FACSIMILE OF ORIGINAL
 

• Daily & Online • Newspaper of the Left • Sunday, June 08, 2003 •
 

A Marxist Definition: What is Cuba?
What's Left? By Gina Alvarez

“One cannot categorically deny in advance the theoretical possibility that, under the influence of completely exceptional circumstances (war, defeat, financial crash, mass revolutionary pressure, etc) the petty bourgeois parties, including the Stalinists, may go further than they themselves wish along the road to a break with the bourgeoisie.”
Leon Trotsky, The Transitional Program, 1938


The aims, class nature and objectives, as well as the methods of the July 26 Movement of Fidel Castro were revolutionary nationalist, anti-dictatorial and anti-imperialist.

Most of the leadership, the political program and the membership, as well as the methods of struggle (guerrilla warfare) represented the radical middle class and layers of the peasantry, but not the working class nor did they have any kind of socialist objectives.

Under mounting pressure from reactionary domestic forces and US imperialism, and because of the structural weakness of the Cuban national bourgeoisie, however, Fidel Castro’s political movement and government were forced to go well beyond their original plans, and adopted some incomplete, limited, and contradictory revolutionary measures.

Fidel Castro was a radical activist against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. He was originally a member of an oppositionist bourgeois party, disgusted with the pacifist cretinism of its leadership and their constant accommodations and dealings with the dictatorship.

In 1953, he organized a group of youth to attack the headquarters of the Army in Moncada, near Santiago, the second largest city of Cuba.

The action took place on July 26 of that year. The “Manifesto of Moncada” issued by the group called for national independence, freedom and dignity following the ideas of Cuba’s founding father, Jose Marti.

The group of youth that participated in the attack, saw themselves as the catalyst that would unify the bourgeois opposition to Batista and the US domination of the island, as well as the tool to push that opposition towards revolutionary action to overthrow the government.

The attack failed, some of the members of Fidel’s group were killed and a number of them, included Fidel himself, were arrested. But it catapulted Fidel Castro into the ranks of recognized anti-dictatorship fighters.

Other members of the bourgeois Orthodox Party – the political organization Castro was nominally a member of - and the Communist Party (known as the Popular Socialist Party) were also arrested by the Batista forces who used the attack as an excuse for a crack down against oppositionists in general. All those arrested from the OP and the PSP were freed shortly afterward.

In his speech defending himself at the trial, known by the closing remarks as “History will absolve me,” Castro spelled out a program of limited agrarian reform, independence from the US and educational and health reforms for the poor, and stated that the purpose of the movement was to create a democracy, and a modern and independent capitalist state.

In May 1955, Batista granted an amnesty to Fidel Castro and other members of his group and in June of the same year the July 26 Movement was formally founded but never fully developed, as the government kept members under permanent surveillance.

Fidel decided to leave Cuba for exile in Mexico in 1955, a traditional road taken by Cuban oppositionists since the 30s.

Castro organized a tour of different US cities where he received financial assistance and recruited some followers from the forcefully anti-Batista Cuban American communities.

The main slogan of his movement was “democracy conquered by force” since any and all other avenues were closed, according to his characterization of the situation. He maintained at this time close contacts with the bourgeois Orthodox Party, which he still believed could be reformed.

The same year, Fidel and Che Guevara met by chance in Mexico City where Guevara arrived during his graduate motorcycle tour through Latin America.

Guevara, who was mostly apolitical until a few months before meeting Castro, was involved during his crossing through Guatemala with activists of the populist government of Jacobo Arbenz that was deposed during his stay in that country, leading him to briefly join the barricades in the streets of Guatemala City.

Guevara was arrested and expelled from Guatemala for his actions.

In 1956 Fidel headed a small force of 82 fighters in the vessel “Granma” to “invade” Cuba, with the hope that the action would provoke an insurrection in the island. Several nationalist organizations in Cuba, which promised an insurrection, could only deliver some minor attacks with bombs and shootouts in several cities.

The “invasion” proved to be a failure as the ship sank, most of these fighters either disappeared or were killed by the Army and only less than a dozen survived, including Che, Raul Castro and Fidel.

By the time they regrouped, and recruited some peasants to fight their first battle on January 17, 1957, the guerrilla force had 32 members.

Fidel then received a stroke of good luck. He was interviewed in the Cuban jungle by the American journalist from the New York Times, Herbert L. Mathews, who transformed the leader and his guerrilla group into instant celebrities worldwide.

The New York Times, Time magazine and a number of other mainstream presses – disgusted by the US mafia domination of businesses in Cuba and the naked brutality of the US’s puppet regime of Fulgencio Batista – lent a helping PR hand to the ragtag opposition.

The emphasis of the July 26 movement on democracy, elections, Cuban independence and agrarian reform in the face of accommodations made by the main bourgeois parties and the PSP to the Batista regime, gave it a tremendous impetus, helped by the work of nationalists and anti-imperialist student leader Frank Pais until his assassination in July, 1957, which awakened a tremendous outpouring of anger in the country.

Some international media compared the bearded guerrillas with the “Founding Fathers” of the American Revolution.

The guerrilla army, pragmatically, adopted in the areas it controlled the “First Law of Agrarian Reform” in Sierra Maestra in 1957, which eventually benefited over 100,000 peasants, prohibiting foreigners from owning lands in those areas under their control, supporting peasants' occupation of lands and limiting the properties to less than 402 Hectares, with some exceptions where properties could be substantially larger if they produced rice or sugar cane.

While progressive, the law facilitated the continuation of a strong agrarian bourgeoisie because the size of properties allowed by the law was significant.

But the law gave the guerrilla army a substantial base of support among peasants.

This law clearly defined what the nationalist bourgeois objectives of the M-26 and Fidel Castro were, and the limits that Fidel had in mind for the transformations in Cuba.

The July 26 Movement broadened its base of support, forming the mainly bourgeois and middle class Civic Resistance Movement, basically a soft nationalist and anti-dictatorial front.

At one point, Fidel pushed for an alliance with the bourgeois Authentic Cuban Revolutionary Party, the Party of the Cuban People (PPC), even the Rotary club, organizations that signed the so-called “Pact of Miami” in opposition to the dictatorship.

This new alliance rejected the electoral process, proposed an interim government led by the bourgeois leader Felipe Pazos, and requested the intervention of the UN and the Organization of American States (OAS) to help in the process of democratization.

But some of the parties tried to bypass and outmaneuver Fidel Castro in the struggle to lead this front, and they eventually destroyed the effort, even though Fidel respected the agreements of this outfit once victory was achieved.

By the time, in 1958, when Batista and the US State Department tried to diffuse the growing and massive opposition to their regime in Cuba by talking about “free elections,” it was too late. Most of the peasantry, if not actively supportive, at least looked at the guerrillas sympathetically. The unrest at the Cuban universities favoring the opposition was overwhelming.

In July 1958, the US was forced, by popular unrest, to withdraw additional US Marine forces sent to the base in Guantanamo.

On April 9, the rebels for the first time called for a General Strike, but this was done without preparing the strike in cooperation with the working class sectors.

Instead, the M-26 issued a communiqu� from the mountains. As a result, the strike was a complete failure but served the objective of further destabilizing the government.

Even though the regime had the upper hand in brute force, and carried out acts of repression, it miscalculated its own strength and launched a premature “victory offensive” against the guerrillas that ended in a military disaster for Batista.

On January, 1959 the regime and its Army collapsed and a General Strike was now successfully carried out. The working class action was particularly aimed at stopping attempts from a layer of the officer’s corps to organize a coup d’etat to displace Batista from power in order to appease the mass movement.

On January 4, 1959, most of the country was in the hands of the rebels. On January 8, the guerrillas led by Fidel Castro entered Havana.

The first government of the revolution was a bourgeois government led by the traditionalist politician Dr. Manuel Urrutia Lle� who had as a Minister the millionaire Jos� Miro Cardona, both conservative opponents of Batista.

Other right wingers like Dr. Roberto Agramonte and Manuel Ray were also part of the government. Fidel was appointed head of the Army that emerged from the guerrilla forces after the collapse of Batista’s army.

This government was representative of a national bourgeoisie which was structurally too weak and dependent on US imperialism to represent any substantial change in the country.

The furious resistance to the revolutionary process by layers of the US bourgeoisie and the Cuban more reactionary elements, produced the first crisis of the government in February when Urrutia opposed the minimalist reforms put forward by the M-26 and Fidel Castro.

Castro forced the resignation of the President, who was replaced by Dr. Dortic�s Torrado and dissolved the Cuban Congress due to the increased opposition and established “Revolutionary Tribunals” to execute the leaders of a tidal wave of counter-revolution mounted by the US and the reactionaries in Cuba.

Castro was named Prime Minister and started to exercise full power backed by the Army. This became, fundamentally, the structure of power that remains until today. Power never shifted to the working class and the peasantry, but remained in the hands of the Army and its political front groups.

Threatened with a growing opposition at home and abroad, Fidel Castro executed hundreds of oppositionists and expropriated their properties.

Sugar mills, textile industries, Casinos and night clubs were taken over or confiscated. When threatened by the US government, the guerrilla-centered government seized American assets. The Cuban Confederation of Labor was virtually dissolved and only much later reconstituted.

While workers and peasants participated in demonstrations and actions in this period, and were for the most part favorable to the measures taken by the government, they never did so as part of independent organizations of their own.

At the same time, to gain the support of these same masses of workers and peasants – who without organizations of their own were putting much pressure for reforms – Fidel announced a new agrarian reform and made concessions to workers such as the “Law of Urban Reform” – eliminating rental agreements.

Plans for a national health plan and a massive educational program were announced and began to be carried out.

Under the extreme threats of attack by imperialism and reactionaries, Fidel Castro and the M-26 were thus forced to go well beyond their initial plans for a modern bourgeois and independent Cuban state, in effect confirming the theory that in semi colonial countries, the democratic tasks of national independence and social justice cannot be achieved without breaking with the bourgeois order and imperialism.

What was by its nature a democratic and anti-imperialist revolution was forced to carry out some democratic and revolutionary tasks, but because it was not a socialist revolution, those tasks were left incomplete and not followed up by other equally critical initiatives.

In fact, these reforms including the literacy campaign, free housing, health and education are the very same gains of the revolution that are still maintained, for the most part, to this day.

Because the working class was essentially left to play a supportive, secondary role and not the leading role – power remained in the hands of the Army until the present; the revolution lacked, and still lacks, the elements of workers’ democracy and workers’ rule, indispensable characteristics of a socialist revolution.

Unrelenting US pressure

Almost immediately after the victory in Havana, the revolution was attacked by US imperialism with all the means at its disposal, including an economic blockade and sanctions for more than 40 years; attempts to assassinate the leadership of the revolution; military invasion in 1961 (Bay of Pigs); and the creation of a permanent base for counter-revolutionary activity in Miami based on the Cuban exiled community…

While US interests were lost in Cuba during the revolution, these losses were far from critical for the economic interests of the American ruling class.

All Democratic and Republican administrations, however, put at the top of their policies towards Cuba the recovery of the imperial pride lost with the overthrow of Batista and further aggravated by their defeat in the Bay of Pigs invasion and the alignment of Cuba with the Soviet bloc.

The US was not going to accept, nor does it today, the independence from its domination of a country it considered for over a century its backyard, private beach, brothel, and drug den.

Declaring Cuba Socialist and aligning it with the Soviet Union bloc

On 16 April, 1961, confronting an imminent military invasion from the US, Fidel Castro made a speech proclaiming the Socialist character of the Cuban Revolution – two years after taking power and ten years after the initial struggles against Batista, and a few months after the first EIR (Schools of Revolutionary Instruction) were started to form the cadre of the M-26 on Marxism.

In June, 1961 the M-26, the PSP (Communists) and the nationalist Revolutionary Directorate – March 13 agreed to dissolve and create a common party. But both the PSP and the DR-13 were purged.

The PSP, in spite of being a communist party, maintained many links with the dictatorship of Batista and some of their leaders were considered enemies of the revolution and expressed positions hostile to Fidel Castro. On the other hand, because of the desertion of hundreds of thousands of educated middle class professionals who left the country, the PSP was the only organization with professional cadres in its ranks.

The DR-13 was not a socialist or communist grouping, but a nationalist one competing with the M-26 in that arena. Castro and the M-26 convinced some of its leaders to change positions and turned against those who resisted, in exchange for promises to share some portion of power.

The new party was first called the Only Party of the Cuban Socialist Revolution (PURSC) and it changed its name to the Cuban Communist Party in 1965.

Simultaneously, the Cuban revolution, cornered by US imperialism, decided to side with the Soviet Union, adopting its general political outlook in the hopes that this would save the political regime and would dissuade the US from further military attacks.

The latter was only achieved years later, when the US agreed to sign a treaty with the Soviet Union saying they would not militarily intervene in Cuba again, in exchange for the Soviets withdrawing the nuclear missiles being assembled in Cuba in 1962.

For a few years, the Cuban leadership adopted an enthusiastic approach to its newly discovered identity as a Socialist state and correctly characterized that the best defense of the gains of its revolution would be its extension of the revolution to other countries in Latin America. During this period, political power in Cuba was shared between the Army and the Cuban Communist Party.

To this period belong the Cuban initiatives of creating the ICAP (Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos), its promotion of the Non-aligned bloc of countries and its call for the Tri-continental Conference in 1966 and the creation during its proceedings of the OLAS (Latin American Solidarity Organization) and other organizations to confront imperialism.

But Cuba’s relationship with the Soviet Union and its lack of theoretical and political initiatives and some international initiatives that ended in disasters such as Che Guevara’s attempts to reproduce the Cuban guerrilla strategy in other countries produced a backlash among the Cuban bureaucrats.

Soon after Che Guevara's assassination in Bolivia in 1967, the Cubans stopped almost all and every international move to expand the Cuban revolution, and accepted a secondary role as the Soviet Union’s left face on international issues, some zigzagging notwithstanding. Gradually, power shifted back completely into the hands of the Army, whose elite top commanders and a selected number of members of the CCP are now the real power in the island, through the State Council.

During the 70s Castro advised the “peaceful road to socialism” in Chile that ended in the Pinochetist bloodbath; after the victory of the Nicaraguan revolution, Castro advised the FSLN not to follow the Cuban road of expropriating capitalism and to sever all direct contacts with other revolutionary processes in Central America.

Fidel’s logic has regressed to that of his initial steps in politics when in Argentina, as recently as May, 2003 he stated that “in order to re-distribute wealth it is not necessary to carry out a Socialist Revolution.”

The relationship with the Soviet Union helped Cuba to sell its production of sugar and import at convenient prices machinery, spare parts for existing industries and start some other minor ventures. Together with the Soviet Union’s aid, however, came political conditions to serve the diplomatic interests of the Soviet bureaucracy and economic restrictions that affected the economic diversification of the island.

These elements of the relationship with the Soviet Union made Cuba too dependent from Moscow, and when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Cuba sank into an extreme economic crisis, called in Cuba “the special period.” This economic crisis that, while not at its worst now, is still present in the island, had a tremendous impact in moving the entire bureaucratic apparatus in Cuba toward more conservative political and economic positions.

Fidel has repeated hundreds of times in recent days, that education and health care achievements represents the victory of the Revolution, as if they were enough to justify the name of Socialist for Cuban society.

Conclusions:

The 1959 Cuban revolution was led by a middle class radical movement utilizing the methods of guerrilla warfare, the method of middle class radicals. Not by a working class organized from below and utilizing the methods of the general strike, the barricades and insurrection.

As exemplified by their manifestos, program and practice during the revolutionary struggle and the first year in power, the revolutionary movement had a nationalist, reformist and anti-imperialist program, not a socialist one. Only the fierce resistance they encountered from reactionaries and imperialists pushed that program beyond the wishes of the leadership of the revolution.

The program of the revolution was a bourgeois, nationalist and reformist program only pushed into breaking with imperialism and to the expropriation of capitalism by the fierce and unrelenting attack of US imperialism and reaction.

Some significant democratic and revolutionary tasks were fulfilled like an agrarian reform, the nationalization of industries and the almost total elimination of illiteracy. Health care and education for all became outstanding features of Cuban society.

The revolution overthrew a hated dictatorship’s government and its political regime – the Army, courts and Congress - and replaced it with interim bourgeois governments based on the power of the guerrilla army and later replaced them by the whole power of the Army that was, in turn, institutionalized not as a popular militia, but as a regular army like the ones one encounters in capitalist countries.

The massive defeat of counter-revolution in the period 1959-65 produced a massive exodus of the upper middle class and the bourgeoisie from Cuba and their transplantation to Miami where they created their base of opposition to the revolution, constantly plotting counter-revolution. Almost 30% of the entire population of Cuba left the country in the years following the 1959 victory of the revolution. Among them were many artists, and most intellectuals, professionals and technicians of the country.

These completely unusual sets of circumstances, plus the need for the nationalized economy under the rule of the Guerrilla army to expand, practically proletarized Cuban society, creating, for decades, the most important social base for the defense of the revolution: a new, younger, healthier, better educated working class.

In many ways, these victories of the revolution clearly showed the superiority of a centralized, planned economy, over the anarchy and profit-hungry nature of capitalism, even if they were cut short, marred with inefficiency and the emergence of a privileged layer of bureaucrats.

This social base of the new Cuba is the decisive factor that helps us to characterize it as a workers’ state, strengthened by the nationalization and passage into public ownership of most industry and commerce and the physical displacement of the bourgeoisie that left the country en masse.

The revolution did not push or create organs of dual power, either during the uprisings or after the seizure of power. All institutions created to formally represent the working class and the peasantry – like the Committees to Defense of the Revolution (CDR), Popular Assemblies, peasant and workers’ unions, etc -- were created from above and were born completely controlled by the Armed Forces and the political regime, the party and the government representing it.

This hybrid was later further transformed by the incorporation of Cuba into the Soviet Union –led bloc of countries, where it adopted many of the bureaucratic institutions, forms and methods and forms of government and the rhetoric as well as the international policies of the Moscow’s bureaucracy.

The combination of all these factors resulted in the creation of a deformed and incomplete workers state with a Bonapartist government – based on the power of the Armed Forces - and a hybrid political regime where institutions that resemble bourgeois democracy (Assembly)are mixed with powerless local and regional Committees – acting more as advisory boards – and unions not independent from the state but completely integrated and subordinated into it.

Even the power of the ruling party is limited and is subordinated to a super-state power State Council not directly elected by the population, but appointed among members of the ruling elite, semi-independent even from the Cuban Communist Party’s main rank and file and regional committees.

These bureaucratic super-structures and the Bonapartist characteristic of the state, the regime and the government is what help us to define Cuba as a deformed workers state.

The limited gains of the Cuban revolution: independence from the US; public ownership of many of the elements of the economy; universal and free health care and education and housing as a right, not a privilege, as well as elimination of landlordism – among others – are the gains that need to be defended against imperialism and reactionaries, while at the same time Marxists advocate a political revolution – not a social one – in Cuba for the working class and the oppressed to exert direct power through their own institutions and guarantee to stop the retreat of the revolution, now being implemented with the re-introduction of capitalism and class differentiation by Castro’s government.

This task is becoming more urgent every day. Fidel Castro, due to the deformed characteristics of the present regime, is the only undisputed leader among Cubans. Not even the enemies of the revolution will challenge this.

At an old age, Fidel has an appointed heir, his brother Raul, widely disliked by many Cubans. The Revolution has no heir and does not count on an independent working class that could take the decision to revolutionize the political system and jump start the energies of the Cuban and Latin American working class and the oppressed.

Without that element, and a revolutionary party of a new kind, all the gains of the revolution are at risk of being lost once Fidel is gone. That will be a tragedy for the Latin American masses and, of course, for the Cuban people. That makes the task of the political revolution an urgent one.

CLICK HERE TO GO BACK TO THE LIST OF ARTICLES OF THE "CUBA DOSSIER"



source for this facsimile:
http://web.archive.org/web/20030609010830/www.sf-frontlines.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=378&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0