CHALLENGES TO THE APHENOMENAL MODEL:
HOW CUBA ADDRESSES THE "ENERGY CRUNCH"
During 2006, the Cuban government declared "the Year of the Energy Revolution".
Up to now, the consequences of Cuba’s “energy revolution” have been discussed among development economists and Cuba enthusiasts in terms of the model of development that is paced to conform to a “sustainable” footprint within the ecological system of the planet as a whole. Niether their government's declaration, nor how the declaration was implemented, have been examined in the context of what Cuban people themselves believe to constitute a revolutionisation of development. Contrary to certain assumptions harboured widely among many proponents of "sustainable development" who accept Cuba's solution as a possible model, this is no grab-bag of techniques that can be refitted and implemented just about anywhere. It is an entire process, including discrete steps, that has been developed consciously and popularised into a real movement within Cuban society.
This note introduces three aspects of Cuba's energy revolution that conventional development economists, even those supporting Cuba as a viable alternative approach, have failed to weigh or assess fully if at all.
Cuba's systematic approach is garnering increasingly international recognition. The World Wildlife Fund recently declared Cuba the only country whose development fell within the criteria of what its experts considered sustainable. More recently a Cuban lab that looks at renewable energy sources was singled out for international recognition.
The first of several major implications of the work of the Renewable Energy Laboratory at the University of Oriente in Santiago de Cuba which no commentary outside Cuba has yet grasped is the fact that, based on careful preparatory investigation, Cuban enterprises increasingly can and do modify imported commodities and-or how they are fitted for use and consumption in the Cuban system. This activity carries on in addition to and on top of mass-organised materials recycling programs of the type most recently reported, for example, in yesterday's editions of Cuba's national daily newspaper "Granma" by Lourdes Perez Navarro, about how "Energy-savings program permits recovery of more than 40 000 tons of materials"
What is actually going on here, “beneath the surface” so-to-speak, is the organisation of The Consumer as a power capable of countervailing the diktat of international finance capital as The Producer. This countervail takes place in the context of sectors of commodity trade that have become more-or-less thoroughly socialised, so that the Final Product as delivered by the international trading system is not, and need not be, The Last Word as to what The Consumer eventually gets to consume.
This countervailing power is exercised, however, *not* over the exchange-value of the commodities in question, but over their use-value once purchase and importation have been arranged. From the standpoint of the state-organised system of material commodity production within Cuba, these transactions may be accounted as a kind of cost of raw or only semi-finished material, rather than as a purchase of goods whose cost is to be recovered through resale in domestic markets.
If the consuming society were capable of organising, and-or [also] compelled / impelled by global encirclement to organise, all material commodity production itself from the outset, this arrangement would not be the preferred solution. But in a world divided between the rich North and subjugated, impoverished and manacled South, the collective organised intervention in such countries of The Consumer to fit the imported product to the end-uses of the population becomes a practical possibility for restraining some of the oppressive yoke of the global diktat of international finance capital.
Utilising its own internal state monopoly capitalist mechanisms, the Cuban government and people have thus hit upon a highly original amendment to the model that said that the mode of consumption is, or has to be, dictated entirely by the mode of production. In sum: within the Cuban context, and notwithstanding the criteria of the awarding jury, what this lab is actually accomplishing is ultimately not about “stustainability” according to the Brundtland Commission’s definition. That definition has been concerned only with sustainability of the status-quo against practices and tendencies that would tend to degrade current levels of actual or potential consumption and production. In contrast to the mindset back in 1987 that was informing the work and report of the Brundtland Commission, the Cuban government and people have actually set out upon an entirely different and truly novel path. Given particular conditions of the degree to which material commodity production has become socialised, consumers backed by a popular state power can modulate considerably the degree and extent of the diktat exercised by international finance capital as the power behind the throne of The Producer.
That is one of the least discussed, but real, messages of the Energy Revolution in Cuba.
With regard to Marxist economic theory, it has been assumed up to now that Production and Consumption stand in a dialectical contradiction that is antagonistic under capitalism but that disappears under “socialism”. In reality, as this Cuban example brings out, in a world of globally socialised production on the one hand, and relations of production dictated by international finance capital on the other, a pro-social regime that is neither bound to nor propped up by international fiance capital may indeed intervene to modulate the diktat of international finance capital. This diktat derives from the widescale ownership of means of production on the world scale beyond the territory of that regime by international finance capital. Normally this diktat also provides the oppressive and antagonising pole of the contradiction between this social form and the exploited and oppressed peoples of the colonial, semi-colonial and neocolonial countries. However, by converting and re-using imported finished goods as inputs for a collectively-organised process of consumption, the manner in which use-values are realised becomes modified, such that the antagonism of the contradiction is displaced.
As this organised and conscious approach to consumption, within a pro-social regime, gives rise to new forms of domestic material production of goods and-or services, arrangements can and will be put in place to integrate new production and further consumption such that both become entirely domestically based and no longer dependent on imports. Deploying the collective organising powers of a pro-social regime in this way entirely redefines and displaces the traditional roles of commodity imports. What the Cuban government’s renewable energy lab is doing represents in embryonic form a significant modification of the import-substitution strategies of conventional “development economics”. These strategies up to now assumed little or no significant agency for developing countries as consumers of the exports of developed countries.
That is the second of the messages of the Energy Revolution in Cuba that is not being, but deserves to be, discussed.
From a standpoint of engineering innovation, there remains to unfold yet another entirely different strategy, or strategic stage, within the energy revolution. This stage would be based on harnessing natural energy sources directly without intermediate conversion of the energy content into electricity. That should provide the starting-point for entire lines of domestically-produced substitutes for conventional existing energy sources. The issue is how to get there ---- how to accomplish this final step of complete domestication of the sources of energy for the Cuban economy --- without sacrificing one millimetre of such financial and economic independence as the the Cuban people have been able to achieve so far over the last 58 years, in the teeth of both the ongoing U.S. embargo in place since 1961 and the collapse of the Soviet bloc since 1991 including the barter relations developed in that latter connection. That is where intermediate steps, such as the end-use conversion approach to the import and dissemination of appliances and other energy-consuming equipment based on the orientations of this laboratory ratings project, enter the picture.
This is the third of the messages of the Energy Revolution in Cuba that is not being, but deserves to be, discussed.
All these messages, separately or in combination, pose the profoundest challenge to the present and future of deploying aphenomenal models to address the “energy crunch”.
