Intercontinental Press - February 19, 1979
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What We Have Learned From It
Cuba --Twenty Years of Revolution
By Jack Barnes

(The following talk was given by Jack Barnes to a rally in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on December 31, 1979. The gathering of more than 600 people celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the victory of the rebel forces led by Fidel Castro over Fulgencio Batista's dictatorship. The rally was a highlight of the eighteenth national convention of the Young Socialist Alliance.

[Jack Barnes is the national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. He visited Cuba in 1960, as the revolutionary regime was instituting the sweeping nationalizations that transformed Cuba into a workers state.

[We have taken the edited text of the speech from the February issue of the International Socialist Review, monthly magazine supplement of the Militant.]

This celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the Cuban revolution is a unique occasion. In the course of modern history, twentieth anniversaries of revolutions have not often been joyous occasions. Just the opposite.

Twenty years after the first American revolution was won, this country was in the grip of the alliance between the slaveholders and the mercantile capitalists. They had imposed their constitution on the country and consolidated their rule.

Twenty years, a generation, after the second American revolution-the Civil War and its aftermath- Radical Reconstruction had been completely smashed. Reconstruction, in which Blacks had fought for and won a large measure of equal rights and political power, was overthrown by force and violence. The Black leaders who had emerged were suppressed. Jim Crow was being enforced and institutionalized. American imperialism was raising its ugly head. The labor movement in the United States had been driven back. This period in our history marked the end of any progressive role whatsoever for the American bourgeoisie, or any of its wings or parties.

In France, twenty years after 1793, the crest of the French revolution, Napoleon's rule had wiped out the democratic gains of the movement. All the popular leaders of the revolution had been murdered, suppressed, or had made their peace with reaction. And Napoleon's reign ended shortly thereafter with the outright restoration of the Bourbon monarchy.

It is not just these bourgeois revolutions whose twentieth anniversaries have been less than joyous occasions. This is equally true of the proletarian revolutions of our period.

What was the twentieth anniversary of the Chinese revolution like? What was the state of affairs in China in 1969?

Now the world is learning part of the truth about the arrests and exile of hundreds of thousands by the Stalinist bureaucracy in Peking. We are being told of the murder of oppositionists, the holding down of the standard of living of the masses, and the sending of the youth by the millions to forced exile in the countryside. The regime was following a foreign policy aimed at one, and only one, objective: to maneuver to get close to Nixon, to open up relations with U.S. imperialism. And to do that they were-and are-ready and willing to help imperialism crush revolutions.

What about the twentieth anniversary of the Russian revolution, the mightiest revolution in history?

By 1937, the entire leadership of the Bolshevik revolution had been murdered or was on the verge of being murdered by those who had betrayed the revolution. Stalin's monstrous Moscow trials and the massive purges were in full swing. The Gulag had come into being and was growing, imprisoning the beat proletarian fighters.

Relations between the countryside and the city were at a low point. The regime brutalized the peasants. Far from having pride in the national diversity of the Soviet Federation and respect for the oppressed nationalities, there was the rise of national oppression and crass Great Russian chauvinism.

The Soviets, the organs of workers democracy, existed only in form- Stalin ruled through terror and police-state tactics. The inte'rnationaliam that had been the hallmark of the Bolshevik Party under Lenin and Trotsky was destroyed. Stalin opposed the attempts of the colonial people to liberate themselves from imperialism if their fight was against the "democratic" imperialist powers with whom Stalin was seeking alliances. Twenty years after the Russian revolution Stalin was consciously and cold-bloodedly knifing in the back the workers' revolution in Spain.

The general staff of the once-mighty Red Army had been beheaded, gravely weakened, and virtually immobilized. The entire bureaucracy prayed that they would never have to use it even to defend their own privileged caste rule.

Far from there being any internationalism left, the policy of the leadership could be-and was-summed up in one phrase: "Socialism in one country." The bureaucracy had no desire to extend the revoiution. Just the opposite: their sole desire was to extend relations with the bourgeoisie in powerful countries, and they were willing to carry out any betrayal to accomplish this.

Far from telling the truth to the Soviet people about the needs of the revolution, Stalin institutionalized the lie. A privileged caste, one of the most rapacious ruling groups in the history of humanity, was in total power. Far from a beacon to revolutionists round the world, as the Leninist regime had been, the Soviet government was a center of conscious counterrevolution.

Those were some of the facts that had to be stated on the tragic twentieth anniversary sary of the Russian revolution.
 

A Living Revolution

So this is a unique occasion. What can we say twenty years after the victory of our revolution in Cuba?

Far from the revolution devouring its leaders and children, the revolutionary leadership that brought the revolution to victory remains intact, with the exception of Camilo Cienfuegos, who was killed in an airplane crash and Che Guevara, who died on the field of battle in Bolivia.

Far from turning toward Stalinist-style "peaceful coexistence" and detente, the Cuban leadership says openly, we will never trade away our support for the Puerto Rican independence struggle; we will never bargain over our sovereign rights; and we will never trade away our right to respond to revolutionary opportunities around the world with any means necessary-including the Cuban armed forces if we are asked.

Far from devastating the countryside and beheading the proletariat, the revolutionary alliance between the workers an! peasants that has been key to the Cuban revolution remains on solid foundations The alliance of the proletariat and the peasantry in Cuba is the firmest on the face of this earth.

Far from fostering the development of a privileged caste, a distinct, consciously counterrevolutionary grouping lording it over the rest of society, the Cuban revolution continues to advance an egalitarian consciousness, although serious bureaucratic deformations and privileges, haunt the revolution.

Far from having gigantic concentration camps-and spreading Gulags. Cuba is the only workers state that allowed a delegation from Amnesty International to tour the country. The delegation visited the prisons and was allowed to talk with the prisoners. And they received the full cooperation of the Cuban government.

They did have some criticisms—such as the Cubans shouldn't have executed so many of Batista's torturers. They also had some criticisms that seem correct—for instance, that there should be clear rules on how a sentence can be reduced for good behavior, to avoid arbitrariness.

But the Amnesty International team reached an extremely important conclusion: they did not challenge the Cuban government's classification of political prisoners as counterrevolutionaries who are imprisoned for specific acts against the revolution or their membership in armed counterrevolutionary organizations. Amnesty International does not consider these people "prisoners of conscience."

And now Castro has told Carter pointblank: These criminals are your pupils. If they want to live in the United States, you take them'.
 

Extend the Revolution!

And why, are the Cubans in Africa? They are in Africa because they are attracted by the Black African revolution — just like every other revolutionist and everyone of African descent throughout the world. They sense the coming showdown in Black Africa, and they are determined to be a part of it and to aid it.

The Cubans responded enthusiastically to the Ethiopian revolution. The scope and significance of the events that have unfolded in Ethiopia are misunderstood by all kinds of socialists in this countrv.

But the Cubans are not making- that mistake. They identify with the Ethiopian revolution down to the marrow of their bones They know that the land reform, the elimination of feudalism and slavery in one of the last empires of that kind, the breaking of the tie between church and state, the beginning of the eradication of illiteracy, the nationalizations-all this marks a deepgoing revolution in process, one of the most profound upheavals that continent has seen.

The Cuban revolutionaries have responded to these revolutionary acts.

But above all, the Cubans are in Africa for one simple reason: They are there because for them there is one law above all others: Extend the revolution.

What is it that explains the unique character of this revolution and this revolutionary leadership' We have never seen a revolutionary leadership in power for this length of time. We have seen only one greater revolutionary leadership in power—the central core of the Bolshevik Party.
 

Bypassing Stalinism

The first thing is that the Castro leadership led their revolution over the objections and opposition of the Cuban Communist Party. They bypassed the Stalinists and bypassed Stalinism. They acted as revolutionists and in doing so proved to the whole world that the Stalinists are not fated to stand at the head of revolutionary upsurges. They proved that the Stalinists are obstacles in the way of a revolutionary leadership and have to be dragged along by the nape of the neck.

This was completely conscious on the part of the Cuban leaders. They built the July 26 Movement in opposition to all other existing organizations in Cuba. The bourgeois liberals had their own formations, which the Fidelistas broke from decisively. The Stalinists and the standard American-type corrupt trade-union bureaucrats had a stranglehold on the Cuban labor movement.

In order to lead a revolution, the Castro team had to find a way around these obstacles. And they did.

The second thing that we have to note is the political character of the Cuban leadership. There is a great myth that the Cuban revolutionary leadership was simply the barbudos in arms, the guerrilla army. This was the image projected by people like the French journalist Regis Debray

But this was not the most important aspect. The Castro leadership were political people, just like we are political people They think politically right to the very end. Military tactics were always subordinated to political strategy and aims. From the beginning, there was an interplay at each step of the revolution between political initiatives by the Castro leadership and initiatives in the streets, in the factories, and on the land by the Cuban masses-back and forth, driving the revolutionary process forward.

The Castro leadership began their struggle not by taking up arms, but by doing something we emulated twenty year, later—they filed a suit against the government. When Batista made his coup in 1952 Fidel went to court. He said Batista had violated the constitution.
 

How Batista Was Defeated

We demand some relief, said Fidel. Namely, throw Batista out of office and jail him. And if this court doesn't take this elementary step, it means that this court is totally corrupt and entitled to no respect as a court of law. It means that the masses will have to take things into their own hands, and this court will not be fit to pass judgment on the actions we must take. In this way, they established before the masses the legal and political legitimacy of the struggle they were preparing to undertake.

And they went forward from there. They were always willing to act—above all with the gun. That's what set them apart from those who merely talked revolution.

But they were always thinking politically. They always explained to the Cuban people what they were doing and why. In 1956, Fidel announced from Mexico that they were going to return to Cuba to start the fight again before the end of the year. They were considered fools for doing this It was viewed as silly military tactics. But they rarely did things for reasons of military tactics. They did things for reasons of political strategy.

In the mountains they did not primarily carry out brilliant military tactics. In fact, there was never a pitched battle between the Rebel Army and Batista's army. The fall of Batista was not primarily the result of military action.

The Rebel Army carried out propaganda in every way possible. They talked to peasants, and they set up Radio Rebelde in the mountains to transmit their program all over the island. They published newspapers. They would fight to get interviews — in the New York Times. They fought to organize the urban working class. They even seriously considered sending Che to Santiago to lead the urban resistance. The July 26 Movement had underground operations in cities throughout Cuba.

They didn't defeat Batista militarily. They won the hearts and minds of the Cuban masses, and this totally demoralized the Batista army. In the end, it was no longer an effective fighting force.

Twenty years ago, the Rebel Army walked into Havana unopposed, after having called a successful general strike that tore away the last shreds of the Batista regime. They arrived in the capital after a leisurely political stroll across Cuba lasting almost a week. They mobilized thousands as they went from city to city on their wav to Havana.

They accomplished all this by acting as revolutionists, by telling the truth to the workers and peasants of Cuba. They knew that arming the people with the truth was decisive to the victory of the revolution.

And on this basis they went so far as to establish the first workers and peasants government, the first workers state, the first successful socialist revolution, in the Western Hemisphere.

A third thing for us to note is the capacity of the Cuban revolutionary leadership to stand up to the might of American imperialism. Cuba is a small country with a population of six million at the time of the revolution, no great strategic resources, no great military leverage—yet it has defied American imperialism for two decades.

They defeated Kennedy's invasion at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. A year later, they made pne of the boldest political moves of the century. They talked the Russians into giving them nuclear arms, because they knew that another massive, American-organized invasion was being prepared. They had an important decision to make.

This is what they thought: An invasion that destroys and crushes the Cuban revolution will set back the worldwide fight for socialism. It will change the whole relationship of class forces on a world scale. It will be the green light for reaction to drive ahead in the Americas, in Asia, in Africa, all over. The yanqui imperialists are absolutely ruthless, they will not hesitate to use their power to incinerate our small country. The one way we can probably stop it this time for certain is to get nuclear weapons.

That's exactly what they did. And that was the heart of the Cuban missile crisis. But Kennedy backed off. Kennedy and Khrushchev made a deal-without consulting the Cubans-that the United States would not invade Cuba and the Russians would pull the missiles out. That was the end of the immediate threat of nuclear war, and the end of the immediate threat of the destruction of the Cuban revolution by a L.S. invasion.

The Cubans never forgot this lesson. Their greatest grievance against the Stalinists in Moscow and Peking was their refusal to come to the defense of the Vietnamese revolution against the imperialist onslaught earlier and with more arms. The Cubans published and spread far and wide in many languages the speeches of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in which they fervently argued that aid must be given the Vietnamese revolution.

Che explained that if Vietnam was declared an "inviolable part of socialist territory" where any attack would be treated as an attack on the Soviet Union, there would be no Vietnam War and there would be an end to the horrible brutalization of the Vietnamese people.

Because of their response to historic tests like this, Uncle Sam knew the Cubans were not counterrevolutionary Stalinists—even if some so-called socialists in this country couldn't figure that out.
 

Role of Soviet Aid

The fourth thing for us to note is the role of the Russian revolution in making it possible for the Cuban revolution to survive.

Economic aid, oil, a market for sugar, and finally arms—this assistance was essential to the Cuban revolution. Without these things it would not have been able to withstand the war of aggression, the blockade, the invasion organised by Washington.

Now you notice that I said the role of the Russian revolution—not the Soviet bureaucrats. The aid was available because of the victory of the Russian masses in 1917, a victory that remains alive despite the Stalinist bureaucracy that rules in the Kremlin today.

However, the Stalinist bureaucracy controls this aid, and the aid isn't given freely to Cuba. The Moscow traitors demand a political price be paid for every barrel of oil, for every machine gun, for every credit granted.

This put continuing pressure on Cuba. It led the Cubans to take many wrong positions, positions with which we strongly disagree. It led to silence about all sorts of crimes of the Stalinists around the world. It contributed to Fidel's defense of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

It was inevitable, given the relationship of forces, that the Cubans would be forced to pay a political price. Some price would have to have been paid by the best and most conscious revolutionary leadership.

What was inevitable was the price, and the damage resulting from paying this price. What was not inevitable was the Stalinization of the revolutionary leadership. That has not occurred

The final thing we should note is that the political stance of the Cuban leadership has remained constant since the beginning. It has not changed.

Everything I was taught when I was down in Cuba twenty years ago remains the basic political line. They haven't changed either the strengths or the weaknesses of their line.

They believe that the only real revolutionists are those who act to advance the revolution. They don't really care much about what you say. They care about what you do.

Now, on the whole, this is not a bad approach. It is much better than the opposite stance. But there is a political weakness in it, because it tends to ignore theory, to downgrade the importance of the hard-earned accumulated political lessons and experiences of the workers movement.

Another aspect of their outlook is their belief that the revolution in the advanced imperialist countries is far, far off in the future. They simply do not believe it is possible to think seriously about victorious revolutions in France, Britain, West Germany, Japan, or the United States. They do not believe it is possible in their lifetimes, or their children’s lifetimes. They don't believe in it, don't think about it, and consequently don't do many things they could do to advance it.

Another weakness we have to recognize is that the Cuban leadership never developed a Leninist-type organization, with the right of minorities to argue for their point of view in front of the entire membership. This did not change with the institutionalization of the party.

The Cuban revolution occurred without the creation of large-scale democratic committees of the working masses—what the Russians called "soviets"—that could organize the society effectively, settle differences in the most efficient way, and mobilize the masses to do everything possible to extend the revolution to other countries.

The party and the government got all mixed up together as a result. Fidel acts at one moment as the head of state, another as the foreign minister, another as the head of the party, and another as the guerrilla trainer.

From the beginning, they would remain silent about reactionary actions of some governments, such as Mexico's, that maintained friendly diplomatic relations with Cuba. They have often taken an uncritical stance toward governments that take some anti-imperialist stands or actions, as in Chile under Allende and Peru under Velasco.

They fail to understand and take the right line on questions like the Eritrean national liberation struggle. Fortunately. the Cubans have sharply differentiated themselves from the all-out support offered by the Kremlin to the Dergue's war against the Eritreans. However, they have failed to come out in favor of the right of Eritrea to independence.

So these are some of the weaknesses of Castroism. They have been there from the beginning of the Cuban revolution. And they have not been surmounted yet.

But beneath all these weaknesses is something much mightier—the tremendous egalitarian thrust of the revolution; the uncompromising belief on the part of the entire leadership that made the revolution that one must act on revolutionary beliefs; their willingness to tell the truth to the world as they see it, and, most important, their refusal ever to give up the fight to extend the revolution as the key to everything.

Never for one minute have the leaders of the Cuban revolution been interested in the line of "peaceful coexistence," that is, the total subordination of the interests of the world revolution to seeking diplomatic and economic deals with imperialism. None of the leaders of the Cuban revolution have ever gone for this.

They have known from the beginning that the only hope they have in the long run is the successful extension of the Cuban revolution. And that helps to explain the uniqueness of this anniversary celebration.

We Trotskyists have learned quite a few things from the Cuban revolution and from its leaders.

I realize now that I oversimplified it when I was younger. If people responded positively to the Cuban revolution, I thought they were potential members of the Young Socialist Alliance. If they responded negatively, I didn't think they were worth much, and, frankly, didn't want them in the Young Socialist Alliance.

Now I have learned that you can't organize that way because every once in a great while you miss someone who might have made it as a revolutionary. But I still think it's not a bad method, in general. We used the same approach with the rise of Malcolm X, and the new wave of feminism, and the beginning radicalization of the American working class, and it didn't turn out too bad.

What we learned to do was to recognize a revolution and to recognize a revolutionary leadership. Now, that sounds simple. Any fool should be able to do it.

But many people who considered themselves not only progressive-minded, but even socialists and revolutionaries, were incapable of that. Faced with the living reality of a revolution, with all its contradictions and imperfections, some people couldn't recognize reality for what it was. It didn't match exactly the schemas they had learned from books.

Jim Cannon, the founding leader of the Socialist Workers Party, considered it the number one test of our movement that we take the right stance toward the Cuban revolution.

In letters to Farrell Dobbs and Joe Hansen, he expressed the judgment that the leadership of the party had proved it not only knew how to recognize a revolution when it happened before our eyes, but we had recognized a revolutionary leadership and had shown how to fight shoulder to shoulder with them against our common enemies.
 

"Che's slogan, 'Create two, three, many Vietnams,' was not just rhetoric."

We made a bloc with the Castro team against the Stalinists from the beginning. We did that because the Stalinists have been the number one internal enemy of the Cuban revolution.

There have been, and are today, two basic wings inside the current Cuban Communist Party: the Castroist wing and the Stalinist wing.

We made a bloc with Castro against the Cuban Stalinists in the fight against the bureaucratic course of Anibal Escalante in the early 1960s, and later in the conflict with the Stalinists internationally over defense of the Vietnamese revolution and the Cuban leadership's efforts to extend the revolution to Latin America.

We learned how to bloc with Castro against the Stalinists in the fight to defend and extend the revolution. And that conflict between the Castroists and the Stalinists is still going on.

So we learned quite a bit. And we were fortunate, because revolutions led by revolutionary leaderships haven't come along very often.

Everything the Socialist Workers Party and the YSA did in defense of the Cuban revolution was done from the point of view of building our movement. This is not a contradiction. Not at all. We were always convinced that everything that helped strengthen the YSA and SWP also helped strengthen the Cuban revolution, and that everything that aided the Cuban revolution aided the party and the YSA.

We also learned the difference between real-life politics and textbook politics. We learned to recognize real forces and real processes and real revolutionary contradictions when they were messy and didn't live up to the letter of our norms.

We learned a lot about Stalinism and Trotskyism by watching the way the Stalinists try to subvert the Cuban revolution and the way the Trotskyists defended it and tried to extend it.

We discovered that the real line to be drawn is the line between the revolutionists-meaning Castro and those around him, including us-and the counterrevolutionaries on the other side, including the Stalinists and the so-called "Third Camp" social democrats.
 

Where Petty-Bourgeois Socialists Went Wrong

We also learned that we had to get rid of any kind of fatalism, which in politics is just another word for cowardice. You have all heard this attitude: "Well, Cuba is just a little island, it doesn't have a Trotskyist leadership, so it's only a matter of time before they are swamped, overthrown, or degenerate and become Stalinists. So why bother ourselves too much about defending the Cuban revolution? It's only a matter of time."

That sounds sickening to us, but that is the standard line of group after group of petty-bourgeois socialists,

I had read, in Lenin's writings, about petty-bourgeois socialists. I used to think it was some kind of curse word, an epithet. But I sure found out what petty-bourgeois socialists were, what petty-bourgeois revolutionary phrase-mongering is. We all learned that in the struggles to defend the Cuban revolution.

There were quite a few people who considered themselves socialists but didn't recognize the Cuban revolution as a socialist revolution. I assume many of you here tonight have never heard of them. They were known as the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL). They have modern day clones like the Spartacist League, wings of the Maoists, people you run into today.

In the early days of the Cuban revolution, the YPSL had quite a bit of influence on a number of campuses. In some cases we had to-argue for and physically defend our right to carry picket signs in demonstrations that said, "Hands Off Cuba!" The YPSL tried to tell us that signs had to say "All Hands Off Cuba." They drew an equals sign between the Soviet aid, for the Cuban revolution and Kennedy's attempt to invade Cuba and crush the revolution.

To them, the Russian revolution was dead, the Soviet Union was not a workers state. There was no socialist revolution in Cuba, nor was there any revolutionary leadership there, and that was that.
 

Meany's New Anti-Cuba Move

A few days ago, George Meany made a big announcement that the AFL-CIO was going to boycott Chilean goods. This was presented as a progressive step. He was congratulated in editorials by the Washington Post and the New York Times explaining that this was an unfortunate but necessary step to secure human rights in Chile. But when you read Meany's statement more carefully, you discover that his action is really an attempt to tighten the imperialist blockade of Cuba.

Meany is sending delegations to meet with counterparts of the AFL-CIO bureaucracy all over this hemisphere and in Europe to make the final plans for the hemispheric-boycott of Chilean and Cuban trade. So the boycott of Chile is just a fake cover for the Cuban boycott.

I mention this here because some of Meany's speechwriters were leaders of YPSL, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, whom we in the YSA battled over Cuba. Their line during the Bay of Pigs invasion was very simple: they defended it publicly. They urged socialists to align themselves with the "democratic trade-union" wing of the invading army!

We also learned how to combine understanding of reality and our norms. Reality was very rich and complicated in Cuba.

You didn't have cardboard figures such as you find in allegorical novels-figures like Betty Good, Bobby Bad, Willie Wise, Lucy Lustful, and people like that. These are not human beings but cardboard figures representing an idea or passion or tendency.

That's how most petty-bourgeois socialists look at a revolution. But we knew the Cuban revolution, we knew the Cuban revolutionists, and we knew the Cuban workers. We knew they were real flesh-and-blood people and a lot more complicated than Betty Good and Bobby Bad.

We learned that reality came first. Our task was not simply to understand reality but to participate in it and try to change it, move it forward, working with everyone moving in a revolutionary direction.
 

Revolutionists of Action

The Cuban leaders were revolutionists of action. In one of Trotsky's discussions with members of our party at the end of the 1930s, he predicted that the next great' revolutionary leaders would not be great theoreticians like Marx, writing things like Capital. We are in an epoch now where we will see great revolutionists of action come forward, and we must come forward and meet them.

That's what we saw in Cuba: an installment on that promise by Trotsky. At the 1961 convention of the SWP, Morris Stein, one of the experienced veteran leaders of the party, explained to a minority grouping inside the SWP that was opposed to recognizing the realities of Cuba that the Castro leadership team was superior to the Bolshevik leadership, once you leave aside Lenin, Trotsky, Sverdlov, and people like that.

That was what we were dealing with historically, that is what our responsibilities were, and are.

On the other hand, we also learned the great value, irreplaceability, and strategic importance of our norms. It is only by having the right strategy and the right norms, only by absorbing theory politically, that we can successfully defend and extend the revolution.

In the very first report that Joe Hansen gave on Cuba for the SWP Political Committee, we pointed to three central political questions:

First. Over time, it is absolutely necessary for forms of proletarian democracy to be developed in Cuba if the revolution is to continue to advance.

Second. The fight to construct a revolutionary party along Leninist lines on a national and international scale is crucial to this process.

And, third, the key to everything is to participate in the fight to extend the Cuban revolution and to defend it against American imperialism.

This third point is also the key to helping the Cubans to understand the first two points. Maybe I can explain what I mean by telling you how I became a Trotskyist.

When I first met our movement, I didn't thoroughly understand the role of soviets, the exact character of workers democracy, the nature of a workers state. These were all somewhat abstract questions.

I didn't fully understand the role of a Leninist party, a Trotakyist party. I don't think most of us do when we first come around.

But I understood one thing. I knew there was no one in this country like the SWP and YSA for defending the Cuban revolution-a real socialist revolutionand fighting to extend it right into the United States. And I said, that's my party, that's my organization. After that, I learned the other things as I went along.

And that is the way the Cubans will learn about those questions. The only way. They won't listen to anybody who sits on the sidelines and flaps their gums. They watch. And the time will come when they will listen to revolutionists who show in deeds that they are worthy of respect and worth listening to.

It would be faster and better if there were another way-but there is not. That's the only way the Cubans-not just the leaders but the Cuban revolutionists as a whole-will be convinced.
 

How Trotskyists Defended Cuba

It really came down to understanding the most important fact of all: the Cuban revolution is our revolution. Our fate and their fate are totally intertwined.

The YSA wrote several genuinely heroic chapters in defense of the Cuban revolution.

The first stage is one I'm sure most of you know about. That was building the Fair Play for Cuba Committees and turning the YSA into the propagandists and tribunes of the Cuban revolution.

We did everything we could. We showed slides. We walked picket lines. We sold pamphlets, A few of us wore militia hats and committed one or two ultraleft excesses. We went to the workers and farmers of the United States with the message of the Cuban revolution. That was harder to do then than it is today. The country was not that far out of the McCarthy era. The radicalization was at its bare beginning with the sit-ins against segregated lunch counters in the South.

We went to a lot of churches. We discovered that if you got the use of a church and showed slides about this island and how the conditions of the people had been improved as a result of the revolution, some workers came, some students came, and in Minnesota some farmers came.

We figured that any student or worker or farmer who was interested in Cuba was a prime candidate for recruitment to the revolutionary movement.

We also learned about Black nationalism from the Cubans. We learned about it even before we learned from Malcolm X and from the changes going on in the Black Muslims. Of course it was only with the rise of Malcolm X and the split in the Nation of Islam that we really were able to grasp completely what Trotsky had tried to teach us a long time ago about Black nationalism.

But the Cuban revolution played a big role in opening the doors for us. From the beginning, the Cuban revolution had an Afro-Cuban side that was deep-going and had a big impact in this country among Black people.
 

Impact on U.S. Black Community

Of course the colonial revolution, the upsurge of the nonwhite masses against their oppression, struck a deep chord among Afro-Americana. But Cuba had a special impact because it was a successful revolution, because of the role that AfroCubans played in it, and because of the determination with which the revolutionary government abolished race discrimination.

When Castro came to New York in 1960 for the session df the United Nations General Assembly and moved from a midtown hotel to the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, it had an impact on the entire Black population.

The founding supporters of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee included some of the most prominent of the Black nationalist intellectuals, poets, and musicians in this country.

Robert F. Williams, a revolutionary-minded Black nationalist and civil rights leader from North Carolina, and Socialist Workers Party leader Ed Shaw carried out joint tours in defense of Cuba and of the Black struggle.

So this was the first stage of our defense of the Cuban revolution. It was an exciting stage. We printed Castro's speeches. We published The Truth About Cuba by Joe Hansen. We campaigned for Farrell Dobbs-the only presidential candidate who told the truth about Cuba and socialism.

We picketed and marched. We fought with those spineless YPSLs. We held meetings at churches. We had forums. We sold the Militant and the Young Socialist everywhere. And we recruited to and strengthened the SVi'P and the YSA.

There is a second stage that more of you are familiar with, although you might not think of it this way. This was the period of the Vietnam War. This is a side of our defense of the Cuban revolution that we don't talk about enough. Everything that we did to oppose the U.S. war of genocide in Vietnam was a concrete fight to defend and extend the Cuban revolution. The Cuban leadership understood their stake in Vietnam completely.

Che's slogan, "Create two, three, many Vietnams," was not just rhetoric. This was the conscious line that the Cubans always

held. They understood that only by extend: ing their revolution, only by having heroic people like the Vietnamese standing up and fighting, only by putting everything on the line, could they defend what they had won and extend it further. That is what they believe. And so do we.

Che Guevara gave his life as much in defense of the Vietnamese revolution as of the Bolivian revolution. And what you accomplished, along with millions more like you who marched and rallied against the war, was to buy time for the Cubans while we fought-successfully-to win over the American people to oppose that war.

The Vietnamese revolution bought the Cuban revolution some crucial time, a breathing space, to overcome some of their economic problems, to combat the blockade, and to be ready to move into Africa in solidarity with the battle against apartheid and imperialism when the opportunity opened up.

Now we are in a third stage. We have to take the lead in direct defense of the Cuban revolution and in defense of the emerging Black African revolution. It is the same fight.

This is the continuity in our defense of this revolution going back twenty years. Cuba is right at the center of world politics. It has been from the day the revolution triumphed, and it will be until that revolution is defeated or we prevail. It is at the center of everything, because the existence of a workers state with a revolutionary lead ership.poses a permanent challenge to all that is reactionary, all that exploits and oppresses, and to all the privileged bureaucrats in the world.
 

Cuba and U.S. Politics

The Cuban revolution and the attitude we take toward it remains the acid teat for revolutionists.

And because the fate of the revolution in this country is so intertwined with the

Cuban revolution, we should realize thoroughly how horrible a defeat in Cuba would be for us. A defeat of the Cuban revolution, or the Stalinization of Cuba, would be a terrible blow to the ` world revolution.

For twenty years we have understood the interpenetration of the Cuban revolution and the coming American revolution. We can see this growing more concrete every day.

Think about the overtures Castro is making to the Cuban Americana and the significance of this.

This is a bold, audacious, political move against the Carter administration's hypocrisy about human rights. But more than that even, it is a small but important move into American politics-a first for the Cuban revolution.

At the very beginning, the Cubans had the idea that maybe someone in the United States would go up into the Appalachians or somewhere and do it here like they did it in Cuba. They gave Robert F. Williamewho lived in exile in Cuba for many years after being framed up on kidnapping charges in this country-a radio station to beam messages to Mississippi and Alabama. They were ready to help train guerrilla fighters, but of course nothing ever came of this.

The Cubans never tried to use their strength and leverage to influence the U.S. labor movement. They wrote it off. But times have changed.

The current dialogue with the Cuban community in the United States involves thousands of Cubans who are in this country to stay. They are divided by class. Many work in factories, they go to school:, and they are moved by the same things in the class struggle that affect you and every other worker. They also find latinos aren't treated equally in the land of Carter's human rights hypocrisy.

The new relationship emerging between Cuban-Americans and the Cuban revolution is going to mean a change in the attitude of a section of the American working class to the Cuban revolution.

And a new stage is opening up in the Cuban revolution's relations with Afro-Americans. Afro-Cubans are fighting in Africa, and they are watched and cheered on by Afro-Americans. If an upheaval takes place and Cuban troops are called on to help and do battle for the freedom of Zimbabwe. Namibia, and South Africa, I am convinced that Afro-Americans and other American workers will go over there to join the fight, You will see international brigades fighting for the liberation of Africa.

Just use your imagination and think what will happen when those battles begin-the attitudes and feelings this will inspire in millions of people.

So we don't change a single, fundamental thing in our position after twenty years. We celebrate. We defend this revolution with all our heart. And we fight to extend it. '

We recognize the revolutionary character of its leaders, and we make a bloc with them against their enemies abroad and against the Stalinists at home. The Socialist Workers Party, the Young Socialist Alliance, and the Fourth International will influence the Cuban revolutionists by showing in action what revolutionary Marxist politics is.
 

A Missed Opportunity

The world Trotskyiat movement must accept the responsibility for missing two great opportunities to influence the Cuban leadership. The first was right after the victory over Batista. Unfortunately, in Cuba Trotskyism was misrepresented by a group that followed a cult leader named Juan Posadas. Their specialty was passing out leaflets demanding a march on the Guantanamo naval base, while the Cubans were trying to consolidate the revolution.

They denounced the leaders of the revolution-for not being socialists.

I will always remember one night in that summer of 19Ein in Havana. A'few nights earlier Fidel had spoken to a gigantic meeting in Havana. He had announced that they were going to nationalize every piece of American-owned property in Cuba.

On this particular evening there was a big meeting at the Bianquita Theatre. There Che Guevara told a gathering of thousands of students from all over Latin America that this was the beginning of the socialist revolution in our hemisphere. This was the first time a central leader of the Cuban government had described the revolution in those terms.

The Posadiatas were out there again, denouncing the Cuban leadership for not being revolutionary enough.

Fortunately, there were people like Peter Buch, Pedro Camejo, Eva Chertov, and Suzanne Weiss in Cuba at the time, so I learned that there was quite a difference between Trotskyism and the Posadista insanities.

But the Fourth International lost an opportunity to influence the Cuban leadership as much as it could have because of the character of the Cuban organization that called itself Trotskyist This resulted, in part, from an unnecessarily long and brutal split in the Fourth International. This split, which wasn't healed until 1963, weakened the world movement, and blocked the international leadership from using its full strength to influence the Cuban Trotskyists.

There was a second missed opportunity. This was the period from about 1967 to a little more than a year ago. During this time a majority of the leadership of the Fourth Inte:-national themselves turned toward a strategy of guerrilla warfare. The Cuban leadership was trying to think out how to move forward in the aftermath of

the collapse of the guerrilla orientation in Latin America, symbolized by the defeat in Bolivia and the death of Che. At that very moment, several sections of the Fourth International were speeding right past the Cubans in the opposite direction.

The Trotskyist movement was giving the Cubans an outmoded answer that the Cubans themselves were trying to move beyond.

It took some years and much discussion, but the Fourth International has now rejected these errors and puts forward a revolutionary strategy for Latin America that does provide correct answers to the questions the Cubans were weighing. But valuable time was lost in this process.

But now we have opportunities like we never had before. We have opportunities because the one thing above all is that the Cubans watch politics, they watch revolutionists, and they watch revolutionary activity.

The changes coming in this country are a great opening for deeply influencing the Cuban revolution. The rise of working-class struggle in this country and the role Trotskyists will be playing in it is going to spark some new thinking in Cuba about the revolutionary prospects in the imperialist countries.
 

Learning From the Cubans

So this is a unique, happy anniversary for the Cuban revolution, and for the twenty years we have been fighting shoulder to shoulder with the Cubans.

The Cubans have done a few things for us and are still doing some things for us. They have inspired us with confidence in the power of the proletarian revolution. Think about the powerful forces that are

actively working, and have been actively working for twenty years, to crush that revolution. Think of what they have stood up against-and what they are still standing up against.

A little island, a superexploited country a few miles away-opened the socialist revolution in our hemisphere!

They taught our generation that our class can take over and run this society. They taught us that you should be proud of your African heritage, your latino heritage, because it deserves pride.

They showed us that the mobilization of the working class and its allies, under e leadership that is conscious, that tells the truth, is more powerful than the mightiest economic and military power that has ever existed on the face of the earth.

They demonstrated in practice that the Stalinists are not ordained to be at the head of every revolution, to smother it. derail it, betray it. We are in the epoch of revolution, not counterrevolution.

At the Bay of Pigs, in Bolivia, and in Africa, the Cubans have taught us how to fight, how to live, and if necessary, how to die for the liberation of humanity. And they showed us that Che was absolutely right when he said that the uncompromising revolutionist is motivated by great love.

And they taught even those of us who are ignorant of Spanish the meaning of one word in Spanish that we must know: Venceremos, we shall win.

In exchange for all this, we only owe them one small thing. That is to organize a revolutionary movement capable of leading the American workers to do exactly what the Cubans did. And that is what we will do.