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CUBA: LIVING THE REVOLUTION WITH OSCAR LEWIS

Michael Higgins

A good deal of controversy, much of it familiar, has been stimulated by the publica- tion of three volumes of ethnographic material dealing with socialist Cuba, co-authored by Ruth E. Lewis and Susan M. Rigdon.

Oscar Lewis was the project director for this investigation of Cuba, and was involved in the primary collection of data and its organization. His death left editing and ana- lysis to Ms. Lewis and Ms. Rigdon. All three books are attempts at using Lewis' life history format to present an oral history of the changes that have taken place in Cuba during the first decade of the revolution [ 1 ]. The material presented is fascinating, difficult to encompass in one reading, and leads to critical questions about the nature of social action within a socialist country: how accurately can that process be understood and recorded by outside, though sympathetic, researchers?

That is the question which I shall consider here, because Lewis' works have always been approached with suspicion by the American academic left. In a review in a popular journal, Womack raised some questions about Lewis' model of the culture of poverty, his political purity, and the overall usefulness of his stu- dies, inclusive of the current material on Cuba [2]. I will briefly address these issues before dealing directly with the books under review. The Cuba volumes as they now stand

Michael Hig~ns is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Normern Colorado.

have little to do with the concept of the cul- ture of poverty [3]. Lewis was interested in determining if socialism could eliminate what he had termed the "culture of poverty" and his first conceptualization of the project was to test this "hypothesis" in the social context of Cuba. However, the Cuba project was begun when both Valentine's [4] and Leacock's [5] criticism had been incorpo- rated into public discourse and Lewis was con- cerned about confronting such objections. He had hoped that his Cuba project would equal his earlier empirical work on peasants in Mexico [61 and his work in the U.S. among American Indians and poor rural farmers [7]. Thus, at the time of his death he was moving beyond the limits of his much abused model, and Ms. Lewis and Ms. Rigdon felt no moral or intellectual commitment to organize the material in these three volumes around the concept of the culture of poverty. There is no real need to discuss the concept of the culture of poverty in terms of these books, except for the fact that Lewis' critics have introduced the issue. In so doing, the general critique of Lewis' work in taken as having established the uselessness of his model; his critics feel quite comfortable in reducing Lewis' studies to the status of capitalist apologetics of the species of Daniel Moynihan. But if one care- fully reads Lewis' critics, most object either to things Lewis never said or to government policy on urban poverty which is somehow attributed to Lewis. Furthermore, most of

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the reworking of Lewis' position by his critics turns out to be a weak paraphrase of his original argument [8]. What both Lewis and his critics failed to analyze was how poverty or the culture of poverty was part of the overall process for the production and repro- duction of poverty within the context of capitalism. Within capitalist production there are material constraints that force the poor into particular patterns of gender relations, household organization and the use of labor time [9]. This being the case, the study of such patterns within a socialist context would be vitally important for understanding both poverty as a way of life, and the means appropriate for transforming the conditions that generate either poverty or the culture of poverty. In a limited sense the material in these three volumes presents us with rough comparative data on socialist and capitalist social formations. It should be remembered that Lewis had felt (long before the current surge of radicalism in the social sciences) that the culture of poverty was a product of capitalist development and that its distinctive features would be altered in a socialist con- text. The fault in Lewis' work was the lack of/my formal means to demonstrate his intuitive feelings about poverty. He once stated that he thought there were only two "cultural systems" in existence - capitalism and socialism - and that this should be the conceptual boundary for anthropological in- quiry. With the development of such models as "capitalism as a world system" [ 10], Lewis' reflection now becomes very sharp indeed. If Lewis was overly romantic in his image of the poor and their relationship to the social mechanism of capitalism, his critics were equally naive in the reformist overtones of their criticism, and their alternatives to Lewis' ideas.

If, however, we look to Lewis for concep- tual insight into the dynamics of poverty (and how to transform it), we will be dis- appointed; it simply is not there. But if we

wish to use his data from Mexico, India, Puerto Rico and the United States, and now the ma- terial from Cuba, we have a wealth of roughly organized data about the realities of poverty as a way of life. It is important to understand how Lewis organized his data, for it seems to me that Ms. Lewis and Ms. Rigdon have kept that organization intact in their editing of the Cuban materials. If one looks at the totality of Lewis' anthropological effort, a clear epistemological structure emerges. Lewis, like many of his colleagues who were trained in the late thirties and early forties, was con- cerned to synthesize his understanding of the works of Freud and Marx. To Lewis this meant a focus on the career of a particular person within specific socio-historical contexts. Lewis saw personal realities (emotial, sexual, and familial) as being molded by social and historical factors outside the control of indivi- dual personal power domains. He was con- cerned with how people adapted to adverse material conditions, and what effect that adaptation had on different levels of individual existence. Just as Redfield projected a lineal- causal direction in his folk-urban continuum, Lewis had similar, somewhat mechanical, views on how conditions control the range of~ndivi- dual behavior and limit alternatives. To him, the institutional structures of capitalism oper- ate to destroy poor people and that destruc- tion he analysed as the "culture of poverty". This position of Lewis' has clear limitations; it could, in his non-dialectical work on urban poverty, illustrate the horrors of capitalism, but it provided only limited insights into poverty as a pervasive feature of the social structure of capitalism. The same orientation, within a socialist context, produces a syste- matic account of individual lives, but seems uncomfortable with the possibility that the institutions of socialism may be responsive to, instead of repressive of, the needs of poor people.

The three volumes under review are entitled Four Men, Four Women, and Neighbors.

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They total over 1,500 pages of data with no more than 169 pages of analysis. Using the methodology of life history and daily obser- vation, the three volumes present the lives of many Cubans both in the context of pre- revolutionary and post-revolutionary Cuba. The cast of characters is large, the narratives are detailed; they range from the mundane to the ecstatic, with passages that are deeply moving in their presentation of the pain and joy involved in the attempt at revolutionary social change. There are bits of ethnographic information that are of interest to students of the Caribbean (the life styles of the urban poor in Cuba had been much like those of Jamaica; many of the Afro-Cuban religious activities were still in operation at the time of study). The ethnographic information also reveals, impressively, the depth of change that is needed to build a socialist system. But in an overall critical perspective, the material leads us to ask a basic question: what were the epistemological premises that structured the organizing and editing of the data. This can be illustrated by assessing the range of each volume.

The first - F o u r M e n - contains the life histories of the four principle characters and the persons who were associated with certain aspects of their lives, ex-wives, children, other, more distant relatives. Three of the men were previous residents of shanty town in Havana, and the fourth person was a poor resident from another section of the city. The first biography is of an elderly black man, Lazaro Benedi Rodriguez, who had a long social and political history in shanty town. His youth was spent (with various wives) in various occupations, and semi-radical political actions; at the time of the revolution he was considered one of the political leaders of the community. His story ends with his reflections on the positive fea- tures of the revolution_and his attempts to deal with what limited contributions he can continue to make. The second life history

is of Alfredo Barrera Lordi, whose back- ground is similar to that of many impoverished males in urban areas. His life was adaptive and reactive - learning how to hustle and make the most of very difficult situations. Many of his solutions to these difficulties were defined as criminal or, one way or another, extra- legal. He had trouble believing that the cur- rent government was any different than past governments and persisted in behavior that in a revolutionary society, became labelled anti-social. The third subject of this volume is Nicolas Salazar Fernandez, who was very poor and viewed the revolution as an act of redemption. Though he had problems in coming to terms with the social organization of the revolution, he perceived the current social system as a clear improvement over the past. The last participant in the volume Gabriel Capote Pacheco - had a somewhat more secure childhood than the others; how- ever, he was aware of how severely handi- capped the poor had been in the pre-revolu- tionary period, and viewed the revolution as a means for improving the lives of poor people. Though he felt that he was being mis- treated by the revolution (his housing seemed to him inadequate), he expressed hope in the even more revolutionary future.

The lives of these men illustrate the emo- tional and physical horrors of poverty in pre- socialist Cuba. They also clearly signal that one decade of a social revolution cannot trans- form peoples' previous attitudes. All four sub- jects were sexist in their views of women, the last man had strongly racist views and with the exception of Benedi, all had problems with the occupational and political demands of the socialist regime. Benedi and Salazar were the most committed to the revolution, whereas Capote and Barrera seemed at times confused about the changes that they were confronting and seemed to express longing for the "freedom of older days". This longing for the past is commented on by Rigdon in her introduction, when she suggests that the

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attempt of the government to bring the poor into the mainstream of life had confused many of them and stimulated feelings of a lost freedom. Further, it seems that many anti-social acts (absenteeism, vagrancy, fre- quent job changing, gambling and black marketing), were abreactive means of holding on to what they perceived as personal free- dom (see p. lxi). This statement follows from the epistemological premise of the study, namely, the assumption of a lineal or one-dimensional quality in human action. There is no sense of a historical dialectic that relates the development of the lives of people in Cuba to the developing social and political structures of the revolution. It seems odd to normalize aspects of social pathology as elements of personal freedom, although, within capitalist contexts such forms of beha- vior are both symptons of the repression of human creativity and the means for adaptation to adverse conditions. None of these men ex- press the socialist desire for a "new person" (and they certainly do not illustrate it); how- ever, none of them is any longer forced to exist in the extreme conditions of poverty. Rigdon ex- presses concern over the collective demands of the revolution and the effects this will ha, ce on the immediate human needs of the people documented. She expresses a necessary skepticism about the degree to which the social changes or the revolution have bene- fited them as individuals, at least in their own perspective. On first reading, these life histories convey the failures of capitalism, while not giving as strong a view of the suc- cesses of the revolution. However, they do convey the victories of the revolution, if one looks differently at the structure of the text. The horrors of capitalism are seen more clearly in the perspective of the life history, because the daily struggles of the poor are hidden by statistical growth rates of capitalist development. This is inverted in a socialist context. There are major (and visible) col- lective successes in the areas of education,

medicine, and overall social reform; however, the personal struggles are not seen as clearly. But the fact that these men can confront their problems of adjustment and still not be materially penalized goes beyond the routine exploitation in the capitalist social order.

But the concern with personal freedom within socialism deliberately obscures the issue of civil liberties within socialist systems. For the patent fact that these men have the time and means to confront, and slruggle with the changing social order is a demonstration of real civil liberties, of real personal praxis. The forms of personal freedom that Rigdon feels these men are deprived of can perhaps be defined as politically creative acts under the social and historical conditions of capitalism. Under socialism, such actions are no longer politically creative; thus, they lack the element of authentic praxis, except as they are symp- tomatic of how each of these men struggles with the new conditions and attempts to cre- ate new definitions of successful coping. This becomes a new form of social and perso- nal praxis which is not bound by severe mate- rial restrictictions. The other two volumes illustrate this process in a somewhat more dramatic fashion.

The range of life styles in Four Women is a much broader portrait of the drama of the Cuban Revolution. In important ways, the lives of the women in this volume illustrate how a revolution can effect changes in the social existence of persons, on all levels of being. The first life-history is that of Monica Ramos Reyes, a university-trained woman of middle class origins. As in the first volume, the narrative of the main character is supple- mented with observations of people close to the main story teller. Hence, we get in- formation from Ramos' mother, sister, and ex-husband. What emerges from these stories is the complexity of the Cuban middle class dilemma: on the one hand, their responses are governed by the need for a "rational" structure to protect their economic interests,

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and on the other, there is the thrust beyond such pragmatic interests (at least in the part of a segment of the bourgeoisie) toward a sincere involvement in the revolution and the achievement of social justice. Within Ramos' family there are people who fought for straightforward political reforms, others who became political activists (including an uncle who lost his life to the secret police of Batista), young people like herself who joined the revolution after the Sierra struggle, and family members who become counter- revolutionaries and who finally left Cuba for the United States. Also traced in this life

history is the affective-cognitive evolution of Ramos from romantic teenager, to politically active university student, to a mature woman attempting to find herself professionally, with a strong commitment both to her country and to her children.

The drama of the second life documented is somewhat more subtle, though equally magnetic. Gracia Rivera Herrera lived in pover- ty and domestic disorganization, haunted by fear and confusion. Her background was apoli- tical, and the course and basis of the revolution perplexed her. She was young at the inception of the revolution, and sought refuge in religion. She became a secular nun, participated in counterrevolutionary acitivities, and assumed the role of a mistress to the priest who ran her convent. Her involvement with the church is strong evidence for the existence of religious freedom in Cuba during the first decade of the revolution, but also intimates that the regime's acceptance of church programs could have been more controlled. At the conclusion of her narrative, Rivera's life is still in a state of confusion. She had left the nunnery and was searching for ways and means to synthesize her faith with the goals of the revolution. She was not interested in simple polemics, but seemed determined to find, and create, real social choices for herself.

Pilar Lopez Gonzales' life is classic, the sort that the socialist-movement delights in.

Her childhood was subordinated in poverty, and she eventually became a prostitute, work- ing in a brothel for several years, her suffering being expressed in alcoholism, drugs and abortions. She was apolitical and knew little or nothing about the direction or purpose of the revolution. When the government an- nounced for formation of schools to train prostitutes for new jobs, she was one of the first to volunteer and graduate from the pro- gram. Although her psyche is still scarred from her years as a prostitute and she has been in 'therapy for many years, the transfor- mation involved is an obvious virtue of the revolution.

The concluding life history is of an older woman, Inocencia Acosta Felipe, who spent many years in low paying jobs, primarily in domestic service. Ironically, after the revolu- tion, she continued in that work, but with better wages and substantial social and medi- cal benefits that she did not have before. As she tells her story, the reader develops insight into the nature of job domination and sexist social patterns in the careers of the urban poor. Most of Inoeencia's adult life was spent in marriage to a man whom she did not par- ticularly love, but to whom she felt she owed respect and service. She was not politically active before the revolution, though after- wards she attempted to participate in new social groupings (such as CDR), and was ex- cited about the prospects of receiving an edu- cation. Her husband supported the revolution; nevertheless he did not want her to leave the house. In order to become an activist, she divorced him.

Though Rigdon gives solid information in her introduction on the legal and political changes that have developed in revolutionary Cuba with reference to the liberation of women, she does not address the differences between the lives of these women and the men in the companion volume, although it is clear that the lives of the women seem to have been more radically altered by the course

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of the revolution than those of the men. Why? All the men have been affected by the overall changes that the revolution has generated in education, medicine, employment and con- trol of material goods. However, they still de- t'me their roles more or less traditionally, in terms of what they conceive as masculine be- havior - providing for their families and pro- tecting their women. For the women, even though the nature of the women's movement is an aspect of the general program of the revolution (which is controlled primarily by men) and there has been little concern with consciousness raising, the revolution does provide practical alternatives to previous roles. These alternatives are not easy for women to adopt and fulfill; they face a constant struggle, personally and politically. However, the new Cuban social order does emerge against the background of their lives.

The third volume, Neighbors, deploys the life history method to illustrate the nature of community living in revolutionary circum- stances. The volume deals with five households who share a (formerly luxurious) building in one of the more exclusive sections of Havana. After the revolution, the area was used primar- ily for embassies and schools, with some of the smaller units being allocated for private dwellings. As a result of a need for housing, the five households came to be neighbors. This study is rich in data about pre-revolution- ary times, military events during the revolution (two of the men involved served in the Sierra campaigns), problems of urban adaptation and the construction of urban social services. Good information is also provided on inter- and intra-familial patterns of interaction, also on how households deal with the problems of rationing, and the attainment of municipal services, such as getting a telephone. The book includes narrative material from the children. of the household, namely, their views on the revolution, and their sense of their futures. However, as a statement on community organi- sation in Cuba, the work inevitably falls short,

since the neighborhood was not really a com- munity. The five households are not densely connected with those in private dwellings; hence, minimal community organs have devel- oped in the area. Also, the material in this volume is less elaborately developed than in the other two.

In the afterword of Neighbors Rigdon up- dates.the lives of the persons who participated in the Cuba project, and returns to some of the questions she posed in the introductions to Four Men and Four Women. She also asks questions about the future, and wonders if, as the glamor of the revolution fades, Cuba will become the Poland of the Caribbean. To understand why she asks these questions one must return to the general structure of the entire project, including Oscar Lewis' episte- mological premises. In Lewis' earlier work, the life history method did project the indi- vidual triumphs and defeats of poor people within a capitalist context. Though certainly not in Lewis' words, one could describe this earlier work as an empirical demonstration of the nature of praxis within poverty. Given the harshness of urban poverty in the third world and in our own ghettos, Lewis' portrayals of the lives of the Sanchez and Rios families indicate that survival becomes a form of cre- ativity, and thus a genuine expression of praxis, In the milieu of capitalism, this praxis is demonstrated in gambling, spontaneous work strategies, and allied forms of illegal behavior. The personal freedom of the poor is not an ideal, but a reality enabling them to survive. The continual struggle of the poor to endure under capitalism is both a critique and a negation of the system, and one should not fall into the trap of normalizing the be- havior of the poor beyond the particularity of their material environment. On the basis of the data presented in these three volumes, there is no doubt that the Cubans are cons- ciously attempting to organize their society for the elimination of poverty and moreover, for the elimination of certain usages of poverty

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as a way of life. This implies the disappearance of the "personal freedoms" of poverty. How- ever, new freedoms, of a different social di- mension, are taking their place. The most dramatic of them involve a recognition of social equity, and a strong passion for, based on the possibility of, attaining formal education.

Lewis' mixture ("blend" is too smooth a word) of Freud and Marx led him to suspect power, and his earlier works do in fact, sup- port such a suspicion. The structures of capitalism function to maintain and extract surplus value, hence poverty becomes "a fact of life", and this, in turn, generates cer- tain problems among the poor. Lewis' method of recording life histories was a critical instru- ment for the examination of such a social pro- cess. However, it was based upon the premise that poor people have little control over their material conditions. This is accurate in capi- talist societies, but is not necessarily the case within a socialist context. The goal of social- ism is to destroy the mechanism for the ex- traction of surplus value, obliterate labor alienation, and allow for the creation of an institutional order devoted only to the further- ance of human growth. This creates a novel situation for both the people in a socialist system and for people studying such a system. That is: How does one either live in, or per- ceive from the outside, a social structure that is designed for the general benefit of the whole population? Because of the failure of the Soviet Union to develop such progressive institutions, and because of the restrictions on the work of artists and on the movements of certain ethnic groups, in a society that defines itself as "socialist", the question posed may seem irrelevant. But it is also necessary to realize that the problematic of civil or personal liberty draws our interest and criti- cism because it is the domain of social action

within which Americans have had experience and we can recognize the dangers involved in the absence of such rights. What we lack is any real or concrete experience with an in- stitutional system that might in fact be struc- tured consciously to foster human growth, in any effective or meaningful cultural defini- tion of the concept.

Cuba has and will continue to make mis- takes; however, as indicated in the life histories projected in these volumes, such mistakes do not per se destroy the lives of people as they do in a capitalist social system. The range of personalities presented - from committed re- volutionaries to ex-nuns - illustrates the exist- ence of a high degree of personal freedom within socialist Cuba, and outlines the para- meters of revolutionary praxis. The realities of the people in these volumes are still "pri- vate" (as opposed to "public"); they are not yet socially integrated; emotional, sexual, social and familial problems are narrowly conceived. However, the confrontation and alteration of such problems differ profoundly from the experience of the capitalist social world.

In conclusion, it should prove useful to anchor my "epistemological" remarks in cer- tain material realities. In the concluding sec- tions of Neighbors, the authors offer data on the cost of household maintenance in Cuba during the period 1969-70. This includes the ration book from the Cardenas house- hold and an estimation of the general budgets for all five households. I shall compare the range of foodstuffs consumed and prices that were available to the Cardenas household (seven persons) with that of an urban poor family in Oaxaca, Mexico during the same time period [ 11 ]. This family (also of seven) - the Sanchez' - was better off than many other families in the squatter settlement where they lived.

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Food Consumption for one month: 1970 [ 12]

Cuba - Cardenas Household Mexico - Sanchez House- hold

Meat 9.5 kilos 4 kilos Milk 90 liters 24 liters Beans 1 package a month 4 kilos Rice 9.5 kilos 2 kilos Eggs 84 40 Sugar 19 kilos 1.2 kilos Noodles 2 packages a month 2 kilos

Prices (U.S. dollars)

Meat 1.07 a kilo 1.76 a kilo Milk 0.25 a liter 0.19 a liter Beans 0.37 a kilo 0.35 a kilo Rice 0.37 a kilo 0.35 a kilo Eggs 0.8 a piece 0.5 a piece Sugar 0.2 a kilo 0.34 a kilo Noodles 0.20 a package 0.32 a kilo

Approximate cash surplus after meeting household expenses

$ 80.00 $ 45.60 with no medical or education benefits

The significant differences are in the quan- tity of foodstuffs consumed by the Cuban household, and the cash surplus available at the end of the month. That surplus does not have to be used to meet either medical or educational expenses. Although the compari- son is limited, it suggests that the urban poor ofq3axaca would be less likely to be worried about the loss of those "personal freedoms" (rooted in the reproduction of poverty and its attendant cultural style) than is Rigdon. Such material factors do not, of course, provide us with a sufficient definition of freedom, but it is a necessary one.

NOTES

1 Oscar Lewis, Ruth Lewis and Susan Rigdon, FourMen, Living the Revolution: An Oral History o f Contemporary Cuba (Urbana: University of Iilinois press, 1977); Oscar Lewis, Ruth Lewis and Susan Rigdon, Four Women. Living the Revolution: An Oral History o f Contemporary Cuba (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,. 1977); and Oscar Lewis, Ruth Lewis and Susan Rigdon, Neighbors, Living the Revolution: An Oral History of Contemporary Cuba (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977).

2 See John Womack, Review of Lewis et al., Four Men. in New York Review o f Books, vol. XXIV, no. 13 (1977), pp. 25-28.

3 Lewis perceived the culture of poverty as a pattern of adaptation of the poor to the class structure of capitalism. He felt that this pattern was reproduced in the life styles of the poor.

4 Charles Valentine, Culture o f Poverty: Critique and Counter Proposals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).

5 Eleanor Leacock (ed.), Culture of Poverty: A Critique (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971).

6 Oscar Lewis, Life in a Mexican Village: Tepoztlan Re- studied (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1952).

7 Oscar Lewis, Anthropological Essay (New York: Random House, 1970).

8 Michael Higgins, Somos Genre Himilde (Mexico City: America Indigena, 1974).

9 Michael Higgins, The Production and Reproduction of Poverty, 1978, manuscript.

10 Immanuel Wailarstein. The Origins o f the Modern Ir System (New York: Academic Press, 1974).

11 M. Higgins, op. cir., 1974. 12 Mexican data were obtained during my fieldwork in

Mexico, 1969-1970. All prices have been converted into United States dollars.

DialeticalAnthropology 3 (1978) 365-372 �9 Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Amsterdam - Printed in The Netherlands