Washington Tightens Vise

Defend the Cuban Revolution!

Last month, the White House levied a series of punitive measures designed to starve the Cuban workers state into submission: hardening economic sanctions, cracking down on tourist travel and capping remittances from relatives abroad. The Trump administration is reversing Barack Obama’s modest “Cuban thaw.” Obama had normalized diplomatic relations and eased some trade restrictions while keeping intact the decades-long embargo, which continues to strangle workers and peasants on the island. It is crucially necessary for the working class in the U.S. to defend Cuba, oppose all imperialist sanctions and demand an end to the embargo, an act of economic warfare. Cuba should have every right to trade with whatever countries it chooses.

The Cuban Revolution laid the basis for the overthrow of capitalism in 1960-61, and since then the U.S. ruling class as a whole has relentlessly sought to restore capitalist slavery and imperialist domination there. Both Democratic and Republican administrations have combined their economic blackmail with everything from terror attacks and assassination attempts to military invasion, namely the CIA-organized 1961 Bay of Pigs, ordered by John F. Kennedy.

Before a crowd of gusano Bay of Pigs veterans in April, Trump’s national security advisor, John Bolton, pledged gunboat diplomacy in U.S. imperialism’s “backyard,” gloating that the 19th century Monroe Doctrine, which designated the Americas as the sole dominion of the U.S., “is alive and well.” The Obama administration was a tad more subtle in how it packaged the same counterrevolutionary goal, seeking to develop a class of entrepreneurs and flood the island with cheap imports, as well as to further bolster pro-imperialist “dissidents” from within. Meanwhile, he kept open the U.S. military’s torture center in Guantánamo Bay, which has long served as a staging ground for provocations against Cuba. We say: U.S. out of Guantánamo now!

The Trump administration presented the new measures as a way to strong-arm Cuba into severing ties with Venezuela, its major trading partner. Cuban president Miguel Díaz-Canel has been accused of “controlling” Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, whom the U.S. political establishment wants to depose. Deeming both countries part of the so-called “troika of tyranny” (along with Nicaragua), Bolton demanded that Cuba remove the 20,000 soldiers that it supposedly has in Venezuela. In response, a Cuban official dubbed Bolton a “pathological liar,” remarking that there are no such troops or security forces and that “we can’t withdraw something that does not exist.” Rather, tens of thousands of Cuban doctors and teachers remain in Venezuela as part of an agreement, implemented by the Hugo Chávez government in 2003, to provide subsidized oil to Cuba in exchange for medical and educational services.

Unlike Venezuela, which is a capitalist state where the bourgeoisie is fully intact as a class, Cuba is a deformed workers state where property is collectivized but a nationalist bureaucratic caste, not the workers, holds political power. When Fidel Castro’s peasant-based rebel forces marched into Havana in 1959, the army and the rest of the capitalist state apparatus that had propped up the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship collapsed. In the face of imperialist aggression, the new Cuban government began a series of nationalizations in 1960. By the time Castro declared the country “socialist” the next year, the Cuban bourgeoisie and the U.S. imperialists had been expelled and private property expropriated.

Nonetheless, Cuba was never socialist. Socialism is a global, classless, egalitarian society based on material abundance, in which economic productivity is at the highest level. From the outset, the Cuban bureaucracy politically suppressed the working class and opposed the perspective of international socialist revolution. The fact that a petty-bourgeois guerrilla movement could smash capitalist property relations was due to historically exceptional circumstances: the absence of the working class as a contender for power, hostile imperialist encirclement, the flight of the national bourgeoisie and a lifeline thrown by the Soviet Union, which supported Cuba with billions in annual aid and provided a vital military shield against the U.S. Decisively, there was no authoritative revolutionary Marxist party to intervene into the political development of the Cuban Revolution and put it on the path of workers democracy.

Though Cuba remains underdeveloped and beset by scarcity, not least due to the crippling effect of the U.S. blockade, its social revolution led to enormous gains for the working masses, particularly women and blacks. With Soviet aid, a centralized, planned economy was built, guaranteeing jobs, housing, food and education. To this day, Cuba’s health care system remains far superior to its capitalist Caribbean neighbors.

As Trotskyists, we stand for the unconditional military defense of Cuba against capitalist counterrevolution and imperialism. At the same time, we oppose the rule of the privileged Stalinist bureaucratic caste, which has always 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. We stand for proletarian political revolution to oust the Castroite bureaucracy and institute a regime committed to the fight for world socialism.

Cuba’s stagnant economy has never fully recovered from the severe crisis following the 1991-92 counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet degenerated workers state, even with the relief provided by the subsidized oil from Caracas. During the last couple decades, the Cuban government has been promoting “market reforms” like small-scale private enterprise, though at times it has pulled back from them. While these measures by themselves do not constitute the restoration of capitalism, they have significantly increased social inequality. Under Stalinist rule, such schemes are the only available “answer” to bureaucratic mismanagement and commandism. As against both bureaucratic centralism and Stalinist “market reforms,” we are for centralized planning under democratic organs of workers rule, which would determine the direction and operation of the economy.

Nationalized industry remains overwhelmingly dominant on the island. At the same time, the Cuban regime has opened up the economy to imperialist capital penetration from West Europe and Canada in the form of joint ventures with state-owned companies and enacted trade deals with Venezuela and the Chinese deformed workers state. Imperialist economic penetration comes with risks to the socialized economy, underlining the need to maintain a strict state monopoly of foreign trade.

Today, as Cuba struggles with low world prices for nickel and sugar—its only substantial exports—stagnant food production and widespread shortages, the White House is putting pressure on its foreign investors to cease any involvement in Cuban enterprises and projects. Trump has activated the Title III provision of the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, signed into law by Bill Clinton, which grants the former owners (and heirs) of nationalized property the right to sue for compensation in U.S. courts. The measure, waived by every previous administration, promises to open the floodgates to potentially hundreds of thousands of lawsuits against international firms with operations in Cuba. Already, dozens of corporate sharks, including Texaco, Coca-Cola, and IBM, are salivating over their claims amounting to billions of dollars.

Some in Washington view a belligerent policy toward Cuba as outmoded and counterproductive to U.S. imperialist interests. In a 3 May Foreign Policy article, Rebecca Bill Chavez, a former Defense Department official under Obama, argues that Trump’s sanctions will harm American commercial ventures and Cuba’s “emerging private sector.” Her main concern is that the Cuban government will be driven into the arms of China and Russia: “If the U.S. goal is a democratic transition in Cuba, it should not deliberately create the conditions for the country to fall under the sway of the United States’ two most powerful strategic competitors.” Whatever cynical catchphrase they employ—“democratic transition,” “human rights,” etc.—the American rulers are committed to turning Cuba into a neocolony for untrammeled capitalist exploitation.

The isolated Cuban deformed workers state will not be able to endure forever the vast economic and military pressures exerted by the U.S. and the capitalist world market. For Cuba to not only survive but thrive requires workers revolution throughout the rest of the Caribbean and Latin America and not least in the U.S. imperialist bastion. The Stalinist misrulers have always opposed the fight for workers revolutions elsewhere and instead fostered deadly illusions in “progressive” bourgeois rulers—e.g., Salvador Allende’s Chilean popular front in the early 1970s and Venezuela under both Chávez and Maduro.

The Spartacist League is dedicated to forging a revolutionary workers party as the necessary leadership in the fight for proletarian rule in the U.S. The multiracial working class, in liberating itself from capitalist wage slavery and bringing down the imperialist beast, will come to the aid of its international class brothers and sisters, including the courageous working people of Cuba.