Defend the Cuban Revolution!

(Quote of the Week)

Fifty years ago, as Fidel Castro’s Rebel Army 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 dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista shattered. In the face of the hostile encirclement of U.S. imperialism, the Castro regime in 1960-61 expropriated the Cuban bourgeoisie as a class, creating a bureaucratically deformed workers state. Ever since, the U.S. ruling class has worked relentlessly to overthrow the gains of the Cuban Revolution and re-establish the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

From the time of its inception as the Revolutionary Tendency in the Socialist Workers Party, which was undergoing political degeneration toward reformism, the Spartacist League has fought for unconditional military defense of the Cuban deformed workers state. At the same time, we fight for proletarian political revolution to oust the ruling Stalinist bureaucracy and to establish a regime based on workers democracy and revolutionary internationalism. The following excerpts are from a document submitted by the Revolutionary Tendency to the 1963 Convention of the Socialist Workers Party, which had given open political support to the Castro bureaucracy.

13. The Cuban Revolution has exposed the vast inroads of revisionism upon our movement. On the pretext of defense of the Cuban Revolution, in itself an obligation for our movement, full unconditional and uncritical support has been given to the Castro government and leadership, despite its petit-bourgeois nature and bureaucratic behavior. Yet the record of the regime’s opposition to the democratic rights of the Cuban workers and peasants is clear: bureaucratic ouster of the democratically-elected leaders of the labor movement and their replacement by Stalinist hacks; suppression of the Trotskyist press; proclamation of the single-party system; and much else. This record stands side by side with enormous initial social and economic accomplishments of the Cuban Revolution. Thus Trotskyists are at once the most militant and unconditional defenders against imperialism of both the Cuban Revolution and of the deformed workers’ state which has issued therefrom. But Trotskyists cannot give confidence and political support, however critical, to a governing regime hostile to the most elementary principles and practices of workers’ democracy, even if our tactical approach is not as toward a hardened bureaucratic caste....

15. Experience since the Second World War has demonstrated that peasant-based guerrilla warfare under petit-bourgeois leadership can in itself lead to nothing more than an anti-working-class bureaucratic regime. The creation of such regimes has come about under the conditions of decay of imperialism, the demoralization and disorientation caused by Stalinist betrayals, and the absence of revolutionary Marxist leadership of the working class. Colonial revolution can have an unequivocally progressive significance only under such leadership of the revolutionary proletariat. For Trotskyists to incorporate into their strategy revisionism on the proletarian leadership in the revolution is a profound negation of Marxism-Leninism no matter what pious wish may be concurrently expressed for “building revolutionary Marxist parties in colonial countries.” Marxists must resolutely oppose any adventurist acceptance of the peasant-guerilla road to socialism—historically akin to the Social Revolutionary program on tactics that Lenin fought. This alternative would be a suicidal course for the socialist goals of the movement, and perhaps physically for the adventurers.

—Revolutionary Tendency, “Toward Rebirth of the Fourth International”
(June 1963), Marxist Bulletin No. 9