Defend the Cuban Revolution!

The February 19 announcement by Fidel Castro that he was resigning as president of the State Council of Cuba and as commander-in-chief of the armed forces was met with a chorus of self-righteous pronouncements by U.S. bourgeois politicians. President Bush took time from his tour of Africa to offer to “help” Cubans to “realize the blessings of liberty.” The masses of Iraq and Afghanistan, devastated by years of imperialist war and occupation, know the realities of U.S. imperialism’s “blessings of liberty.” Republican front-runner John McCain wished Castro dead, declaring, “I hope that he has the opportunity to meet Karl Marx very soon.” Democratic front-runners Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama prattled on about helping Cuba move toward “democracy,” hypocritically decrying the Castro regime’s repression against pro-imperialist dissidents. Meanwhile, it is the U.S. that is holding hundreds of prisoners with no rights in the torture chambers of Guantánamo Bay, a major U.S. military base on a piece of stolen Cuban land. Free the detainees! U.S. out of Guantánamo!

It is the duty of the international proletariat, especially the working class in the U.S., to stand for the unconditional military defense of the Cuban deformed workers state against imperialism and capitalist counterrevolution. When Castro’s petty-bourgeois guerrilla forces marched into Havana in January 1959, the bourgeois army and the rest of the capitalist state apparatus that had propped up the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship shattered. Ever since the government of Fidel Castro, facing implacable hostility by the U.S., expropriated the capitalist class in Cuba in 1960-61, establishing a deformed workers state, the U.S. ruling class has relentlessly worked to re-establish bourgeois rule on the island—from the 1961 Playa Girón (Bay of Pigs) invasion carried out by Democrat John F. Kennedy to hundreds of assassination attempts on Castro; from the backing of gusano (worms) counterrevolutionary terrorists in Miami to the ongoing economic embargo.

In the mid 1990s, Bill Clinton twice tightened the embargo in an attempt to squeeze Cuba into submission, while in 2003 the Bush administration set up the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba to coordinate U.S. efforts to restore capitalism on the island. At the same time, there are elements within the U.S. bourgeoisie, represented by the likes of Obama, who look to ease the 48-year-long economic embargo in order to increase U.S. imperialist economic penetration and strengthen the forces of counterrevolution within Cuba. All sections of the U.S. ruling class are committed to reconquering Cuba for untrammeled capitalist exploitation.

We demand an end to the embargo against Cuba. At the same time, we warn that the calls for “free elections” are nothing but code words for “democratic” counterrevolution, for the “electoral” rise to power of capitalist-restorationist forces financed by U.S. imperialism, intent on destroying the workers state and wreaking massive repression, if not a bloodbath, against workers and Communists.

The expropriation of the holdings of the U.S. imperialists and the Cuban bourgeoisie has led to enormous gains for Cuba’s working masses, particularly women and blacks. With Soviet aid, a centralized, planned economy was built, guaranteeing jobs, housing, food and education. Cuba’s health care system, despite the crippling effect of the U.S. blockade, is far and away the best among Third World countries. Cuban doctors have provided medical assistance to scores of poor countries. After Hurricane Katrina, Cuban doctors packed their bags for the U.S. to assist the victims, but were refused entrance.

Following the 1991-92 counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet degenerated workers state, which had supported Cuba with some $4 billion a year in aid and provided a crucial military shield against the U.S., the Cuban economy massively contracted. In response, the Cuban government opened sectors of its economy to imperialist economic penetration from West Europe and Canada, which has increased inequality. However, in recent years, the government has sought to reduce dependence on imperialist investment by enacting new trade deals with the capitalist regime of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and the Chinese deformed workers state. Today there is widespread debate about a post-Fidel Cuba undertaking an economic “opening up” along Chinese lines. Regardless of the particular Stalinist economic policies pursued by Raúl Castro, who has taken over as Cuba’s president after holding the post on a provisional basis since Fidel Castro underwent surgery in July 2006, we underline our unconditional military defense of Cuba—as well as the other remaining deformed workers states of China, North Korea and Vietnam.

At the same time, we stand in political opposition to the Stalinist bureaucratic misrulers—a parasitic layer sitting on top of proletarian property forms—whose nationalist dogma of “socialism in one country” is an obstacle to the defense of the workers states. Rather than fighting to win the working masses in Latin America and the U.S. to the struggle for international socialist revolution, the Castroite Stalinist bureaucracy has fostered illusions in “progressive” bourgeois regimes, from Salvador Allende in Chile in the early 1970s to Chávez today. Outrageously, on February 20 the Vatican’s secretary of state arrived in Havana to unveil a monument to the late Pope John Paul II on the tenth anniversary of his visit to Cuba—a monument to the Pope of counterrevolution who worked tirelessly to restore capitalism in the East European deformed workers states, especially his native Poland!

We Trotskyists stand for proletarian political revolution to oust the Stalinist bureaucracy in Havana and establish a regime of workers democracy, based on the power of workers councils, and revolutionary internationalism. The fight to defend and extend the Cuban Revolution has been a hallmark of our tendency from its origins as the Revolutionary Tendency (RT) in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the early 1960s. Against the SWP majority, which equated the Castro regime with the revolutionary Bolshevik government of Lenin and Trotsky, the RT described Cuba as a deformed workers state. As explained in the 1973 preface to “Cuba and Marxist Theory” (Marxist Bulletin No. 8), the RT

“fought for three main programmatic points in orienting to the Cuban revolution and its defense: insistence on the Permanent Revolution, i.e. the view that no essential task of the revolution could be achieved short of the victory and consolidation of a workers state; and, correspondingly, insistence on the struggle for hegemony of the working class in the revolution; together with the necessity for a conscious Trotskyist party as the proletarian vanguard to lead that struggle.”

In contrast to our fight for workers political revolution and international socialist revolution, various leftist intellectuals, including prominent Cuban writer and Castro supporter Celia Hart, have pushed the illusion that support to Hugo Chávez’s bourgeois regime represents the possibility of extending the Cuban Revolution. Speaking of Chávez’s call for “socialism,” Hart asserts: “It’s like seeing how the Permanent Revolution thesis of that Russian [Trotsky] in 1905 comes to life a century later.” In fact, Chávez is a bourgeois populist ruler, no less the class opponent of the victory of the workers and oppressed than any neoliberal politician. He has moved to tighten the capitalist state’s control over the workers movement and, as even Hart admits, is not about to countenance the expropriation of the Venezuelan bourgeoisie.

The main ally of the Cuban masses in their fight against imperialism and counterrevolution is the international proletariat, not least the multiracial working class in the U.S. The Spartacist League/U.S., section of the International Communist League, fights to forge a revolutionary workers party that brings to the American proletariat the understanding that defense of the Cuban Revolution is integral to its struggle against its own exploiters, the U.S. capitalist rulers. Along with our comrades of the Grupo Espartaquista de México and the Trotskyist League/Ligue Trotskyste of Canada, we fight for socialist revolution from the Yukon to the Yucatán and throughout the Americas. Down with U.S. imperialism! Defend Cuba!