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Workers Vanguard No. 978

15 April 2011

TROTSKY

LENIN

Defend the Cuban Revolution!

(Quote of the Week)

Fifty years ago, the Spartacist League’s forebears in the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) advanced the call to defend and extend the Cuban Revolution. In a document presented to the SWP’s youth group, the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), the RT upheld the need for a Trotskyist party against the liquidationist trajectory of the SWP leadership, which uncritically hailed Castro’s petty-bourgeois forces as they were consolidating bureaucratic rule. Pointing out that the process in Cuba was that of the formation of a deformed workers state—i.e., a society akin to the Soviet Union under the Stalinist bureaucracy—the RT advanced a program of political revolution, which would open the road to Cuba’s further development toward socialism in conjunction with the fight for world proletarian revolution.

The full victory of every modern revolution, the Cuban revolution included, requires the emergence in a leading role of a mass revolutionary-Marxist party. The small Trotskyist groups, in Cuba and elsewhere, have a vital role as the nucleus of such parties. They can fill this role only if they continually preserve their political independence and ability to act, and if they avoid the peril of yielding to non-Marxist and non-proletarian leaderships their own ideological responsibilities and the historic mission of the working class.

In its relation to the Cuban revolution the YSA, like every revolutionary group, has two principal tasks:

a) To exert the utmost effort to defend the Cuban revolution not only against the military and other attacks of U.S. imperialism, but also against the political attacks of the social-democratic agents of imperialism.

b) To struggle for the development and extension of the Cuban revolution and against the attempts of counterrevolutionary Stalinism to corrupt the revolution from within. We seek to further this development and extension both by supporting revolutionary actions of the existing leadership and by constructively criticizing, openly and frankly, the mistakes and inadequacies of that leadership. Both to develop the Cuban revolution and to extend it throughout the Hemisphere, we base ourselves on the imperative necessity for the establishment of workers democracy and the formation of the mass party of revolutionary Marxism.

—“The Cuban Revolution,” December 1961, printed in Spartacist No. 2 (July-August 1964)

 

Workers Vanguard No. 978

WV 978

15 April 2011

·

“National Unity”: Bosses Profit, Workers Pay

Japan Tsunami Disaster and Capitalist Criminality

·

Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!

Supreme Court Gives Green Light to Troy Davis Execution

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State Vendetta for 2007 Protest

Jena, Louisiana: Free All Victims of Racist Cop Roundup!

·

April 1961

Bay of Pigs: Cuban Revolution Defeated U.S.-Backed Invasion

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Defend the Cuban Revolution!

(Quote of the Week)

·

French, UN Troops Out of the Ivory Coast!

·

The Anti-Union Drive and Black Workers

Editorial Note

·

German Reformists Tail Kurdish Nationalists’ Appeals to Imperialism

For a Socialist Republic of United Kurdistan!

(Young Spartacus pages)

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Tear Up Conviction of Evan Emory!

Michigan Bigots Hate YouTube, Sex, Children

(Young Spartacus pages)

·

Stop the Deportation of Leyla!

(Young Spartacus pages)

·

Join the Spartacus Youth Clubs!

(Young Spartacus pages)

·

Britain: For Class Struggle to Defend Public Sector Jobs!