HAVANA VS DAVOS: THE UNBRIDGEABLE CHASM

In January, two major world economic conferences straddling the ambiguous theme of globalisation took place, one in Havana, Cuba and the other in Davos, Switzerland. While the latter received world coverage in the corporate media, the former was practically overlooked. Frederic Clairmont, who attended the Havana conference, reports on it.

By Frederic F Clairmont

February 1999

Two major world economic conferences straddling the ambiguous theme of globalisation occurred in January 1999: the first, in Havana, by the Association of Economists of Latin America and the Caribbean; the second, by the world's biggest capitalists and their political hangers-on in the elite Swiss Alpine resort of Davos. That, however, was where the similarity ended.

The first ruthlessly analysed the ravages of the economic, cultural, political and social policies of neo-liberalism, pressed so relentlessly by the satellite trinity of transnational capital and the US caste oligarchy: the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organisation. Its logo is uninhibited market freedom of capital, liquidation of the nation-state, and the wholesale obliteration of the democratic institutions that partnered it over the last two centuries. These policies were tantamount to a gulag of a special kind that literally involved job liquidation to the tune of millions. The name of the game is restructuring.

The Davos Forum, militant propagandist of transnational capital, was engineered to ensure the perpetuation and consolidation of the univers concentrationaire of Big Capital, with the pensee unique its dominant totalitarian trait. Understandably, its deliberations received world coverage in the corporate media in contrast to Havana. Was this not to be expected inasmuch as Big Capital and its mediatic protuberances are cesspools that hardly require publicity?

The Organising Principle

The first thing that struck the participants in Havana was the beauty of the surroundings. The hotel and its huge complex, one of the most stunning in the Americas, included the convention centre where the plenary was held; a source of enormous pride: financed, built, owned and managed by Cubans. The numbers attending the meeting were between 550 and 600. Simultaneous interpretation in five languages (including Chinese) was provided.

Many of the participants were economists, engineers and workers and intellectuals and public figures such as Mme Mitterand and many other prominent political, scientific and cultural figures from the Americas and elsewhere. The architects of this gathering were explicit as to its purpose: to ensure maximum participation in the free exchange of ideas.

A goal that was consummated.

It was the antithesis of the pensee unique for widely divergent opinions were expressed. Many corporate media enterprises were invited but not all came. The World Bank spokesman aired his views, and he was not boiled in oil for doing so. Nothing could have surpassed the spirit of generosity of the conference than the courteous public exchange in the plenary between him and President Castro. What country in the world, as an Indian delegate observed, could ever have financed and undertaken this project on such a vast scale, and that in a nation that still labels itself Third World?

For five days the intense pace of work never slackened: from 10.00 hours to 22.00 hours with pauses only for meals. The research papers met the highest standards of academic scholarship. They will ultimately be printed and disseminated within Cuba and abroad as pedagogic materials to assist the reshaping of a crisis-stricken international economy.

Unfailingly, President Fidel Castro and certain members of his political entourage were always present, assimilating the knowledge revealed in the presentations. Happily, vigorous meetings of this kind will be institutionalised, if only as a countervailing force to the destructive force of transnational capital and its propaganda apparatchiks, of which the Davos Forum is a notorious exemplar. Havana, as a Colombian historian noted, was the twining of humanity and applied economics.

Here was a head-of-state raising questions, assimilating the new knowledge, venturing his observations forcefully but never dogmatically. His analysis was derived from the staggering diversity of Cuba's revolutionary experience over the last 40 years, nourished by his own extensive reading, discussions and meditations on international economic relations. He never pontificated but by his incessant quest for dialogue it was apparent that the Congress had opened new vistas to him and indeed to all of us.

In Cuba, the Special Period (following the demolition of the USSR and the socialist camp) is drawing inexorably to an end, perhaps too slowly for many, but nonetheless this is its trajectory. Growth is forecast, according to The Economist Intelligence Unit, to surpass 4.5% this year. Macro-aggregates depict however only a very small part of the gigantic metamorphosis that this nation of 11 million people is traversing; and whose impact on Latin America remains irrepressible.

A Jesuit participant came closer to the heart of the matter when he said that Cuba was the only country he knew in the Americas where children do not go barefoot, where they do not go hungry, where they do not sleep on streets, and where they were able to read and write. Monumental achievements by any standards no doubt but Cuba's achievements were much larger, as so tangibly exhibited in this conference.

It was a poignant reminder also of the stark tragedies of the totalitarian Frankenstein of neo-liberalism and its maledictions. The Congress was a bastion of criticality whose goal was to promote debate on current trends within the world economy by exploring avenues of research via new theoretical and analytical tools. Hence, it was not conceived exclusively as a debating forum but also one for the formulation of alternatives in which social justice, that sworn enemy of the neo-liberal gulag, becomes the noblest of realities.

The Economic Background

What shaped the contours of the debate was the breakdown of international capitalism that battered the world economy since the collapse of the Thai baht in June 1997. A firestorm that shows no signs of relenting, but of accelerating.

The once vaunted Tigers, touted by the World Bank, the IMF and the US oligarchy as paragons of 'investor confidence', and the miraculous workings of unhindered capital flows, are now squirming in the gutter of moral and economic decay. They are not alone: the credibility of the World Bank and the IMF is in tatters, shunned and assaulted even by the likes of George Soros, who has lost faith in the system and transnational speculative orgies that was the source of his net worth of $25-30 billion.

As the discussions highlighted, even the spokesmen of transnational capital and their media ventriloquist dummies can no longer dissimulate the system's putrefaction, demoralisation and a sense of impending breakdown that permeates corporate board-rooms. Japan is but one more example, followed by the Russian debacle of 17 August. The rot did not halt and cannot be halted.

The aftershocks of the Brazilian financial bubble and the wretched expediencies being taken, such as the appointment of one of Soros's agents to be boss of the central bank, dramatise the depths of an irreversible crisis. A moribund Mexican economy and its diseased ruling class, like that of Chile, is no more capable of weathering the typhoon than Brazil. Perhaps nothing is so humiliating as the liquidation of the national sovereignty of certain comprador governments such as Argentina, as stressed by several speakers.

It has sold out the national patrimony to the TNCs, including the banking system. There is nothing much left to sell off. Everything that could be privatised has been privatised. These engulf transportation networks, airlines, gas, oil, and electricity, and even streets. Vast tracts of the Argentinian pampas including farm holdings of as much as 400,000 hectares have been sold out to foreign investors. George Soros, one of the most conspicuous urban real estate dealers in Argentina, ranks also among its biggest latifundistas, as do the major US grain companies.

Far more tragic is that the ruling class is crawling on its belly calling for the removal of the last vestige of sovereignty: replacement of the peso by the dollar. A once-freed slave is now hollering for the imposition of his chains.

Conclusion

It was appropriate that this pathbreaking Congress was held in Havana on the threshold of a new century. What it above all demonstrated was the vitality of a nation that had chosen a divergent development path, and for which it has been condemned to death by a foreign power; but which refuses to die or capitulate. A sizeable chunk of Cuban territory, grabbed one century ago, continues to be occupied by a foreign power that celebrates its rape of Cuba's sovereignty.

But that's not all. The economic blockade imposed on Cuba has already cost the nation over $60 billion. The US in its unilateral action remains accountable to no one. It is a mockery of the very notion of a free Multilateral Trading System which the US claims to be defending when its political oligarchy has galvanised more than 40 laws and executive decisions to apply unilateral economic sanctions against 75 countries representing 42% of the world's population.

Globalisation is not an irreversible process. That is the moral of the Congress. What has been globalised by the conquests of the TNC gulag can be de-globalised.

What the Congress in its far-reaching debates served to remind us was that while the transnational corporation is an iniquitous institution, it contains the seeds of its own destruction best glimpsed in the headlong thrust of the concentration of capital, revelatory not of its strength but of its weakness.

Moreover, mass movements are emerging with impetuous force. Ultimately those movements will come to play a decisive role in reshaping the global economy and its peoples. It is precisely the advent of this mighty countervailing force that President Castro had in mind when he observed that inasmuch as the United States today is the basis of globalised imperialism, the battle against its dominion must also be globalised. - Third World Network Features

About the writer: Frederic Clairmont is an economics researcher, formerly Senior Economist at the UN Conference on Trade and Development in Geneva, and author of several books on trade and economics.

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