Why Castro Ended Up in the Minority in Venezuela by Joseph Hansen (1969) 1. Guerrilla war in Latin America was not the invention of the Cubans. It has existed in the continent as a living tradition with a venerable history. 2. One of the most unexpected features of the Cuban revolution was that this tactic could prove sufficient to win. Our conclusion at the time was that this testified much more to the weakness of imperialism and the national bourgeois structure than to the discovery of something superior to a Leninist combat party. 3. More than a mere guerrilla band was involved in the Cuban struggle. The July 26 Movement had an extensive organization. Its petty-bourgeois program enabled it to secure financial assistance in a big way from Cuban bourgeois circles. It was also able to operate quite freely in the United States, where it was actively supported by a large Cuban colony. 4. The July 26 Movement proceeded to a considerable extent like a party based on a single issue-armed struggle against the Batista dictatorship. Its appeal cut across class lines. 5. The key leaders of this movement were of such high caliber that when the revolution reached the crossing point to socialism, they plunged ahead, splitting their own movement and transcending the program they began with. 6. In transcending their original program and declaring for socialism, they also transcended the tactic through which they had won. Just as every succeeding revolution in Latin America must take as its model socialist Cuba instead of the July 26 Movement as it was first formed, so in tactics it is compelled, if success is to be assured, to make an advance, developing means capable of achieving the mass mobilizations required to win a socialist revolution. This means putting politics in command. Technique, tactics, even armed struggle must be subordinated to political consciousness, to political direction, to a clear political program. The key problem, consequently, is to build a combat party capable of seeing this and doing it. 7. The Cuban leaders, although the logic of their own revolution calls for it, have not proceeded along this line up to now. The reasons for this are plain. Dependent on aid from the Soviet Union, aid which was absolutely essential to the survival of the Cuban revolution, they were confronted with the problem of the Kremlin's policy of "peaceful coexistence" with imperialism and in particular its rabid opposition to Trotskyism. The course followed by the Cubans shows that they decided that if errors were to be made, they should be made on the side of caution so as not to jeopardize the flow of material aid. This explains why the Cuban Stalinists were not reproved for their gross attacks on Trotskyism and why Castro himself could make the kind of attack he did at the Tricontinental conference in January 1966. It explains, too, why the Cubans took such an ambiguous attitude during the May-June 1968 events in France and why to this day they refrain from publicizing the role of the Trotskyists in the French upsurge. And it explains why Castro-with very important reservations, it is true-came out on the side of the invaders of Czechoslovakia. In short, the Cubans have not yet settled accounts with Stalinism. Until they have done so, it is misleading to say without qualification, as the resolution does in point 11: "This leadership by its attitudes, its actions and generalizations has contributed in a desive way to the maturing of a new vanguard." 8. There is an immense anomaly in this failure to settle accounts with Stalinism, inasmuch as the Castro team won their victory in Cuba in face of the default of the Blas Rocas and their active opposition. One of the main lessons of the Cuban revolution is that it is now possible to outflank the Stalinists from the left. 9. Instead of fostering an extension of this course elsewhere in Latin America, the Castro team sought to utilize the existing Communist parties. On the surface, it appeared feasible to repeat the political formula of the Cuban revolution-but with a different combination of political tendencies from those assembled in the July 26 Movement in the struggle against the Batista dictatorship. The formula was to suppress the political differences with the Stalinists and form a combination on the single issue of armed struggle against the indigenous dictatorships and their imperialist backers. The basic idea was once again to make politics secondary to technique, to subordinate political strategy to the tactic of rural guerrilla war. The results were hardly brilliant. No sector of the opposing camp was taken in by the camouflage. The lack of political clarity could only serve to sow confusion in the ranks of the revolutionists. Still worse, greater forces were now required to win; i.e., the masses in the urban centers. But the tactic itself was not designed to raise their political understanding, to organize and mobilize them. It banked on winning by pitting very small contingents in skirmishes remote from the cities. Moreover, the political confusion in the camp of the revolutionists involved a decisive issue in the new stage of the Latin American revolution-the role of Stalinism. Lack of clarity on this led to some very costly defeats. The Cubans have made progress in overcoming this limitation, but only through very painful experiences. It is the beginning of political wisdom to insist that revolutions in Latin America, or elsewhere in the world where similar conditions exist, cannot be won along a "peaceful" or "democratic" road, or under the leadership of an alleged progressive sector of the national bourgeoisie. The issue, once considered in the radical movement to be a hallmark of "Trotskyism," proved to be of key importance in bringing the Cubans to understand that Stalinism and organizations dominated by Stalinists are not reliable instruments of revolution. But by confining the dispute with the Stalinists almost exclusively to the issue of armed struggle, and limiting it even further to thequestion of rural guerrilla war, the Cubans gave precious political ground to their opponents by default. Thus the Stalinist betrayers of the revolutionary struggle in Venezuela were able to advance telling arguments on why the workers need a revolutionary party. For the Venezuelan Stalinists, who cited Lenin in a completely abstract way, this was only a smoke screen; but the Cubans were not able to answer them effectively, and this could not fail to influence at least some good. revolutionary-minded militants. In the same way, the Cubans failed to offer an adequate challenge to the Stalinists in the urban centers, making it easier for them to retain a rather large following, which they, of course, are now seeking to use in their wheeling and dealing in the bourgeois electoral arena. The Cubans likewise conceded the field of theory to the Stalinists under the hardly laudable guise of ridiculing the "theorists" as against men of action, who don't need to learn about revolution in books inasmuch as they are practicing it with guns. The Cubans even made the mistake of posing the issue in terms of a conflict between the men in the mountains and the bureaucrats in the city over who should have final command. Arguments were adduced concerning the technical difficulties of urban guerrilla war-the helplessness of the masses, the corrupting influence of the city, the difficulties and dangers of maintaining liaison-to explain why leadership should be in the hands of the men in the rural areas. The political issue underlying this obscure debate was very simple: should the struggle be led by men committed to a revolutionary struggle for socialism or by men committed to Moscow's treacherous foreign policy of "peaceful coexistence" with imperialism? This was the key question no matter where the leadership was located under the exigencies of the struggle. But this issue, which should have been brought to the fore in order to clarify the dispute and to fight for a majority on the basis of it, was left in obscurity by the Cubans. The Stalinists took full advantage of the ineptness of the Cubans, or their hesitation at speaking out because of possible economic pressure from Moscow, to further obscure and bury the question. The result of these mistakes was that even in such a favorable situation as the one in Venezuela, with the prestige of the Cuban revolution behind them, and the not immaterial advantages of state power, the Cubans ended up as a small minority in their factional struggle with the Stalinists. 10. Immediately after the Cuban victory, the Trotskyist movement held that one of the most important tasks facing the revolution there was construction of a revolutionary Marxist party. This has been borne out in the most decisive way by events and ought to be pointed out in the draft resolution on Latin America. 11. The key task facing the vanguard in Latin America, as elsewhere, still remains the construction of a revolutionary Marxist party. This takes priority over all questions of tactics and strategy in the sense that these must be directed to achieving this end as the decisive link in the revolutionary process. It is not. enough to say, as the resolution does in point 19, that "the existence and functioning of a revolutionary party, far from being an outworn schema of outmoded Marxists, corresponds to the concrete and ineluctable needs of the development of the armed struggle itself. ..... The party is not a means to the armed struggle, as this sentence seems to say; the armed struggle is a means to bring the proletariat to power under the leadership of the party. Construction of the party must be viewed and presented as the central task, the main orientation, the almost exclusive preoccupation of the vanguard. And the explosiveness of the situation in Latin America does not lessen the need; it intensifies it. FROM: Dynamics of the Cuban Revolution: The Trotskyist View Pathfinder Press, New York and Toronto (1978)