NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {‘C} uba presents a hopeful alternative to a profit-oriented capitalist economy,” a promotional poster for a guest lecture at Connecticut College on October 20 boldly proclaimed. The lecture, titled “Socialism 101,” was organized by the college’s economics department and co-sponsored by the program in environmental studies, the department of history, and the department of Hispanic studies. It was given by Sabrina Melendez, introduced to the audience as a scholar, artist, and activist involved with the Autonomous University of Social Movements. A lecture examining Cuba and socialist theory could have been intriguing and academically stimulating, even if given by a socialist activist. Instead, it was a master class in idealistic fervor, misunderstanding economics to defend communist Cuba.
Melendez began by making a hash of economic theory. She argued that the original sin of capitalism is the profit motive. For her, capitalism’s very essence is exploitative because the pursuit of profit devalues labor and produces poverty. Poverty, you see, isn’t an inherent condition; rather, it emerges because capitalism undervalues the labor of certain individuals.
To illustrate this, Melendez described how a shirt is sold. In this scenario, the seller, whom she dubs “the capitalist,” spends $2 on the cotton and another $2 to pay a seamstress, making the shirt’s value $4. But when the capitalist sells the shirt for $4, after paying for the cotton and the labor, no profit remains. So, to make a profit, the capitalist decides to pay less for the cotton (50 cents) and pay the worker less (50 cents). By devaluing production costs, the capitalist can sell the shirt for $4 and make a profit of $3.
This argument wholly rejects supply-and-demand economics. Melendez would have us believe that the capitalist can arbitrarily decide to pay less for raw materials and labor. If prices were truly arbitrary, why would the capitalist pay 50 cents rather than just one cent? Prices and wages are not determined by the seller’s generosity or greed, but by the equilibrium of supply and demand. “Whenever there is trading, there is price discovery — that is, the opportunity to learn the market value of whatever is being traded,” behavioral economist Robert Shiller observed.
Contrary to Melendez’s claim, these market forces do not devalue labor. Rather, labor becomes more valuable. For example, consider the vast availability of light. “The amount of labor that once bought 54 minutes of light now buys 52 years of light,” according to HumanProgress.org. No capitalist individual chose to make labor more valuable in purchasing light or any other product. Labor became more valuable as our production capabilities expanded, allowing us to satisfy our needs more efficiently. Thus Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla both profited by marketing the light bulb, and the light bulb led to the prevalence of safer illumination for a fraction of the cost.
Melendez would deny that the profit motive explains the wide accessibility of light. It is, to her, a tool for violence: Because profit creates a demand for resources, it inevitably leads to violent colonialism. One example she offered: While the Holocaust killed 6 million Jews, American colonialism killed over 100 million Native Americans. She conceded that violent colonization is no recent phenomenon, nor a strictly American one: Other colonizers include the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Incas, and Ethiopians. But they “colonized for power, or war strategy, or access to certain key resources” — not to accumulate profit. Never mind that Roman general Scipio Africanus, through his conquest of silver mines in Spain, created a steady revenue stream to Rome. Never mind that the Chinese Han Dynasty conquered territories to establish trade routes with the goal of — you guessed it — bringing in profits. To accept Melendez’s distinction one must characterize the resource-grabbing conquests of ancient civilizations as entirely devoid of profit motives yet cast similar endeavors of modern European in the Americas as entirely profit-driven.
Melendez’s argument that capitalism and the profit motive seek the accumulation of capital at any cost is also flawed, as economists have long recognized. “Though the growth of income depends in part on the accumulation of capital, more probably depends on our learning to use our resources more effectively and for new purposes,” F. A. Hayek wrote in The Constitution of Liberty. Melendez’s disapproval of wealth accumulation is more a critique of human behavior than capitalism. The desire for more as opposed to less stuff is a product of human nature, not of capitalism.
This misconception led Melendez to conclude that the profit motive — along with capitalism — is directly responsible for colonialism. But this argument ignores the critical function of private property within a market economy. “Capital goods come into existence as private property determines the institutions of the capitalistic system,” Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises wrote. But private property conflicts with another core belief promulgated in her lecture: that private property, too, is bad.
Melendez bemoaned that private property leads to the “enclosure of the commons,” thereby restricting public access and use. But enclosure protects the commons from depletion, an effect explained by Garrett Hardin in his famous essay “The Tragedy of the Commons”:
The rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another. . . . But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit—in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination towards which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest.
Private ownership provides an incentive to take care of a good. Compare the bathroom at your house with a bathroom on the New Jersey Turnpike, for example.
But Melendez is none too keen on private ownership. A critical component of any socialist state is “the transferring of private property from individuals to the people,” she said. Deciphering the difference between “individuals” and the “people” here requires us to understand people not as independently autonomous but as a collective with a shared goal. In this view, seizing the property of individuals is righteous so long as the property is given to the almighty collective — the government. It’s even “democratic,” because the people can choose through democratic mechanisms how to use the taken property. Melendez argued that, although we live in a liberal democracy, the economy isn’t democratic because we don’t get to vote on whether Jeff Bezos should own Amazon or whether the Walton family should own Walmart. Minutes earlier, she had admonished the European conquest of Native American land. But when seizing property achieves a socialist state, it’s somehow fine.
Yet this apparent inconsistency in Melendez’s logic served a purpose: extolling the virtues of Cuba’s government and economic system as a “hopeful alternative” to the existing status quo. The Cuban Revolution, she said, was a “socialist revolution,” and therefore, enabled (violent) resistance not only against political leaders and regimes but also against landowners. To Melendez, seizing the means of production and placing them into the hands of the new Cuban government was simply “putting well-being over profit,” noting specifically the nationalization of the sugar industry was a “big deal.” Indeed, it was a big deal, but not for the reasons Melendez believes. “Cuba was quickly impoverished, of course,” as one National Review editorial noted. “There is an old joke about socialism: If the Eskimos adopted it, they would soon have to import ice. Well, Cuba, for a while, had to import sugar.”
Melendez acknowledged that Cuba is “very poor.” But she attributes its struggles not to its economic system or tyrannical government but to “neo-colonization imperialism.” She emphasized, however, that Cuba has reoriented its economy around self-sufficiency, noting that most of Havana’s food supply is grown within the city itself. But self-sufficiency is not the same thing as efficiency, as one man who decided to make every ingredient of a sandwich from scratch learned (it took him six months and cost $1,500).
Regardless, Cuban citizens desire an anti-capitalist society, Melendez claimed. Under Cuban socialism, democratic participation is of the utmost priority. Its economy is not only under “democratic” control (meaning the government owns the means of production), but it also has higher voter-turnout rates than the U.S., while Cuba’s elected representatives have constituencies much smaller than in the U.S.
But Cuba is a democracy in the same way two kids donning a trench coat to buy tickets to an R-rated movie are legal adults. In Cuba’s most recent election, there were 470 candidates running for 470 seats. Not a single opposition candidate ran; campaigning is illegal anyway. All candidates — and elected officials — are members of the Communist Party, the only political organization allowed in the country. More than 700 Cubans were arrested protesting the country’s single-party regime in July 2021 (a fact Melendez ignored). Melendez urged us to disregard such criticism. “If you read pretty much anything that comes from us [the U.S.] about Cuba, it’s going to be filtered through an imperialist lens,” she alleged. Moreover, we should be skeptical of Cuban Americans who are critical of the Cuban government because many of them are “descendants of the very landlords who had their land taken away from them by the Cuban Revolution.”
After the lecture, I asked Melendez about Cuba’s restrictive immigration policies that made it illegal to leave the country without getting permission from the communist government. She replied that she knew of such policies being in place during the 1980s and 1990s — in fact, such policies remained in effect through 2013 — but said they were implemented because the Cuban government wanted to make sure people had enough money to go abroad. She conceded this was an overly “paternalistic approach.” Some paternalism: On July 13, 1994, the Cuban coast guard deliberately sank a tugboat raft seven miles off the coast of Havana, resulting in the deaths of 37 Cubans — mostly women and children. Was this state-sanctioned murder performed out of concern of the victims’ financial standing? According to contemporary Washington Post reporting, Cuban officials stood only a few hundred yards away and refused to rescue victims from the water. This wasn’t paternalism; it was the tragic result of a totalitarian dictatorship.
Melendez concluded her economically illiterate, historically inaccurate, Cuba-whitewashing lecture by urging students to join the Party of Socialism and Liberation. Student groups have every right to host their share of idealistic-obsessed activists. But when academic departments showcase questionable characters, it provides such characters unearned scholarly legitimacy. For instance, the Student Flat-Earth Society may choose to invite a flat-earth guest lecturer, but for the astronomy department to do the same would be an embarrassing spectacle. Perhaps, in encouraging students to think critically, academia shouldn’t feel compelled to legitimize every fringe theory.