This became sadly clear when I sought to teach them about free-market economics. The concept of private property, something we understand intuitively, was mysterious to my Cuban students. They would ask: Doesn’t all property belong to the community? How, and on what philosophical foundations, does property become privately owned?
I realized that I had to adjust my lectures to an audience unfamiliar with the most essential concepts of capitalism. For example, the classical justification for property rights was articulated by 17th century political philosopher John Locke:
“Every Man has a Property in his own Person...The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left in it, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property.”
To explain Locke’s argument, I asked half of my students to take a sheet of paper and to make a paper boat. I then used the paper boat they had made to illustrate how property rights are a necessary implication of self-ownership as argued by Locke: “If I take a sheet of paper that I own and fold it carefully so as to make a paper boat, that paper boat is properly mine. I have joined my labor with my sheet of paper, making the crafted paper boat my property.”
They had been taught in Cuba that, according to social justice theory, the boat was not rightfully their own. Yet, when I asked the students if the paper boat they had crafted was theirs, the answer was always a unanimous “yes.”
As Socialists see it, the sheet of paper used came from a tree that is part of the common heritage of mankind; therefore, the byproduct of the tree- the sheet of paper that I bought- is not properly mine. It belongs to all of us. Moreover, the labor and technology I used -my paper boat making skills- were learned in a public school financed by the community. Thus, since the raw material and the skilled labor used in making my paper boat came from society, the boat, or a portion of it, belongs to the community.
