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In defence of Marxism

Theoretical journal of the Leninist-Trotskyist Tendency

Written: 1993.
First Published: May 1993.
Source: Published by the Leninist-Trotskyist Tendency.
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In defense of Marxism
Number 2 (May 1993)

Defend Cuba!

The collapse of Stalinism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and the accompanying social counter-revolution is a victory for the imperialists. However, while they claim that the complete victory of capitalism has already been accomplished, in reality much remains to be done. Thus imperialism is putting increased pressure on the remaining deformed workers’ states in Asia and, above all, Cuba. The centre of this pressure is the dominant imperialist power – the United States of America. The replacement of Bush by Clinton has changed little in this respect. The defence of the gains of the Cuban revolution must be taken up energetically by workers’ organisations all over the world.

The situation of the remaining deformed workers’ states has deteriorated sharply since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of COMECON. This is especially true of the smallest, Cuba, which is now desperately short of raw materials as a result of its previous high level of integration into COMECON and its growing exposure to the world market. The disintegration of COMECON also meant the loss of firm buyers for sugar and other agricultural products and for Cuban nickel and other minerals and brought to a halt favourable bartering arrangements involving the import of important goods such as oil, food and industrial manufactures. Since 1989, the Cuban economy has shrunk by an estimated 40 per cent while imports are down by 75 per cent. Meanwhile, the US blockade, in operation since 1960, was further tightened in October 1992 to include foreign-based US subsidiaries, which accounted for 85 per cent of European trade with Cuba.

These acute shortages have led to a rapid growth of social inequalities. Meat is very scarce in the cities and, like a range of other goods, is only available through the black market or the ‘dollar economy’ of the special shops used by bureaucrats. While the average wage of factory workers is 200 pesos per month, eggs cost three pesos, a ham 30 pesos and a chicken 120 pesos.

The imperialists and the bourgeois media observe with delight the economic problems of Cuba and look for pro-capitalist elements within the bureaucracy and for oppositionists outside it. They hide the fact that poverty and scarcity within Cuba are primarily the result of the trade embargo by the USA and its allies. In addition, defence against the US military threat, which is still very real and includes the Guantanamo naval base, absorbs considerable resources. Faced with the blockade, the Cuban leadership has attempted to prioritise the supply of food and medicine and mobilise the entire population to overcome the scarcity of oil and other energy resources. Most of the little foreign exchange available also goes on food and medicine. In this way, the Cuban leadership has so far retained for itself a relatively broad popular base.

But the social gains of the Cuban revolution are now clearly threatened. For example, in May this year it was reported that there were 26,000 cases of optical neuritis, a condition linked with vitamin deficiency, which can lead to blindness.

In spite of these grave difficulties, there are still very real gains which must be defended. The abolition of grinding exploitation by Cuban and American capitalists paved the way for considerable social advances. Life expectancy is 74 compared with 57 in 1958, infant mortality is 13 per thousand compared with 60, literacy is 98 per cent compared with 76 per cent. A comprehensive health service, free to all, was developed. The institutionalised racism of the pre-revolutionary years was abolished, even though racism still exists in less overt forms.

Women also made definite advances, although these always remained circumscribed by the conservative outlook and policy of the Cuban leadership. Today, women’s rights are being rolled back; women’s employment has decreased, and the National Assembly voted recently to cut maternity rights so that they remain on full pay for only three months, for three months at a reduced rate and for six months without pay. Crèche provision and nursery education have also been cut. Such measures, combined with the general economic problems, are forcing an increasing number of women into prostitution, often linked to the tourist trade.

The existing bureaucratic leaderships of the deformed workers’ states are a major obstacle to the struggle for international socialism. In the case of China, this is obvious. There, the Stalinist regime maintains a political reign of terror while heading consciously for capitalism, groping its way forward step by step.

It has long since renounced even the rhetoric of internationalism. The same applies to North Korea and, to a lesser extent, Vietnam. In contrast, many leftists consider Cuba to be an exception; some consider it to be a shining example of revolutionary leadership. They claim that its revolutionary tradition is more alive than that in other deformed workers’ states and is more established amongst the masses. They also argue that the Cuban leadership has chosen the only viable economic strategy.

However, much of this reputation of Castroism is based on the one-sided radicalism of its initial decade in power. This radicalism was distinctly petty bourgeois in character and limited in scope to what in essence were political and economic experiments. Since Castro embraced Stalinism, there has been a steady growth in bureaucratic privilege, extending to upper echelons of the working class and professional layers whose political orientation is acceptable.

The vulnerability of Cuba to imperialist attack – at this stage on the economic front – is above all a result of the Stalinisation of the political movement which carried out the revolution and the consequent deformed character of the Cuban workers’ state. The Cuban Stalinists of the PSP opposed the July 26 movement right up until the flight of Batista. This opposition extended to sabotage and betrayal of militants to Batista’s police. But the radicalisation and mobilisation of the masses, and the workers in particular, which took place during 1959 and which accompanied and prompted the nationalisations which began in December 1959, led Castro into an alliance with the PSP as the most effective instrument for controlling the working class. Although the PSP opposed the major nationalisations of 1960, there was eventually a fusion between the PSP, the July 26 movement and the Revolutionary Directorate on July 26, 1961 which finally led to the establishment of the Communist Party of Cuba in 1965. This new ‘Communist Party’ was in reality scarcely a party at all, but an apparatus dominated by Castro and leaders of the July 26 movement who, having purged their own liberal bourgeois wing, proceeded to remove most of the old-style PSP Stalinists. In the process, Castro and his followers had embraced a brand of Stalinism, although one with a stronger popular following and less overt police oppression than in Eastern Europe.

The present turn in economic policy is the latest in a series of bureaucratically implemented changes of direction which began in 1959 with an attempt at accommodation with imperialism and the liberal bourgeoisie, moved to the expropriation of foreign-owned and indigenous capitalists, passed through a stage of radical experiment and ended with full integration into the orbit of the Soviet Union. By Autumn 1960, both Cuban and foreign capitalists had been eliminated. By the mid-1960s, a centrally-planned attempt to industrialise, based on Che Guevara’s Mao-inspired view that a leap straight to communism was possible, had collapsed. This was followed by a similarly abrupt attempt to re-emphasise agriculture and modernise it through a system of moral incentives. The ‘Revolutionary Offensive’ of 1968 was Castro’s equivalent of Stalin’s ‘liquidation of the kulaks’ and saw the state expropriation of 56,000 small (and very small) businesses. By 1970, the attempt to attain relative economic independence had failed and Cuba became more closely assimilated to the Stalinist economic model.

In 1972, Cuba joined COMECON, entered trade agreements with the Soviet Union and adopted the Soviet approach to planning throughout the economy. On this basis, alongside the inefficiencies attributable to bureaucratic control, including shoddy production techniques, Cuba grew economically at a rate of between four and six per cent throughout the 1970s. At its height, 88 per cent of Cuban trade was with COMECON countries, its exports being mainly sugar, citrus fruits, cobalt and nickel. In this relationship lay the seeds of the subsequent decline. In the first half of the 1980s, the USSR became less tolerant of unpaid bills and Cuban indebtedness increased sharply. (The total debt is currently estimated to be $6 billion). Castro was driven to embark on yet another sharp turn in 1986: ‘the rectification process’. This included measures to increase industrial investment, cut wages and staffing levels and eliminate private peasant markets. None of these measures succeeded in solving Cuba’s problems. The collapse of Stalinism in Eastern Europe in 1989-90 came at what was already a bad time. The Fourth Congress of the CCP in October 1991 marked a new turn, in the opposite direction to the rectification process, by making concessions to petty traders.

Cuba has responded to Stalinism’s collapse with a twin-track policy. It is carrying out an abrupt turn to attempt self-sufficiency in food and reduce consumption of oil, particularly by slashing industrial production. At the same time, the regime has expanded tourism, sugar cane processing and exports of pharmaceutical and biotechnological products, and sought to establish new joint ventures with European and Latin American partners.

There are clear indications that significant sections of workers, and particularly young people, are tiring of the endless exhortations to tighten their belts, to produce more and consume less. Increasing numbers are attempting to leave Cuba. The growing disaffection was reflected in the fraudulent elections to the National Assembly in February 1993, in which up to 20 per cent of the electorate spoilt their ballot papers or voted blank. A further 11 per cent only voted for some of the official candidates and rejected Castro’s call to endorse the entire list.

The Cuban bureaucracy cannot be reformed. All independent workers’ activity has been prohibited and all avenues for workers to control the government and state officials have been blocked for over three decades.

Under the banner of ‘socialist morality’, the regime has exalted the nuclear family and persecuted gays and lesbians. In the 1960s, gays were rounded up and isolated in special prisons and, more recently, people with HIV / AIDS have been put in jail. Gays are not allowed to be members of the CP. These reactionary reinforcements of the oppressive character of the bourgeois family, which Stalin embraced in the late 1920s, are central to the maintenance of a corrupt bureaucracy and are a bridge to capitalist restoration.

Although the relations between Castro’s movement and the Stalinists internationally were distinctly uneven for the first decade in power, their early tolerance of Trotskyists soon gave way to a thoroughly Stalinist intolerance. Repression of the Cuban Posadist organisation, the POR(T), began in 1961 when the plates for a Spanish edition of Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed were smashed. This was followed by the seizure of editions of the POR(T) paper and imprisonment of its members. The Castroites have also suppressed advocates of independent trade unions, as well as those who have opposed bureaucratic privilege, mismanagement and the one-sided orientation of the economy towards the USSR. All left-wing oppositional activity remains illegal.

As the problems within Cuba have multiplied, so have divisions within the ruling bureaucracy. These are accompanied by the growing isolation of Castro. In 1989, the vice-minister of the Cuban armed forces, General Amaldo Ochoa Sanchez, was executed, having been convicted, along with 10 other officers and officials, of drug smuggling. The removal from ministerial office last year of the party’s number three, Carlos Aldana, was a blow against the ‘reformist’ elements and followed an increase in the already enormous powers of Castro himself. The leadership has ousted older members of the bureaucracy from positions of responsibility and replaced them with younger people, a familiar Stalinist ploy to refurbish its image.

If the regime begins to crumble then there is little doubt that a section of the bureaucracy will, like its counterparts in Eastern Europe, declare for capitalist restoration and seek a deal with US imperialism. Another major economic power, Japan, is attempting to get its foot in the door by buying a proportion of the sugar harvest to smooth the path to investment. Before imperialism can seize the decisive initiative, workers must take the road of political revolution. There is no other way out of the impasse. Only the overthrow of the bureaucracy and its replacement by a workers’ government based on workers’ councils could inspire Cuban workers, peasants and youth to make the necessary sacrifices. Only such a government led by a revolutionary party could develop the perspective for extending the revolution internationally, starting in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Nevertheless, neither Cuba, nor for that matter the Asian deformed workers’ states, can survive indefinitely in isolation. Since the demise of the Soviet Union, it is clearer than ever that any attempt to build socialism in one country must fail. Socialism will either be international or non-existent. Further, international socialism requires the victory of the socialist revolution in at least the most important capitalist countries. The question of extending and deepening socialist revolution is thus the strategic key to the future of the remaining deformed workers’ states.

The international policy of the Castroite regime has always endangered the continued existence of the Cuban deformed workers’ state. The original class basis of Castroism, the radicalised and nationalist petty bourgeoisie, marked its foreign policy from the start. This led to an underestimation of proletarian mass action and an overestimation of the potential of guerilla activity. The establishment of an uncontrolled bureaucratic system following fusion with the Stalinists was accompanied by increasing compromise with US imperialism on the international plane. The Castroite regime served its own national interests by using the Latin American guerrilla movements as pawns in its manoeuvres.

Initially, Castro attempted to export petty bourgeois guerrillaism to the rest of Latin America and in general supported struggles against imperialism. The radicalism of which this was a part led the Cuban leadership into a conflict with the Soviet bureaucracy which reached its high point in 1967 with the arrest and imprisonment of the ‘microfaction’ in the Cuban Communist Party led by Anibal Escalante, a leader of the Cuban Stalinist movement since the 1930s. Economic sanctions imposed by Moscow brought Castro back into line sufficiently for him to endorse the suppression of the Czech working class in 1968.

In the 1970s, the Castro leadership demonstrated clearly its new orthodox Stalinist credentials by forming alliances with bourgeois nationalist and military regimes through Latin America. Castro’s support for the popular front government of Allende in Chile helped to neutralise left-wing opposition to it and disarm workers in the run up to Pinochet’s military coup. By the early 1980s, the Cuban leadership had abandoned even the rhetoric of radical politics and was producing statements in support of peaceful coexistence.

It used its political influence to restrain the revolution in EI Salvador. In Nicaragua, limited practical support was accompanied by pressure on the Sandinistas to do a deal with the Contras and not take the ‘Cuban road’. Castro has always defended the status quo between the imperialists and the deformed workers’ states.

In Africa, Cuba played an equally duplicitous role. In Angola, Cuban troops were decisive in defeating imperialist attempts to overthrow the MPLA government. But, subsequently, the Cubans used their key position to help maintain the MPLA regime by eliminating proletarian opposition. As part of the Gorbachev regional settlement of 1989, the Cuban forces were withdrawn and the Angolan revolution thrown to the imperialist wolves. In Ethiopia, Cuban troops were used, not to fight imperialism, but to crush the national aspirations of the Somalis in the Ogaden region and of the Eritrean people.

There are growing signs of new attempts by the Cuban leadership to build bridges to bourgeois regimes in Latin America, in particular Carlos Menem’s government in Argentina. Cuba, which owes $1.2 billion to Argentina, recently withdrew its veto on Argentina being a member of the UN Security Council. In return, Menem congratulated Castro on the predictable outcome of the National Assembly elections in February this year.

As in all other deformed workers’ states, only political revolution can provide a progressive perspective. The specific character of such a revolution is another matter. The Castro regime clearly has rested on mass support, although indications are that this is diminishing as conditions worsen. What is missing above all is the involvement of the masses in the determination of their own future. The demand for workers democracy, which is central to the real defence of the Cuban revolution, is a political revolutionary demand. However, even if it were realised, the Cuban working class (and the workers of China, North Korea and Vietnam) could not solve all the problems of socialist construction alone. They would need more than ever the solidarity of the international workers’ movement.

International solidarity with Cuba is already essential. It must be unconditional and not be dependent upon the overthrow of the Stalinist bureaucracy. Workers should demand that their organisations give immediate material help through the collection and sending of food, medical and other supplies. But such campaigns will not on their own successfully defend Cuba against the acute problems it faces. Only action by the international working class against the imperialist blockade can have a major impact.

Cuba must be defended by all revolutionaries, not on the basis that the Cuban leadership represents an objectively progressive current because it does not; in spite of its distinctive history Castroism is a fully-fledged Stalinist movement. It must be defended on the basis that its nationalised property relations remain a gain for the world working class.

But the only long-term solution to the crisis depends upon the Cuban working class taking its destiny into its own hands. The economic situation facing the Cuban masses cries out for workers’ control and workers’ management to replace bureaucratic mismanagement. This in turn depends on the formation of independent organs of workers’ power – workers’ councils. In close collaboration with factory committees and representatives of rural workers, planned economy must be defended and developed at the expense of bureaucratic privilege and restorationist tendencies.

The formation of workers’ councils would unavoidably lead to a head-on collision with the Castroite bureaucracy and pose directly the question of political power. Only the overthrow of the bureaucracy can lead to a workers’ government based on workers’ councils. This cannot be accomplished spontaneously: it requires above all the building of a revolutionary workers’ party.

In defence of Marxism Index (1992-1996)

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