‘To achieve as much as Kerala has done for a population of its size is no mean record in world history.’

– Amartya Sen

 

‘…the Cuban revolution declared, from the outset, that no one should go malnourished. (Nothing)… has deterred Cuba from freeing itself from the suffering and shame of a single wasted child or an elderly person ignominiously subsisting on pet food. No other country in this hemisphere, including the United States, can make this claim.’¹

 

WHY compare Kerala with Cuba – an Indian state of 33 million people and a Caribbean island nation of just 11 million – lying in two distant continents with different histories, cultural traditions, and especially political systems? To begin with, their Human Development (HD) achievements, made in a short period of time, largely relying on their own resources, and without foreign advisors and NGOs, are significant and noteworthy. Second, the trajectories and the patterns behind their achievements can be examined as development models that are comparable (though not necessarily replicable) because these are identifiable and amenable to empirical investigation. Note that it is in this sense, and not in the sense of exemplars for emulation, that the word model is used here.

Third, their differences demonstrate that homogenization of political systems or cultures is not necessary for achieving human development (HD) gains. Finally, the lessons they offer are all the more relevant, even urgent, at this historical juncture when neo-liberal prescriptions for the Third World have been tested and found wanting. A particularly cruel example is the fate of the very first of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – the promise of halving the number of the world’s hungry from 850 million to 425 million by 2015. Today, after a decade or more of neo-liberal policies, increasing corporate and WTO control over the world’s food system, diversion of food for fuel to feed automobiles, and increase in food prices across the world, the number of the hungry stands around a billion.

The achievements of Kerala and Cuba are well known and documented. Their HDI ranking, high for their level of income, in fact masks their real gains because of the one-third weight given to income. For example, Cuba ranks 51, at the top of the High Human Development group, but if we look at the GNI per capita rank minus HDI rank Cuba’s score is 52, the highest for any country, indicating that it has succeeded more than any other country in translating its income into social well-being.

Kerala is decades ahead of India in almost all indicators of HD and, in sharp contrast to India, the male-female differential in its achievements is small. With an HDI value of 0.790, literacy rate of 94 (India 67), life expectancy of 74 (India 63.5), and infant mortality rate of 12 (India 50), Kerala sits along with countries such as Cuba and Uruguay in the top quarter of UNDP’s High HDI group (somewhere around 50 among 187 countries), way above India’s 134th place in the bottom quarter of the Medium Human Development group. Female literacy, a critical statistic in terms of its impact on many other gains such as child survival and birth rates, is 92 against India’s 65. Life expectancy for women is 76, more than 12 years higher than India’s and 16 years higher than that of India’s largest and politically powerful state, Uttar Pradesh.

Further, Kerala, like Cuba, is a rare example in the Global South of a society reaching the third stage of the demographic transition, a stage of zero population growth, achieved without much modern industrialization or use of such draconian measures as forced sterilization in China. Notable also is Kerala’s record of reducing poverty and hunger. Add to these other more intangible achievements such as exceptionally high readership of books, newspapers and magazines, high levels of democratic participation, and the sense of dignity and self-worth visible among the formerly oppressed and humiliated sectors of the population.

 

Cuba’s human development achievements are even more remarkable with some notable features. In 1996, Cuba’s Vice President, Carlos Lage, declared in the UN General Assembly: ‘Each day in the world 200 million children sleep in the streets. Not one is Cuban.’ What he said about homelessness could have been said with equal validity about other deprivations that afflict so many in the world – hunger, malnutrition and eradicable diseases. Cuba does not even figure in the Global Hunger Index (GHI 2011) since its value is less than five, the cutoff point for inclusion in its ranking (India’s value, 23.7). Few countries can claim to have fought against the spread of AIDs with a single-minded intensity as Cuba, achieving a level of success that has eluded even the US. Needless to say, the HD indicators are exceptionally high for its level of income ($5416 in PPP). On some indicators of education and health (e.g., pupil-teacher ratio, life expectancy and under five mortality rates), it outperforms even the US (per capita income $43,017). What is more, Cuba’s achievements are far more equally distributed than in most countries. The white/non-white gap in life expectancy in 1981 was one, compared to 6.3 in the US and 6.7 in Brazil. Its exceptionally high quality of education and health care systems have been noted and praised by international organizations such as Unesco and even the World Bank.

 

I discuss below three factors underlying our models: an interventionist state, a mobilized society that engages the state through institutionalized forms of participation and, what I call, a cultural revolution that changes people’s consciousness, their ideals and values.

In an era when ‘downsizing the state’ is the ruling ideology, it is important to ask why the state matters. To cut a long argument short, let me emphasize one point: there is strong historical and empirical evidence, buttressed by sound theoretical arguments, to suggest that all forms of general human well-being that people enjoy in a society – be it peace and security, freedom from violence and crime, freedom from famine and malnutrition, economic development and scientific progress – have been associated with good public institutions at the centre of which is the state, relatively strong, well-organized, well-governed, and democratic, and enjoying a high degree of legitimacy and social consensus. For purposes of our discussion what needs to be highlighted is the fact that every observable society with high HD, including those in East Asia, has a history of some form of state-led development. In such cases, the incidence of poverty and hunger have also been quite low.

In both Kerala and Cuba, the state was ‘captured’ or constructed through popular struggles and/or revolution by coalitions of underprivileged classes and reconstituted to act on their behalf. The regimes that came to power on the wave of such popular movements enjoyed the capacity and the legitimacy to act boldly to transform entrenched class and power structures and to create the preconditions for democratic participation by the masses of the population. Agrarian reforms are notoriously difficult to implement, but critical in this process. While Cuba’s reforms eliminated the landed elites, Kerala’s more modest reforms were still the most radical for any state in India and did succeed in neutralizing the power of landlords. This has been noted as an important factor in understanding the contrast between the high levels of democratic participation in Kerala and the clientilist politics of many other Indian states, especially in the North, where powerful landlords continue to be in control.

 

A notable example of effective state action is the manner in which the Cuban state responded to a system threatening crisis that followed the sudden collapse of Cuba’s major supporter and only trading partner, the Soviet Union. The crisis was of a scale comparable to the great depression of the 1930s for an island country, now without friends (but with a powerful enemy next door) or trading partners, without the foreign exchange needed to import food and fuel, even as its GDP shrank by as much as 35-40 per cent. The Cuban state declared a ‘special period in time of peace’ and introduced a series of austerity measures and economic reforms. But it was a structural adjustment programme with a difference: it relied entirely on the country’s own resources and increased social spending from an already high 20.08 per cent of GDP in 1990 to 32 per cent by 1998.

The state is necessary, but not sufficient. It is equally important that the underprivileged classes are able to influence state policy by being integrated into the political process. Both Kerala and Cuba throw considerable light on this critical political issue.

The literature on Kerala is replete with accounts of the state’s long history of social mobilization and struggle. From the ‘social reform’ movements of the latter part of the 19th century (by the disadvantaged castes), through the nationalist, trade union, socialist and communist movements well into the mid-20th century, Kerala was transformed by its own models of renaissance, enlightenment, reformation, nationalism and socialism. By the 1930s, there were strong political parties, including a well-organized Communist Party with a universalistic and class ideology and with a mass base across caste and religion in one of the most pluralist societies in the world.

 

Since the 1970s, Kerala’s numerous political parties have functioned largely within two coalitions, the left-of-centre Left Democratic Front (LDF), led by the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM), and the right-of-centre United Democratic Front (UDF), led by the Congress Party. The two fronts have alternated in holding power with some regularity. The choice Kerala’s (and India’s) communists made to engage in multiparty democracy and adversarial politics required considerable class compromise and moderating some radical goals. But the strategy, apparently based on an astute assessment of the actual possibilities, proved to be successful in creating a mass base and organizing a strong party.

Cuba’s trajectory shows some important similarities with Kerala’s, despite its obviously different political and cultural history. Its movement for independence from Spain in the late 19th century mobilized Cubans across lines of social class and gender, gradually becoming linked to the broader struggle for the end of slavery, for social justice, universal human rights, and a transformation of society that would guarantee basic entitlements to every citizen. These struggles continued into the 20th century as the US, and US controlled ‘strong men’ replaced the Spanish as the new oppressors (1920s to 1950s), and as social justice and equality still eluded the Cuban people. Eventually these culminated in the armed revolution of 1959, at least in part because by the 1950s there was little space in Cuba for the kind of accommodative politics that characterized Kerala.

 

For reasons rooted in Cuba’s political history, its unique geopolitical situation, as well and its socialist ideology, post-revolutionary Cuba rejected the model of party-based democracy; the Cuban Communist Party (Partido Communista de Cuba or PCC) does not function as an electoral party. Instead, the revolution established and institutionalized a classical socialist form of ‘direct democracy’ and instruments of popular participation through ‘organs of people’s power’ and mass organizations.

As in Kerala, Cuba’s many mass organizations influence debates and policies at all levels. These include, besides the Communist Party, strong trade unions, farmers’ unions, women’s and student organizations and the controversial ‘Committees to Defend the Revolution’ (CDRs). The formal representative bodies are municipalities and provincial and national assemblies. People’s representatives are nominated directly by the voters and elected to these bodies in competitive elections by secret ballot on a non-party basis, and with no private use of money.

From the standpoint of human development, elected bodies at the local, municipal level are critical, and greater decentralization in the 1990s have made participation at this level more extensive and intensive. The local bodies manage and control economic and social affairs, develop and monitor local economic plans and budgets, and indirectly also contribute to national plans. Agricultural cooperatives and other local economic enterprises and distribution systems, as well as basic services including education and health, come under their control. In the absence of any significant private sector and access to alternative means of livelihoods and services, the stakes are high and participation is vigorous.

There is also an institutionalized system of vigilance and monitoring, mainly through the ‘accountability sessions’ at which delegates must periodically give account of their activities and answer the electorate’s questions. The reforms of the ‘Special Period’ of the 1990s were intensely discussed and debated at all levels of government and mass organizations.

 

Emmanuel Kant used the phrase sapere aude (dare to know or be wise) in defining the motto behind the European enlightenment. A daring critique of prevailing ideologies is a prerequisite for a ‘release’ from the hold of ideas that imprison the mind and make it unable to visualize alternatives to the status quo.

Visiting Cuba during the first year of the revolution and interviewing a wide variety of people, sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote about the radical vision, the enthusiasm, the open-mindedness and eagerness to learn he observed among young Cubans who dominated the revolutionary government at that time. Mills’ observation resonates with what I saw in Kerala in the late 1950s, in the months before and after the first communist government was elected to power in the newly formed state. These peak moments were the culmination of a process of awakening, a cultural revolution that fired the imagination of the people.

I use the concept here (quite different from Mao’s usage) to refer to a transformation in human consciousness and a paradigm change in social values and ideals, in people’s conception of and commitment to social and distributive justice, human dignity and human rights, and in people’s aspirations for themselves and their children. Such a cultural revolution is also a revolution in hope – giving new hope to people who formerly accepted their fate as inevitable and unchangeable. The social movements described earlier were also cultural movements that brought together different strands of radical thought and ideas about a better life which were also subversive for the subaltern classes.

 

In contrast to many such movements elsewhere (eg., the Bengal renaissance), in Kerala, and perhaps to a lesser extent in Cuba, these ideas did not circulate just in elite circles, but became part of the collective consciousness of the people and fired the popular imagination. A widespread belief in people’s ‘entitlements’ is itself transformative. Interestingly, Amartya Sen’s characterization of modern famines as entitlement failures can be turned on its head to argue that Cuba’s success in avoiding a famine in the early 1990s was a notable instance of ‘entitlement success’.

A striking feature of the cultural revolution in Kerala and Cuba was the high priority given to mass literacy by the people and state alike. The struggle for access to literacy and education by the subalterns in Kerala is a well documented part of its social history. In Cuba, the victorious revolution was followed by a pledge by Fidel Castro to turn the whole country into a gigantic school. Two years later Cuba captured the world’s attention by its pioneering and vigorous campaign for mass literacy. In 1989-90, Kerala too pioneered a similarly successful campaign to push its 89 per cent literacy to well above 90 per cent.

There is little doubt that these cultural changes also translate into forms of behaviour in such areas as sanitation, and has much to do with Kerala’s record in the latest index of open defecation that has been called ‘India’s shame’. The percentage of Indians who defecate in the open is over 50; in Kerala it is under four.

 

Neither Kerala nor Cuba could escape the forces of globalization and reform. Both have embraced market reforms and greater privatization and sought foreign investments, though these have been more measured and state-controlled in the latter. And both have achieved historically high economic growth rates over the past decade, perhaps proof that early gains in HD can be instrumental in later economic growth. But what is the impact of these reforms on their HD models?

On the positive side, it can be said that both have proved to be better prepared and better equipped to adapt to the changes, especially to offset the negative effects of the reforms, if only because the support systems and safety nets were already in place in contrast to countries like India. The HD achievements have been largely sustained, and even improved in some respects.

But there are disturbing trends and clear threats to the models. In Kerala, privatization of public goods, especially education and health care, has shaken the bedrock of its model. In tandem with declining pubic investments there has been a proliferation of private English medium schools and self-financing professional colleges. Unequal access to these institutions is now the norm, given two, three or even more tiers of educational institutions. Public provisioning for health care has also eroded even as private institutions have mushroomed. Many at the bottom of the income ladder face catastrophic expenses and debts during medical emergencies. Meanwhile, the quality of public institutions in both areas has deteriorated. Many schools are closing down due to lack of enrolment, both because of a demographic transition which is in an advanced stage and because of competition from the more elite private schools. If this sounds like a crisis in the system, there seems to be little recognition of such a crisis, and even less attention to it at the policy level.

Cuba, in contrast, has sustained its high quality education and health care systems, entirely publicly funded and free, and even enhanced delivery and accessibility with the implementation of greater decentralization. Every child is weighed and measured at birth, assigned to a local paediatrician who makes periodical home visits. Similar facilities exist to serve other vulnerable groups. I visited a hospital ward in Havana exclusively reserved for women with difficult pregnancies where they receive high quality care.

 

Another bedrock of the models now under threat is the famous food ration system (also referred to as the Public Distribution System or Civil Supply System). This has, arguably, been the single most important policy responsible for the rapid reduction in hunger and malnutrition among the poorest sections of the population in Kerala. In Cuba the ration card, the libreta, has been a symbol of the revolution which declared that no one shall go hungry or malnourished and guaranteed, since 1962, every Cuban a basic basket of food. Now this system is under threat in both. Both have so far sustained their systems albeit with reduced entitlements, Kerala better than most other Indian states and Cuba defying pressures from reformers advocating more substantial changes.

 

In both Kerala and Cuba there is rising inequality, but for different reasons and of different magnitude. In Kerala this is due to increasingly unequal access to public goods such as education and health, as well as to income, wealth and status in a high growth economy (higher than the Indian average) driven by the service sector and high consumption (higher than every other Indian state). The most visible forms of inequality in Cuba are an outcome of the tourist industry and a dual currency system in place since the 1990s with a convertible peso (which replaced the US dollar that was allowed for a short period) in addition to the Cuban peso, the former available only to those with foreign currency.

An estimated 50 per cent of Cubans receive foreign currency as remittances from relatives abroad, savings from service abroad or earnings from new tourism related jobs. This in turn provides exclusive access to the dollar stores that sell high-priced or imported goods, as well as to many other public facilities, including restaurants and hotels, which only accept the convertible peso. The tourist industry, now a source of foreign currency for Cuba, has led to a form of ‘tourism apartheid’ or ‘enclave tourism’ that keeps Cubans away from the best beaches and resorts, and from the upscale hotels frequented by tourists.

Although some of the blatant formal restrictions were removed after Raul Castro came to power, the inequalities are still striking and a blight on the Cuban model of socialism. It has also created a curious situation of taxi drivers, waitresses and other workers associated with the tourist industry earning incomes several times those of doctors or professors.

On the critical issue of environmental protection, Kerala fails in comparison to Cuba’s impressive record. Indeed, the World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report (2006) listed Cuba as the only country to have achieved high HD (greater than 0.8) with a sustainable ecological footprint (less than 1.8 hectares), meaning that Cuba is the only country in the world to have achieved high human development in an ecologically sustainable manner. State policy promotes environmentally sustainable projects such as organic agriculture (now another Cuban success story) and gives priority to environmental protection in the event of a perceived conflict with industries such as tourism. Kerala’s record on this score is unenviable, even deplorable. Despite years of public discussion and government promises, it has not even been able to effectively stop the ruinous practice of sand mining in its rivers (resulting in vanquishing rivers and drinking water), now believed to be controlled by a sand mafia enjoying political patronage of different colours.

 

Many have dreamed of a society free of hunger and endemic deprivations, but people in Kerala and Cuba did more than dream. Through their relentless struggles they achieved real gains which stand out as no mean achievement in history. They have also fared better in protecting their vulnerable population from the worst depredations caused by the forces of neo-liberal globalization across the world. It is noteworthy that many of the pro-poor and equity-enhancing policies behind their successes are precisely those assailed as ‘market distortions’ by the Washington Consensus. But now, in a vastly changed historical conjuncture, Kerala and Cuba face difficult challenges. I believe there is a lesson they can and must draw from their own past, and that is the need for more public action – people ‘daring to be wise’ once again, and to reinvent and revitalize their participatory democracy.

 

Democracy is a controversial issue, especially when applied to Cuba. It is also complex as there are varieties and degrees of democracy. For example, there are some serious limits to demo-cracy in a capitalist society in which the critical sphere of the economy is outside the purview of democratic control since the means and instruments of production are controlled by the capita-list class. Social democracy – a historical compromise and a contract between capital and labour – has met with some success in regulating the system, redistributing income and making public provisions for social security and HD, but has faced serious challenges during the recent neo-liberal period.

Kerala has been called a social democracy by political scientists such as Patrick Heller who has also argued that it has been an effective (vibrant, high energy) democracy because of its ability to put redistributive pressures on the state. From this perspective, Cuba has certainly been one of the most effective of democracies. The US, in contrast, is a very ineffective one in so far as state policy there has been tilted solidly in favour of the corporate elite, the one per cent that has been the target of the recent Occupy Movement.

That said, a few critical observations on our two models of demo-cracy are in order. To turn to Cuba first, there is no question that Cubans are denied some freedoms that are available to citizens of most democratic countries, including India. For example, many Cubans cannot obtain a visa to travel abroad. A group of Cuban students told me that they would have the least chance to get visas since the government believes they are the least likely to return to Cuba. I have already referred to the restrictions placed on Cubans in accessing tourist facilities and premium hotels.

Having described Cuba’s success in eradicating hunger earlier, let me also add that the standard of living for many Cubans is very low. A doctor in Havana explained why he has not bought a new shirt in years, wearing only those gifted by some grateful patients: his salary of 425 Cuban pesos in 2010 (around 18 US dollars) left nothing for such luxuries after providing for his and his mother’s basic needs, in spite of the free two bedroom apartment he had at the hospital and a small pension that his mother received. Reputed to be a good doctor and committed to his profession, he was grateful for the free education he had received, but was waiting for a posting abroad from where he hoped to return with enough savings to buy an apartment in Havana. Needless to say, there are other democratic deficits noted by Cuba’s critics such as the absence of adversarial politics and a free press, both striking to a visitor from Kerala awash with political parties and newspapers (more per 1000 people than in the US). Cuba’s one major, national paper, Granma, is the official publication of the Communist Party; a couple of others in circulation too are mouthpieces of organizations affiliated to or controlled by the party.

 

My second, related comment is about the Cuban revolution that gave birth to the Cuban model. An armed revolution (not a tea party in Mao’s words) has some inherent logic that, in my view, creates a system with tota-litarian tendencies. The winners must consolidate their power, pre-empting the counter-revolutionaries from regrouping to overthrow them. This is often done by executions aimed at liquidating the enemy. In Cuba such executions were stopped early on after the revolution. What I see as even more worrisome is the idea – perhaps the imperative – that the revolution is ‘irreversible’, a slogan widely advertised in Cuba. The implications of this are many. The heroes of the victorious revolution who come to power after considerable personal risk and sacrifice, acquire (and claim) a legitimacy which too becomes irreversible. How do they then deal with criticism and dissent?

 

I was part of a group of scholars who visited an art centre near Havana and held discussions with several artists and writers. An elderly writer told us about a visit to their centre by Fidel in the early days after the revolution. Even as he encouraged artists to sharpen their minds and provide critical perspectives, he also warned that their criticisms must be ‘within the revolution’. Given a revolutionary leadership that is practically irreplaceable and any dissent allowed only ‘within the revolution’, the only avenue for major policy changes seems to be the ‘rectification’ programmes aimed at correcting previous errors such as the liquidation of even small private farms. But in the absence of the kind of checks and balances in multiparty democracies, these too have not pro-ven to be very useful.

Finally, the totalitarian tendency is also manifest in the organization of the communist party as a cadre based, vanguard party and following the Leninist principle of democratic centralism (a point applicable to Kerala’s CPM too). Internal democracy within the party seems to become more tightly controlled as the party consolidates its power. Ensconced as the leading force of society and of the state, and the ‘organized vanguard of the Cuban nation’, the party’s over-arching reach is unmistakable.

Continuing economic reforms, increasing solidarity with and support from Latin American countries, waning US influence, and a softening of the ‘siege mentality’ among Cubans may offer greater possibilities for political reform in Cuba, but this is something only the future can tell.

 

Kerala’s multiparty system too is showing signs of decline. With increasing factionalism, dissension, clientilism, communalization, corruption and even criminalization, Kerala’s system now looks more like its Indian counterparts and less like the vibrant democracy it once was. Corruption is rampant in an economy with high growth, high degree of financialization and awash with cash. The CPM is no exception and its decline is a particular source of worry given the dominant role it has played in the making of Kerala’s effective democracy. Ridden with dissension, it is also now widely regarded as corrupt and even employing criminal gangs.

The recent mafia-style murder of a prominent defector from the party who dared to become the popular leader of a splinter party, has reopened the debate about the party, and more broadly, about the nature of democratic politics in the state. It is significant that in the face of widespread accusations pointed at the leadership of the dominant faction within the party, its powerful state secretary, who had earlier called the murdered defector a traitor, was constrained to explain that the CPM does not operate like a mafia. Observers have speculated about the possibility of another split in the party.

It would seem that Kerala, like Cuba, needs to rethink its politics, reinvent its tradition of public action, and revitalize its participatory democracy. The task belongs to all Keralites-civil society, intellectuals and NGOs, not just the political class.

 

Footnote:

1. M. Benjamin, J. Collins and M. Scott, No Free Lunch: Food and Revolution in Cuba Today. Food First Books, Institute for Food and Development Policy, San Francisco, 1984.