Defend the Gains of the Cuban Revolution!

Obama Pushes Counterrevolution in Cuba

Early in his March 22 speech at Havana’s Gran Teatro, President Barack Obama quoted from a poem by 19th-century Cuban nationalist leader José Martí, offering his audience a “white rose” of friendship and peace. The real symbol for his talk, which was broadcast throughout Cuba, is the Venus flytrap.

For five and a half decades, the U.S. imperialists have tried through various means to smash the social revolution that expelled them from Cuba and expropriated capitalist property: economic embargo, the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion and countless terrorist acts by CIA-trained gusano exiles, assassination plots against Fidel Castro including poisoned cigars. Declaring that such methods were “not working,” Obama sang of reconciliation and the glories of democracy and free enterprise. This was simply an updated formula for overturning the Cuban Revolution through promoting pro-imperialist “dissidents” and subverting the nationalized economy, a strategy buttressed by overwhelming American military might. For Obama as for his predecessors, “reconciliation” means nothing other than restoring capitalist slavery and again subjecting Cuba’s workers and peasants to bloody imperialist domination.

Most Cubans are aware of such hallmarks of U.S. “democracy” as homelessness, people without medical care, black people wantonly gunned down by cops, youth smothered by college debt. Despite Cuba’s material scarcity, its collectivized economy has provided housing, jobs and free medical care, including abortion, and education for all. Obama represents American bourgeois democracy—a form of the dictatorship of the tiny class of capitalists over the many they exploit and oppress. In imperialist countries like the U.S., it is based on the superprofits the ruling class accrues through plunder of the more backward parts of the planet. In Cuba, bourgeois democracy is a program for capitalist counterrevolution, which would propel the masses into the kind of vast inequality and miserable poverty that define life in its neocolonial Caribbean neighbors.

The U.S. Imperialist-in-Chief has won some popularity on the island—and at home—by moving to normalize relations with Cuba. Obama was applauded during his speech when he spoke of ending the starvation embargo. That embargo remains in place with slight modifications, along with the U.S. military detention-torture center at Guantánamo Bay (which Obama did not bother to mention). Down with the embargo! U.S. out of Guantánamo!

The audience went silent when Obama praised the exiles who consider Cuba their “true home”—i.e., the Miami-based rabble that fled from Castro’s rebel army along with the despised dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959, supplemented by those who left after the nationalization of private property in 1960-61. The Cuban exiles and their U.S. godfathers would do anything to get their hotels, plantations and rum distilleries back. A hero for the exile pack is Luis Posada Carriles, a Bay of Pigs veteran wanted in Cuba for engineering the 1976 bombing of a Cubana airliner, which killed 73 people, and for a 1997 hotel bombing. Posada Carriles, who lives freely in Miami along with his fellow gusanos (worms), represents the sort of reactionary terror in store for Communists and militant workers if capitalist counterrevolution were to succeed.

Up Against the Imperialist Beast

We Trotskyists stand for the unconditional military defense of Cuba and its revolutionary social gains against imperialism and capitalist counterrevolution. At the same time, we oppose the rule of the nationalist Stalinist bureaucracy, which has always excluded the working class from political power and promoted the fallacy of building “socialism” in a single country, in this case a resource-poor island 90 miles from U.S. imperialism’s shores. (On the development of our understanding of the Cuban Revolution, see page 2.) To eradicate poverty and all forms of oppression requires material abundance, which would end the struggle of each against all. That goal can be reached only after a series of socialist revolutions internationally, especially in the U.S. This will lay the basis for a global planned economy that will utilize and further develop the advanced technology and resources today controlled by the imperialist powers.

Particularly after the demise of the Soviet Union broke its economic lifeline, Cuba has suffered economic stagnation. With Cuba destitute and facing the U.S. economic blockade, in the early 1990s the ruling Communist Party loosened some restrictions on private enterprise and encouraged tourism and other businesses that could attract foreign currency. Such moves have accelerated more recently under Raúl Castro, while ties with the U.S. have also grown stronger. There is more travel between the two countries and bank transactions are easier.

We uphold the right of the Cuban deformed workers state to enter into diplomatic and economic relations with any country it chooses. Increases in small-scale private enterprises and commercial and financial ties to U.S. and other imperialist corporations do not amount to the piecemeal restoration of capitalism. However, they do bring the danger of undermining the collectivized economy and strengthening internal counterrevolutionary forces.

Obama’s call for ending the embargo is on behalf of a growing section of corporate America that wants to set up shop in Cuba, where their competitors from Europe and elsewhere have been doing business. Meanwhile, internal pro-imperialist forces are being fostered by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which bankrolled anti-Communist dissidents in the former Soviet bloc and does the same today in the remaining Stalinist-ruled workers states. In addition to groups pushing “independent” journalism and using the demand for Internet access as a rallying cry against the Castro regime, the NED funds an outfit called Supporting Independent Unions in Cuba, which harks back to “free trade unions” that ran point for the CIA during the Cold War.

The recently reopened U.S. Embassy in Havana will no doubt be a hive of activity for such forces, which are also being bolstered by the Catholic church. Emulating his 16th-century Jesuit forebears, Pope Francis visited Cuba last year, helping prepare the ground for the would-be conquistador Obama. The Vatican’s influence in Cuba is a particularly dire threat to women given its die-hard opposition to abortion and contraception.

In badgering the Cuban government about (unnamed) political prisoners, the American media dutifully ignored those locked up in the U.S. “incarceration nation.” The press went on to make much of the arrest in Havana of some 50 members of “Ladies in White” prior to Obama’s visit. That organization was formed in 2003 in support of imprisoned relatives who were associated with the Varela petition campaign, which demanded the right of private enterprise, amnesty for political prisoners and “free elections.” These demands amounted to a call for “democratic” counterrevolution—the electoral rise to power of capitalist-restorationist forces. We defend the Havana regime’s imprisonment of active collaborators with U.S. imperialism. But we oppose the repression of critics or political opponents who defend the revolution and its social gains, such as the imprisonment of Cuban Trotskyists in the early 1960s.

We are for workers democracy. Our program calls for political revolution in Cuba to place power in the hands of workers and peasants councils (soviets). Led by a Leninist-Trotskyist party, such a regime would support the fight for workers revolution throughout the Americas. This is the only way to defeat the forces of capitalist counterrevolution once and for all and to open the road to Cuba’s further development toward socialism.

U.S. Jailer-in-Chief Sings a Freedom Song

In many respects, Obama was the man for the job of opening the door into Cuba. The president, who had given U.S. imperialism a face-lift after the Bush years, talked music and sports with his Communist Party hosts while writing a prescription for assisted suicide for the workers state. Furthermore, breaking bread with the Cuban government now plays well at home, where the bulk of a younger generation of Cuban Americans favors bilateral relations, unlike their rabidly anti-Communist fathers and grandfathers.

Obama’s Havana speech was pure imperial arrogance and cynicism. The same man who has led a vendetta against courageous whistle-blowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden taunted the Cuban regime for not being more open and tolerant. Likewise, he pointed to the supposedly high U.S. living standards attained “because workers can organize”—after two terms of waging war against teachers and other unionized public employees, furthering the decades-long decline of American workers’ wages and living conditions. But it was downright obscene when he pointed to himself as a prime example of what people with dark skin can aspire to in the U.S. After intoning that Cubans as well as Americans can “trace their heritage to both slaves and slave-owners,” Obama said that he is “able to stand here today as an African-American and as President of the United States.”

As president, Obama has deported over 2.5 million immigrants and has overseen the continuing mass incarceration of mainly blacks and Latinos, the racist cop terror against black people that has impelled thousands to protest in the streets and the horrors of life in the ghettos, including infant mortality rates comparable to many impoverished Third World countries (and far worse than in Cuba). Apparently Obama felt comfortable in Havana echoing his pronouncement from the halcyon days of his 2008 election that racism was 90 percent of the way gone in the U.S. Today, he steers away from striking this “post-racial” theme on U.S. soil, where it is such an obvious lie. The legacy of chattel slavery lives on in American capitalist society, in which the mass of the black population is forcibly segregated at the bottom.

The Cuban Revolution took a huge step toward overcoming the island’s own history of slavery and racial segregation by expropriating capitalist property. In a country where two-thirds of the population is black or mixed-race, blacks benefited disproportionately from efforts to raise the living standards of the poor. It is no accident that almost all those who fled the revolution were white. Despite vestiges of racism, Cuba is far more racially integrated than the U.S., and intermarriage between whites and blacks is commonplace.

In facing down the American rulers, the revolution inspired many black militants in the U.S. who were fighting for their own liberation. A number of them found refuge from U.S. government persecution in Cuba, including Robert F. Williams. As head of the NAACP in Monroe, North Carolina, Williams organized black armed self-defense against KKK terror. He visited Cuba in 1960, getting a first-hand look at the revolution. Expelled from the NAACP by its legalistic, middle-class leaders and hounded by the FBI, in 1961 Williams escaped to Cuba. There he broadcast “Radio Free Dixie,” until it was shut down after Williams developed political differences with the Stalinist regime.

More recently, Cuba has been a safe haven for Assata Shakur, a Black Liberation Army member who was victimized in a racist frame-up for the 1973 killing of a New Jersey state trooper. After escaping prison, Shakur fled to Cuba, where she has lived for more than 30 years since being granted political asylum. The Cuban government has refused repeated demands to extradite her. Hands off Assata Shakur!

In a stinging rebuke to Obama (“Brother Obama,” Granma, 27 March), Fidel Castro recounted the imperialists’ dirty tricks against Cuba and pointed to some of the revolution’s achievements, not least for black people. His letter also recounted the Cuban Army’s heroic and successful struggle in Angola beginning in 1975 against the military forces of apartheid South Africa, whose white-supremacist rulers were backed to the hilt by the U.S. Castro’s rebuff to Obama calls for raising a glass of fine Cuban rum (except it’s still banned here). That said, the statement closing his letter that Cuba is “capable of producing the food and material riches we need” through its own efforts is simply absurd. Castro’s nationalist glorification of autarky is a recipe for continued impoverishment on the island, which has almost no industrial base and counts doctors among its chief exports.

A level of inequality persists in Cuba because of material scarcity, reinforced by backward technology and national isolation and compounded by Stalinist mismanagement. The loosening of the nationalized economy has aggravated racial disparities. On the whole, black Cubans were not well placed to benefit from the opening up of businesses like tourism, where lighter-skinned people are often favored in jobs dealing directly with foreign clientele. Furthermore, remittances from overseas overwhelmingly go to white Cubans, who are more likely to have wealthier relatives abroad. Washington has recently relaxed the limits on such remittances, which give a layer of white Cubans a big leg up in starting businesses on the island.

Growing imperialist economic penetration and social inequality serve to continually reinforce pro-capitalist tendencies within Cuba and to undermine popular support for the revolution. Trying to exploit divisions between black, white and mixed-race Cubans, the NED has turned on its spigot for “activists” supposedly promoting racial integration on the island. Obama preaches that U.S. efforts are meant to “lift up” black Cubans. To see what awaits oppressed layers following capitalist restoration, one need only look at East Europe and the former Soviet Union after counterrevolution a quarter-century ago. The return of the profit system devastated working people’s lives and brought massive ethnic bloodletting, violent persecution of immigrants and Roma (Gypsies) and a full-bore assault on basic rights for women.

For Proletarian Internationalism

Following his trip to Cuba, the first by a U.S. president in almost 90 years, Obama flew to Argentina in support of the recently installed right-wing president Mauricio Macri. His visit occurred 40 years to the day after a military coup led by General Jorge Videla ushered in a reign of terror against leftists and union militants, many of them supporters of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. The Argentine junta was backed to the hilt by Washington, which three years earlier had helped engineer the coup in Chile that overthrew Salvador Allende’s bourgeois Popular Unity government and drowned the combative proletariat in blood. The Videla regime systematically tortured and slaughtered thousands in Argentina’s “dirty war”—a favorite method was to throw prisoners from airplanes into the Atlantic. The widely disseminated photo of Obama and Macri “honoring” the junta’s victims could suitably be captioned: “In Memory of a Mission Accomplished.”

Obama is clearly seeking to firm up U.S. imperialism’s hold over its Latin American “backyard.” By tightening the screws on oil-rich Venezuela, Washington aims to get rid of the troublesome bourgeois-populist government led by Nicolás Maduro, successor to Hugo Chávez (see “Venezuela in Crisis,” WV No. 1084, 26 February). This policy is also designed to further squeeze Cuba, which has been relying on cheap oil from Venezuela. Revolutionaries in the U.S. must oppose these and all other machinations of their imperialist rulers. But Marxists do not give political support to nationalist populists or other bourgeois forces, which are enemies of the fight for proletarian revolution.

As with all Stalinist regimes, the Havana bureaucracy opposes the perspective of revolutionary proletarian internationalism, instead looking to supposedly friendly bourgeois regimes to act as a counterweight to American imperialism. The Castroites’ anti-revolutionary program was made unmistakably clear in regard to Nicaragua after the masses smashed the Somoza dictatorship in 1979, shattering the state apparatus and opening the road to a social revolution. We said at the time: “Defend, complete, extend the Nicaraguan revolution!” But Fidel Castro advised the petty-bourgeois Sandinista government to “avoid the early mistakes we made in Cuba: the political rejection by the West, premature frontal attacks on the bourgeoisie, economic isolation.”

The counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union, which had been undermined by decades of Stalinist mismanagement and betrayal, confirmed the futility of trying to construct “socialism in one country,” whose necessary corollary is the quest for “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism. As Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky wrote in The Revolution Betrayed (1936), his classic work on the Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy:

“The longer the Soviet Union remains in a capitalist encirclement, the deeper runs the process of the degeneration of the social fabric. A prolonged isolation would inevitably end not in national communism, but in a restoration of capitalism….

“On the historic order of the day stands not the peaceful socialist development of ‘one country,’ but a long series of world disturbances: wars and revolutions. Disturbances are inevitable also in the domestic life of the Soviet Union.”

Trotsky continued: “The working class will be compelled in its struggle for socialism to debureaucratize the bureaucracy. On the tomb of the latter will be inscribed the epitaph: ‘Here lies the theory of socialism in one country’.”

The alternatives Trotsky spelled out for the USSR, which was an industrial and military power, are doubly and triply the case for Cuba. The isolated and impoverished Cuban deformed workers state will not forever be able to withstand the immense economic and military pressures exerted by the U.S. and the capitalist world market dominated by the imperialists. Genuine defense of the Cuban Revolution against imperialism demands a revolutionary internationalist perspective. The fight against Stalinist misrule in Cuba must be linked to the struggle to destroy U.S. imperialism from within through workers socialist revolution. The key requirement for victory is the building of revolutionary workers parties as sections of a reforged Fourth International.