NOTE: The Cuban Revolution challenged all tendencies on the political left to respond in one way or another as it was unforeseen by the then-existing tendencies. This document was written nearly thirty years ago, when I was still a member of the Socialist Workers Party of the United States. It was one of many documents through which individuals and groups in the Trotskyist movement were grappling with the ideas and implications of the Cuban Revolution. Looking back at it after all these years, I dread the turgid literary style. All those run-on sentences! But politically I'm pleased at how well it still holds up. Doing some research the other day I found this old document and took the time to read it over once again. Thanks to scanners, such old documents can be made available once again. Naturally, I thought and expressed my ideas in the vocabulary and political concepts of the movement to which I belonged at that time.

Walter Lippmann
Los Angeles, California
August 7, 2007
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A Third Opportunity to Influence the Cuban Revolution
By Walter Lippmann, Los Angeles Branch

Socialist Workers Party Discussion Bulletin
Vol. 36, No, 18, pp. 25-29 July 1979

In his speech to the December 1978 Young Socialist Alliance national convention, Jack Barnes discussed two opportunities which our movement had to influence the politics of the Cuban revolution, but which were unfortunately missed.

The first occurred during the early years of the revolution, when Trotskyism in Cuba, as a result of the split in the Fourth International in 1953, was represented by the bizarre Posadas sect. This grouping became notorious for its position of "defense" of the "right" of the Soviet Union to initiate nuclear war.

Subsequently, after Che's death in Bolivia, when 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," the majority of the leadership of the Fourth International unfortunately decided to push forward a policy of support for guerrilla warfare as the strategy for revolution in Latin America.

Had our world movement not been split in 1953, and had the majority of its leadership not decided to make a political adaptation to guerrallaism at the very time that the Cubans themselves were abandoning it, Jack correctly concludes that we could have avoided "missing two great opportunities to influence the Cuban leadership."

I believe that a third opportunity to influence the Cuban revolution exists today, and that we can have an impact on their political thinking in general and on their attitude toward our movement if we make the most of this opportunity.

What is needed today is a political campaign, carried out both within the United States and internationally, of solidarity with and support for the Cuban revolution. In the United States such a campaign would center around the demands for normalization of relations with Cuba and ending the U.S.-imposed blockade.

This campaign need not necessarily require the framework of a single organization to be carried out, though it could result in the formation of an organization. It would be, above all, a political campaign, aimed at cutting across the anti-Cuban propaganda in the capitalist mass media, and at winning political support and sympathy for the Cuban revolution in the United States.

The opportunities for such a campaign to meet with a positive response are truer today than at any time since the Fair Play for Cuba Committee days. The Cuban leadership's deliberate effort to open up lines of communication with sections of the Cuban exile community is a development of powerful significance. No longer are all Cubans who left the island to be thought of, or referred to, as "gusanos" (worms), and consequently written off as a solid bloc of unbending hostility to the Cuban revolution.

Fidel Castro, in opening up this dialogue, has by a single political tactic, split the Cuban community abroad, and thus sharply reduced political support for the counterrevolutionary overthrow of the Cuban regime. The development of the Antonio Maceo Brigade, and the terror it has struck into the hearts of those irreconcilably opposed to the revolution, has caused a significant shift in the political situation within the exile community inside the United States, and consequently in the U.S. as a whole—a shift to the advantage of Cuba.

As revolutionists of action, the Cubans would no doubt appreciate anything that could be done to help break the blockade against Cuba, which has done terrible damage to the Cuban economy Despite everything Cuba has done to counteract its effects. it has had great impact.

The Cuban economy before the revolution was dominated by the United States in innumerable ways. This meant that machinery was "Made in U.S.A.." and that after Cuba was cut off from supplies and replacement parts only available in the U.S., the Cuban people had to suffer and put up with great hardship. A central aim of this blockade imposed by the imperialists was to literally break the back of the Cuban economy, in hopes of thereby breaking the spirit of the Cuban people, and in hopes of creating sufficient discontent within Cuba to bring about the overthrow of the Castro leadership, and the overthrow of Cuba's post-capitalist economic relations.

This campaign was unsuccessful in its main aim: bringing about the overthrow of the Cuban revolution. Cuba was bailed out by the Soviet Union. In exchange for its material support, the Kremlin bureaucrats have extricated substantial political concessions from the Cubans, concessions which had to be made, else Cuba would have fallen.

Cuba's isolation and consequent dependence on the USSR was not something Cuba desired. It was imposed by the U.S. Cuba has always been willing to trade or have relations with the U.S., but only on a principled basis: Cuba has steadfastly refused to trade its political sovereignty for an opportunity to sell its sugar to the U.S.

The U.S., in a hypocritical attempt to pass itself off as "humanitarian" has offered to sell medical supplies to Cuba, supplies Cuba badly needs. But Cuba has refused to engage in such commerce if the price is that Cuba must abandon its support for significant political struggles which Cuba has maintained through the years, such as its support for the independence of Washington's Puerto Rican colony.

Cuba has offered to trade its own prisoners for the imprisoned fighters for Puerto Rican independence fighters. It is internationalist acts such as these which symbolize Cuba at its best, and demonstrate why the Cuban revolution and its leadership are absolutely unique in the world today. This is why Cuba has such a powerful and deep reservoir of support and admiration in the ranks of all truly revolutionary-minded people, regardless of their attitudes toward other questions.

The Cubans are supremely conscious of the consequences of their isolation and of the cost of their dependence on the Kremlin for support in order to survive. Their numerous conflicts with the Stalinists in their attempts to construct their own political party, in their conflicts with the Stalinist hack Anibal Escalante, in their political combat with the Venezuelan CP, and in their consciousness of the responsibility of the Bolivian CP for its role in the death of Ché and the defeat of his attempt to spread the Cuban revolution, the Cuban leaders can have no illusions that the Stalinist Communist Party leaderships are just not their kind of people, not revolutionary fighters.

In fact, the Cuban leaders knew this long before these events. They knew it before the landing of the Granma. In response to a redbaiting attack against the revolution by the dictator Fulgencio Batista, 'Fidel said, "What moral authority, on the other hand, does Mr. Batista have to speak of communism when he was the Communist Party presidential candidate in 1940, if his electoral posters took shelter under the hammer and sickle, if his pictures beside Blas Roca and Lazaro Pena are still around, if half a dozen of his present ministers and trusted collaborators were well-known members of the Communist Party?" (Source: Revolutionary Struggle )1947-1958), Volume I of The Selected works of Fidel Castro, edited by Rolando E. Bonechea and Nelson P. Valdes, MIT Press number MIT 256, $4.95 paperback.)

Thus, as indicated above, it should be clear that the Cubans would appreciate anything which would help break down the blockade, and thus reduce their dependency on the Kremlin, with the concomitant political concessions they have to &hake to keep the Soviet aid coming.

A political campaign for normalization and for an end to the blockade would bring us into contact and collaboration with other radical political activists who identify with and support the Cuban revolution for the same reasons we do: the Cubans are revolutionists who mean business. When they say "The duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution," their meaning is unambiguously clear.

Other radicals, demoralized in the wake of the Sino-Soviet split, and the Indochinese wars, have joined up with the anti-Cuba gang. Those who echo the Maoist analysis kel that Cuba has gone capitalist (K.S. Karol, Rene Dumont, the RCP, the CP(ML) and others under their influences are basically moving to the right politically, toward a cynical adaptation to U.S. capitalism.

Yet there are many others who support the Cuban revolution and the Castro leadership, for all the right reasons. There are radical scholars such as those who publish Cuban Studies/Estudios Cubanos. There are activists in groups like the Center for Cuban Studies, the Venceremos Brigade, the Antonio Maceo Brigade, and others who, regardless of their attitudes on other questions, could be persuaded to participate in a broad political campaign of support for the Cuban revolution.

Part of the work of such a campaign would be the organizing of tours of Cuba by groups in the United States who will want to find out the truth about Cuba for themselves. Women's groups will want to see Cuba's internationally-acclaimed child care facilities. Teachers in this country who have realized that illiteracy has become a big problem in the United States will (and some, such as Jonathan Kozol already have) studied the success of the Cubans in eliminating illiteracy. Blacks will no doubt have an interest in a society where all forms of racism are illegal. Upon their return, they can tour the country or their local areas simply reporting w hat they have seen.

Now that travel to Cuba is legal, this process should be easier than ever. And with so many of our own members now having relatively well-paying jobs, more of our own members could afford such trips than ever before.

In the long run, our activities as revolutionists of action, preparing to make the coming revolution in the United States, will be the biggest influence on the Cubans. Before that time, a campaign for normalization in which we pay a role can help open up avenues for mutual interaction and influence between the Cuban revolution and our movement.

We will want to find ways to help our ideas expand their circulation among the Cuban people, through the publications such as the Militant, the IP/I, and Perspectiva Mundial, as well as other literature of our movement.

At the same time, we need to deepen and concretize our knowledge of and our understanding of the revolutionary process as it continues to unfold in Cuba. (Isn't it very significant that in Cuba, they consider the "Revolution" to be something which is still going on, not just a historic event which occurred in the distant past. . . ?)

We know the limitations and weaknesses of the Cuban revolution, caused in the first instance by the U.S. blockade, and helped along by the Kremlin bureaucrats. We have chronicled these in one way or another from the start. Despite all its weaknesses, the Cuban revolution is alive and well, but in need of all the political support it can get. There is a role for us in this situation.

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It would be virtually impossible for us to get a hearing from the masses of the workers and peasants of Cuba if we adopted one of the various minority proposals for revising the analysis we have held of Cuba until now.

The bottom line of the differences we have with comrades Flint, Levine, Kramer, Keil, and Wohlforth et al., on Cuba is this: Shall the Socialist Workers Party advocate the overthrow of the Castro government? To the average worker or peasant in Cuba, the difference between the "social" and the "political" overthrow will be incomprehensible.

Let us not forget that the United States rulers also favor the overthrow of the Castro government, though its aims and methods and motives are different. How would the comrades differentiate themselves, in Cuba, from those who would overthrow the Castro government to bring Washington or a stooge for Washington back?

To advocate a new revolution in Cuba, be it "political" or "social" means, if one is not simply playing with revolution, that we must procede to the construction of a section in Cuba, a political organization hostile to, and aiming to overthrow the Castro government. Since it is the Castro team which led the revolution itself, a fact self-evident to everyone, what kinds of people would rally to such a grouping? There were people who thought the Bolsheviks were undemocratic in their handling of the civil war and in their responses to the interventions by the capitalist powers. Some of them were sincere. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and when they rallied to Kronstadt, which they mistakenly thought was a democratic alternative to the Bolsheviks, they found themselves on the other side of the barricades facing the Russian revolution as enemies..

Comrades who hold the state capitalist or the bureaucratically deformed viewpoints wish that the Russian revolution had been directly repeated on the island of Cuba. Don't we all? Unfortunately, this did not happen. Castro never thought of himself as a Bolshevik, and never claimed to be one. We can't fault him on "truth in advertising" grounds.

We cannot complain that soviets were not part of the historic practice of the Cuban revolution, either. In Russia, soviets appeared in the process of the revolution, and without calls for their existence by the revolutionary political groups. In Cuba there simply weren't soviet-s created. Castro, alas, did not call for them, nor did anyone else we know of at the time. We cannot go back and rewrite history according to our wishes, or if we did, we would have to expect to be looked upon strangely by the living Cuban human beings we tried to recruit to our perspective. And then we cannot have any justification for complaining that soviets did not come into existence, and then taking it out on our analysis of the nature of the revolution and its leadership if they didn't,

Comrade Wohlforth has the merit of consistency. He has never been caught up in the SWP's enthusiasm for the Cuban revolution or the Castro leadership. And even though he has shifted gears, from "social" to "political," we can see clearly that the bulk of his position, the thrust and the direction, is that of opposition. His defense isn't worth much, on balance, since 99% of what he has to say is hostile.

It makes a big difference to us that there is one government on the face of the earth whose overthrow we do not call for. When co-workers ask, when we explain that the USSR is not our model of what the socialist society should be, is there any country that seems to be a model for you? We can respond: "Despite many problems and weaknesses, we like what they are doing in Cuba, and see it as qualitatively different from the USSR of Brezhnev or the China of Mao and Deng."

We know what the weaknesses of the Cuban revolution and its leaders are, and have analyzed them over the course of their evolution. When they have made major errors in foreign policy we have criticized them unhesitatingly and without pulling our punches.

It would be much better if Granma were The Militant, but the likelihood of Soviet aid continuing if that were to take place is small.

We in the Socialist Workers Party have a great stake in the continued health of the Cuban revolution. First of all because it shows that Stalinist bureaucratism is not an inevitable consequence of the socialist revolution, and that it is possible to outflank the Stalinists. Most of the young generation of leaders of our party were won to revolutionary socialism by the Cuban revolution, and by the SWP's vigorous support for that revolution, despite the fact that the Castro team was not politically Trotskyist.

We know that there are not institutions of workers democracy in Cuba, and that this weakens the revolution, and makes it much harder to correct errors. Had there been workers democracy, Cuba might not have made all the errors it did trying to harvest ten million tons of sugar.

We know that the Cuban Communist Party is not internally democratic, and that this fact also weakens the revolution profoundly. Such weaknesses could be multiplied throughout Cuban society. By participating in an active political campaign of support and solidarity for the Cuban revolution and for a lifting of the imperialist-inspired embargo, and by getting to know Cuba better through visits there and a deeper study of the actual revolutionary process as it continues to unfold there, we can win a much more advantageous position from which to influence the revolution than we would if we were to join the "noisy claque of the criticizers." The latter, regardless of whether they are motivated by good will, bad will, or lack of will, will simply not be able to influence those, inside and outside of Cuba who can see what has really occurred and are doing what they can to strengthen it.

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Comrade George Breitman's contribution fails into a quite different category, and one with which we must have a different kind of discussion. He correctly points out many of the. weaknesses of the Cuban leadership, and he could have chosen more. His desire for terminological precision has been helpful in stimulating all of us to read and to reread our material on Cuba more carefully, indeed to scrutinize it. In general, it must be said, when we write about Cuba's internal life we have been largely uncritical. We usually tend to talk about how racism has been made illegal, about the wonderful child care, about the labor shortage and the total elimination of evils such as unemployment and illiteracy, evils endemic to capitalism.

But our study of and participation in the process of the Cuban revolution must also remind us of the major gap which exists between Cuban reality and our programmatic norms for what we would characterize as a healthy workers state. These programmatic norms are implicit in documents such as Trotsky's Revolution Betrayed, and would be supplemented by things we have learned and appropriated from the radicalization of the 1960s: the need for independent political movements by women, Blacks, and others whose oppression began under capitalism, and has yet to be fully eradicated after twenty years of revolutionary development.

The difficulty I have with Comrade Breitman's approach is that it is not precise-on just what political conclusions would flow labeling the Castro leadership "centrist." How would we approach Cuba and the Cuban leadership if we decided to characterize it with the term "centrist"? Particularly important to keep in mind with centrists is the general direction in which they appear to be moving in. If they have gone from revolutionary at first to centrist today (which is not to say that they could not make many zigs and zags), doesn't this suggest a historic tendency by this team away from a revolutionary approach, and thus toward some other, less than revolutionary approach? This, and the political attitude we should consequently adopt, is not addressed adequately by Comrade Breitman, and is a real weakness in his document.

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One last topic should be addressed, and that is the precise term we should use to sum up our attitude toward the current stage of the Cuban revolution and our attitude toward its leadership.

Until now, we have utilized four different phrases to characterize the workers states which have thus --far existed. We described the Soviet Union in Lenin's time, with Lenin, as a "workers state with bureaucratic deformations." The meaning of this was clear. When the first workers state fell into the total domination of the Stalinist bureaucracy, we called it a "bureaucratically degenerated workers state." This term indicated that the workers state had evolved from one thing to another. When workers states with political structures and bureaucracies very similar to that in the USSR were created in the wake of World War II, we characterized them as "bureaucratically deformed workers states," indicating that their deformations were present from the moment they became workers states because they were under the domination of Stalinist parties. These terms were all helpful and clear, summarizing their developments in a very concise way, and indicating a political attitude.

When we approached Cuba, and saw capitalism abolished for the first time since 1917 under the leadership of a non-Stalinist grouping, we utilized another term, a different term, to indicate politically, our attitude. This term was "workers state lacking as yet the democratic forms of proletarian rule." This term clearly indicated the absence of institutionalized forms of workers democracy, but the "as yet" meant that we thought it was still to be accomplished, and that it could be accomplished without the overthrow of the Castro leadership.

Now we are proposing to change our characterization of the Cuban revolution to "workers state with bureaucratic deformations," the same term we use for our description of the USSR of Lenin's time. I do not think we should do this. Cuba continues to be a workers state "lacking as yet the democratic forms of proletarian rule." This is also true of the degenerated and the deformed workers states. They, also, are "lacking as yet the democratic forms of proletarian rule." But we call them bureaucratically deformed or degenerated in order to say that their deformations are so profound that they could not be eradicated short of a thoroughgoing political revolution, involving the overthrow of the present governing bureaucratic castes. To utilize the same phrase we use to characterize the USSR of Lenin's time suggests more similarities than we should, and since we are only talking about a total of four different categories so far (in historical experience), we need not be in a big hurry to reduce the total of categories to three.

The Russian Revolution included the spontaneous development of soviets and the leadership of a revolutionary combat political party. To have said in the USSR in 1924 that "We need to go back to soviets" would have made political sense in the USSR. No such evolution took place in Cuba, and what Cuba needs is to institutionalize democratic forms of proletarian rule which have not been part of the process of the destruction of capitalism. In other words, we are calling for the construction of institutions which have not yet existed in Cuba.

"Lacking as yet" has an algebraic character so far as the timing is concerned, but at the same time signifies that a political revolution is not indicated. At the same time, it suggests a quite different historic process and traditions than existed in the Soviet Union.

For these reasons, I think it' would be better to indicate that Cuba was a remains a "workers state lacking as yet the democratic forms of proletarian rule."