, and undercover allies in her region when she turned her talent and energy towards the Revolution. Her love of the natural world and fishing gave her knowledge and awareness that contributed first to planning the landing of the Granma and later to the hiding and survival of large numbers of rebel soldiers them in the rebels’ hideout camps, she shared her love of nature.

The attention she had once given to the poor mill workers’ children was turned to the individuals who had made huge personal sacrifices to serve in the Rebel Army. She attempted to make their lives better. She was a fierce protector of Fidel; at the same time, she would diplomati­ cally challenge him when necessary. She was someone who, given an idea, made it come to fruition.

Too often women who have entered leadership roles in male-dominated fields claim “progress” by moving horizontally and replacing the patterns and customs of men. Celia, on the other hand, seems to be an example of real progress, as she took on leadership by moving forward (vertically) in her own unique way.

While organizing military units, doing rigorous and dangerous clandestine work in the countryside, and strictly maintain­ ing guerilla protocol, she also kept the comfort of others as one of her priorities.

This meant new shoes for the soldiers sive things in the world. If you are going to pay the enormous costs of these huge capital expenditures, you had better make enormous profits.

But now, with all the giant corporations basing op­ erations in countries throughout the world, intensely competing with one another, profit rates have a long-range tendency to fall as overhead expenses increase. One of the ways to bring down production costs is to pay less and less to labor, destroy workers’ unions, outsource labor to poor nations, and so on. The other cost saver for the capitalists is to get their taxes cut: the more drastic the better.

Nevertheless, this mad race among so many com­ petitors to produce more at less cost per unit of production inevitably leads to market gluts of over­ production. That is exactly what happened during the recessions of 1969-71; 1973-75; 1979-80 (the “stagflation” recession under Jimmy Carter); 1981-82 under Reagan (unemployment reached 10.8%); the eight-month recession of 1991-92, and another eightmonth one in the early 2000s; and, finally, this Great Recession we’ve been mired in since December 2007.

These binges of overproduction are related to what mainstream economists call “capacity utilization.” In order for today’s industries to pay back the debts they’ve incurred for the very expensive technology they have purchased to increase productivity, they have to operate at full or nearly full capacity.

The trend since the 1970s in the United States has been a decline in economic growth, notable decline in workers’ wages, and an overall tendency for profit rates to decline. As you will shortly see, economic sta­ tistics illustrate the U.S. decline dramatically. And it is the declining rate of profit, which, in a sense, forced “financialization” to expand massively, from 8% of all U.S. corporate profits as Ronald Reagan took office in 1981 to as high as 41% in 2008, depending on which statistical sources you consult.

In a word, banks and investors lost confidence in the profitability of much of the real economy. Today, the percentage of corporate profits that are financial is still at 33%, according to many government sources; and the major investments are still in the specula­ tive bond markets, the stock market—both of which are bubbles waiting to burst—and derivatives. That’s right, these are the same investments based mainly “could see right through Fidel—and that’s not very romantic.” Stout might be right in reporting this, but I think that by that time Celia was older and had recognized the importance of her independence. At any rate, they seemed to maintain their soul­ mate closeness despite Fidel’s romantic affairs with other women.

Besides chronicling the extraordinary life of Celia Sanchez, this book also gives an inside and suspenseful account of the staging of the Cuban Revolution by this disparate and mostly very young group of individuals.

The book documents the chaos that ac­ companied the days after the Jan. 8, 1959, entry into Havana, the 1962 trip to the UN when the Cuban delegation chose to stay in Harlem, the redistribution of property, and (even today) the lingering divisions in all Cuban families between those who stayed in Cuba and those who left, those who supported the new government and those who did not. These topics are related with personal anecdotes that make them all come that much more alive in the read­ er’s imagination.

Alice Walker in her Foreword, finishes by saying how much she loved this book and in the end just wanted to turn to page one and start reading it all over again.

I agree. n on real estate and debt that were the proximate cause of the crash of 2008!

And now, here are statistics to support our case: First, “The Boom & the Bubble: the U.S. in the World Economy” by Robert Bremer (whose stats come from a wide array of respected public think tanks), and secondly, from an important study by respected re­ searchers Ergodan Bakir and Al Campbell, “Neo- Lib­ eralism, the Rate of Profit and the Rate of Accumula­ tion,” appearing in Science and Society (July 2010). Gross profit rates in the U.S. were 20.8% between 1959-69; 17.9% from 1969-79; 15% from 1979-90; 11% from 1991-2000 (during the ballyhooed Clinton years); and 8.3% in 2001. After-tax profit rates were 6% in 2000, 5% in 2005, an upward spike to 6.75% in 2007 (due in large part to rapidly growing real es­ tate and derivative sales profits in the first half of the year), and then back down again to 5.9% in 2008. Marx’s “Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall” seems to be borne out in what has transpired in the last 40-plus years. And profits today? Well, this writer would have to say, “Of course, they are up in many companies!” What would you think in the face of steeply declining wages since 2008?

In a New York Times October 2012 reprint (of an article written in April of 2012), economic analyst and reporter Catherine Rampbell reported that the median loss of income to American families during Obama’s first four years in office was nearly $3000 per year.

As for the big banks, none of them can be reported to have made authentic profits. They no longer are re­ quired to report the market worth of assets gone bad. They are permitted to report the values of bad assets as still having the values they were bought for! That’s why the bank bailouts in the form of “quantitative easing” through the Federal Reserve Bank and Trea­ sury Department have given the big banks $8-12 tril­ lion since October 2008 at taxpayer expense, mostly to the richest holders of U.S. Treasury Bills. In the real economy, the “C.I.A. World Factbook” of 2007 stated that the U.S. share of the world’s manu­ factured goods production was 21%, as compared to more than 60% in 1953. Fewer statistics better illus­ trate the decline and future fall of the American eco­ nomic empire. n