So I was reading a Jacobin article on Miguel Diaz, the new president of Cuba, and it outlined a number of serious issues facing the Cuban economy.
jacobinmag.com
It also got me thinking about a problem confronting the socialist movement that seems insurmountable without a more or less simultaneous worldwide revolution, that of capital flight. Many of Cuba's problems stem from the fact that it just doesn't have the cash to pay better wages or repair infrastructure, and being a socialist country, it obviously will have a hard time attracting any foreign capital. Similar problems can be seen plaguing Venezuela, as foreign capital flees the country, leaving the economy in shambles. China on the other hand managed to make huge strides in development and poverty reduction by liberalizing, but at the cost of its dictatorship of the proletariat.
This appears to be a unique challenge facing the remaining socialist holdouts or any third world countries hoping to establish socialism. Developed countries have enough of an existing capital base, or at least a far larger one, to make this a less pressing issue for first world socialists. However countries like Cuba or the DPRK appear to be caught in a trap, with their choices being either abandon socialism or slowly decline into ruin.
So I asked the question, is it possible to temporarily re-introduce capitalist economy without destroying proletarian democracy? In my view, there are certainly some measures that could be take to seriously cripple the return of bourgeois rule even as capitalism returns.
It seems to me that with these measures in place, a country such as Cuba may be able to attract foreign capital, address the issues crippling its economy, and then eventually make a graduated return to socialism, first through market socialism and state capitalism, and eventually through the cybernetization of a planned economy. What do you guys think? How can Cuba find a way out of their predicament? Can a capitalist economy cooexist with a genuine DotP?