Chapter One

Dynamics of the Cuban Revolution: Where Now?

1. Introduction

The Cuban Revolution of 1959 overthrew capitalist relations, blacked the eye of American imperialism and established the only workers’ state in the Western hemisphere. This revolution was entirely novel in that it was led throughout by a group that considered itself radical bourgeois democrats. What was not new, and had to be re-discovered yet again, was that the demands for national independence, the liberation of the Cuban people, social equality, and a better life could not be realised in a capitalist Cuba subject to imperialist domination. To achieve these goals, it would be necessary for the Cuban Revolution to take the first steps towards socialism and create a workers’ state.

The Cuban revolution booted out US-backed dictator, Fulgencio Batista in a victory for popular democracy, for the exploited masses of Cuba and the world. Its continuing existence is a daily reminder to US imperialism of its defeat and the triumph of the Cuban people. To follow and understand what happens in Cuba is a duty for every socialist, every revolutionary and every socially-aware person, because knowledge of what happens in Cuba is essential for understanding the social dynamics in all so-called Third World countries.

Cuba led the way forward, not only for Latin America, but the world, and how it has developed, and will develop, holds important lessons for hundreds of millions of people. In ex-colonies across the world, the local bourgeoisie and landlords are the ruling classes inherited from colonial times. But they have failed to accomplish the main tasks of the democratic revolution: truly national independence, land reform, creation of a democratic state, and equality for women and black people. In 1959 these tasks were still pending in Cuba, and throughout Latin America.

The nature of the Cuban leadership was key to the progress of the Cuban revolution. Farrell Dobbs led the historic Minneapolis truck-drivers’ strike (and the accompanying street battles with police and vigilante gangs) that transformed the American mid-west from an open shop into a union stronghold, and knew a thing or two about the class struggle. He described the characteristics of those, initially left-wing reformists within the union, who under the pressure of events, adopted a revolutionary position. He listed their characteristics: they had to be committed to the cause of the working class, they had to be honest, they had to have the vision to see that victory was possible, they had to be prepared “to try new things”, to have the foresight to see the potential gains of the struggle, but most importantly they had to have “guts”.1

We will argue that the Cuban guerrilla leaders possessed these qualities and were prepared to transcend bourgeois limits when those limits became a barrier to bettering the conditions of the Cuban people. To achieve democratic goals, they were ready to transform the Cuban struggle into a struggle for socialism. The decisive element in the victory of the Cuban Revolution was unquestionably the leadership provided by Fidel Castro and his team, who succeeded in overcoming the long default in revolutionary leadership due to Stalinist domination of the world labour movement, by-passing the Cuban Stalinists from the left. Naturally, the masses responded, as did the overwhelming majority of young people throughout the world, who rallied to support what they hoped would be the opening of the democratic anti-imperialist revolution in all oppressed colonies. The appearance of a new leadership, generated in the very process of a revolution, largely untainted by Stalinism and imbued with revolutionary determination, was hailed with immense enthusiasm.

The background of the Cuban Revolution was, at least initially, propitious. The context was a highly unstable world situation: (1) with the end of World War II there had been a significant decline in the power of imperialism internationally, the US had been forced to take on the central responsibility for world capitalism, but it had recently been fought to a standstill in Korea; (2) the Soviet Union had risen in status to the second strongest power in the world; (3) WWII had given rise to a tremendous groundswell of national liberation movements that challenged imperialism and served to weaken it further – China, the most populous nation on earth was now a workers’ state. However, the growth of Stalinist parties as a result of the Soviet victory in Europe and the Chinese Revolution obscured Stalinism’s essentially counter-revolutionary nature, and blocked the growth of mass Marxist parties that could challenge capitalism in the advanced capitalist countries.

2. Some History

The history of Cuba can begin with the invasion of Cuba by Spaniards in the first years of the sixteenth century and the indigenous population who fought the conquistadors being driven to virtual extinction. Spain attempted to keep tight control of Cuba. However, a series of momentous events eventually freed the island from the grasp of the Spanish crown, but placed it in thrall to its neighbour, the imperialist giant, the United States of America.

To weaken England in the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) in which the Thirteen English Colonies of North America declared their independence from the British crown, Spain suspended many of its economic restrictions and approved trade between Cuba and the colonists. The price of sugar shot up and, free to trade, the Cuban economy boomed. After the victory of the colonists, the Spanish crown re-imposed many of its tariff controls, and the Cuban economy temporarily declined, generating ill-feeling, especially amongst the merchants.

In 1789, in the Great French Revolution, the French populace rose in revolt against the crown and the church. Under the banner of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity they abolished feudalism and adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man. These events reverberated throughout the French colonies and nowhere more than in Saint-Dominque (Haiti) where slaves and freed slaves comprised about ninety per cent of the island’s population. Inspired by the Revolution and driven by the cruelties of a slave state, in August 1791 the historic slave revolt led by Toussaint L’Ouverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, began. Despite attempts by both British and French imperialism to quell the rebellion, by 1804, the sovereign state of Haiti had been established as the first colonial society to free itself, and explicitly reject race as the basis of social ranking.

Only sixty miles away, Cuba became the destination for some 30,000 French settler refugees who brought with them their knowledge of the most efficient sugar and tobacco production processes then in existence. These settlers soon transformed the Cuban economy from small-scale village-style farms to agribusiness. Simultaneously, they chaffed under the economic restrictions imposed on them by the Spanish crown, a state that was, at heart, feudal. However, their innovations demanded the use of slave labour on a previously unimaginable scale and by the mid-1800s black slaves comprised about forty-five per cent of the population, and freed slaves another thirteen per cent.2

With the victory of the national independence forces led by Simón Bolívar over the Spanish continental army at Ayacucho in Peru on 9 December, 1824, Spain was, to all intents and purposes, ejected from the Latin American mainland. The USA took the opportunity to stake its claim to economic dominance in the region and announced the Monroe Doctrine in December 1823. At this time, the USA contained some 4 million slaves, predominantly in the cotton-producing southern states. Naturally, after the events in Haiti, the US took great interest in the Caribbean islands, particularly Cuba because it was so close to the Florida coast and events there might inspire the slaves in the south to rebel.

In November 1843, Carlota, a female slave at the Triumvirato sugar mill in Matanzas Province, and fellow slaves, many of whom were women, organised and led the most important uprising prior to the first war of independence. “In terms of its vigour and bravery, Carlota’s liberation struggle is part of the Cuban heritage of rebellion against oppression”.3 The uprising was quashed. A reign of terror was instituted, and all free black people not born in Cuba were expelled. A few days after the rebellion began, the Vandalia, a US Navy corvette, appeared in the port of Havana under the command of Rear-Admiral Chauncey who, accompanied by the US consul in Havana, officially notified the Spanish colonial governor that he could count on the aid of the US to crush the “Afro-Cuban” rebellion.

In 1845, the USA annexed the newly independent republic of Texas as the twenty-eighth state in the union. President Polk, who had campaigned on the slogan that the US should “extend from sea to sea,” instigated a war with Mexico in 1846 by sending troops to occupy land then in dispute between the two countries. The Americans emerged victorious in 1848 and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo gave the US the vast northern provinces of the Mexican state that would become the states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the US had emerged as Cuba’s largest trading partner, taking sugar, tobacco, and coffee in exchange for manufactured products. Cuba was producing about a third of the world’s sugar, and between 1848 and 1854, the US made three offers to buy Cuba, which were welcomed by the majority of Cubans engaged in business or trade. Each time the Spanish crown refused and, to silence the voices of dissent, increased its despotic and unpopular hold on the island.

2.1 The Ten Year War, the End of Slavery and José Martí

Then, in 1867, in a move that seemed designed to provoke outrage and resistance by the sugar, tobacco, and coffee plantation owners, Spain imposed a new tax on land and increased taxes on incomes and trade. The result was the first War of Independence. In October 1868, Carlos de Céspedes, a forty-nine-year old lawyer and landowner called his friends, co-thinkers and slaves to hear him formally declare Cuba’s independence on the grounds that the Spanish crown was no longer fit to rule Cuba on account of its excessive taxes, corruption, and deprivation of political and religious freedoms. He declared Cuba to be a republic based on universal suffrage, freed his own slaves, many of whom joined his volunteer army, and called for the indemnified emancipation of all slaves. Other local planters joined in, freed their slaves and, by November, the rebel army had grown to 12,000. 

Certainly, the moment seemed propitious because Spain was riven by civil war, but both sides insisted on retaining Cuba as a Spanish colony. It was too valuable for either side to let go. To supplement the 22,000 ill-paid, ill-disciplined troops at his disposal, the Captain-General recruited a volunteer force of poor white immigrants. Most of these were from the Spanish mainland, had been granted land by the Spanish government and were loyal to the motherland. They were often deeply racist and the authorities played up the fear that the emancipation demands of the rebels would turn Cuba into another Haiti. A well-organised force of some 35,000 – the voluntarios – was formed, faithfully reflecting the views of the slave traders and most backward of the landowners against emancipation.

This was the Ten-Year War, ending on 11 February, 1878 when both sides signed the Treaty of Zanjón. The treaty contained face-saving clauses for the rebel leaders but neither independence nor emancipation were mentioned. The outstanding and leading rebel guerrilla fighter, Antonio Maceo Grajales, son of a free black Venezuelan farming couple, opposed the treaty and was exiled to Jamaica.

However, the victory of the North in the US Civil War (1865) and other factors had made the sugar barons reconsider their need for slaves. With eighty per cent of Cuba’s overseas earnings coming from sugar, fluctuations in market conditions meant big risks for the sugar barons. It was becoming increasingly obvious that slavery was not as economically beneficial to the slave-owners as might be first thought. Sugar production in Cuba is highly seasonal, requiring intensive labour only a few months of the year. The summer months bring the rains, the so-called dead season; and sugar cane farmers, require few labourers. In October, the soil begins to dry and the cane farmers prepare the harvesting equipment. By January, the sugar mills are ready, and so begin the feverish activity that will last until about June. Coffee production followed much the same cycle. The sugar barons did their calculations. By the 1880s, sugar production in Cuba had been totally reorganised in a new economic system that de facto ended slavery. Seasonal labourers and field hands, the former slaves now working for wages, had to feed, clothe, and house themselves and their families from May/June to November/December with little or no paid work available. Capitalist emancipation meant, for many former slaves, worse living conditions!

American capitalism was brimming with aggressive self-confidence; in 1803 with the Louisiana Land Purchase, Thomas Jefferson had bought the French title to a swathe of land extending from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border containing the present states of Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma; it had seized Texas at gunpoint, thrashed the Mexican army and taken the American mid-west (1845-48); it had carried through the last great bourgeois revolution and won the American Civil War (1861-65); it was rapidly clearing the native Americans from their homelands; and in 1893 US marines invaded and seized Hawaii. By 1894, most sugar mills in Cuba were in the hands of American companies, fewer than one in five mill owners were Cubans, and more than ninety per cent of all Cuban sugar exports went to the US. Most of the other key sectors of the economy (electricity, telephones, etc.) were American-owned. Essentially, Cuba was being reduced to a single-crop economy with a single customer.

José Martí embodies Cuba’s struggle for independence from Spain. Soon after the commencement of the first War of Independence, at the age of sixteen, he was arrested and found guilty of treason for criticising Spain in a letter to a friend. His sentence of six years hard labour was commuted to exile in Spain. Martí returned to Cuba in 1878, and immediately took a leading role amongst those demanding Cuban independence, but fearing arrest he fled to New York in September 1879 where he lectured, wrote, raised funds, and worked to form the Cuban Revolutionary Party (PRC) a petty-bourgeois nationalist party with a revolutionary programme.  

In March 1892, he launched Patria, a newspaper dedicated to building the newly-launched PRC on a programme of armed struggle to achieve independence and establish a bourgeois-democratic state. In January 1894, he denounced collusion between the Spanish and American commercial interests in an article, ‘A Cuba!’ Martí understood that the policy of the US, had been accurately expressed by the then-Secretary of State, James G. Blaine, “(Cuba) the key to the Gulf of Mexico … a part of the American commercial system… If ever ceasing to be Spanish, Cuba must necessarily become American.” The US perspective was not one of an independent Cuba.

In Cuba, no less than in Algeria, Palestine, South Africa, Vietnam and elsewhere, unfolding anti-imperialist struggles intertwined with struggles by women to end their own brutal forms of oppression. August Bebel, in his seminal work, Woman and Socialism, wrote in 1879: “In Cuba, the women fought beside the men and enjoyed great independence” but was at pains to point out that only the road of the socialist revolution can open the way to a qualitative transformation in the lives of the masses of women, especially in the semi-colonial countries.

Parallel to the evolution of Cuban nationalism, was the growth of a bourgeois feminism, the one feeding the other. Despite social limitations imposed by church, state and custom, women made bold personal and anti-colonial statements. Participation of the men of a family in the anti-colonial struggle encouraged women to examine their own position and role within the family and society. In a dramatic shift of cultural attitudes, many women began to view themselves as equal partners with men. Disseminating leaflets, raising funds, speaking in public, and writing political pamphlets, opened their minds to expanding their rights not only as Cubans but also as women, and soon the slogan ‘Votes for Women’ was heard.

Its economic dominance of Cuba now assured, the US was determined that the country would be neither a Spanish colony nor fully independent. It decided to take control of Cuba while appearing to act within international law, and at minimal cost. Its method was devious, presenting an appearance that blatantly contradicted the reality. The Spanish empire was falling apart, everywhere its colonies were on the point of open rebellion. The American strategy was to publicly encourage the independence movements while working behind the scenes to ensure they would be so handicapped in terms of supplies that a quick victory was impossible. The US would strive to ensure the two sides would battle to a state of mutual exhaustion, at which time they would step in, on purely humanitarian grounds, to become the new colonial master.

Martí and his fellow Cuban rebels had planned to launch the war of independence in February 1895. But on 12 January, three or four ships full of armaments bound for the rebels were stopped at Fernandina port, Florida, by US authorities, their cargoes confiscated and the Spanish government alerted. Despite this terrible blow, Martí and Maceo (the latter representing continuity with the veterans of the first Cuban War of Independence) did return to Cuba in early February 1895 to renew the struggle, and were both killed in the battle of Dos Ríos on 19 May. On paper, the colonial forces looked impregnable, and robbed by the US of most of their armaments, the rebels had no choice but to adopt a guerrilla-style war. But the mood in Cuba had changed dramatically since the Ten-Year War. Now the rebels had the support of the overwhelming majority of the population.

The war did not go well for Spain, though neither the rebels nor the Spanish forces were able to win a decisive victory. The mambises, the independence fighters, despite being outnumbered and outgunned, were inflicting defeat after defeat on the Spanish forces. In January 1896, General Valeriano Weyler y Nicolau (nicknamed the ‘butcher’) took control. Weyler, recognising that the guerrillas had the support of the civilian population, attempted to break the link by introducing containment camps. Half a million peasants were crowded into squalid, unhealthy containment camps with little provision made for food, housing, clothing, sanitation or medical care. The local economy collapsed in areas where the camps were created, causing tens of thousands of Cubans to starve to death or die from disease.

Faced with these prospects, many families, including the women, joined the fight for national liberation. Coming from a wide variety of backgrounds, young and old, rural and urban, black and white, rich and poor, these women resolutely and ardently helped forge Cuba’s new national identity. The majority of women who participated in the actual fighting were, as one would expect, poor black women. These mambisas4 took on dangerous missions as couriers and carried military correspondence across enemy lines, served as nurses, fought in the rebel army, some as officers,5 and established workshops in the rebel territory that produced war supplies of all sorts. Women also single-handedly ran field hospitals. Added to all these activities they also raised their families.

The best known mambisa is Mariana Grajales Coello, Maceo’s mother. Mariana and her sons participated in all three wars of independence. Mariana was in charge of a hospital, responsible for tending the wounded and keeping it supplied. As for ‘Votes for Women’, Cuban women would have to wait until 1934 before they could vote, but the women’s movement in the fight for an independent Cuba helped set the stage for the women’s liberation movement in post-revolutionary Cuba.

2.2 “Remember the Maine!”, Cuba Becomes an American Colony

Important US economic interests were being harmed by the prolonged conflict and deepening uncertainty about the future of Cuba. The US press, especially those newspapers that favoured a take-over of the country, informed their readers of the gross inhumanities taking place, presenting them as “a policy of extermination”. The sub-text was that someone had to do something about it. That someone was the US, and that something was the invasion of Cuba.

In August 1896, the Philippine revolution began. Spain now had two wars of independence on its hands, presenting the US with the opportunity to strike at the Spanish empire as it fell apart and pick up the pieces. Wanting to retain Cuba, Spain decided to sacrifice the Philippines. To end the unwinnable war against the Cuban guerrillas, it offered an amnesty for political prisoners in Spanish gaols and a ‘home rule’ government for Cuba. To show good faith no further military offensive would take place. But the offer was too little, too late; the rebels who remained were determined to fight on for full independence.

On 25 January, 1898, the US battleship USS Maine arrived in Havana harbour in a show of strength to ensure American property and lives were not threatened. On 15 February, the Maine exploded. A naval court of inquiry was inconclusive, but the American yellow press laid the blame on a mine planted by the Spanish. On 19 April, the US passed an ultimatum: independence for Cuba or war with the US. President McKinley was given the authorisation to declare war if Spain did not yield.

On 21 April, the US severed diplomatic relations with Spain and the US Navy began a blockade  of Cuba. Four days later, the US Congress declared a state of war existed between the US and Spain. On 1 July, 1898, US troops landed in Cuba. Superior fire-power and overwhelming numbers gave them victory in the one and only substantial battle in the war, the battle of San Juan Hill, for control of the harbour at Santiago. Within six weeks, the war with Spain was over with the US in control of Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico.

Supposedly, the US had intervened to support the Cuban independence fighters, but it ordered them to disarm immediately. A military government was established in January 1899, headed by US general John Rutter Brooke. At the treaty officially granting Cuba’s independence, it was the US flag, not the Cuban, that was raised over Havana, and during the surrender ceremonies in Santiago, US General William Shafter refused to allow the rebel forces to participate.

The island of Cuba was transferred from one colonial master to another: for three years after 1898, Cuba was militarily occupied and ruled by the USA. During those three years the oath of loyalty sworn by Cuba’s state officials was to the US, not Cuba. During this occupation, black people and mulattoes were generally kept out of government as America’s systemic racism was imposed on Cuba. The American Governor created an all-white-Cuban artillery corps, just as after the Indian rebellion (1857-1859) the artillery units in the Indian Army were staffed with white British troops.

Afro-Cubans were greatly angered and concerned when Cuban history was re-written to suggest that black people had not made an equal contribution to the War of Independence when, in fact, over 80,000 Afro-Cubans had died in the war compared to fewer than 30,000 whites. Veterans of the war protested the blatant contradiction between the segregationist policy of the US Government of Occupation and the integrationist ideology of the Cuban nationalists.

A Bill containing the Platt Amendment, which reduced Cuba to a colony of the US was rushed through the US legislature and signed by the President on 2 March, 1901. On 3 March, 1901, the Cuban Convention was presented with a fait accompli; with US marines looking over their shoulders, and the US fleet occupying their harbours, it was told that until it signed up, Cuba was clearly unpacified and the American army of occupation would have to remain. The carrot offered was that, if they agreed to accept the Platt Amendment, the marines would go home and Cuban sugar would have preferential access to the US market. They were free to agree or disagree, they were free to secure a facade of independence under the Platt Amendment or continue under a US military administration. The Amendment, word for word, was voted into the Cuban constitution as an ‘appendix’ on 12 June.

The Amendment gave the US the right to intervene in Cuba if the US administration felt American property was threatened. It surrendered, “indefinitely”, three important bays as military bases for the US; it also surrendered the right “to enter into any treaty or other compact” with any foreign power which the US did not approve. For Cuba, the period of the pseudo-republic had begun.

In December 1902, a Convention was signed in Havana, which gave US companies preferential treatment regarding import duties. From now on, US imports would pay between twenty-five per cent and forty per cent less than those from Western Europe, or elsewhere. In return, Cuban sugar (i.e. what would soon be United Fruit Company sugar) would be given a virtual monopoly in the US market. One year later the Platt Amendment was included in a permanent treaty between the two countries, and received the formal approval of two-thirds of the Senate. The US formally handed over power to the new Cuban government in May 1902. Guantánamo Bay and Bahía Honda were leased to the US as military bases in perpetuity. (Bahía Honda was given up in 1912, in return for the expansion of Guantánamo.)

Cuban politics for the next sixty years would be determined by the US, which sent in its troops no fewer than four times; 1906-1909, 1912, 1917-1920 and 1933; in each case (save 1912) to install a government of its choice.

The crushing domination of the US relied not only on overwhelming military force, but on an economic system whereby a few landowners owned most of the land while the great majority of peasants were landless labourers. The war for independence had seen the wholesale destruction of the smaller, more isolated sugar mills; of the 1,100 sugar mills registered in Cuba in 1894, only about 200 survived the war. The capital to buy up bankrupt estates, to rebuild and refurbish came, as expected, mostly from American sources. By 1905, nearly two-thirds of rural properties were owned by Americans. The United Fruit Company purchased nearly 200,000 acres (80,000 hectares) of land in Oriente at the give-away price of US$1 per acre. Soon, fewer than 0.1 per cent of farms occupied twenty per cent of the land while at the other end of the scale forty per cent of farms occupied only about four per cent of the land.

Where Cubans sought capital to invest and expand, it came from American banks, machinery for the mills came from American companies, increasingly senior managers and administrators were American. During and after the 1906 elections, there was considerable unrest and President Roosevelt, to protect US interests sent in the marines. Two thousand US marines landed near Havana in September 1906. The US established a new provisional government headed by a US judge, Charles Magoon, and US marines ‘kept order’ until 1909.

The Magoon administration attacked each and every political and social gain made in the struggle for independence. The remnants of the Liberation Army were demobilised, all the institutional expressions of a ‘free Cuba’ (Cuba Libre) in which Afro-Cubans had registered important gains disappeared, and with them political positions, military ranks, and public offices. In response, in 1908, Evaristo Estenoz and others founded the Partido Independiente de Color (PIC) to address these losses, but found itself facing the entrenched racism of the American and Cuban bourgeoisie. The Morúa Law of 1909 was passed, which effectively banned the PIC by banning political parties based on race or class, with no independent allowed to run for president. Simultaneously, a limit was placed on immigration of black Haitians and Jamaicans. In 1910, in an attempt at intimidation, the leaders of the PIC were arrested and charged with conspiracy against the Cuban government. After being found not guilty, the PIC held a mass, peaceful demonstration on 20 May, 1912 behind the slogan ‘Down with the Morúa Law!’

Bourgeois newspapers presented the demonstration as the beginning of a race war, carrying exaggerated and lying reports of the demonstration; El Día on 26 May, 1912, portrayed the demonstration as an “uprising of blacks” and subsequently reported fictitious attacks by blacks on whites including murders and rapes. Former members of the voluntarios formed the backbone of white vigilante groups which sprang into existence all over the island, harassing, arresting and killing Afro-Cubans simply out of ‘suspicion’. Those ‘protecting civilisation’ did so with impunity. Bodies of suspected rebels were left hanging outside the towns for ‘moral reasons’, and severed heads were placed on the side of railroad tracks for the edification of train passengers.

This massacre achieved what Morúa’s amendment and the trial against the party in 1910 had been unable to do; it put a definitive end to the PIC and made clear to all Afro-Cubans that any further attempt to challenge the social order would be crushed with bloodshed.6

The true reason for this concerted attack on black people soon became clear. In 1912, the Cuban government lifted the ban on importing black workers, and the United Fruit Company was granted special permission to bring in workers from Jamaica and elsewhere, who would be paid less than Cuban workers. United Fruit and other employers built villages on their properties for these new employees, who were kept separated from the rest of Cuban society.

US sugar tycoons increased their profits tremendously. Between 1912 and 1931, over a quarter of a million black workers from Barbados, Haiti, Jamaica and other Caribbean islands arrived in Cuba to work in the expanding sugar industry, mainly in the eastern provinces of Oriente and Camagüey, where the biggest and most modern estates on the island had been developed by US capital. Meanwhile, the living conditions of the Cuban masses were hard hit. In good years twenty-five per cent of the workforce was unemployed and the percentage went up to fifty per cent in bad years. Illiteracy was over ninety per cent in many rural areas where few dwellings had either running water or electricity.

World War I (1914-18) brought temporary prosperity as Cuban sugar replaced that lost due to the war: the price of sugar doubled and output increased by 175 per cent. Immigration from Spain had been encouraged, but many of the immigrants were workers from areas where anarchism was a strong influence. A significant number had taken jobs in the sugar industry and now flexed their industrial muscle by organising what is commonly known as the first great sugar strike, demanding an eight-hour day and an increase in pay. The US sent in the marines to protect US property and ‘keep the peace’.

The troops ensured US sugar plantations were safe against strikers and their efforts contributed substantially to a record sugar crop that year. The presence of the marines meant that, by mid-1918, the focus of the strikes had moved to the cities, targeting sugar exports and shipping. The American authorities presented these protests as political, which justified their continued intervention under the Platt Amendment. In December 1918, the US poured thousands more marines, fresh from the Western Front into Cuba to break the strike.

As the European sugar beet industry recovered after WWI, the Cuban sugar industry virtually collapsed, meaning many of the small Cuban-owned banks went bust with the resulting vacuum filled by US banks. Simultaneously, the Cuban bourgeoisie was increasingly being limited to those areas of production not dominated by US industry.

To stifle any likelihood of protest, in January 1921 Major-General Enoch Crowder, President Wilson’s personal representative, arrived in Havana harbour aboard the American battleship Minnesota, with the job of re-writing Cuba’s election laws. To ensure the Cubans had no ideas above their station, all discussions took place aboard the Minnesota. In May 1921, Alfredo Zayas ran unopposed for the Conservative Party.

Cuba was formally independent and democratic (although women could not vote) but these qualities were, to a large extent, fictitious as the US could veto or overturn any decision by the Cuban government. This situation was conducive to high levels of corruption in a political system where elected representatives openly accepted bribes in return for government contracts, pardons, jobs, etc.

The Minnesota, and Crowder remained in Havana and, on Crowder’s advice, elections were called for 1 November, 1924. This time Crowder chose Gerardo Machado y Morales, a member of the Liberal Party, a farmer with business connections to several US companies, and who ran on a platform of the closest possible co-operation with the US.

2.3 Mella and the Founding of the Cuban Communist Party

There were periodic outbreaks of protest and rebellion, most of which were crushed. But in 1922-23, protests by university students secured a victory. Across Latin America, students campaigned for the autonomy of the universities, in particular, against the influence of the Catholic Church and corrupt practices in the universities. In Cuba, Julio Antonio Mella (then about twenty years old) was secretary of the newly-formed University Students Federation (Federación Estudiantil Universitaria, FEU) which was successful in having more than a hundred corrupt ‘professors’, cronies of the president, who had been given fictitious jobs at the university, sacked. Further, a system of election of the rector by students, staff and ex-students was achieved. For its successes, the FEU was banned in 1924. Mella rapidly evolved in his revolutionary thinking. He soon understood that the struggle for university reform had to be part of the struggle for social emancipation which could only be achieved by the proletariat’s seizure of power.

Initially, Machado had some successes, increasing investment in construction, mining, manufacturing, and tourism. But his manner was arrogant, his style dictatorial, and his methods increasingly brutal. As economic problems grew, a small trade union organisation, the National Confederation of Cuban Workers (Confederación Nacional Obrera Cubana, CNOC) was founded, and about the same time (August 1925) the Cuban Communist Party (Partido Comunista de Cuba, PCC) was launched by Carlos Baliño and Mella (who was elected to the Central Committee).

The government showed little or no interest in addressing the working or living condition of the workers, nor did private enterprise do much to alleviate the grievances of the working class. Struggles for better wages and improved working conditions were often led by ‘Spanish radicals’ who were more open to the ideas flowing from the Russian Revolution. Despite government suppression, the PCC survived and, by playing a leading role in these struggles, especially of sugar mill and railway workers, made significant headway in the labour unions. The Machado government responded by clamping down on all opposition groups, Mella and other party leaders were arrested, forcing the communists underground.

The government was rapidly becoming an authoritarian dictatorship, jailing, torturing and assassinating oppositionists. Those who dared to participate in strikes put themselves, literally, in the firing line. The repression extended to the middle classes, much to their surprise and consternation. Machado’s response was more repression; he imprisoned Mella who, although released under the pressure of mass protests, feared for his life and went into exile in Mexico City, where he was assassinated in 1929.

Mella’s untimely death was a serious blow against the development of revolutionary theory in Latin America. At the time of his death, Mella was already well-advanced in a developing a theory on how the revolutions in Latin America would develop, with strong similarities to Trotsky’s theory of the permanent revolution:

(T)he revolutionaries of the Americas who aspire to defeat the tyrannies of their respective countries (....) cannot live with the principles of 1789. Despite the mental backwardness of some, humanity has progressed and in making revolutions in this century one should count on a new factor: the ideas of socialism in general, which in one shade or another takes root in every corner of the globe.7

Mella, in his best-known work ¿Qué Es el APRA?8 contended that the Apristas made political concessions to the petty and national bourgeoisie, and gave a classical Trotskyist definition of the role of the national bourgeoisie:

In their struggle against imperialism (the foreign thief), the bourgeoisies (the national thieves) unite with the proletariat, the good old cannon fodder. But they end up realising that it is better to form an alliance with imperialism, which at the end of the day pursues similar interests.

For statements such as these, the official Communist Parties damned him for “Trotskyist tendencies”.9

At that time it was almost impossible for Mella and other Latin American Communists to acquire accurate factual information on parallel struggles elsewhere. China was the most important of these, but after the Shanghai massacre of April 1927 and the total disaster of the Canton Commune in the December, a dense smokescreen of outright lies was published in the international Communist press to protect Stalin. Thus, those Latin American Communists who argued against Stalin’s theory of stages had the trebly difficult task of having to produce an accurate analysis of the relation between the class struggle and the anti-imperialist struggle in their own countries, of having to face down the criticisms of the official Communist International, and to explain why a policy which – allegedly – had produced such wonderful results in China, should not apply in Latin America.

The Machado government deported many Spanish radicals, but Cuban militants replaced them. The PCC organised illegally, forming ‘revolutionary fractions’ in the unions, particularly among railroad, tobacco, and sugar workers. Eventually, the PCC became one of the strongest parties in Latin America; succeeding in publishing an illegal weekly, El Comunista. Its core strength was urban labour, and by the late 1920s the PCC was strong enough to take control of the National Confederation of Cuban Workers. The Machado government responded by declaring the CNOC illegal but failed to suppress it. Kapcia gives the following membership numbers for the ‘old’ PCC; 1927 – 199, 1932 – over a thousand, 1935 – 2,480, 1958 – 15,000 and, after its reconstitution as the ‘new’ PCC, in 1965 – 45,000.10

The Wall Street crash of 1929 had severe repercussions for Cuba. The Communist Party gained in strength because of the depression, despite the repression. In 1930, 200,000 workers participated in a political strike against Machado, and the CNOC became increasingly important as a centre of opposition to the government. On 30 September, 1930, a demonstration led to a mass confrontation with the police in which the demonstrators, many of them students, successfully repelled the police attacks.

In the early 1930s the PCC led and supported many workers’ strikes; textile, shoemakers, cigar, transportation, and sugar. On 27 July, 1933, bus drivers in Havana struck against a new tax imposed on urban transport. Tram drivers, inter-city truck drivers, dockworkers, teachers, and others joined the strike. Fearing US intervention, the PCC reluctantly supported the workers immediate demands but then, to everyone’s surprise, added a call for an end to the Machado government. After bloody confrontations with the police and army on 1 August, the strike escalated to include sugar workers. There were reports of many strikes in the interior of the country, and the CNOC called for a general strike to begin on 5 August. As train drivers and tobacco workers joined in, army officers, faced with a situation outside their control, demanded that Machado quit. Machado tried to divide the opposition by making a deal with the CNOC; offering legal recognition as well as official government support if it ended the strike. CNOC leaders were in favour of the agreement as was the Central Committee of the PCC. The workers, however, rejected their leaders’ agreement and remained on strike. The PCC’s support for the return to work, seen by many militant workers as a betrayal, was a good indicator of the future role of the PCC.

Under pressure from the US ambassador, Sumner Welles, Machado resigned and fled the country on 12 August. Welles tried to organise a new openly pro-US government and arranged the mobilisation of the US marines and for the American Atlantic Fleet to be stationed off the Cuban coast. Carlos Manuel de Céspedes y Quesada, a conservative diplomat, was declared President on 10 September.

De Céspedes, was a man of such political ineptitude that, despite American blessing, his presidency lasted less than one month. The rapid amputation of the de Céspedes regime occurred due to its complete failure to enlist any support from amongst the population or the armed forces. Although the Havana workers ended their strike, strikes continued on the sugar plantations, and soldiers sent to put down these strikes, for the most part, fraternised with the workers. The first mills were seized by their workers towards the end of August, and by the end of September, thirty-six mills were under workers’ control, and revolutionary councils (proto-soviets) established. Of particular concern to authorities were the leading roles taken by black people and women in the mill seizures and mass demonstrations which challenged their deepest racist and patriarchal prejudices. On the revolutionary left, these events were seen as the formation of embryo soviets and a promise for the future.

3. Batista Takes Power: the 1933 Coup

The de Céspedes regime made no secret of its pro-American sympathies and proceeded to infuriate the anti-imperialist elements amongst the petty-bourgeoisie by refusing to expel Machado’s appointees from governmental posts. Then de Céspedes declared his intention to cut soldiers’ pay, and that was the final straw. The soldiers rebelled and, on 4 September, soldiers of Camp Columbia, a giant military base on the outskirts of Havana, under the leadership of their sergeants (amongst whom Fulgencio Batista Zaldívar was a central figure) took to the radio and asked for the support of all enlisted men. The response was immediate: almost the entire army and navy joined them. Students from the University of Havana joined in, supporting the soldiers.

It is claimed that the sergeants sent out cars to collect all the well-known radicals they could find and bring them back to the camp to produce a ‘Proclamation to the People of Cuba’. This was signed by eighteen prominent civilians and Batista – on his own authority raised to the rank of ‘Revolutionary Chief Sergeant of all the Armed Forces of Cuba’. The resulting provisional Junta, headed by university professor, Ramón Grau San, in gratitude, promoted him to the rank of colonel, and would soon appoint him Head of the Army.

This petty-bourgeois Junta of four professors and a banker called for the immediate convocation of a Constituent Assembly. To progress, the national bourgeois revolution demanded, as priority, an end to a treaty which gave the US the right to intervene at will in Cuba, but no such demand was made. These leaders were quite incapable of leading the Cuban national bourgeois revolution and, in a pitiable attempt to stave off further US intervention, they proclaimed: “Strict respect of the debts and obligations of the republic”. The Chase National Bank and the House of Morgan were assured that their loans and the magnificent interest rates they charged had nothing to fear from that junta. But the other jaw of the vise pressing the junta were the class actions of the workers, the ‘riots’ and ‘bloodshed’.

The demands of the proletariat were, at that time, democratic in character and appeared quite compatible with the continued existence of capitalist society. But there were clear signs, as Mella had foreseen, that the workers would not limit their demands to the economic: higher wages and better working conditions. In the interior, sugar plantations had been seized, managers were still being held prisoner and made to comply with the workers’ demands. Such actions are the first step towards workers’ control and soviets. Patrols of workers and local peasants (sometimes soldiers also) armed with clubs, with red armbands as uniform, kept order, which was an important step towards a workers’ militia. Relief committees were formed to feed the strikers and their families.11 Given that the vast majority of the plantations in Cuba were American owned, it followed that the majority of the plantations seized were owned by American interests.

Caught between these two opposing forces and with no sense of direction of its own, the junta could provide no way forward for the Cuban masses. It was doomed to early extinction, and on 10 September, the junta was dissolved and Grau San Martin, became the provisional president. Refused American recognition, the Grau government staggered on, basing itself on populist not socialist measures: all businesses had to ensure fifty per cent of their employees were Cuban born, tens of thousands of Haitians were deported, demands for academic freedom in the universities, the eight-hour day, paid holidays and better working conditions for urban workers were, nominally, introduced, Cuban Electric was nationalised and Batista was appointed Army Chief of Staff.12 The only pro-worker and consistently anti-imperialist actions of Gran San Martín’s short lived ‘100 days government’ were introduced by Antonio Guiteras, minister of labour, a Cuban revolutionary who started from the position of armed struggle for national liberation and who had adopted socialist ideas. It was during this period that the PCC made significant headway, and most Cuban trade unions affiliated to the CNOC, with the result that CNOC membership was 300,000 by January 1934.

The army under Batista remained a repressive force. On 29 September, for example, it attacked a memorial rally for Julio Mella and sacked the headquarters of the National Labour Confederation. The US sent warships into Cuban waters but did not intervene, possibly because during the entire period of the Grau presidency, Batista was in secret talks with US ambassador Welles and had mutually agreed on a front man for interim president. Colonel Carlos Mendieta was duly installed in a coup organised by Batista, on 18 January, 1934.

Batista’s coup marked a turn to the right, but it did not mean the immediate and total reversal of all the gains made under Grau. Batista still claimed to be a revolutionary. While he was willing to repress militant workers, he also wanted to win popular support, which required him to accept some progressive reforms. In some ways, Batista in his early years was comparable to other third-world bourgeois-nationalist leaders of military origin, such as Peron and Nasser. Within five days, the US recognised Cuba’s new government. For the next six years, Batista ran the country from the background, using a series of puppet presidents; Carlos Mendieta (1934-35), José Barnet (1935-36), Miguel Gomes (1936), and Frederico Bru (1936-40).

Mendieta is the best remembered of this bunch because, in February 1934, a provisional constitution was approved, formally extending the vote to women; and on 9 June, 1934, the Platt Amendment was abrogated and the Reciprocity Tariff Act signed, giving Cuban sugar (United Fruit Company sugar) preferential access to the US, and US-manufactured goods preferential access to Cuba, seriously impeding Cuba’s industrial development. The Platt Amendment had been a major source of hatred of the US in Cuba, and throughout Latin America. This concession was one of the results of the workers’ upsurge which had been powerful enough to shake the rule of the exploiters to the very foundations. Renouncing the Platt Amendment and granting a few reforms were measures taken by the American imperialists, in conjunction with the native exploiters, to reinforce the position of Mendieta, to prevent any rekindling of the revolutionary fires and to protect the capitalists and landowners.

The years of colonial and semi-colonial domination, by Spain and then the US, restricted and distorted all aspects of Cuba’s development, with women suffering the extreme oppression that is characteristic of countries dominated by imperialism. By the 1930s many Cuban women from the upper and middle classes considered themselves ‘revolutionary feminists’. Given their social positions, these women assumed their voices would be heard and listened to, they were shocked when they weren’t. Their activities began with charitable works and education of the less privileged, but their support of women’s issues such as maternity rights meant that they were soon involved in the rights of domestic workers. These women wanted political representation not to challenge the social system, but to better the welfare of women.13 However, even this limited goal could not be achieved without the women’s movement attacking traditional norms, such as the Catholic Church, patriarchal privilege, and the social order embodied in the plantation-centred economy.

This was a society in which women were discouraged from taking part in public life, and in many families, women were not even allowed to venture out of the house without a chaperone. Fewer than ten per cent of urban women worked outside the domestic environment, primarily as nurses, secretaries, and teachers though a few found jobs in factories, mills or mines. Some peasant women found work in the sugar cane fields. However, the great majority of working women were employed as servants of the rich, so the centuries-old myth that women were not suited to work outside the family domain went largely unchallenged. Contraception was generally unavailable and abortion was illegal, which meant many women were forced into prostitution to survive and feed their families, a survival route that was encouraged by many in authority.14

This legacy of economic and social backwardness was the most serious obstacle to women’s equality. Real changes could only occur with economic development and the incorporation of women into social production. Thus, changes in the situation of women in Cuba took place in step with the struggle against underdevelopment, against the Catholic hierarchy, and against the many who held to traditional Spanish customs and myths that denigrated women (machismo). Although the women’s movement succeeded in inserting women’s rights and laws against gender discrimination in the workplace into the Cuban Constitution of 1940, it was not until Cuba implemented the Family Code in 1975, that wives who worked were officially regarded as equal wage earners.

The 1933 coup had not fully extinguished the revolutionary mood, and more than 100 strikes occurred between 1934 and 1935. In late February 1935, teachers and students in Cuba’s public schools staged a walkout, demanding increased government funding for public schools. By 25 February, 4,000 teachers and 100,000 students were on strike. They were joined by students and staff of the University of Havana, who appealed for a general strike to re-establish civilian government (as a colonel, Mendieta was widely regarded as representing the armed forces), the military to be subject to civil authority, withdrawal of all troops from educational institutions, and restoration of social and economic stability.

Initially, the CNOC and the PCC were reluctant to support a general strike, declaring it premature. In Latin America, the policies of the national communist parties followed the Stalinised Communist International, which had entered its ultra-left Third Period and viewed all governments, whether of a bourgeois-reformist or pro-imperialist hue, as fascist, and all non-communist workers’ organisations as the moderate wing of fascism (and were accordingly denounced as ‘social fascist’). Such a stance meant the CNOC leadership was divided, and it took until 10 March to issue a strike call. As the strike extended and deepened, the PCC hesitantly gave its support. Participation in the general strike numbered up to 500,000, walk-outs by civil servants paralysed ten of the twelve government departments, and crippled government functions. Banks, newspapers, the telephone services, and manufacturing industries were all seriously affected.

President Mendieta (and Batista) suspended the constitution, martial law was declared in Havana, prohibiting public meetings, striking unions were dissolved, and strike leaders were abducted and assassinated. The University of Havana, a centre of resistance, was occupied by the military and closed for over three years. There were mass arrests of strikers who were brought before special courts created for the sole purpose of convicting them of activities illegal under martial law. Indefinite detention was implemented, and for the first time civilians were executed by firing squad. Mendieta dismissed government employees on strike. Troops took over some public services and compelled reluctant employees to work, literally at gunpoint. Soldiers were sent to vandalise the union headquarters and ferry in strike-breakers to keep Havana running.

These actions succeeded in crushing the strike and driving all political opposition into exile or underground. The defeated strike was followed by a period of intense repression, in which all unions and free speech were banned. The government’s actions, its treatment of strikers and students, had made Mendieta a figure of hate. Batista now made sure the press and other media gave Mendieta full responsibility for every unpopular measure, and forced him to resign in December 1935. Mendieta was replaced by another puppet president, José Barnet, and the oppression continued until toward the end of 1937, when the restrictions began to be eased.

By 1938, the Stalinist International had turned its previous policy upside down. Popular Frontism was now the order of the day and the PCC adapted its policy accordingly, resolving to “adopt a more positive attitude towards Colonel Batista”, in the hope he would adopt “positively democratic attitudes”.15 The popular front strategy of cuddling up to the bourgeoisie was prettified by declaring it an ‘anti-fascist alliance’. The PCC, in line with the Stalinist International had previously adopted the theory of the ‘two-stages’. According to this, Communist Parties in, for example, Latin America, were supposed to form an alliance with the so-called progressive national bourgeoisie and support them in the ‘anti-imperialist and democratic revolution’, with the struggle for socialism postponed to some unspecified time in the future.

The Stalinists needed a national and progressive bourgeoisie with which local parties could ally themselves if the theory of stages was to be realised. Thus, in the early 1930s, Communist Party theoreticians, ignoring agribusinesses and the myriad of business and family links between the urban bourgeoisie and the owners of the vast ranches and farms (latifundismo), found the latter were inherited from the Spanish conquistadors and the Latin American form of feudalism. The national bourgeoisie was then presented as a progressive force who would be the natural allies of the peasants and workers. This view continued to be accepted by CP historians until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In contrast were the two documents drawn up by the Communist International during Lenin’s life time; On the Revolution in America (1921) and To the Workers and Peasants of South America (1923). These had posed the task before the Communist Parties of Latin America as forging an alliance between workers and peasants to break the power of the landowners, capitalists, and government. Neither mentioned feudalism as a characteristic of Latin American economies and certainly no suggestion of feudalism as a separate stage to be overcome. This permanentist perspective was developed separately by Mella, and taken up later and developed by Trotskyists and independent Marxists.

Mella had argued that the theory of stages was utterly divorced from the real class relationships existing in Latin American countries. The Cuban landowners and the tiny bourgeoisie were completely linked to, and dominated by, the US. They had no intention of carrying through the tasks of the bourgeois revolution because that would have meant dealing a mortal blow to themselves. The PCC searched hard for this progressive national bourgeoisie; all it found was Batista, so it determined to support him.16

This perspective had been disproved by the experience of the Russian Revolution of 1917.17 Lenin had quite the opposite view. In August 1917 in From a Publicist’s Diary he wrote:

You do not have to give these demands (confiscation and distribution of land) a lot of thought to see that it is absolutely impossible to realise them in alliance with the capitalists, without breaking completely with them, without waging the most determined and ruthless struggle against the capitalist class, without overthrowing its rule.

In practice, the stagist perspective, when practised by the Communist Parties in colonial countries restricted the actions of the workers and peasants to what was acceptable to the national bourgeoisie and that meant, as Mella had pointed out, to what was acceptable to the imperialists.

Although the Communist Party was still illegal, Batista permitted the formation of a Communist front party, the Partido Unión Revolucionaria (PUR), headed by Juan Marinello. By the summer of 1938 a compromise had been agreed between Batista and the CCP, and in May 1939, it was permitted to publish a party organ, Noticias de Hoy (always abbreviated to Hoy), edited by Anibal Escalante Dellundé. At its tenth Plenum, convened in June, the Party abandoned its former public antagonism toward the ex-sergeant, and agreed to support him as an anti-imperialist, as a ‘man of the people’. Following a meeting between Batista and top Communist leaders a week later it appeared that, in return for Communist backing, he would allow the Communists to take formal control of the trade union movement. The CCP was granted legal status in September 1939.

This adoption of dictators and would-be dictators as good bourgeois democrats was a world-wide phenomenon. The same process had unfolded in China a decade earlier, Chiang Kai-sheck was lauded as an anti-imperialist, even elected to the Central Executive Committee of the Communist International, and his army trained and armed by the USSR. The pay-back; tens of thousands of Communists massacred.18 Batista would be Chiang writ small. However, without this coalition, Batista could never have got into a position to secure his bloody dictatorship, which definitely involved two stages; in the first, the revolutionary forces supported a ‘man of the people’, who was supposed to carry through the bourgeois democratic stage of the revolution. In the second, on taking power, the ‘man of the people’ destroyed the revolutionary forces and consolidated his dictatorship.

Now legal, the PCC immediately began to organise to take leadership positions within the labour movement. In January 1939, the Cuban Workers’ Confederation (Confederación de Trabajadores de Cuba, CTC) was established under Lázaro Peña, Communist leader of the tobacco workers union. Soon, most of the urban labour unions had joined, with a total membership of some half a million. The CTC was given favoured status by the Ministry of Labor and significant advances and improvements in pay and working conditions of urban workers followed. The Communist Party and the PUR merged into the Unión Revolucionaria Comunista (URC) and, in the 1939 election for the Constitutional Convention, won six seats on the basis of an election campaign which included demonstrations to demand the inclusion of workers’ rights in the proposed constitution. The Communists delivered their end of the deal by calling on the workers to support Batista in the 1940 presidential election.

Batista’s deal with the PCC, which included giving them substantially enhanced authority within the trade unions, was a blow to revolutionaries who were also trade unionists. During the 1930’s, the Cuban Trotskyists had a significant presence in the trade unions, controlling the Havana Workers’ Federation (Federación Obrera de la Habana), the umbrella trade union body for the capital and whose general secretary was Gastón Medina. They were also strong in Oriente province (traditionally the revolutionary heart of Cuba), where their trade union work was through the Orient Workers’ Union (Unión Obrera de Oriente). In particular they were strong in Guantánamo, forming the leadership in the local trade union federation (Federación Obrera Local), and also had strong bases in the railway workers and local Bakery Workers Union. The Guantánamo militants, specifically, Antonio ‘Ñico’ Torres, would join the Castroist guerrillas and provide the model for their industrial organisation.

With Batista’s backing, the Cuban Constitution formulated in 1940 gave substantial benefits to labour, making it one of the most advanced in the capitalist world. Among the commitments in the new Constitution were: equal pay for equal work; provision for social insurance; eight-hour working day and forty-four-hour working week; prohibition of child labour; one month annual paid vacation; maternity benefits; right to organise and to strike. Amidst a great fanfare, Juan Marinello, and other PCC leaders took credit, claiming the gains made confirmed the correctness of Communist Party policy. Few of these provisions were even partially realised.

On the other hand, the proletariat paid a very high price for the small gains actually made; direct interference and de facto state control of the unions and the virtual destruction of legitimate, independent labour organisations such as the General Confederation of Workers (CGT). After the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany in 1941, PCC members themselves policed the unions denouncing militants to the police as class traitors. These actions contributed to a hostility towards the PCC that continued for many years amongst both workers and peasants, including amongst many members of the radicalised petty-bourgeois youth.

Co-operation between Batista and the Communists continued through World War II, with the labour unions supporting the President. Batista’s confidence in the PCC was demonstrated when it was allowed its own radio station, Radio Mil Diez (Radio 1010). Launched on 1 April, 1943, it broadcast from Havana under the slogan ‘Voice of the People’, and is still remembered today for its cutting-edge music programmes, particularly Cuban jazz. The number of registered Communist voters increased from 90,000 in 1940 to 150,000 by 1946, and several of their members, including CTC chief Lázaro Peña, were elected to the National Congress. Additionally, in March 1943, Juan Marinello and Carlos Rafael Rodriguez became the first Latin American Communists to hold cabinet posts. During the war, the Communists changed their party name to the Partido Socialista Popular (PSP).

During and after World War II, the degree to which the Communist Parties of both the USA and Latin America prostrated themselves before the US and local bourgeoisies is, today, almost unbelievable. By declaring the economies of Latin America feudal, the development of capitalism became a ‘revolutionary objective’. The Cuban CP published a pamphlet lauding Collaboration between Bosses and Workers, the Mexican CP was wholeheartedly in favour of an Historic Worker-Boss Pact, both to be based on ‘an alliance of the workers and capitalists’, and other Communist Parties (most notably in Bolivia and Brazil) followed suit. All this was to be achieved with the active collaboration of US imperialism!

Later, Batista insisted that his co-operation with the PSP was necessary for the struggle against fascism and that he made an important distinction between ‘international communism’, represented by Lázaro Peña, and ‘local communism’, represented by Eusebio Mujal, who quit the PSP for the Cuban Revolutionary Party (also known as the Auténticos) whose main slogan was ‘Cuba for Cubans’ but which had a substantial base in the unions.

Batista, did not contest the 1944 presidential election; instead, he left office a very wealthy man as a result of corruption and a last-minute raid on the Cuban treasury, and migrated to Miami. In the election, the Communists supported the Batista candidate who was defeated by Grau San Martín of the Auténticos, but managed to get nine of their candidates elected to the Chamber of Deputies, three to the Senate and more than a hundred posts in Municipal councils.

The growing strength of the Auténticos, demonstrated by the election of Grau, was reflected in their attempts, led by Mujal, to take control of the CTC. In July of 1944, Lázaro Peña met with the new president and it was agreed that Peña could remain as Secretary General of the CTC. In return, the PSP would support and co-operate with the Auténtico administration.

With the onset of the Cold War, and under pressure from the US, the Grau government launched an offensive against communists in the unions, leading to communist union leaders being murdered by government thugs. The formal break between the PSP and the Auténticos came at the Fifth Congress of the CTC held in May 1947, when the Auténticos tried to gain control. However, they over-estimated their strength and in July the Minister of Labour, Carlos Prio Socorrás, had the CTC headquarters seized by the police and handed over to union officials who were Auténtico supporters. Angel Cofifio of the Electrical Workers’ Union was declared the new Secretary General and an Executive Council composed of Auténticos and independents imposed.

Later in 1947, there was a general purge of Communists. Lázaro Peña and over a hundred other Communists were arrested and communist newspapers suppressed. The following year, 1948, Radio Mil Diez was confiscated. Gradually, and accompanied by a good deal of violence, the chief unions went over to the Auténticos, especially after the government gave them official recognition. Communist membership declined steadily, and by the early 1950s it had been reduced to a shadow of its former self. Most PSP-led trade unions were dissolved or applied to join the Auténtico-led federation. The reforms agreed between the CP and Batista in 1940 were now only words on paper. After World War II, inflation had severely eroded the real wages of workers but the new leadership of the CTC was so tied to the Auténticos that its efforts were mainly to contain any protests, and it did little to make up the losses.

The Grau government turned out to be even more corrupt than Batista’s. The issue of corruption led to a split in the Auténticos, with Eduardo Chibás establishing a new party, the bourgeois Cuban Peoples’ Party (commonly known as the Ortodoxos), in 1947, on an anti-corruption platform. However, for the 1948 elections Carlos Prió Socarrás replaced Grau as a face-saving measure, and the Auténticos won an easy victory. Batista, from Miami, spent huge sums to get himself elected, in absentia, as Senator from Las Villas Province.

4. Batista Returns: the 1952 Coup

Chibás regularly denounced corruption on his weekly radio programme, and won the Ortodoxos increasing support. The succession of corrupt governments and military coups with the real power in the island remaining firmly in the hands of the US and their local crooks, created widespread discontent amongst the population: small businessmen made bankrupt by the big monopolies, small landowners crushed by the big US landlords, poor people who were going hungry, students who resented the foreign domination of their country, all supported the opposition. It was then that a young Fidel Castro became active in politics as a supporter of the Ortodoxos. But in 1951, Chibás committed suicide, depriving the Ortodoxos of their most popular leader and candidate for the May 1952 presidential elections.

Batista had declared himself a candidate, but the opinion polls placed him a poor third. Although no longer an army commander, Batista still had support amongst army officers. He sounded out young officers and NCOs, who had gained nothing from the rampant political corruption and saw gangsterismo as an insult to national pride. On the night of 9-10 March, 1952, Havana’s main army base, Camp Colombia, arrested the senior officers and sent tanks to surround the presidential palace.

The ambassadors for both the UK and USA welcomed the coup’s timing and its leadership. They also noted the support given to the coup by Cuban business, commerce, and industry. They expected Batista to tackle the problem of low labour productivity with a stick rather than a carrot, to restrict the ability of the Cuban workers to defend their wages and working conditions, and to reduce the power of organised labour.

The most significant resistance to Batista’s coup was on 10 March, when hundreds of students at Havana University staged a protest rally, but this had little support because Batista was in contact with CTC leader Mujal and promised that he would respect the existing labour laws and confirmed all existing trade union officials would remain in post. Mujal subsequently became one of Batista’s closest collaborators, and helped suppress opposition to the dictatorship within the unions.

The leadership of the CTC around Mujal would become known as the mujalistas, an openly self-seeking group of trade union bureaucrats whose level of corruption fully reflected that in Cuban society generally. The arguments used by Mujal were the same as those used by class-collaborationist trade union officials everywhere; that any pay deal had to be within the limits the company could afford, that workers in employment should be prepared to sacrifice pay and conditions to create jobs for the unemployed and, when the price of sugar on the international market fell, workers had to accept pay cuts.

Batista worked closely with the US, so closely that US Ambassador Earl Smith claimed that the American Ambassador in Cuba held a position second only to the President “because of our vast business, cultural and social ties”. To all intents and purposes, Cuba became a wholly owned subsidiary of North American businesses. As a neo-colony, Cuba was a dependent satellite of the US economy; a US plantation producing sugar and tobacco with cheap labour and a Mafia-dominated playground for Americans who came for the beaches, the gambling casinos and the prostitutes.

Cubans who opposed the Batista regime were taken into custody, beaten up, tortured or disappeared; over 20,000 people were murdered in the years leading to his overthrow. The North American Mafia owned and controlled every casino, most hotels, and the sex tourism industry in Havana, and was a law unto itself. The drug trade and child prostitution went unrestricted, thousands of children were kidnapped and sold into sex slavery. Batista looked the other way as the US raped Cuba of its riches: in addition to its land and sugar interests, US businesses owned ninety per cent of Cuba’s mines, eighty per cent of its public utilities, fifty per cent of its railways, and twenty-five per cent of its bank deposits.

What little economic progress was made, was at the price of political suffocation, of state terrorism and intimidation, torture and reprisals. Efforts by Cubans to reform this system in the name of social justice and national dignity faltered in the face of the fundamental reality of any neo-colony, viz. while nominally independent, any serious effort to reform would inevitably court US hostility. Reform was not possible without real independence, and that required a revolution.

The PSP remained legal until November 1953, when it was banned. At first, the ban was not enforced strictly and the illegal Communist Party continued to maintain a base in the urban areas and trade unions, but not enough to challenge Mujal for leadership of the CTC. Its remaining support largely evaporated when, in 1957, the regime launched a wave of assassinations of PSP members and repression of the PSP.

Henry Gitano19 has given a brief review of conditions in rural Cuba at this time: sixty per cent (of the peasants) lived in huts with thatched palm roofs and bare dirt floors without running water or sanitary facilities of any sort. Kerosene lighting was used by seventy per cent, with the remaining thirty per cent having no illumination at all. Basic foods consisted of rice, beans and vegetables, with only eleven per cent drinking milk, four per cent eating meat, and two per cent having eggs. The result was a caloric deficiency of 1,000 units daily. The Cuban government’s own 1953 census confirmed that, in rural dwellings, eighty-five per cent had no inside or outside piped water.

Women suffered most from all the effects of under-development. It was women who did household chores without benefit of electricity and running water, walking to the nearest water source, loading up and carrying (often contaminated) water home, while caring for their children. The economic stagnation and low level of industrialisation – results of imperialist exploitation – meant they suffered from the highest levels of illiteracy so that, as in all Caribbean countries at this time, it was almost impossible for a woman to get a job except as someone’s personal servant.

Accentuating the poverty was job insecurity. According to Investment in Cuba, a US Department of Commerce study of July 1956:

The spectre of unemployment affects all thinking on labour … unemployment normally reaches a total of one million … in a country of 6,500,000 inhabitants.

The study notes:

[D]istinct improvement has occurred in recent years, however, in the atmosphere of labour-management relations … declining economic activities have also had an influence in moderating excessive demands.

A starving people and a corrupt, puppet dictatorship provided an ideal environment for US investors.

5. Revolutionary Struggle Against Batista

Groups of activists began, independently, to make plans for the overthrow of Batista. Fidel and his brother Raúl were leaders of one such group, consisting of as many as fifty students from the University of Havana, sometimes referred to as the Youth of the Centenary (the centenary of José Martí’s birth). In 1944, at the age of eighteen, Fidel had been acclaimed as Cuba’s best all-round school athlete. At university, he demonstrated he was an exceptional student leader, outstanding public speaker, charismatic, with great self-assurance and a dominant physical presence (his height was 1.93 m [6ft 4 inch]). From university, Fidel became a lawyer in Havana, taking the cases of poor people, many of whom could not afford to pay him. His first-hand experience made him extremely critical of the great inequalities in wealth that existed in Cuba for which he blamed the American businessmen who controlled the country. Raúl, the youngest of the five Castro children, had joined the PSP youth group while at university and in 1953 attended a World Youth Congress where he met and befriended Soviet diplomat Nikolai Leonov, a KGB agent, who would be posted to Havana in 1960.20

In 1947, Fidel joined the newly formed Ortodoxos, attracted by its campaign against corruption and injustice. He was attracted to anti-imperialist policies, which included his participation in a failed military expedition to the Dominican Republic to overthrow the Trujillo dictatorship in 1947. Later, he was part of a delegation to a student congress in Colombia, where he witnessed the Bogotazo uprising, which followed the assassination of radical leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán on 9 April, 1948. With his public speaking skills and charisma, he soon built a strong following amongst the young members of the party. In 1952, he was an Ortodoxo candidate for Congress and expected to win, but during the campaign Batista thwarted the election by staging his coup.

Fidel Castro concluded that revolution was the only way the Cuban People’s Party would gain power, and with an armed group of about 130 men (this figure has appeared variously as 120, 123, 135 and 140) and two women, the overwhelming majority being Ortodoxos, attacked the Moncada Army Barracks on 26 July, 1953. The attack was planned in the smart Havana apartment rented by Abel, younger brother of Haydée Santamaría Cuadrado, both from the village of Encrucijada. After the Batista coup, Abel began inviting home those with radical ideas for social change, including Fidel Castro. The apartment became a meeting place for what would become the leadership of the 26 July Revolutionary Movement, and its organisational centre, housing a simple duplicator on which they produced the underground paper El Acusador. A small bookcase housed ‘the library’, reflecting the group’s political orientation, Martí was prominent, Marx was missing.

The aim of the attack was to act as a spark that would detonate a nationwide insurrection, which would overthrow Batista’s regime. Here we have a small group of petty-bourgeois, with no mass base, no links to the workers or peasants, hoping to spark a national insurrection by an heroic action. They may have been brave and bold but as with almost every such ultra-left endeavour, it was a disaster. The plan ended in tragedy and, although only eight were killed in the fighting, Batista ordered that ten prisoners should be shot for each dead soldier and eighty were murdered by the army after they were captured. Fidel was arrested and, as luck would have it, was not taken to the Moncada barracks, where he would have been killed, but to a police station.

5.1 Fidel Castro: History Will Absolve Me

Haydée with Melba Hernández Rodríguez del Rey were the only two women directly involved in the Moncada attack. Both were arrested and tortured using lighted cigarettes, but neither gave anything away, not even when:

With a bleeding eye in their hands, a sergeant and several other men went to the cell where our comrades Melba Hernández and Haydée Santamaría were held. Addressing the latter, and showing her the eye, they said: “This eye belonged to your brother. If you will not tell us what he refused to say, we will tear out the other.”21

The PSP, still clinging to legality and largely limiting itself to verbal criticisms of Batista, denounced the attack on the Moncada barracks as a ‘putsch’. That did not save them, Hoy was closed down and the party banned.

In September, over 100 radicals, leftists and socialists, few of whom had anything to do with the Moncada attack, were charged with organising an armed uprising. As a qualified lawyer, Fidel Castro took charge of the defence proceedings so successfully that only twenty-six were convicted, though his brother Raúl received a fifteen-year prison sentence. Fidel was tried separately from the others in October. He was found guilty and also sentenced to fifteen years in prison. He used this opportunity to make an historic speech ‘History Will Absolve Me’, which became the manifesto of the Castroist current.

The attack, the subsequent trial, and the publication of the speech made Fidel Castro famous in Cuba. Most demands of the manifesto were reformist, but radical, an advanced democratic programme of national liberation and agrarian reform, with a strong social content: to reinstate the rights given in the 1940 constitution, including for the state to ensure gainful employment for all citizens. The programme of what would become the 26 July Revolutionary Movement, was summarised in the five revolutionary demands they had planned to broadcast:

• The reinstatement of the 1940 Cuban constitution.
• Agrarian reform: setting a maximum size to land holdings; all those peasants farming less than about seventy hectares (170 acres), including squatters, to receive title to the land and the owners compensated with ten years rent.
• The right of industrial workers to a thirty per cent share of company profits.
• The right of sugar workers to receive fifty-five per cent of company profits.
• The confiscation of holdings of those found guilty of fraud under previous administrations.

These demands would be the basis of a progressive, national democratic programme, intended to improve the conditions of the mass of the people. It was consistent with the ideological balance and social composition of the membership of the Movement but did not to go beyond the limits of the capitalist system, nor did it question private property. Such goals, which appeared reasonable to the petty-bourgeoisie, would, of course, prove quite unattainable in an economy dominated by US multi-nationals.

A veteran reporter for the New York Times, Herbert Mathews, described Fidel Castro at this time thus:

The personality of the man is overpowering. It is easy to see that his men adore him and also to see why he has caught the imagination of the youth of Cuba all over the island. Here was an educated, dedicated fanatic, a man of ideals, of courage, and of remarkable qualities of leadership. … the most remarkable and romantic figure … in Cuban history since José Martí.

Fidel’s attempt to start a revolution had considerable support in the country. After all, the party he represented would probably have won the election in 1952 had it been allowed to take place. Batista did stand for president in late 1954 and, having won handsomely, decreed an amnesty under which Fidel and Raúl were released in May 1955. However, Fidel’s insurrectionary perspective was not welcomed by the Ortodoxo party and he and his brother soon left for Mexico where they began to plan another attempt to overthrow the Batista government.

Melba Hernández and Haydée Santamaría had both been sentenced to seven months in the women’s prison in Guanajay. They were flung into cells with common criminals who were expected to abuse them, but instead protected them from the abuse of the guards.22 After their release, these women were instrumental in assuring the publication of ‘History Will Absolve Me’. Fidel had posted his speech in parts, in letters to different comrades with the text written in lemon juice between the lines written in ink. These were collected, collated and re-constructed, then printed and distributed as the political programme of the 26 July Movement.

Fidel was held in Isle of Pines off the coast of Cuba. On his release, he was met by Haydée and it was on their ferry trip back to the mainland that the name 26 July Movement (M-26J) was decided upon. Fidel and other amnestied prisoners, constituting the leadership of what was now the M-26J travelled to Mexico. Frank País, leader of the M-26J’s urban underground, designated ‘national director of action’, and Fidel’s equal in the Movement, would later request Haydée to join him in meetings with the US Consul, during the period before 1957, when the Movement still believed it could do a deal with US imperialism. She was also liaison with the Ortodoxo party and would succeed in winning the support of an important group of more radical members.

A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution,23 reports that the founding meeting of the M-26J was on 12 June, 1955, and that it agreed to establish a workers’ section, (sección obrera) to co-ordinate activities amongst workers. The activities of this section have been largely ignored, official histories have concentrated on the activities of Fidel Castro and guerrilla warfare. However, Frank País was extending the M-26J into the working class and had some important initial successes. In September, a group of railway workers in Guantánamo led by Ñico Torres (a Cuban Trotskyist) affiliated, as did the entire workers’ section of the Ortodoxo Party in Santiago. País took as his model the newly-formed M-26J cell in Guantánamo and this led to the formation of a nation-wide committee within M-26J to organise its industrial work.

Almost immediately on arriving in Mexico City in July 1955, Fidel and Raúl met Ernesto Che Guevara, with whom they had an immediate rapport, and Che signed up for the duration. Their time was spent mainly in fund-raising, isolated from events in Cuba where the FEU led by José Antonio Echeverria was making its presence felt, as were sugar workers led by Conrado Bécquer. Eventually, enough money flowed in to rent a local farm where guerrilla recruits could gather for training, for the purchase of weapons and a sixty-four foot (19.5 metres) diesel-powered motor yacht, the Granma, which would carry the core of the Rebel Army (Ejército Rebelde) to Cuba.

In March 1956, Fidel Castro formally broke with the Ortodoxo Party declaring the M-26J would be a movement “without sugar barons, without stock-market speculators, without magnates of industry and commerce, without lawyers for big interests, without the provincial political bosses…” Instead, the M-26J would be “the revolutionary movement of the … Cuban working class, the hope of land for the peasants who live like pariahs in the country that their grandfathers liberated”.24

In preparation for the landing of the Granma the M-26J formulated its (1956) Programme/Manifesto. As to be expected it was much the same as that drafted in 1953, defining itself as “guided by the ideals of democracy, nationalism and social justice … of Jeffersonian democracy”. It contained the traditional aim of the petty-bourgeoisie, of marrying together for their mutual benefit the conflicting interests of capital and labour, of reaching a “state of solidarity and harmony between capital and workers to raise the country’s productivity”. However, the programme of the M-26J demanded the revolutionary overthrow of the dictatorship and its refusal to compromise on this would gain it mass popular support.

At this time the administration of the M-26J was under the supervision of Armando Hart, assisted by Haydée Santamaria, both located in Havana. Haydée later joined Frank País, to plan the M-26J attacks that would be launched in Santiago de Cuba to act as a cover for the landing of the Granma. In Cuba, support for the M-26J was growing, despite the dangers associated with joining such a movement, and at this time its membership was almost entirely urban.

Celia Sánchez, one of the earliest members of the M-26J and a leading militant, was given responsibility for ensuring the rebels on board the Granma were swiftly and efficiently transported to the Sierra Maestra mountains which was to be their base. Celia was receptionist, orderly, and nurse to her doctor father (who was famous for not charging his poorest patients while respecting all his patients equally), and was also well known for her charitable work of collecting and distributing toys to children on the Feast of the Epiphany. In these capacities she had access to almost everywhere, and almost everyone.

Villalobos describes how Celia, while supporting her father’s provision of healthcare to his peasant workers became extremely attached to María Ochoa, a peasant girl who, it is said, she treated as her own. In 1953, Ochoa, at the age of ten, went missing and several days later one of Celia’s closest friends, who worked in Havana at a high-end casino, found Ochoa’s body in the basement. María Ochoa was one of many victims of Cuba’s child sex industry. She had been “used up and thrown away” by a wealthy North American gambler who requested a young girl for the night. “Sánchez declared war on both Batista, who refused to make paedophilia illegal, and the US Mafia which organised the crimes.”25

Celia’s task was to establish a network of militants to act as spies and guides, and to do this quickly to meet the deadline of a landing planned for the end of November. Celia targeted women who had been raped by Rural Guards. As the doctor’s daughter and nurse, she could genuinely offer comfort and assistance while discretely sounding out the likelihood of a family member being prepared to join her network. Unfortunately, rape was common and Celia soon had a numerous, well-organised and growing band of activists. In rural Cuba at that time, recruiting one member of a family gave access to a clan network that spread for miles. In the last few days of 1955, Frank País travelled to the area where the Granma’s landing would take place. There he met with Celia, who had lived in that area all her life, and together they made the necessary plans.

5.2 Class Struggles 1955-56

During and shortly after World War II the Cuban sugar industry boomed, but as the former producers came back on line, the price of sugar fell. Cuban sugar farmers attempted to maintain their profits by cutting wages. In one year, 1952 to 1953 the total wages fell by almost forty per cent. The price of sugar continued to fall through 1954 and into 1955, and then the US unilaterally declared it was cutting Cuban sugar imports by about 100,000 tons.

Batista waited until the 1954 elections were over before attempting to attack working conditions. In conjunction with Mujal it was decided to divide the Cuban workers and attack working conditions sector by sector. The state began with the railway workers, demanding a cut in both the workforce and pay. The attack was launched only after the sugar harvest was in store, robbing the rail workers of their strongest weapon. The superior forces of the state forced the workers to accept an eight per cent pay cut, 600 lay-offs, and a no-strike agreement.

The decisive struggle was, of course, with the half a million sugar cane workers. Strikes at different farms started at different times. Typically, the owners would announce job losses and this would be followed by a strike. By the end of December 1954, most of Cuba’s 500,000 sugar workers were on strike. That most of the centrales were US-owned gave an anti-imperialist and populist dimension to the struggle and the mujalista union officials hurried to assume leadership of the strike, all the better to settle for some trivial offer. The normal trade union practices such as peaceful picketing were useless in the face of ferocious attacks by police and army. Soon the strikers were actively engaged in street battles, setting up barricades, occupying public buildings, derailing trains carrying troops, and burning bridges to hamper troop transports. However, at the end of 1955, the mujalistas signed a deal which surrendered all the sugar workers’ demands.

Women’s support groups were an important component of these struggles, particularly in stopping strike-breakers from going to work. In one case, some 200 women managed to stop police from taking arrested strikers to prison. Cuban students have a long history of supporting the struggles of the working class and these strikes were no exception. Students participated in demonstrations, occupied their colleges, and generally behaved in ways that won them respect and gratitude from the Cuban working class. José Antonio Echeverria, a self-professed revolutionary, had been elected president of the FEU. He had concluded that the violence of the regime was such that the traditional trade union tactics of strikes and demonstrations was no longer sufficient and formed the Revolutionary Directorate (Directorio Revolucionario, DR) composed largely of students of Havana University, and which would become an important component of the anti-Batista struggle.

The greatest support for the sugar workers came from dockers, who were themselves fighting their own battle against the bulk loading of sugar, whereby sugar was poured directly into the ship’s hold rather than carried on board in jute bags. Mujal personally chaired a rigged meeting of union ‘delegates’ that approved bulk loading as the official union position, but in the ports themselves the dockers were refusing to implement the decision. So strong and effective was the opposition that the Batista government was forced to delay its implementation.

Similar confrontations over productivity measures and increased mechanisation were taking place across Cuban industry, from cigar production to textiles to banking. These events produced a strong reaction with a solid anti-US content amongst the workers of Cuba. The mass of workers were ready to support any movement that opposed the Batista regime and the US imperialists. During 1955, the Cuban working class had suffered a series of defeats and many militants drew the lesson that, to defend their interests, they had to move beyond traditional trade union methods. They were looking for new ways of fighting back and there was a growth of the M-26J amongst the working class.

The working class took stock of the situation and, as is typical after such defeats, turned to its base organisations, the trade unions. There was a general lull (though not a cessation) of strike activity, but, at grass roots level, substantial changes were evident. Within the union structures, three forces were competing for the workers’ loyalty.

(i) The mujalistas were fighting a losing battle and increasingly relied on election fraud and heavy-handed armed interventions by troops to remove militants (many of them women) and any remaining independent officials.

(ii) The M-26J, from a small start, was making considerable headway amongst workers who saw the futility of the peaceful road to the overthrow of Batista. It was successfully establishing dozens of workplace cells, particularly in the east of the island, and was having a significant impact on the youth section of the PSP, the Juventud Socialista.

(iii) The PSP was calling for la lucha de masas (mass struggle) counterposing this to the M-26J, which it continued to condemn as ‘putchist’. The main thrust of this initiative was the setting up of committees for the democratisation of the trade unions.

By the time that Fidel and the guerrillas set sail from the Mexican port of Tuxpan on 25 November, 1956, the M-26J, under Frank País’ leadership, had successfully established a network of workers’ cells in areas ranging from banking to railways. It was this success and the strength of the network that enabled the M-26J to launch a series of actions on the scheduled landing date of the Granma to divert attention. The most important started at 05:00 on 26 November, in Santiago, when Frank País aided by Haydée Santamaría, led an attack with some twenty fighters on the customs house. Simultaneously, and surprisingly, the PSP member and dockers’ leader Juan Taquechel, called a strike in Santiago docks.

5.3 Granma; Rural Guerrilla Warfare in the Sierra Maestra

The landing of the Granma was planned to re-trace the route taken by José Martí in beginning Cuba’s War of Independence in 1895. The target was a town called Niquero, in Oriente province where Celia Sánchez would be waiting with an assortment of trucks, jeeps, food, weapons and about fifty militants. They planned to establish a base in the Sierra Maestra mountains and from there launch a campaign to ignite an irresistible national uprising.

The Granma, overloaded with eighty-two guerrillas on board, leaking and delayed by bad weather, landed at Playa Las Coloradas, about fifteen miles south of the designated spot, two days late, on 2 December, 1956. The well-planned diversions that had taken place had alerted the local police and army that something was afoot. Forewarned, Batista’s troops were waiting, killing many, and capturing twenty-two.

The trucks organised by Celia were long gone, and the remaining guerrillas had to walk the fifty kilometres to the Sierra Maestra. These remnants were harried by Batista’s troops and, by the time they reached the Sierra Maestra, there were only sixteen left with twelve guns between them. Lost, hungry, and exhausted, it took ten days before contact was made with the local resistance, one Crescencio Pérez, an outlaw peasant leader who had been recruited by Celia and would play a central role in obtaining local support.

The Batista regime maintained that Fidel had been killed in the landing, and to refute this lie the M-26J decided to combine a national leadership meeting on 17 January with an interview with the renowned New York Times reporter Hubert Mathews. The task of making arrangements was given to Celia. Armando and Haydée flew from Havana to Santiago and then drove with Frank and Vilma Espín Guillois over the mountains to the meeting. Che and Raúl came with Fidel. It was at this meeting that Fidel met Celia for the first time.

The first of Mathews’ three articles appeared on the front page of the Times on 24 February, 1957, declaring Fidel was alive, and painting a picture of a young, vigorous and committed group of rebels who were running rings around Batista and his troops. This was a serious blow to Batista’s prestige.

Soon after, differences arose between Frank País and Fidel: Fidel had requested that the M-26J supply him with more “men”, to at least restore the guerilla army to eighty-two, the number that had been on the Granma. Frank argued that, so far, the guerillas had shown themselves unprepared for the situation in Cuba, and that Fidel should consider leaving the country. Frank decried the poor level of organisation shown thus far by the guerrillas.26 The delay in the arrival of the Granma had cost lives needlessly, poor discipline was demonstrated by the lack of maintenance of the guerrillas’ weapons (Frank had spent the afternoon going round the camp cleaning rifles that were, reportedly, filthy), and lax security that had allowed, in the short time since the landing, one, and possibly two, informers to infiltrate the camp.

A compromise was reached. Fidel would stay and the movement would supply the soldiers requested. But these fighters would be selected by Frank and undergo preparatory training by Celia. Frank and Celia decided that her organisation skills were desperately needed on the Sierra Maestra and on Tuesday, 23 April, 1957, Celia Sánchez became the first woman to become a member of the Rebel Army.

Fidel, Che and the majority of the Rebel Army were urban. Frank was sending those members of the urban underground whose cover had been blown and were in danger of being killed. The guerrillas needed to integrate themselves into the local communities, they did this by teaching the peasants to read and write and providing medical services – Che acted as doctor and, so it is said, was extremely proud of his skills at extracting teeth.27 For the next few months the guerrillas raided isolated army garrisons and were gradually able to build up their stock of weapons, all the time their numbers growing with many of the additions being local peasants.

Frank País worked on widening the network of support for the M-26J with the priority of supporting and supplying the guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra. The M-26J had around it a number of front organisations, one of which was the Civic Resistance Movement (Movimiento de Resistencia Cíviva, MRC), composed mainly of local business owners and professionals who were sufficiently radical to give financial and other support to the M-26J. The representatives of the professional bodies (Conjunto de Instituciones Cívicas), representing the middle-class professional layers, were one of the first to sign up to the Manifesto of the Sierra Maestra, of 12 July, 1957, which promised free elections, a democratic regime, a constitutional government and a non-partisan provisional president.

The Manifesto was smuggled into Havana and published in the magazine Bohemia on 28 July. It is claimed that its appeal was so wide that even bourgeois garden parties declared in its favour. The US ambassador, Earl Smith, saw the writing was on the wall for Batista, and began looking for a transition of power that would safeguard American interests. On 14 March, 1958, he met with business leaders and jointly signed a letter calling on Batista to resign. To show that it meant business the US simultaneously announced it would stop selling arms to the Cuban government, signalling to the Cuban army that it was prepared to ditch Batista. Fidel denounced this ‘pact’ because: 1) it did not reject foreign intervention in Cuba’s affairs; 2) it did not reject rule by military junta; 3) it declared that Batista’s army and police would be an integral part of the bodies of armed men forming the power of any new state; and 4) it was only half-hearted in its intent to overthrow Batista.

From the start of 1957, the workers began to make demands for better wages and conditions. Havana bus drivers (one of the most militant groups of workers in Cuba) struck against the employers’ refusal to pay the traditional Christmas bonus, and later against a reduction in services. Dockers in Caibarién went on strike against the employers’ attempt to reduce the number of workers required to unload cargo. Cushion lists twenty-five industrial actions in the first half of 1957 but, as he admits, this was just a glimpse of what was happening nationally.

The response of the state was to intensify intimidation, force workers back to work, and to launch a reign of terror in which known opponents of the regime would be seized tortured, killed and their bodies dumped by the road. After the attack by the Revolutionary Directorate (DR) on the presidential palace on 13 March, 1957, the level of the terror increased with the Rural Guard, police, army and death squads killing almost at will.

The police were informed of Frank’s whereabouts, arrested him, drove him to a quiet alley and shot him. The MRC called a general shut down and, by dusk, Santiago was a ghost town. 31 July was the day of Frank’s funeral and some 60,000 marched behind the cortège – over one third of the population of Santiago. The strike is often described as spontaneous and, in the sense that it was sparked by Frank’s murder, that is true, but the speed with which it spread is a strong indication that there was an underground grass-roots organisation in place to give form to the expression of popular emotion. The strike spread across Cuba, to Holguín, Camagüey and as far as Santa Clara, and showed the Cuban people were ready to overthrow Batista.

Frank had been considered Fidel’s equal and, with Frank’s death, Fidel was pre-eminent. He jumped-in to appoint one Faustino Pérez as Frank’s successor, much to the dismay of Armando, Haydée, and Celia. Celia, as Fidel’s intellectual equal, was given the task of persuading him to accept the national directorate’s nominee, Rene Ramos Latour. Fidel agreed but used the occasion to demand: “a directive must be given to the movement right now: all weapons, all bullets, and all resources are for the Sierra”.

By March 1958, the Rebel Army considered itself sufficiently numerous for Raúl Castro to lead a column to the Sierra Cristal near Guantánamo to form a second front, to begin co-ordinating activities with other guerrilla groups such as the DR who were already active in the area, but also with PSP militants. Soon, a third front was established closer to Santiago. By the time of the final assault on Batista, there were eight such fronts.

The Communists under Blas Roca’s leadership, had denounced the M-26J as adventurers, putschists, and gangsters. But by late 1957, the PSP (under pressure from the Juventud Socialista and rank and file militants, and impressed by how successful the strike after Frank’s death had been) was re-assessing whether the M-26J could be supported. Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, editor of Hoy, and a member of Batista’s cabinet in 1942, contacted Haydée who arranged a meeting, in February 1958, with Fidel in the Sierra Maestra, one outcome of which was an agreement for a general strike on 9 April, 1958.

The August strike had not had a resonance in Havana, but to be considered successful, a general strike had to seriously affect the capital. Unfortunately, so great was the hostility of many of the supporters of M-26J towards the Communists that they refused to include them in the preparatory arrangements. This attitude was particularly prevalent in Havana, where the Communists were cold-shouldered and the support of the relatively large numbers of workers under their influence, lost. At the same time the M-26J approached the strike as if it were a guerrilla action with the emphasis on armed interventions by the M-26J urban underground rather than mobilising the masses. Fidel received numerous reports of these difficulties but decided to press ahead.

On 12 March, Fidel Castro made his statement, ‘Total War Against Tyranny’, in which he announced there would be a general strike. Preparations for a general strike are difficult to keep secret, extensive preparations must be made because large numbers of people are involved, and there are always turncoats, but this was different: the strike was announced to the world before winning the support of the workers! The M-26J did keep the date of the strike secret – from the workers. It was not until late in the morning of 9 April that the strike call was issued, certainly after 10:00, when most workers were already at work. This fitted with the M-26J’s petty-bourgeois concept of a general strike as composed of armed actions accompanied by acts of sabotage, rather than the self-activity of masses of workers. The police and army were waiting, many of the poorly armed M-26J urban guerrillas (the best weapons had been sent to the Sierra Maestra) were stopped by the police before they even grouped to attack their targets and achieved very little. The strike was a disaster.

There were two major consequences of the failure of the strike. Fidel used it to increase the emphasis of the M-26J on a rural guerrilla strategy, insisting that the Cuban revolution had to be led from the countryside. Of course, the M-26J leaders did not discount the importance of the working class in the cities, but now they were clearly subordinated to the rural armed struggle. Activities in the cities were now limited to providing supplies, funds, intelligence and personnel for the guerrillas. Now, however, many individuals within the M-26J better appreciated the organisation’s weak roots in organised labour and adopted a more friendly approach to the PSP.

Batista had, for some time, been planning an all-out assault on the guerrillas’ strongholds. Celia had been placed in charge of stockpiling food and supplies, and establishing a robust communications network in case Batista achieved an effective blockade. The failure of the general strike gave Batista the confidence to launch his assault. In May, 12,000 soldiers set out to ‘encircle and annihilate’ the estimated 300 guerrillas. But Batista’s troops never got as far as encircling the guerrillas, let alone annihilating them. Irving Horowitz in his book, Cuban Communism, gives part of the explanation when he describes the arrival of one army unit at a village.

The soldiers hurriedly dismounted from their trucks, falling over themselves in a mad scramble to get to a nearby park where there was a grove of coconut trees. The desperate soldiers climbed those trees like monkeys and knocked down every coconut, which they opened with their bayonets and devoured as if someone were going to take them away. … The frenzied enthusiasm that Colonel Sosa Blanco’s soldiers demonstrated for coconuts had a very simple explanation: they were starving. Their scoundrelly colonel had sold their rations.

Led by officers such as this, lacking training and motivation, the bulk of Batista’s soldiers were looking to surrender not fight. In a series of skirmishes, committed and determined, the guerrillas defeated the Cuban army. In the key Battle of La Plata, 11-21 July, the guerillas defeated a 500-strong battalion, capturing 240 men while losing just three of their own. Fidel Castro claimed a triumph that more than compensated for the failure of the general strike; that the time was right for a major extension of activities.

But Batista did not rely only on his army. Prior to troops arriving in a village, the village would be bombed, whether or not it contained rebel troops. Villages would be burned to the ground, wholesale massacres of men, women and children took place. One incident in particular had a determining effect on Fidel. On 5 June, 1958, Fidel observed the use of napalm supplied by the US, against civilians. He wrote to Celia:

I swore to myself that the North Americans were going to pay dearly for what they are doing. When the war is over, a much wider and bigger war will commence for me: the war I am going to wage against them. I am aware that this is my true destiny.28

All the atrocities were to no avail, Batista’s army, comprised mainly of peasants, had no stomach for fighting a courageous opponent who was voicing their own aspirations. Over the summer and autumn, all Cuba’s focus of attention was on the war between the guerrillas and Batista’s army. Strikes and demonstrations were few and far between.

To further undermine Batista’s war effort, the Cuban economy was collapsing as factories closed due to a lack of supplies, lay-offs in the docks due to so few ships coming in to harbour, redundancies due to cuts in public services, and so on. Unable to find work elsewhere, thousands of homeless women with their children roamed the streets of Havana. Most were to be found begging on church steps. Out of necessity, young women sought sex work because vice dominated the cities and resort areas. By the end of the year, Batista could no longer ensure even basic commercial activity. He had lost control of the roads and railways to guerrilla road blocks and blown-up bridges. The city workers favoured the revolution and by the summer of 1958 the mujalista union bureaucracy, tied directly to the Batista dictatorship, was quietly fading away in order to protect its own skin.

In the first days of September, Che Guevara set off westwards for the central province of Las Villas. He was accompanied by Camilo Cienfuegos who would proceed to Pinar del Rio, the most westerly province. In the Sierra del Escambray of central Cuba, Guevara and Cienfuegos formed a united front with guerrillas from the DR, cutting road and rail links crossing the country. Guevara and Cienfuegos started with 230 guerrillas but, as they marched westward, recruits flooded in and by the time the two columns arrived at their destinations they had grown tenfold. These forces were in place by November and ready for a combined assault on Batista’s army. Supported by workers in the towns, the rebels now had an unstoppable momentum, which would culminate in their victory on 1 January, 1959.

Because it was a crime, meriting severe punishment, to treat wounded or sick members of the underground, many doctors fled to the Sierra Maestra for self-protection. It is said that the Rebel Army had the highest ratio of doctors to soldiers of any army on earth! This gave Che the opportunity to take military responsibilities and demonstrate his talent. Che was promoted to Comandante in July 1957 and moved to his own encampment managed by Lydia Doce. Lydia was later captured in Havana in September 1958 along with Clodomira Acosta, a woman courier for Fidel. Batista’s police placed them in sand-filled bags, took them out to sea in a boat and, in order to make them talk, repeatedly dunked them. They drowned rather than betray, and their bodies were thrown into the sea.

During the offensive, the women on the Sierra Maestra did just about everything the men did, but were not allowed to fight Batista’s troops. Fidel was under increasing pressure from the women to allow them to join the fighting. On 4 September, he announced to a meeting of his general staff the formation of what would become known as the Mariana Grajales Women’s platoon. In reply to the criticism that, if there weren’t enough weapons for the men how could women be given rifles, he is alleged to have replied, “because they are better soldiers than you, they are more disciplined, and I’m going to teach them how to shoot.”29 Fidel did teach the platoon to shoot and placed Isabel Rielo, the best shot, in command. The platoon’s first combat was in the battle of Cerro Pelado, only three weeks after their formation. They acquitted themselves so well that every member was armed with the highly prized, M-1 semi-automatic carbine. By the victory of the Revolution it had grown from an initial membership of thirteen volunteers to company size.

5.4 The Fall of Batista

Fidel came down from the Sierra Maestra and won a series of engagements that meant he would soon have control of Santiago de Cuba. In a key battle, Guevara captured the central city of Santa Clara on 31 December, 1958. Faced with the rapid progress of the Rebel Army and a popular uprising, Batista cut and run, fleeing Cuba with his family and closest associates in three planes heading for Santo Domingo. The US did its best to appear to endorse a change of government while, in reality, keeping everything much the same by supporting the transfer of power from Batista to another army officer. During the early hours of 1 January, 1959, General Eulogio Cantillo stepped into Batista’s shoes and appointed Supreme Court Justice Carlos Piedra as provisional president. The M-26J replied by calling a nation-wide general strike, demanding unconditional surrender to the Rebel Army and pledging to continue the armed struggle. The message by Fidel, broadcast by Rebel Radio (Radio Rebelde), in the early hours of New Year’s Day, was sharp and clear “Revolution yes, military coup no!”30

Speaking over the radio from Santiago, Fidel called on all workers to seize their union offices, bring all workplaces to a standstill and paralyse the country. Everything stopped. The strike was decisive in stopping the manoeuvres of US imperialism and the army chiefs; it delivered the island to the Revolution. Faced with such a display of popular support for the new regime, and the news of Batista’s flight, army units throughout the island simply ceased to resist and surrendered their weapons. The apparatus of the dictatorship collapsed like a house of cards, with its henchmen fleeing as fast as they could. With its target met, Fidel called a halt to the strike. This completely successful strike ensured the consolidation of the new revolutionary power.

The dawn of 1959 brought forth a massive outpouring of popular joy over the fall of Batista and nearly unanimous support for M-26J. Cienfuegos took over the Camp Colombia base and Fidel marched into Santiago on 2 January, 1959. In his victory speech Fidel promised: “this time will not be like 1898, when the North Americans came and made themselves masters of our country”. At this stage of the Revolution, it would be true to say that the vast majority of Cubans, the M-26J included, were motivated to get rid of the hated Batista, for national independence from US gangsters and hopes of a better society. This gave the Revolution a very wide base with support from all sections of Cuban society.

The guerrilla army was the mainstay of revolutionary power and authority throughout the country, in cities, towns, villages, and the countryside. It took over all military posts and police stations everywhere and became the revolutionary administrative apparatus throughout Cuba. Initially, summary executions of the worst of the military butchers and most hated secret policemen took place by firing squad. Then public trials were held before mass juries of the population. Evidence against each prisoner was presented and, if a guilty verdict was reached, executions were promptly carried out. A total of some 600 were executed, a small number compared to the tens of thousands jailed, tortured, and murdered by Batista’s henchmen. However, great play was made by the more reactionary media in the US and Europe of the swift and exemplary justice handed out to Batista’s policemen and torturers. Allen Dulles Head of the CIA at the time commented:

When you have a revolution you kill your enemies. There were many instances of cruelty and repression by (Batista’s) army … now there will probably be a lot of justice.

The judiciary at this stage of the Revolution was left relatively untouched. Known Batista enthusiasts, and all Supreme Court judges, were removed, a new layer of magistrates appointed whose determining feature was that they had not been Batista supporters.

M-26J had launched a heroic three-year long guerrilla struggle, which won the overwhelming support of the Cuban people, with the exception of only a tiny handful of people directly linked to the regime, to the landlords, and to US imperialism. The main base of the movement during the initial period was the urban underground, but it rapidly became the peasants, workers, and small producers in the countryside. Both urban and rural groups were eager for an end to the terror and repression that was the Batista regime, were eager for democratic freedoms. But, in the countryside, the only way of solving the problem of poverty was the expropriation of the land.

The guerrillas of the Sierra Maestra did play the central role in overthrowing Batista, but they won only because of a broad underground support movement throughout Cuba as well as in Miami, New York, Mexico City, and Puerto Rico. The basic objectives of the movement were adherence to the democratic provisions of the constitution and national liberation. The M-26J adopted a more radical orientation after its experiences with the Sierra Maestra peasants, but it still adhered to bourgeois democracy and was willing to make programmatic compromises.

By its origin, aims, and social composition, the M-26J was a petty-bourgeois formation, but an extremely radical one. Other, similar groups committed to the overthrow of Batista were engaged in negotiations with the M-26J for united action. Most important was the Revolutionary Directorate that, during the revolutionary upheaval, had seized and still held both the Presidential Palace and Havana University.

What distinguished the Castro team, and which proved decisive, was that it made a principle of no compromise with the Batista dictatorship or its supporters. They were determined to carry the armed struggle through to the end, and to achieve this aim, they launched a peasant guerrilla movement that has been compared to Mao’s. Better parallels can be found, however, in the revolutionary experiences of Latin America, including Cuba itself.31

The guerrillas had the support of the peasantry, which shaded into a great mass of agricultural workers employed in the sugar industry, a dynamic section of the Cuban proletariat. These groups solidly backed the revolution. In a country like Cuba, where the sugar crop provided the main economic base, this was crucial to victory and the core slogan of ‘land reform’, which became the banner and spearhead of the movement, mobilised the oppressed Cuban masses to fight for the seizure of the land. As the military victories grew, support in the countryside broadened in massive waves.

There was a continuity in the political perspective of the M-26J. From Fidel’s ‘History Will Absolve Me’ speech through to his 12 July, 1957 ‘Manifesto From the Sierra’, there was no suggestion that the guerrillas would take steps in a socialist direction. In response to a question on his views at that time Fidel later stated, he considered himself a revolutionary but not a Marxist-Leninist.32 Fidel proclaimed on 21 May, 1959:

Our revolution is neither capitalist nor Communist! ... Our revolution is not red, but olive green, the colour of the rebel army.

6. Revolutionary struggle: From Dual Power to a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government

Soon after the seizure of power, Fidel went to the US on a goodwill tour, declaring in New York:

I have clearly and definitely stated that we are not Communists… The gates are open for private investment that contributes to the development of Cuba.

As an aside here, note the similarity with Mao’s comments made before the Korean War:

China must industrialise. This can be done – in China – only by free enterprise and with the aid of foreign capital. Chinese and American interests are correlated and similar. They fit together, economically and politically…33

Fidel’s initial moves were intended to be seen by the US as placatory. The first government was a coalition based on the 1940 constitution. On Fidel’s initiative, meeting the promises given to the MRC, Dr Manuel Urrutia Lleó, a jurist who did not belong to any party, a leading figure in the civil resistance movement against Batista and known to be anti-Communist was made President. Dr José Miró Cardona, President of the Bar Association, another noted leader in the civil opposition to Batista, a liberal academic who had been Fidel’s professor, and known to be an anti-Communist, was named prime minister. Fidel at first refused any government post, but eventually was appointed Military Commander-in-Chief. Only three of the twenty-five members of the new cabinet, a body without any unified programme or policy, came from the guerrilla army.

The official title of the January 1959 government of President Urrutia was The Cuban Revolutionary Government, though there was little revolutionary about Urrutia. In February, new ministries were created, including the enormously popular Ministry for the Recuperation of Misappropriated Goods, headed by Faustino Pérez Hernández which, it was widely believed, would seize and re-distribute the properties of Batista and his associates.

The M-26J had come to power as the result of a revolutionary mass insurrection that had destroyed the political power of the bourgeoisie and smashed the state apparatus. A petty-bourgeois group, the M-26J, was the effective force in the government, and the power of the state, the “special bodies of armed men” referred to by Lenin in State and Revolution, was in its hands, but it was generally welcoming to other groups such as the DR, which had proved themselves in the fight against Batista.

The main demands of the peasantry were an end to hunger, an end to Batista’s savage killings, and agrarian reform. These demands had become the slogans of the M-26J. On taking power, the M-26J established a coalition government, the composition of which corresponded to the political aims of the revolution as they were then conceived by its leaders. It was not long before differences between the guerrilla fighters, the ‘men of action’ who wanted to get on with the job of land reform, and the others in the government became apparent. Fidel explained:

In the hands of the ruling class at this moment were: all the financial resources, all the economic resources, the entire press… all the big radio and television stations… they were, to put it simply, still the owners of the country… the responsibility for making revolutionary laws was in their hands… we waited to see what would happen… The weeks went by and they had not passed a single revolutionary law.34

The Urrutia government stood in opposition to the demands of the insurgent masses and to the commitments of the M-26J. To satisfy these demands, the revolution urgently needed to make far-reaching inroads into private property, including imperialist holdings. As Fidel and his collaborators pushed for moves that fulfilled the promises of agrarian reform, they met resistance from their partners in the coalition. This was stiffened by the support of Wall Street, which viewed them as the ‘reasonable’ elements in a regime packed with bearded ‘wild men’.

It was during this period that Raúl Castro was formally and publicly presented as second only to Fidel in the senior leadership; on 22 January, Fidel named Raúl as second-in-command of M-26J, in February he was named Commander-in-Chief of Cuba’s armed forces and on 15 October, 1959, as Minister of Defence. This approach was justified as necessary in the circumstances, but was a worrying sign of the lack of the democratic accountability of the leadership. In June 1960, Raúl personally visited Moscow to establish closer links with the Soviet military and obtain a steady supply of arms and munitions.

The contradiction between the masses’ demands for radical measures and the government’s determined inaction forced Cardona to offer his resignation on 17 January, 1959. It was accepted on 13 February along with those of other members of the cabinet. On 16 February, Fidel became prime minister on a twenty point programme that was still, in essence, reformist.35 In March, and April, the government enacted many of the points contained in Fidel’s programme. Intended to be popular, these laws and regulations included: reduction of rents by up to a half, reduction in mortgage rates, landlords forbidden to evict tenants, urban landowners to sell vacant sites at controlled prices to anyone with plans to build a house for their family. A minimum wage for cane cutters, pay rises for the poorest paid civil servants and pay cuts for the tops were also introduced. The cost of electricity was reduced by thirty per cent and public phone rates halved (these were largely US-owned). Dozens of new bridges were built giving access to previously isolated and excluded villages.

The guerrillas won huge public approval for not abandoning their fatigues for well-cut suits, their jeeps for chauffeured limousines, and backed this up with the death penalty for the misappropriation of public funds. The intention of the new Cuban government to honour its promises to the workers and peasants of Cuba took the US government by surprise; this was something new.

The wearing of the olive green guerrilla uniform had many purposes, the relative importance of which has changed with time and circumstances. It reminded the population of who had overthrown Batista, liberating the island, and so legitimised the regime, it reassured the population that the generation of guerrilla fighters remained true to their aims, it was a show of identity with guerrillas across the country who held posts in the administration, and it reinforced the top-down structure of party and state. Thus, for example, when Raúl Castro appeared on television on 14 December, 2014 to announce negotiations with the USA, he wore his general’s uniform.

In the old Cuba, racism had been particularly virulent. Batista may have been President, but he was not white and had been barred from the island’s most select clubs. At this personal level, one aspect of the new regime was causing especial concern: epitomised in Fidel’s speech on 21 March, 1959, to a workers’ rally in Havana – ‘Proclamation Against Discrimination’, which ended ‘whites-only’ facilities in Cuba, and for which the old elite would not forgive him.

The New York Times (16 April, 1959) understood the major threat. If Cuba got rid of US economic exploitation its example might be copied throughout Latin America:

If we didn’t have Latin America on our side, our situation would be desperate. To be denied the products and markets of Latin America would reduce the US to being a second-rate nation and cause a devastating reduction in our standard of living… Latin American raw materials are essential to our existence as a world power.

By October, The New York Times (and Washington) would have deepened its criticisms, damning the new regime for vowing to end hunger and unemployment, for introducing economic planning, for organising co-operatives, financing and managing practically all the land on the island.

In the Sierra Maestra, during 1957-58, the guerrillas had implemented small-scale land distribution to tenant coffee-growers and subsistence farmers, and had confirmed at first hand the importance of agricultural reform for the peasants. The first major revolutionary legislation was the Agrarian Reform Law announced on 17 May, 1959 with the slogan: ‘Those who work the land shall own it’. This Reform Law was, de facto, the first ‘class issue’ of the Revolution, the first issue to divide opinion along programmatic lines. On 11 June, four cabinet members resigned, including the Minister of Agriculture.36 The National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA) was created to implement the new law. On 18 July, President Urrutia resigned and publicly attacked the ‘communism’ of the new order. Less than two per cent of the population owned half of all farmland and the new law was intended to abolish these latifundia. Privately-owned land over about 400 hectares (1,000 acres) or, in the case of the cattle ranches and sugar farms, over 1,300 hectares (3,200 acres), was ‘intervened’ (taken over) by the INRA – notionally headed by Fidel Castro but with Che Guevara and Raúl Castro in day-to-day charge.

The property of Batista’s henchmen was expropriated outright, but there were exceptions. Those farms that were highly productive, producing at least fifty per cent more per hectare than the national average, were exempt.37 All land expropriated was to be run as co-operatives or distributed in parcels to peasants, free of charge. Henceforth, agricultural lands could only be inherited or sold directly to the state, eliminating any building-up of large estates. The turn to co-operatives was determined by Fidel’s belief that large farms and plantations were more efficient than individually-owned plots; that the large landed estates had already trained a section of the Cuban peasantry in co-operative labour and that would make the transition to cooperative and state farms comparatively easy.

The Reform Law was intended to progress the interests of all social classes and groups interested in change (e.g., the rural and urban proletariat, the peasantry, and the middle classes, amongst others). The only ones adversely affected were the sugar bourgeoisie, the importing bourgeoisie, and the capitalist investors in agriculture, sugar, and foreign trade.

Land owners were to be indemnified with twenty-year bonds carrying four per cent interest, with the sting in the tail that this compensation was based on the owners’ own valuation submitted to the authorities for tax purposes. United Fruit refused to accept the offer. Its resistance to the measures was backed by the US administration. These lands were finally expropriated in April 1960 and the US pulled the plug on the sugar quota. A popular revolution with a limited programme of progressive land reforms clashed head-on with the interests of the big landlords and the US multinationals. To carry through the programme of the democratic revolution in a backward country in the epoch of imperialism meant to challenge capitalism and imperialism itself, confirming the practical experience of the Russian Revolution in 1917, and China after 1949.

It is at this point, confronted by imperialism that, typically, the petty-bourgeois leaderships of national revolutions pull back, re-assess their programme, and drop the more radical demands. The Cuban leadership now demonstrated its unique character. It re-assessed its programme and decided to pursue its demands, even if it meant rupture with US imperialism. We must accept that part of the answer lies in the personal qualities of the leadership. The use of US napalm against Cuban civilians had given Fidel Castro the ‘guts’ to stand up to American imperialism, that he and his team were committed to the cause of the Cuban masses and had the vision to see that victory was possible. We have since learned that these are rare qualities.

The Cuban leadership appreciated the threat hanging over land reform. If they continued, it was only a matter of time before the US would stop importing sugar from Cuba. In June 1959, Guevara was sent on a tour of the Third World to see what deals could be done. In Cairo, he had his first meeting with Soviet officials who agreed, in principle, to an initial exchange of crude oil for sugar.

Although the Agrarian Reform Law had been signed by all the Cabinet, many were hostile to it and considered its provisions to be indicative of ‘communism’. The infighting within the Cabinet was a reflection of the growing hostility of beneficiaries of the old system, to the actions being taken by the new government. On 17 July, 1959, Conrado Bécquer, a long-time, and respected leader of the sugar workers demanded Urrutia’s resignation and Fidel Castro appeared on television to deliver a lengthy denouncement of Urrutia and his “fevered anti-Communism”.

Fidel received widespread support, tens of thousands surrounded the presidential palace demanding Urrutia’s resignation, which was duly received. On 23 July, 1959, Fidel appointed a staunch supporter, Osvaldo Dorticós (a leading member of the PSP), as the new president and took the opportunity to replace others.38 The revolutionary government had clashed with the interests of the international telephone trust, the international mining trusts, and the interests of the United Fruit Company, it had clashed with the most powerful interests of the US and relations deteriorated rapidly. In Cuba, this conflict precipitated a political crisis, which was resolved by a categorical turn to the left and the implementation of sweeping agrarian reform.

Responsibility for land reform was given to the INRA, which was empowered to enforce its rulings. INRA contained many who had been active guerrillas, and who tended to follow their wartime practices of assuming whatever authority they felt necessary to achieve their objectives. Simultaneously, it used its powers to implement a broad social programme, including building new houses and schools, thereby ensuring the revolution had an immediate impact on the lives of the peasants. It would be a fair comment that the INRA was in effective control of the Cuban economy in the early years of the revolution.

The takeover of the land proceeded relatively peacefully. The landholders protested against the land reform, both individually and through their associations, and sabotaged its progress as much as they could without directly confronting the new regime. They increased their rate of cattle slaughter, reduced purchase of fertilisers, bought hardly any new equipment, and neglected ploughing, sowing and planting. Many attempted to convert their physical assets into cash and transfer it out of the country.

After the Revolution, the CTC changed its designation to CTC-R (CTC-Revolutionary), and at the first CTC-R Congress in September 1959, Fidel gave a speech to more than 3,200 delegates. He emphasised that, though the vast majority (possibly as high as ninety per cent) of delegates were M-26J activists and supporters, they had been freely elected by the grass roots. He commended them for “(January’s) general strike that gave all the power to the Revolution”. Three days later, after a series of acrimonious debates between anti-communists in the M-26J and those who were unitarios, thirteen delegates (including three communists) were elected to form a new executive committee. Fidel again addressed the Congress, criticising the way the discussions were held on the grounds that any divisions or quarrels at the Congress made the enemies of the Revolution happy. In his opinion, if the working class wished to become an army defending the Revolution, then the existence of political factions made that aim nonsensical. This authoritarian, top-down approach reflected his guerrilla background, but threatened to block soviet democracy within Cuba.

After the revolutionary seizure of power, reactionary gangs continued to make attacks on leading members of M-26J, committing criminal damage on a wide scale, disrupting communications by destroying telephone exchanges, burning warehouses, killing farm animals in the fields, and so on. All this was strongly supported by the CIA with money, weapons and training. The centre of these activities was the Escambray mountains of south-central Cuba. A local militia was launched to counter these attacks, which it did relatively successfully. Expecting an attack by the US, the militia was expanded and launched as a national organisation, the National Revolutionary Militia (MNR), in October 1959. The militia was one of the first activities to draw in large numbers of women. Counter-revolutionaries of all hues, cried out against the ‘immorality’ of women who wore trousers instead of skirts, and carried guns. But there were also supporters of the Revolution who questioned whether women should be in the militia. The performance of these women both against saboteurs and, later, during the Bay of Pigs (Playa Girón) invasion effectively silenced such criticisms.

The road from armed victory to planned economy was marked by ongoing conflict. On 25 November, 1959, in yet another cabinet shake-up, Che Guevara was named head of the National Bank (BNC), replacing Dr Felipe Pazos. Pazos tendered his resignation on 23 October, 1959, transferred the Presidency of the BNC to Che Guevara and left Cuba soon after. The Times of Havana reported, 26 November: “The replacement of Pazos by Guevara came as a stunning blow to businessmen and bankers.” At that time, the BNC was in a critical situation. Not yet nationalised and with few reserves (Batista had helped himself on leaving the country), the Cuban banking system lacked the conditions to promote the country’s economic and social development. The revolutionary government needed to take control of the banking system and Guevara immediately enacted reforms that freed Cuba from American banking interests. Under his Presidency, between 1959 and 1961, all American banks were kicked out, allowing Cuba the freedom to control its own money through a state-run bank.39 When Guevara assumed the Presidency of the BNC, he retained close links with the leading personnel at INRA.

6.1 The Workers’ and Peasants’ Government

Che’s promotion to President of the BNC marked a clear turning point in the direction of the revolution. It symbolised an end to coalition government and a qualitative change in the banking system. The Cuban government declared its independence from the bourgeoisie. The army and police had been destroyed and replaced by forces loyal to the new regime. The existing legal system was being dismantled and replaced. There were comprehensive changes in governmental personnel and policies. Land reform was sweeping the country, imperialism was being faced down, and the masses were mobilising on an ever-broadening basis. Cuba now had a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government. This was a government in transition, its intervention in the economic sphere was still in its infancy; nationalisations had only just begun, there was no clear-cut programme or plan. The leadership operated empirically, trying to solve each problem as it arose, but there was a clear direction of travel.

The Ministers of Public Works and Recuperation of Misappropriated Goods were replaced, with the new Cabinet members expected to give full support to rapid agrarian reform. The new Minister of Public Works accelerated the pace of road building to speed up rural communication and transportation; and the Ministry for the Recuperation of Misappropriated Goods began to transfer the properties it seized to the INRA.

A shift of power was taking place; from those who believed in fighting dictatorship but not imperialism, to those who spoke for the workers and campesinos and were prepared to enact radical anti-imperialist measures. The M-26J was of diminishing importance. According to The New York Times 18 December, 1959, INRA had become Cuba’s most important economic and political entity, supported by the army and the INRA militias. Fidel’s base of support was swinging from the middle class to peasants, workers, and soldiers. This shift resulted from the fact that the Cuban masses were being drawn into the revolutionary arena in ever greater numbers as a prelude to building a new type of society.

From 22 December, 1959, all possessions and property of persons convicted of counter-revolutionary activities, and of persons who conspired from abroad, were to be seized. The Cuban Workers’ and Peasants’ Government firmly resisted imperialism and its Cuban agents, resolutely proceeded with agrarian reform, disarmed the reaction, armed the people, and nationalised capitalist properties; all this was coupled with bold projects to meet the needs of the masses for employment, housing, education, recreation, and culture. During 1959, the Cuban Government effected a series of important expropriations (even if limited) of capitalist property and social prerogatives.

At this time, there were many articles in the US news media praising the achievements of the revolution; in improving the level and quality of food production, the provision of housing for those earning less than US$100 per month, the creativity of the new co-operatives in meeting their own needs, provision of schools and hospitals, etc.40 But there were also reports of the Federation of Cuban Sugar Workers having trained and armed 55,000 sugar workers in the interior “to defend the sugar crop”. In January 1960, the US threatened to cut the sugar quota unless US interests were protected, and the test case would be the interests of United Fruit.

Havana Radio, 5 February, 1960, carried Che Guevara’s, defiance of the backers of ‘free enterprise’:

During the past seven years Cuba has lost $450 million… we were paying… for the privilege of having a so-called free enterprise… This is why some time ago I said that we are not interested in free enterprise… We serve the Cuban people and profits are invested in works beneficial to the nation.41

The key leaders of the revolution (they often admitted it) began as petty-bourgeois. Why then, despite this background, did Fidel and his collaborators not hesitate to nationalise the land and industry, introduce a planned economy and take many measures for the immediate benefit of the workers and peasants? Why did a petty-bourgeois leadership with no intention of doing so, at least initially, lead a national-bourgeois revolution on to a socialist revolution in one continuous process? The answer lay in the way the new regime had come to power and the character of the leadership, the tasks it faced, and the constraints imperialism imposes on the development of neo-colonial countries. The objective reality of the situation facing Cuba was that the leadership could make good on its promises of a better life for workers and peasants only if it went beyond its original economic goals and took the first steps towards socialism.

Fidel and his comrades of the M-26J Movement were finding out by their own experience that the revolution had become a test of their strength of character. Having taken power at the head of the oppressed classes, to meet the promises given and ensure the survival of the revolution, the leadership of the Cuban Revolution had to proceed step-by-step to carry through the first tasks of the socialist revolution. The reason was simple, the basic reforms necessary to give Cuban workers and peasants an adequate standard of living as part of the national-democratic revolution challenged the interests of imperialism and its allies, the national bourgeoisie. As Farrell Dobbs might have put it, they had vision and they had guts. What gave the government its revolutionary vitality and dynamism was its responsiveness to the needs of the masses and its reliance on mass mobilisations – operating in effect by popular consensus. The masses became deeply loyal to this leadership and, at every critical stage, massive turnouts supported their actions.

It should be noted that, during the period 1960-1962, following the launch of the militia in October 1959, a number of mass organisations mobilised hundreds of thousands to take to the streets to voice their demands. Kapcia goes so far as to claim that in this period the Revolution was carried out by such organisations: the militia, the Revolutionary Defence Committees, the National Federation of Cuban Women, the University Students Federation (supported by high school students), and the Federation of Cuban Workers (under new leadership after the Revolution).42

7. Revolutionary Struggle, Cuba Becomes a Workers’ State

The Cuban Revolution took place at the peak of the Cold War. By breaking with capitalism, the Cuban leadership was inexorably propelled in the direction of the USSR, but this process was not free of conflicts and difficulties.

The presence of the Soviet Union restrained the US State Department and Pentagon, who now had to consider the international repercussions of their actions vis-a-vis Cuba. The existence of the Soviet Union as a counterforce to imperialism and an example of a society that had successfully overthrown capitalism gave Cuba a degree of flexibility. Confronted by imperialist economic blockades, the leadership could turn to the Soviet Union for aid, trade, loans, military hardware, and technical assistance. While these relations helped the Soviet Union politically, they were vital to the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government. Foreign trade underwent a tectonic shift in February 1960, when Anastas Mikoyan arrived at the head of a trade mission. The Soviet Union would buy 5 million tons of sugar over a five-year period and give Cuba credit of US$100 million for the purchase of Soviet agricultural and industrial machinery. The agreement with the Soviet Union was supplemented with trade agreements with China and Eastern Europe.

Certainly, the material aid supplied was essential to the Cuban Revolution’s survival but the USSR had another great attraction for all ‘third-world’ regimes seeking national independence. The Soviet Union had transformed the peasant Russia of the Bolshevik Revolution to the second greatest industrial power on the planet. The strength and superiority of the nationalised, planned economy had been doubly demonstrated by the victory of the USSR over fascist Germany in World War II, and the rebuilding of the Soviet economy. This was a model that might be worth emulating

On 20 February, 1960, all private enterprise was placed under the direct control of the revolutionary government with a central planning board to “supervise, coordinate (and) rebuild the general economy of the country”. The army was mobilised to build houses for farm workers, construct roads, lay drainage systems, reforest denuded lands, help farm the co-operatives, build an entire school system in Oriente. With no need for military fortresses, Camp Columbia had become ‘Liberty City’ and, instead of housing 30,000 of Batista’s soldiers, was converted into a technical school. All the larger army posts were transformed into educational centres.

INRA was a major force pushing the revolution to implement a programme of economic and social transformation for the industrial development and social advancement of the country. Strategically, it was pushing to break free of imperialist control its replacement with an economy based on national planning. Throughout Cuba, outside of the wealthy suburbs of Miramar and Varadero, the masses identified with this goal.

By mid-1959, before any Cuba-USSR deal, US President Eisenhower had decided in principle that the US would fund Cuban exiles to overthrow Castro. The plan proposed the invasion of Cuba and the military overthrow of the revolutionary government.43 In preparation, sabotage attacks on Cuba were executed by Cuban exiles, their major targets being sugar mills, although blowing up the Belgian freighter, La Coubre, in Havana harbour on 4 March, 1960, killed over a hundred people and injured 300 more.

In April 1960, the first shipment of Russian crude oil arrived, 300,000 tons. Previously, Cuba had to pay for its oil with dollars, which meant the US had ultimate control over the Cuban economy. To attempt to retain its stranglehold, the US administration pressurised the three existing refineries in Cuba not to process the Soviet oil. Shell, Standard Oil and Texaco agreed. In a make-or-break situation, the Cuban government ‘intervened’, placing the refineries under government supervision.

This was a major blow to the US attempts to control Cuba’s trade, and precipitated a chain of actions and reactions. On 7 July, Eisenhower cut the Cuban annual sugar quota by ninety-five per cent. This was a serious blow for the Cuban economy, and Cuba countered by nationalising American property. Fidel declared: “They may take away our quota pound by pound and we will take away their sugar mills one by one”, and on 6 August, he announced the nationalisation of all US-owned properties; telephone, electric, railways, port facilities, and thirty-six sugar refineries. In September, the Cuban branches of American banks were nationalised. When the first steps were taken, the masses helped to accelerate them by joining huge demonstrations in support of the government’s actions. The radical measures further undermined the possibility of coming to terms with the bourgeoisie. Instead, the bourgeoisie and the middle classes began to flee the country or engage in subversion that compelled the regime to take action against them. This increased the pressure on the leaders to organise the economy through nationalisations and planning to prevent the growth of social instability.

The workers were intimately involved in many of the nationalisations. Two examples given by Cushion are the nationalisation of the US-owned oil companies; when the managers fled, the battle between capitalism and the budding socialism in Cuba became a battle for maintaining oil production, which was achieved only because the refinery workers rallied to the revolution. The second example is the workers’ take-over in June 1960, of the newspaper Diario de la Marina, the public face behind which the forces of reaction and counter-revolution were coalescing. After the workers had seized the presses and been supported by mass demonstrations in Havana, the paper was expropriated and the presses turned over to printing other material.

Cuba, now economically reliant on the Soviet states, took the decision in the summer of 1960 to create a government department to produce a general plan to enable the country to stand on its own two feet economically. The Junta Central de Planificacion (Juceplan) to be led by Guevara would be formally launched in early 1961, staffed by young volunteers who had some background in economics, mainly from Latin America but with a significant proportion from Eastern Europe. Juceplan was tasked to produce a state plan for Cuba’s economy. Not surprisingly, given the presence of so many Eastern Europeans, the plan adopted closely followed that of the USSR with all its bureaucratic dead weight.

As a consequence of the objective conditions which Cuba faced, pressures towards bureaucratisation existed in all organisations to a greater or lesser extent. The unions were one example. With the fall of Batista, his most prominent supporters had fled, being replaced by anti-Batista activists, mainly from the M-26J, with PSP members also holding positions in some unions. However, some less prominent union officials switched sides, claimed to be supporters of democracy, and retained their posts. The Stalinists, combined with the left-overs from the Batista years and elements of the unitarios wing of the M-26J, began to harden into a bureaucratic layer, resulting in a deterioration in democracy within the union movement.

An effective argument used by the bureaucrats against having democratic discussions which, of course, posed a serious threat to their existence, was to argue that the US embargo was the cause of all Cuba’s major problems. In a besieged fortress, it was necessary to stand shoulder-to-shoulder against the main enemy and not to dissipate energy in internal recriminations.

Shortly after the victory of the revolution, a small Trotskyist organisation in Cuba was re-established: the Workers Revolutionary Party (Trotskyist) (POR(T)). Its members were able to attend and intervene, with some success, in the July 1960 First Latin American Congress of Youth, in Havana.44 The Stalinist apparatus was ready to resort to almost any means to silence the Trotskyists and, without the protection of the Cuban authorities, they would undoubtedly have been silenced physically. As it was, the Stalinist leadership decided to rob the Trotskyists of the right to speak at the Congress by challenging their mandate, naming them on the front pages of their newspapers as CIA agents.

The Trotskyist delegation, in the person of Juan León Ferrera, a sergeant in the Rebel Army, immediately distributed to all Congress delegates the manifesto they had brought to support their intended presentation. Copies were also sent to political, trade union, and popular organisations and was widely quoted in the Cuban press the following day. Ferrera had impeccable credentials. He had joined the Rebel Army with his father and fought so well he had been promoted to Sergeant; his mother had served as a nurse with the guerrillas.

To confront and defeat the Stalinists, the Trotskyists attended the first session of the Congress and demanded a revolutionary tribunal judge the truth of the accusations. The Trotskyist delegates were ready to submit their conduct to a review by such a tribunal and asked that if they were cleared of the Stalinist slanders, their accusers should be put on trial as defamers of revolutionaries, and expelled from the Congress.

When Fanjul requested to speak, and was handed a microphone, the Stalinist delegates and some others stood up and drowned him out with shouts of “Cuba sí, Yankees no!”. The uproar went on for some ten minutes, but Fanjul stood his ground, and started to speak, over and over again, until finally he was able to make himself heard. He had been given five minutes to state his case but spoke for nearly half an hour to a completely silent audience.

The Congress president asked whether any delegates took responsibility for the accusations. If no-one did, the Congress could be considered to have confirmed that at no time had the Trotskyist delegation been attacked in word or in deed. No-one rose to take responsibility for the slanders. The POR(T) was allowed to participate in the Congress as a Trotskyist delegation, and have its amendments voted on, a real achievement given the vicious hostility and gagging moves of the Stalinists.

The Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) was launched in late summer 1960 with Vilma Espín its first president. With similar aims to Zhenotdel (Department for Work among Women Workers and Peasants, established by the Bolshevik Party in September 1919) the FMC used the Russian organisation as its model. Its main aims: Bringing women out of the home and into the economy, reorganising peasant households that kept women in subservient positions, developing communal services to alleviate domestic work and childcare, providing equal opportunities for women, mobilising women into political work and government administration, and providing adequate working conditions “to satisfy the particular needs of the female organism and the moral and spiritual needs of women as mothers”.45

The FMC remains a powerful and influential organisation, making women’s social liberation and their integration into the revolutionary process a reality. Initially, its activities were to help organise the masses of women, both urban and rural, into building the militias and the CDRs (see below), establishing a network of childcare centres enabling women to enter the workforce and spreading education on contraception and abortion. As with Zhenotdel, the FMC was an organisation intended for and composed of women; men were not excluded but the reality is that the vast majority of meetings – certainly at local levels – were (and remain) women only. Thus, women who had never previously participated in public activities could feel comfortable in its ranks. With both Zhenotdel and the FMC, the link with the PCC was/is at the top; in Russia the President of Zhenotdel reported personally to the Political Committee of the Party via the Orgburo, in Cuba the link is less direct, as the FMC is officially an NGO and Party control is ensured by having the President and FMC tops, as PCC members.

In late September 1960, the Revolutionary Defence Committees (Comités de Defensa de la Revolución, CDRs) were launched to combat CIA terrorism and sabotage that had mushroomed in the run-up to the Bay of Pigs. CDR units were established on each city block throughout all urban areas. Rural areas had their counterparts. The CDRs were intended to act as a ‘neighbourhood watch’ to protect public buildings, locate and identify terrorist activities and feed information to the police. Women soon provided over half the total membership.

The functions of the CDRs expanded over time and now include approval of proposed building works, change of address, and organisation of voluntary work such as the growing of fresh vegetables in gardens and upkeep of chickens in backyard plots. Current estimates give the CDRs a membership of as high as eight million. Despite their unquestionable social usefulness and mass membership, the pyramidal structure of the CDRs did not, and does not, encourage democratisation or horizontality.

In September/October 1960, all US-owned banks were nationalised, and the Law for Urban Reform, allowing nationalisation of the property of those who had left the country, was passed. Finally, the biggest Cuban companies were taken into public ownership. Cuban-owned factories and industry, generally, had no separate existence from the American firms that dominated the Cuban economy. Thus, the nationalisation of foreign-owned industry meant Cuban-owned factories found it difficult to operate privately when both their major suppliers and customers were government-operated. As a result, nationalisations soon encompassed not only railroads, port facilities and those enterprises engaged in foreign trade, but also Cuban-owned enterprises. In a very short period, Cuba made the transition from an overwhelmingly privately-owned economy to one that was eighty per cent nationalised. The state ran the banking system, and ninety per cent of industries that produced Cuba’s exports, which meant that, by the end of 1960, foreign trade was fully under state control.

US administrations have made much of the number of Cubans who have fled from Cuba, but they forget their own history. At least 100,000 people left the British colonies in America during and after the American Revolution, a higher proportion of the population than fled Cuba after the Revolution. The high church Tories could not stomach the political and social changes which attend all revolutions worthy of the name – that those regarded as inferiors no longer know their place. The Tories fled to Canada carrying tales of barbaric, dissolute and godless American revolutionaries. Those who remained and refused to take an oath of allegiance to the new state governments were denied their civil liberties. Many were jailed, forced into exile or even murdered.

Judges who had not been replaced immediately after the revolution were now being called on to enforce measures such as rent reductions and land seizures that hurt the interests of the bourgeoisie. Where they could not stop the individual cases being brought before them, they awarded excessively generous compensation to the previous land owners. Matters came to a head at the end of 1960 when the entire judiciary was purged of counter-revolutionaries and a new Supreme Court appointed. This time the process extended to the regional and provincial judges. Blas Roca, General Secretary of the PSP, was given the job of hurriedly drawing up a new judicial system in accord with the principles of the revolution. The new system was further modified in 1970 and 1975 to strengthen the position of the lay judges who serve for two months a year, for two-and-a-half years.

The cancellation of the sugar quota marked the beginning of the blockade of Cuba by America. The Soviet Union, followed by the People’s Republic of China, was quick to buy up the surplus sugar. The US refused to trade with Cuba, and when the Soviet Union again stepped in, the US scolded Cuba for cuddling up to ‘Communism’. In a very real sense, the US administration pushed Cuba into the arms of the Soviet Union. As the trade war with the US hotted up, additional treaties were agreed with the Soviet Union and China, so that the major portion of Cuban trade was with the workers’ states. The US retaliated by placing an embargo on all exports to Cuba. Notionally, food and medicines were excluded but trade in these items declined rapidly.

In November 1960, the US announced the blockade of Cuba and, in January 1961, Eisenhower broke off diplomatic relations. By this time Cuba was a state with a government that had come to power by a popular revolution, which had smashed the bourgeois army and police force, and replaced them with a rebel army. It had a new police force recruited largely from the ranks of revolutionary fighters determined to defend the gains of the revolution. The new state was based on the monopoly of foreign trade, nationalisation of the land and every important sector of the economy, and the economy was subject to a national plan based on social need not private profit. When these measures were complete, Cuba had entered the transitional phase known as a workers’ state (transitional between capitalism and socialism). However, it lacked any form of democratic proletarian rule.

The M-26J had smashed the old state structure in coming to power, but the initial failure of the new government to proclaim socialist aims demonstrated that the subjective factor in the revolution remained unclear. This was a workers’ state in which the working class did not hold power directly through, e.g. soviets, and in which there was no organised means to express their demands. Similar formations had occurred after World War II in, e.g., Yugoslavia and China. However, because the leadership of the regime in Cuba was not Stalinist, as were the leaders in Yugoslavia and China, there were those who argued that Cuba must be a healthy workers’ state, despite the state not being under the democratic control of the workers and peasants.

Politically, the revolution was not keeping pace with the economic developments. The M-26J was not a Leninist party. Proletarian democratic forms, such as the soviets of the Russian Revolution, were not established. Control rested with Fidel Castro and a thin layer of leaders who set policies and saw to their execution. The leaders had the enthusiastic support of the workers and peasants, but the masses could not express their views through institutions which allowed for rank and file discussion and decision-making. For example, the Declarations of Havana (both one and two) were presented to mass rallies, read through by Fidel and carried by acclamation. That was not soviet democracy.

Of course, it was correct for revolutionaries to support the M-26J either as members or as allies, but it was also necessary to attempt to establish democratic structures, particularly in the factories and amongst the workers as no structure or mechanism for such discussions existed. A possible substitute might have been the unofficial structures that had organised strike actions within the individual factories and enterprises. The call would have been for the Castro-Guevara team to introduce mechanisms for workers’ control and management of the economy and government. But the dynamism of the revolutionary process meant that the importance of such considerations was obscured.

In early 1961, the campaign to eradicate illiteracy was launched. Brigades composed of thousands of students went to the countryside to teach and live with the peasants. Allowed out of the home to freely associate with other young people for the first time meant that many of these activists look back on the literacy campaign as one of the highlights of their lives. It was a living demonstration that women could work alongside men on an equal basis. Following the literacy drive, women were very much involved in all areas; within a decade over half of medical students were women, the nationalised industries needed managers and in Cuba many women occupied those positions. Over 4,000 women were appointed workplace managers and, whilst machismo was not entirely absent, in the workplaces where women were managers, it went a long way in changing attitudes.

Simultaneously, the vast disparities between rich and poor, city and country were being rapidly narrowed. The mass support of the political and economic revolutionary measures was accompanied by a spontaneous growth of anti-imperialist sentiment among the Cuban people. During 1959 and 1960, the actions of the US helped the Cuban people to become more conscious of their country’s previous subordination to American imperialism.

7.1 Permanent Revolution or Revolution by Stages?

Leon Trotsky was the first to give a full theoretical explanation of the theory of the permanent revolution as applied to a ‘backward’ country. The revolution would have to be ‘permanent’ in two regards: it would start with the national democratic tasks, but these could be fully achieved only if the leaders of the revolution took the first steps towards socialism. The bourgeois democratic revolution could be successful only if it flowed into the socialist, and the socialist revolution, while beginning on a national scale is completed on the world arena; the “construction of an independent socialist society in any single country in the world is impossible”.46

The alternative to the theory of the permanent revolution, was a revival of the class collaborationist theory of stages, promoted by Stalin to protect the rising bureaucracy within the Russian Communist Party. These bureaucrats were accumulating material privileges due to their position within the party and state, and wanted to be left in peace to enjoy them. They convinced themselves that only war with an advanced imperialist power could dislodge them and so were utterly opposed to the theory of permanent revolution, which argued that, for the Russian workers’ state to survive, the proletarian revolution had to spread internationally, seeking the help of the mighty working classes in the advanced capitalist countries. Lenin’s view, expressed many times, that the final victory of socialism in a single country was “impossible”47 and “inconceivable”48 was written out of history, as was his argument that the Russian revolution had to spread to Western Europe or it would eventually succumb to capitalist counter-revolution.

By 1959, the theory of the permanent revolution had, apparently, been buried by wholesale massacres in the Soviet Union, the murders of such Marxists as Trotsky and Mella, and an international campaign in which those opposing Stalin were labelled the running dogs of fascism, for whom a thorough beating was too good. Such gangster methods can never resolve a theoretical question because it will keep rearing its head in new guises.

The theory of stages would, apart from a sudden lurch to the left in the late 1920s, imposed by internal Russian considerations, flow into the People’s Front, then Peaceful Co-existence, and finally the downfall of the Soviet Union. It was not war that overthrew the workers’ states, but higher levels of productivity under capitalism, and better quality goods.

Stalin’s approach was both schematic and formalistic, epitomised by the argument that, because the revolution in a ‘backward’ country had as its immediate objectives bourgeois democratic goals, the national bourgeoisie would not, could not, betray its ‘own’ revolution. Thus, there was a unity of interests between the national bourgeoisie, petty-bourgeoisie, workers and peasants (referred to in the Chinese Revolution as the ‘bloc of four classes’) against the common enemy, imperialism. Unfortunately, to keep the national bourgeoisie on side and preserve the unity of the Popular Front, it was necessary for the workers and peasants to restrict their demands to what was acceptable to the national bourgeoisie.

There was no historical justification for this argument, indeed the facts of the Russian Revolution, demonstrated just the opposite. The first application of the theory was in China during the 1925 revolutionary upsurge. Its application led to the defeat of the revolution and the deaths of tens of thousands of Chinese revolutionaries and Communists. The Chinese national bourgeoisie, faced with revolution, discovered they had more in common with the imperialists than Chinese workers and peasants. For factional reasons, to protect their interests, the Russian party bureaucracy stood reality on its head and hailed the defeat as proof of the correctness of the new theory, which was then enshrined in the programme of the Stalinised Communist International.49

In The Permanent Revolution, Trotsky wrote:

With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses.

The events which followed the seizure of power in Cuba are a striking confirmation of Trotsky’s theory because the M-26J leaders were forced to act in the opposite way they had intended. The Cuban Revolution, starting out as a bourgeois democratic revolution, was forced to move against capitalism to achieve its bourgeois-democratic aims. The development of the Cuban Revolution between 1959 and 1962 is a dramatic, practical confirmation of Trotsky’s theory.

In Cuba, the national bourgeoisie in their majority followed the example of their counterparts in China and elsewhere, and played no revolutionary role. The most direct agents of international capital were thoroughly hostile to the mass upsurges and did what they could to sabotage them, before finally going into exile. The ‘progressive’ bourgeoisie, those that remained in Cuba, attempted to subvert the revolutionary process through their influence within the coalition governments. Most of these would finally go abroad. A few tried to insert themselves into the state apparatus, hoping for an eventual turn in their direction.

Initially, the government tried to set a moderate pace, endeavouring to collaborate with the remaining capitalists and with the upper layers of the peasantry. What upset their plans, and forced them to take drastic action, was the hostile reaction of the US imperialists. The reality was that it was not possible to implement an advanced national democratic programme for Cuba without clashing head-on with the interests of the US, which controlled the country’s economy, and with the tightly-knit alliance of landlords and national bourgeoisie that were imperialism’s local lackeys.

In an interview in August 1960, Armando Hart, Minister of Education, emphasised this aspect of the process:

United States policy is forcing us to make our revolution much faster than we wanted to. It is a stupid policy, because the reaction is always the contrary of what the US wants. Communism was no problem here. If it is now, you (the US) created it by forcing us into policies for which we had no other choice.50

The Cubans were pushed into taking socialist measures to achieve their social goals, and the deepening of the social revolution dealt powerful shocks to the imperialists’ control of the economy.

The Cuban Stalinists, such as Blas Roca and Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, often spoke of the need to avoid the ‘super-revolutionary language’ of socialism, preferring to advance the theory of stages. Roca and Rodríguez conveniently forgot to mention that their own attempts to achieve agrarian reform and national sovereignty in Cuba, by following a stagist strategy, had failed dismally.

In Cuba, Trotsky has been completely verified. Those national movements in countries like India and Indonesia that won independence remain dependent on imperialism in the form of the international banks and imperialist powers for credit and other financial aid, including imperialist investment in the form of new factories which exploit cheap labour. Key aspects that show formal independence has brought neither real national emancipation nor real democracy are the ongoing impoverishment of the peasants, and treatment of women.

8. Bay of Pigs and the Rise of the Cuban Communist Party

‘Jack’ Kennedy became President in January 1961 and approved the existing plan for the CIA to find, fund and train, supposedly in absolute secrecy but, in reality in full view of the world, a small army of dissident exiles to invade Cuba and overthrow the new government. The plan was based on the false belief that there was widespread anti-Castro feeling across Cuba. A trial run took place in the autumn of 1960 when anti-Castro forces infiltrated into the Escambray mountains, supplied by CIA air-drops. But local militia, informed in advance of the adventure, combed the area, taking possession of the air-drops and capturing most, if not all, of the ‘bandits’. The CIA changed tack and proposed landing an ‘advance guard’ of 1,500, which would establish a bridgehead and trigger the expected popular anti-Castro revolt. On 17 April, 1961, the CIA launched the invasion at the Bay of Pigs (Playa Girón).

It was a disaster at every level. The Cuban army and local militia were prepared and waiting, the fighting was intense but lasted only two days. Of the 1,500 exiles who participated, over 100 were killed and nearly 1,200 were captured, the remnants fled back to the USA. The Cuban people rallied to their new government, which was now fully convinced that an alliance with the USSR, China, and Eastern Europe was the way forward. The youth of the world, and Latin America in particular, had witnessed the defeat of the US-backed invasion, had seen that US imperialism was not as powerful as it had once appeared. The new Cuba was there to stay.

Fidel made much of the social composition of the invaders: of those captured about 800 came from wealthy families who had owned, between them, two banks, five mines, ten sugar mills, seventy factories, nearly 10,000 houses and 370,000 hectares (almost a million acres) of land. Most of the officers were former soldiers of Batista. The class character of the invaders was presented as proof positive of the different class character of the new Cuba from the old.

Prior to the counter-revolutionary invasion at the Bay of Pigs the Cuban leaders generally had not described their actions as socialist, but on 16 April, 1961, at the funeral of the victims of a US-sponsored air-raid, Fidel and others openly proclaimed the revolution as socialist. At the May Day rally following the attempted invasion, Fidel declared to over a million Cubans; “This is a socialist regime, yes! Yes, this is a socialist regime”.51

In a televised address on 2 December, 1961, Fidel for the first time declared:

I am a Marxist-Leninist and shall be one until the end of my life… Marxism or scientific socialism has become the revolutionary movement of the working class

This was welcomed by revolutionaries world-wide as a proclamation of a socialist Cuba with a socialist government. In 1963, Fidel gave more details about his transition:

It was a gradual process, a dynamic process in which the pressure of events forced me to accept Marxism as the answer to what I was seeking… So, as events developed, I gradually moved into a Marxist-Leninist position. I cannot tell you just when; the process was so gradual and so natural.52

There is a current within academia which promotes the line that Mao, Castro and others gained power by deception; that they hid their true goals behind popular demands, and that, if the populations of China and Cuba had known their real motives, they would have stuck with Uncle Sam’s nominees. On one occasion Fidel was asked, “If you had announced that you were a Marxist and openly espoused a socialist program while you were still a guerrilla leader in the Sierra Maestra, do you think you still would have been able to come to power?” Fidel responded, “Possibly not. It would not have been intelligent to bring about such an open confrontation”.

It cannot be denied that, in Cuba in 1957, proclaiming socialism would have been unpopular because of the enormous damage done to the reputation of socialism, of communism, by the record of Stalinism in the Soviet Union and in Cuba, where the PCC had supported Batista. However, what is a ‘socialist programme’? Did Lenin’s demands for ‘Bread, Peace and Land’ constitute a ‘socialist programme’?

Fidel Castro was no Trotskyist, and had no concept of transitional demands, demands which solve the problems actually faced by the workers and peasants and lead naturally to a socialist transformation of society. In the reality of a Cuba dominated by United Fruit, had “Land to those that work it” not become a transitional demand? What these academics fail to grasp is that, in the era of imperialism, it is necessary to take the first steps towards socialism in order to fully carry out the democratic revolution. Failing to understand the theory of the permanent revolution, they cannot comprehend how a democratic revolution can end up as socialist, feeling that somehow they’ve been cheated. In their vanity, they cannot see the fault is their own lack of comprehension; instead they label Castro as a deceiver.

It was sensible of Fidel to avoid misunderstandings and, of course, he had been repelled by the record of the PCC. Ideological debates were not his strong point, he was a man of action and the revolution moved forward under the slogan: armed struggle to overthrow Batista. Some might argue this was a particular form of a single issue campaign, and on that basis the M-26J avoided programmatic debates that would have differentiated the anti-Batista groupings.

To protect the Cuban Revolution it was the right and duty of the Castro team to establish whatever economic and military agreements with the Soviet Union they deemed necessary. The problem was the extent of political subordination to the bureaucracy. When Fidel gave unqualified praise to the USSR and its leaders, he did a great disservice to the struggle of the worker and peasant masses. He undermined the struggle of revolutionists everywhere against the bureaucratic counter-revolution and Stalinism.

When the new regime broke with capitalism, the model it emulated was not that of Soviet Russia of 1917, but that of the Stalinist Russia of 1961 where all traces of soviet democracy and workers’ control had long been eradicated. Cuba’s top leaders claimed that they were the government of the workers, peasants and students and it was true that the strength of the masses had brought them to power. However, the guerrilla struggle gave a top-down form to the new government that fitted well with the Russian system, but contained no mechanism by which the masses were organised as the supreme and legal state power. If the masses were to hold power, a new style of state apparatus was needed. To match the soviet democracy of Lenin, it would be necessary to transfer authority to the revolutionary mass organisations, comprised of elected representatives.

The Stalinists of the PCC had organisational experience that was generally lacking, this together with the weight of the Soviet Union in Cuban affairs, meant they were being promoted within the state apparatus. The second CTC-R Congress was held in November 1961, two years after the first, and in that time a seasoned communist leader, Lazaro Peña, had been appointed as chairperson, and would remain in post until his death, in 1974.

The Bay of Pigs invasion brought a regime crack-down on all those seen as oppositionists or dissenters. At this time, the POR(T) was preparing to publish Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed. In May 1961, an issue of the POR(T) paper, Voz Proletaria, made a number of criticisms of the process by which the Cuban Communist Party was being formed. The paper was seized, then the printing presses were closed down and the plates for the book smashed. Those who produced and sold subsequent duplicated editions of the paper were arrested and imprisoned on the grounds that they were calling for a provocative march on the Guantánamo naval base to expel the imperialists, a claim that has been vigorously denied.53

While supporting the new regime, and limiting their criticisms to what they perceived to be distortions within the post-1959 revolutionary order, the POR(T) raised two important questions, both focused on the need for soviet democracy, and based on Lenin’s argument that, in the initial phase of a workers’ state, it was necessary to have trade unions separate from the state, “to protect the workers from their state”.54

Stemming from the May Day declaration that Cuba was a socialist country, there was a common agreement amongst Trotskyist organisations that a constitution based on a government representing workers’ organisations or councils was needed. Also stemming from the May Day declaration, was a general agreement that this representative workers’ government must be led by a mass revolutionary party, open to the most class-conscious and active revolutionary fighters. The leadership of this party could be none other than the Castro team, but the new constitution should provide for a regime of genuine workers’ democracy, in which all tendencies supporting the revolution had full freedom of expression and association. Trotskyists should be allowed to organise as a propaganda group because Trotskyism represented the continuation of revolutionary theory and practice and should be permitted to be a tendency within the new revolutionary party.

The POR(T) called for free elections within, e.g. the Cuban trade unions, and for the right of all tendencies supporting the regime to be allowed to stand for office. Such a demand is, of course, a necessity for soviet democracy. However, it is quite impossible for such a process to be effective without the right of those standing for office to organise. The POR(T) defended the right of all working-class parties and tendencies which supported the revolution and defended the workers’ state to an open and legal existence. They argued that the masses should have the right to choose their representatives from among these revolutionary tendencies and positions.55

The round of arrests and imprisonment reflected the growing political weight of the pro-Moscow Stalinists, but Fidel had already expressed a similar attitude in response to the raising of different opinions at the September 1959 CTC-R Congress. The difficulty facing the POR(T) or any other revolutionary group supporting the revolution, but wanting to correct its deficiencies by calling for soviet democracy, was that there was no party or other structure within which they could express their views.

8.1 The 1962 Missile Crisis

The Kennedy administration remained committed to the overthrow of the Castro regime, but the Bay of Pigs disaster had cured them of any intention of invading Cuba; instead, they put their efforts into diplomatic and economic sabotage. Nevertheless, after April 1961, the Cuban leadership welcomed the protection of the Soviet bureaucracy and, to strengthen the alliance, the Soviet Union was allowed to establish missile bases in Cuba as a deterrent to a US invasion. For the Soviet leadership, these bases were to balance the numerous US missile sites in countries such as Turkey and Italy aimed at the Soviet Union. This led to the so-called Cuban missile crisis of October 1962.

Initial discussions between Soviet and Cuban military leaders provisionally agreed a Soviet presence of: 42,000 soldiers; Mig fighters; Ilyushin bombers; fast, lightweight missile carrying boats; surface-to-air missile batteries; and a total of forty intermediate range missiles with nuclear warheads. The missile bases were detected by American U2 spy planes while under construction. In the face-off between President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev that followed, the missiles were removed in exchange for the removal of US missiles from Turkey, and a verbal undertaking from Kennedy that he would not sanction a US invasion of the island – though pirate raids by exiles continued along Cuba’s coast for more than a decade. The Cuban political leaders were not involved in the decision to remove the missiles. Indeed, some authors, such as Gott, insist they were not even involved in the original decision to site the missiles in Cuba.

Khrushchev handled the Missiles Crisis as a bilateral USSR-USA deal, with no reference to Havana. This gave the Castro leadership serious qualms over entrusting their future security exclusively to Moscow. In response, the early 1960s saw the Fidelistas seeking to establish and maintain a degree of political independence, both with regard to Latin American politics and within the ‘world socialist movement’. But the Soviet Union’s economic stranglehold on Cuba was overwhelming and, increasingly, Cuba was forced to agree that its foreign policy decisions be co-ordinated with the Soviet Union. The close working relationship between the Cuban and Soviet armed forces not only helped strengthen the Stalinist and bureaucratic currents within Cuba but there were parallel links between the Soviet KGB and the Cuban equivalent, the DGI. Finally, the process of bureaucratisation would have a serious and negative impact on the leaders of the Cuban Revolution, especially regarding the democratic movements that would arise in Eastern Europe.

8.2 Che Fails to Export the Revolution to Latin America

Khrushchev’s deal with the US at the time of the 1962 missile crisis made the Cuban leaders deeply suspicious of the USSR. Pushed by Che Guevara, the Cubans attempted to spread the revolution to other countries in Latin America and beyond, something which clashed with the policy of ‘peaceful coexistence’ pursued by the Soviet Union as well as with the profoundly conservative outlook of most of the Latin American Communist Parties. Che announced:

There are no frontiers in this struggle to the death. We cannot remain indifferent in the face of what occurs in any part of the world. A victory for any country against imperialism is our victory, just as any country’s defeat is our defeat… The socialist countries have the moral duty of liquidating their tacit complicity with the exploiting countries of the West.56

The period between 1963 and 1971 was one of widespread ideological and political ferment in Cuba. The discussions and debates can – at the risk of doing damage to the reality – be divided into four:

• Extending the revolution to the rest of Latin America through guerrilla action, which ended with the death of Che in 1967.
• The introduction of soviet realism in art and culture generally, which generated widespread resistance especially in cinema and film.
• The struggle against Stalinism led by the Philosophy Department in Havana University, which ended with the closure of the department and the dispersal of its staff in 1971.
• Che’s differences with Stalinists such as Carlos Rafael Rodríguez on whether it was possible to develop a socialist consciousness and industrial productivity simultaneously.

Che is best known for his “two, three, many Vietnams” message to the Tricontinental Conference in 1967 (made all the more significant by his death in the October), in which he appeared to have come to the same conclusions on the nature of the national bourgeoisie as Mella:

[T]he indigenous bourgeoisies have lost all their capacity to oppose imperialism – if they ever had it – and they have become the last card in the pack. There are no other alternatives; either a socialist revolution or a make-believe revolution.57

During Che’s life and until about a year after his death, Fidel showed a significant degree of independence from the Kremlin. During this time, he (and Che) still believed that rural guerrilla war on the Cuban model could be successful in other Latin American countries. Clearly, Fidel and Che saw the Cuban Revolution as part of the Latin American revolution and, more widely, as part of the struggle of the colonial peoples against imperialism. This concept clashed head-on with the foreign policy of the Soviet bureaucracy and led to a conflict in many Communist parties on the continent. However, the Cubans lacked an understanding of the need for a revolutionary party, and the emphasis on guerrilla action in opposition to the official Communist Parties, meant a continental-wide debate between those supporting the guerrilla line and the more orthodox communists.

This debate was carried on in the open. The issues were posed in terms of men of action leading rural guerrilla warfare having final command of the course of the struggle, which was the subordination of politics to the tactics of rural guerrilla warfare. Fidel made this the subject of a major speech: ‘Those who are not revolutionary fighters cannot be called Communists’, on 13 March, 1967, at the University of Havana.58 The speech was immediately denounced by the Political Bureau of the Partido Communista de Venezuela (PCV), which, soon after, under strong pressure from Moscow, officially renounced armed struggle.59 The Cubans affirmed the need for the masses to take the road of armed struggle and condemned the decision of the Venezuelan Communists to revert to electoral politics and peaceful coexistence.

The PCV advanced as their strongest arguments the need for a revolutionary party, and for the revolutionary vanguard to maintain its ties with the masses in the cities which, in his speech, Fidel had declared “an absurdity”. The Cubans were inexperienced in this kind of debate and, by default, the Stalinists were able to obscure the essential question of whether a revolutionary struggle was necessary to achieve socialism or it could be achieved by peaceful co-existence. In this factional struggle, when the votes were counted, the supporters of the Cuban line ended up a small minority, not only in Venezuela, but throughout Latin America. Nowhere in Latin America did the Cubans succeed in grouping around themselves new forces of a size and quality capable of launching a struggle on the Cuban model. Once again, the Cubans showed their limitations; no attempt was made to draw a balance sheet of the political lessons of the struggle and of the political role of Stalinism – see Castro’s attack on Trotskyism at the Tricontinental Conference in Havana in January 1966, and his support for Russian tanks to put down the Czech spring.

The top leaders of the PCV had moved towards an understanding with the Venezuelan government under which they would be released in exchange for stopping the guerrilla war. The rationale offered for this change of course was that conditions for guerrilla warfare had been proved absent in Venezuela, and that the correct policy was to build a mass party within the existing legal framework.

The PCV had signed a ‘conciliatory document’ on 7 November, 1965, but delayed announcing its retreat until the following year. The PCV view of guerrilla warfare in Venezuela was as a means to push forward a general politically reformist perspective. As a strategy for guerrilla warfare, such an approach was ineffective and bound to fail; and guerrilla leaders like Douglas Bravo, who bucked against it, were deprived of food, medical supplies, clothing and ammunition, and were even accused of being traitors to the revolution and provocateurs. It turned out that the PCV move in 1963 to support guerrilla war had been a cynical ploy to frighten the oligarchy into inviting the PCV to become part of the government. The Eighth Plenum of the PCV, held during the first two weeks in April 1967, formally agreed to end the guerrilla line and to participate in the coming 1968 elections under the slogan ‘democratic peace’ behind a candidate of ‘national unification’. It was at this meeting that Bravo was expelled.

Fidel had led a successful revolution in 1959, so why was it that his current ended up in a small minority? The Cubans had made a socialist revolution, but the US and the local leaders had learned their lessons, as Che’s death had tragically demonstrated. Now the objective situation in the countries of Latin America demanded mass mobilisations based on transitional demands. The Cuban leaders, the ‘men of action’, had scorned theory and were now doubly reluctant to draw a balance sheet of Stalinism, as they had to rely on aid from the Soviet Union for the survival of the revolution.

The attempts to export the revolution failed. US imperialism had learned a lesson in Cuba and had no intention of again being taken by surprise; it had invested heavily and had in place the necessary means to isolate and quickly defeat any small band of guerrillas. Che’s attempt led to his death at the hands of US imperialism, and caused the Cubans to re-assess their guerrilla warfare line. The period from after Che’s death in Bolivia in October 1967 to the failure of the ten-million ton sugar harvest in 1970 was one of transition for the Fidelista leadership at the end of which the Cubans had themselves ditched guerrilla warfare as a means of overthrowing the imperialist-backed regimes in Latin America.

The failure of Che’s attempt to spread the revolution, and Russian pressure, had made the Cubans draw back from the guerrilla line and re-oriented their efforts; they no longer backed OLAS (Organisation for Latin American Solidarity launched by the Cubans as part of their guerrilla strategy). Fidel adopted a new line much more in accord with Moscow’s strategy of peaceful coexistence: OLAS faded from the scene leaving those who were actively engaged in rural guerrilla warfare to bitterly decry the Cubans for letting slip what they saw as a historic opportunity.

However, there are none so blind as those that will not see, and a number of dedicated militants determinedly pursued the rural guerrilla line. One such was ‘Inti’ Peredo who, before he went into action declared: “We will build an armed force. We are not trying to build a political party”. The September-October, 1968, New Left Review carried an article by Peredo: ‘Guerrilla warfare in Bolivia is not dead: it has just begun’. Within a year Peredo and many of his supporters were dead, hundreds more were imprisoned and tortured. The guerrillas in Bolivia, far from being the motor force that would carry the revolution to victory, suffered a terrible defeat. Many cadres were killed needlessly in a hopeless venture.

Fidel Castro’s new political line meant he dampened correct and necessary criticisms previously made of the Latin American Communist Parties, objectively helping to maintain illusions in those parties and their reformist and opportunist policies. Worse still, he took completely wrong positions toward certain bourgeois regimes in Latin America, staying silent about the repression of workers and revolutionists, creating confusion about the role to be played by bourgeois sectors in the Latin American revolution. Behind all this were the profoundly opportunistic conceptions of the Moscow bureaucracy of alliances with the ‘national bourgeoisie’. Fidel’s contributions in these areas were all the more harmful for being made by a leader who, to his credit, had the historic achievement of having established the first and only workers’ state on the American continent.

Fidel was re-opening a question that his own revolution had answered very definitely. What is the nature of the revolutions now on the agenda in Latin American countries? To fall in line with official Soviet ideology the lessons of recent history were ignored. The reality of the Cuban Revolution had demonstrated that, in the era of imperialism, there would be no separate bourgeois-democratic stage, that to complete the bourgeois-democratic tasks the revolution had to take the first steps towards socialism. But Castro and the Cuban leaders were now accepting the contrary, stagist analysis of Blas Roca and Carlos Rafael Rodríguez.60

Despite his huge contribution at the level of practice, Fidel Castro made no contribution to the theory of Marxism. The M-26J programme was limited, an action programme, based on the experiences of the Cuban Revolution, i.e., rural guerrilla warfare. Fidel never understood some of the most important lessons and experiences of the world working-class movement, in particular the Bolshevik Revolution led by Lenin and Trotsky and the growth of counter-revolutionary Stalinism. This lack of understanding was expressed in Fidel’s failure to establish any democratic-centralist party in Cuba, in the lack of a democratic government based upon workers’ and peasants’ soviets. While wholeheartedly supporting the Cuban workers’ state against imperialism it is necessary to understand its political weaknesses: lack of workers’ democracy, and acceptance of Stalinist organisation, methods and theory.

Without workers’ democracy the question of who was to hold the government to account needed answering. The Cuban government functioned by decree and posts were filled by appointment rather than by elections and decisions of representative bodies. To the degree that Cuba remained constrained by its need for aid from the Soviet bureaucracy, it was inevitable that bureaucratic tendencies would develop and increase. What was needed was a form of proletarian democracy based on organs of a soviet type, councils elected by the workers and peasants with members subject to immediate recall and structured in such a way as to form the real backbone of the workers’ state.

This was a fundamental deficiency that could not be compensated for by the prestige of Fidel Castro and the direct ties he and other leaders attempted to maintain with the masses, nor by the existence of other organs that played only a partial role. For instance, on May Day 1960 Fidel spoke to a packed Plaza de la Revolución praising the new militias and warning of an impending US invasion. He took the opportunity to declare that, if he died, his brother Raúl would take his place as prime minister. There was no need for any election since the people ruled Cuba already. The crowd cheered, repeating the slogan ‘Cuba Sí! Yanqui No!’ and adding, ‘Revolución Sí! Elecciones No!’. Under threat from US imperialism, it was correct for the new government to take preventative measures, but this episode strikingly illustrates the lack of conscious collective control and management of government by the masses through their own democratic organisations. Instead, it demonstrated the plebiscitary character of the new government.

By 1962, the lack of involvement in decision-making had led to high levels of absenteeism in the workplaces. Che analysed the problem and declared:

We have fallen behind in trying to get the workers involved… Who is guilty? They are clearly not guilty. We, the ministry, and the labour leaders are guilty… we have become perfect bureaucrats… Why did the massive tasks to be undertaken by the working class always appear as bureaucratic initiatives? … What could we do in order to get the working class participating in their workplaces’ leadership?61

But in the factories, as elsewhere, there was a hierarchical scale in the decision-making process. The workers had ‘the last word’, but only because they were the last to be consulted. What arrived at the workplaces were totally worked-out plans, already decided, to which the workers could only say yes. The factory managers might, or might not, take notice of their comments. At best, workers could suggest improvements, but there were no means by which they could question the premises of the plan or propose an alternative. This was a ‘road to socialism’ without basic democratic rights for the workers. The leadership had become self-selecting with virtually unlimited authority to make plans and enforce them, according to their own presumption of what was best for the people. The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe knew well enough that such a road generated nothing but apathy amongst the workers. For bureaucrats, perhaps, that was not such a bad thing.

Nor can it be claimed that the regime based itself in practice on democratic centralism as Lenin conceived it. For the first fifteen years of its formal existence, the Cuban Communist Party was almost completely inactive outside of the Politburo. The 100-person Central Committee rarely met, and it was ten years after its founding that the first regular Party Congress was held. During that time and still, the differences discussed in the leadership bodies are kept from the masses. Most damaging was that the USSR exported to an already chaotic, disorganised and backward Cuban economy, its own defective model of bureaucratic deformation and mismanagement. Despite tokens of ‘workers’ control’ in planning decisions, Cuban workers (urban and rural) enjoyed less and less real control over the economy. The Cuban workers were becoming a part of a Stalinised economy, headed by a Stalinised party and state machine.

1967 was the last year in which many of the activists who had placed such hope in the Cuban revolution gave it unqualified support. The reason was the Cuban government’s endorsement of the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 to put down the revolutionary, democratic and anti-Stalinist upsurge that threatened to install Soviet democracy.

8.3 Creation of the Cuban Communist Party: the Escalante Affair

The transition to a workers’ state had, quite naturally, caused divisions within the M-26J, resulting in increasing collaboration of the left wing of the M-26J (essentially the military wing led by Fidel and Raúl Castro, Che Guevara, etc., fewer than 3,000 persons), the DR and the PSP (by far the most numerous of the three groups with as many as 15,000 members) on practical tasks such as building the militia. Subsequently, the three groups would merge into the PCC, a process that took several years. With time, the initial, occasional, meetings became more regular and, in the summer of 1961, the three groups fused to become the Integrated Revolutionary Organisations (Organizaciones Revolucionarias Integradas – ORI), then the United Party of the Socialist Revolution, and finally the Communist Party of Cuba on 3 October, 1965. To mark the occasion Hoy closed and Granma emerged as the new Party newspaper.

The PSP was very much the conservative wing of the new Party; in the discussions on how to progress the agrarian reforms, Castro and Guevara were for converting the sugar cane estates into state farms, but the PSP pushed for the sub-division of the land without collectivisation, strengthening the individualistic tendencies of the peasantry. Nor did the PSP favour the general nationalisation of business enterprises. On the very day Fidel was proclaiming the expropriation without indemnification of foreign industries, the leadership meeting of the PSP was discussing only moderate reforms.

However, the Castro leadership team badly needed a disciplined political body to support the government. The M-26J was a heterogeneous and amorphous collection of militants, and the leadership turned to the old Cuban communists, who had organisational skills and experience, but had been trained in Stalinist ‘democratic centralism’. Their practice of blind trust in the top leaders, and their conviction that socialism must be built from above, were qualities that meshed well with the top-down practices of the guerrillas. It was noticed that Fidel had delayed the merger of the M-26J, the DR and the PSP until 1965, after all the major social and economic changes had already been implemented under his leadership and control.

During this period, there began a process of bureaucratisation. The task of setting up the ORI had been given to Anibal Escalante, Secretary the PSP who, in a sectarian and partisan manner, attempted to prepare the way for himself and the PSP to take control of the new party and, through it, the government of Cuba.

Using his authority within the ORI, Escalante began to remove from power revolutionaries who had gained their positions because of their activities during the revolution and thus had a degree of independence. His aim was to create an apparatus in which there would be minimal participation by those who were capable of independent thought or action. What was not on the agenda was a mass Marxist-Leninist party, one that was alive, dynamic, comprised of the most politically advanced workers, which would make democratic decisions and eliminate bureaucracy.

Escalante was intent on creating a structure that integrated the Fidelistas into a Stalinist-controlled party. In the provincial committees of the ORI and at lower levels too, Escalante appointed former PSP functionaries to leadership posts, and called for extending the party organisation inside the armed forces. Escalantismo grew in strength in the mass organisations such as in the CTC-R, where the Communist Party had a base. Escalante’s clear objective was to have Stalinists as the key personnel of the new party so that they would be able to control the National Directorate despite having only ten of twenty-eight seats.

Escalantismo was an extreme form of the bureaucratic layer that was starting to emerge in Cuba. Grounds for bureaucratic growth were present in the objective situation – shortages of goods, relative economic backwardness, a capitalist world environment, the ongoing US blockade and, most important, Cuba’s dependence on the bureaucratised Soviet Union.

The so-called Escalante Affair, was the response of the Fidelistas to the damage caused by Escalante and an attempt to avoid similar problems in the future. A policy of separating the party from day-to-day state administration was introduced, the right to free discussion was declared. But these attempts, welcome as they were, were made within the top-down structure that had been inherited from the guerrilla movement. A small group of people retained the power to say what was to be done and how to do it. Their intentions may have been the very best but methods such as these were counter-productive and eroded the only basis on which the transition to socialism can take place, the full, democratic and conscious participation of all Cuban workers and peasants.

The contradiction between a top-down and democratic approach was made clear in the attempts to draw workers into the party. The Fidelistas called mass meetings in factories to motivate workers to join the party. The declared intention was to recruit into the party many of those radicalised by the revolution, to recruit dedicated revolutionaries and to link the party more closely to the masses. What actually happened was that the names of selected ‘model workers’ were placed in a pool from which recruits to the party were drawn and, as with so much else in Cuba, the fact that this was a top-down process meant those selected were largely determined by local secretaries, who picked those most suited to their purposes.

Stalinist politics within the new party were not eliminated after Escalante was removed from his position, because former PSP and M-26J members, who were conscious supporters of Stalin and Stalinism, remained influential. Carlos Franqui, a participant in the M-26J and the Cuban Revolution alongside Fidel and Che, but who later fled Cuba, claims Raúl Castro was the leader of this current. He reports that at one meeting Raúl shouted: “Nobody offends Stalin when I’m around!” taking his jacket off and squaring up for a fight to stop any continued criticism of his hero.62

The way the revolution had triumphed, through the leadership of a guerrilla army, played a role in the bureaucratic nature of the state after the revolution. As Fidel explained: “a war is not led through collective, democratic methods, it is based on the responsibility of command”.63 Unfortunately, this attitude extended into the post-war period and was reinforced by the Bay of Pigs invasion and the undeclared war that is the blockade by the USA.

After the revolutionary victory, the leadership had huge authority and widespread support. However, there were no mechanisms of revolutionary democracy through which ideas could be debated and discussed and, above all, through which the masses of workers and peasants could exercise their own power and hold their leaders to account. The Castro-led forces came to power with a great deal of popular support, prestige, and credibility, but the M-26J was very far from a classical Marxist workers’ movement engaged in self-emancipation. Fidel’s radical policies were passed down to the masses, who could then express their support. This constituted a serious obstacle to raising the political consciousness of the Cuban people, reducing their understanding of the necessity of their active participation in all decision-making.

In February 1963, the ORI itself was dissolved and replaced by the United Party of the Socialist Revolution (Partido Unido de la Revolución Socialista, PURS). The National Directorate of the new party was the same as for the ORI, with the exception of Escalante. But now, the Fidelistas were aware of the importance of retaining the organisational reins in their hands and only one of the six members of the Secretariat was from the PSP. It is claimed that, as a result of this struggle during 1962-63, the ORI expelled about half its membership in a succession of purges to eliminate Escalante’s influence.64

In 1964, to drive home the lesson of who was in charge, the Fidelistas placed a prominent Stalinist, one ‘Marquitos’ Rodriguez, on trial for crimes against the revolution committed under Batista. In the mid-1950s the PSP had assigned informers and provocateurs to disrupt the activities of the student DR. In the summer of 1957, Marquitos had supplied the police with the whereabouts of four leading DR members, who were then immediately gunned down. Marquitos was brought to trial, found guilty and sentenced to death. Veteran PSP leader Joaquín Ordoqui, member of the ORI Directorate, was arrested and expelled from the party for his role in concealing the affair. Ordoqui later died in jail.

Rejection of Stalinism was very strong among a generation of revolutionaries who had come to Marxism through their own experience in the Cuban Revolution. The team of the Philosophy Department at Havana University, for instance, rejected the Soviet manuals of ‘Marxism-Leninism’, and worked out their own curriculum based on the study of the original texts of Marx, Engels, Lenin and the classical philosophers. The same group of revolutionaries (most of them young) began publishing a magazine, Critical Thought (Pensamiento Crítico), in which they debated, in an open and critical manner, different versions of Marxism, trying to break with the ossified, distorted and anti-Marxist version they were getting from the Soviet Union. In the field of arts, culture and cinema there were sharp public polemics against the attempt of the Stalinists to impose ‘Soviet realism’ and censorship of anything that deviated from it.

In 1964, Cuba and the USSR signed a new trade agreement. The Soviets were committed to purchase 2.1 million tons of sugar in 1965 at the preferential price of US$287 million. For the next five years, it would increase annually the amount of Cuban sugar it purchased. The sugar was now expected to provide adequate foreign exchange earnings to enable the purchase and importation of modern machinery and equipment. The obverse was a return by Cuba to a one-crop economy.

There was a minor hiccup in 1968 when Escalante, having returned from diplomatic service in the Cuban embassy in Czechoslovakia, raised his head again to found a ‘micro-faction’, which made wide-ranging criticisms of the party and its functioning: that no-one listened to the members, and too much depended upon Fidel’s personal views; in the economy, there was too much emphasis on ‘moral’ incentives and ‘voluntary’ labour, and not enough on material incentives. Escalante and eight others were purged from the party, accused of organising a faction, which was treated as a crime. This was a clear warning that organised opposition, criticism or disagreement with the official political line was not going to be tolerated. To many, this was an attack on Stalinism. That was the appearance, but not the content; this was an attack on party democracy, a demonstration by Fidel that he intended to maintain his personal pre-eminence and a degree of independence from the USSR.

The Cuban leadership perceived the family as, primarily, an economic institution, appreciating that, with it (and private property), the oppression of women came into being. They believed that it is necessary to see the family as an economic unit if one wants to end the oppression of women. Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, argued that, to free women, it was necessary to: 1) end their economic dependence on their husbands; 2) get women out of the isolation of the home and into the workforce; 3) socialise traditional household chores done by women through the provision of childcare, public laundries, cafeterias, and other services; and 4) break the economic chains that bind family members together, so that relationships between people are based on affection and not economic necessity.

Starting in 1964, to help overcome the effects of the US blockade, the FMC began a campaign for women, on an unpaid and voluntary basis, to assist in the provision of health care and education systems, and to re-build agriculture by going into the countryside at weekends to pick crops. The response was generally good, and by 1968, the state had initiated a mass campaign under the slogan; ‘Women, the Revolution in the Revolution’ to get women either into the workforce, or to enrol on education programmes. The state was keen to increase the number of women in the workforce and, to that end, it carried out an extensive survey of the reasons for the lack of women applying for shop floor jobs in Cuban industry. Three reasons predominated: the first was that the pressures of housework, due to a lack of access to modern consumer goods, especially washing machines, made housework arduous and time-consuming; the other two showed the effect of the revolution – a much higher proportion of women entered the workforce as doctors, engineers, lawyers and technicians than, for example, in the USA because there was (and is) substantially more open access, and that women’s pay in Cuba does not suffer from the discriminatory practices experienced elsewhere so jobs in industry did not pay women substantially more than jobs elsewhere.

8.4 The Ten Million-ton Sugar Harvest

Economic dependence on the USSR inevitably meant a gradual adoption of the norms of the Soviet Union, both economic and political. This turn went through various stages, slowly at first with Fidel Castro’s public alignment with the Soviet Union in the Sino-Soviet dispute in early 1966, and accelerated rapidly after the ‘Ten Million-Ton’ sugar harvest in 1970, with the Cuban leadership openly adopting Moscow-inspired internal policies and structures.

Historically, Cuba had been the world’s major sugar producing country, but after 1959 the new government had adopted a policy of agricultural diversification and industrial renovation, which led to serious neglect of the sugar industry and would have exactly the opposite effect to that which was intended. The investment required for these new developments led to a serious trade deficit and economic pressures that could not be ignored. The only Cuban product the Russians wanted was sugar and, though they may have been relatively generous in the terms agreed and the price paid, there were two consequences unpalatable to the Cuban leaders: pressure to return to monoculture and increasing political control over their actions.

A large increase in sugar production became increasingly necessary if Cuba was to supply the Russians with the amounts agreed, and to have a surplus for sale on the global market to obtain the funds to buy urgently-needed western imports. In 1966, the leadership decided to turn Cuba once again into a sugar-exporting giant. The emphasis was to be on producing as much sugar as possible for sale on the world market, and to produce ten million tons a year by 1970. This latter aim might have seemed possible, given that in 1952 the harvest was more than 7 million tons, but the reforms of the intervening years, aimed at doing away with monoculture as the cause of poverty, had been taking Cuba in the opposite direction.

Thousands of hectares of planted sugar cane had been run down; the maintenance and repair of many sugar mills and associated sugarcane railroads had been neglected; over 200,000 experienced cane cutters had retired or been transferred to non-sugar activities between 1959 and 1964. These policies had caused a steady annual decrease in sugar production to 4.8 million tons in 1969.65

To meet the ten million-ton target required bringing back into production, not only all the sugar plantations that had been neglected, but placing substantial new acreage under sugar cultivation. Even then, the target was achievable only if modern agricultural techniques were used: irrigation expanded; increasing application of fertilisers and insecticides; replacing of the traditional sugarcane with varieties with higher yields; and mechanisation of harvesting. Unused railroads and sugar mills had to be reinstated and upgraded, and hundreds of thousands of cane cutters had to be found.

To prepare the population for the major mobilisation needed to harvest ten million tons of sugar, Fidel announced on 13 March, 1968, what he called the ‘The Great Revolutionary Offensive’, a measure intended to eliminate small private businesses and carry Cuba upwards onto the plane of economic self-sufficiency. This had strong similarities with the ‘high tide of socialist transformation’ in China, launched in October 1953, when private traders of all kinds, from street-hawkers to small retail shops, were merged into co-operative teams, and private markets in rural areas were banned. In Cuba in 1968, some 58,000 small businesses – including individual craftsmen, stalls and shops – were nationalised! Such wholesale measures, unless there are exceptional circumstances, are not part of Marxist economic thinking. This was a forced march to reach targets arbitrarily determined by the government.

The ‘Ten Million-Ton Harvest’ was a local version of the Maoist “great leap forward”, an adventure in the Stalinist tradition, attempting to overcome the limitations imposed by backwardness through the forced mobilisation of millions of ordinary Cubans. It was believed that enthusiasm and hard work would be sufficient to overcome the technical, engineering, economic, social and political problems faced by Cuban society. And, like Mao, who sacked Central Committee members who pointed out that the great leap forward was an inherently flawed project, Gott records how Fidel sacked Orlando Borrego, the sugar minister, for “faint-heartedness” for suggesting the target would be “almost impossible to reach”. Seasoned managers, administrators and technicians who had left the industry were hurriedly replaced with loyal and politically trustworthy, but inexperienced personnel.

The ten million-ton harvest was officially inaugurated in December 1969, but the technical difficulties in achieving the target, as in China, proved to be greater than could be overcome by exhorting the masses to undertake extra work. Some of these technical difficulties bordered on the ludicrous and demonstrated the inherent failings of top-down control – modern machines from the Soviet Union replaced the now antiquated mill machinery from North America and/or Western Europe, but were significantly larger and there was not enough space within the mills for the workers to operate them.

Other failings were more obvious; the total area planted was insufficient to produce ten million tons; there were insufficient supplies of fertilisers; mechanisation of sugar cane collection was inadequate; the shortfall in professional cane cutters was addressed by using industrial workers, students, housewives, professionals and about 100,000 members of the armed forces (FAR). These may have been committed revolutionaries but mostly they were ignorant of cane cutting and caused immense damage to the harvest. In some areas, the harvested sugar was of such a poor quality due to contamination with leaves and the ends of stalks that cane collection centres had to be established to eliminate the debris before transferring the cut cane to the mills.  

Workers were pushed to participate through a massive propaganda campaign in the government-controlled media, in the mass organisations, in schools, and work centres, all devoted to: Los Diez Millones Van. But bureaucratic miscalculation, mismanagement and lack of sober planning undermined this heroic effort. By the end of the 1970 harvest, more than one million people had worked in the cutting, loading and transporting of the sugar cane.66

The concentration of all resources and energies into achieving a 10 million-ton sugar harvest had adverse effects on production in many other sectors of the economy, and economic dependence upon the Soviet Union increased. Personnel and transport were taken from key sectors in order to cut cane. Farmers were forced to change from raising cattle to producing sugar cane. Meat, milk and even cement supplies were about twenty-five per cent less than in 1968, and supplies of construction steel fell by thirty-eight per cent. The mismatch between promises made by the government and the actual harvest meant that, in 1971, domestic consumption of sugar per capita was rationed to one kilo (two pounds) a month in order to meet export obligations.   

Turning the harvest into the sole objective of every agency and mass organisation promoted the disorganisation of society more than the organisation of the harvest. The 1970 harvest achieved, at most, 8,500,000 tons and occupied the lives of the Cuban people for an entire year; the total social and economic cost of the 1970 harvest will never be fully known. In September 1970, the failure to meet the ten million-ton target had to be faced. Fidel, in a surprise admission, declared that democratisation of party and trade union bodies was necessary to stop such a mistake happening again. It was a dramatic admission. It came to nothing. By 1975, the sugar harvest had returned to more normal levels – 5.4 million tons.

Having failed to achieve the ten million-ton sugar harvest, the regime pulled back from its more radical domestic and international policies. The leadership adopted a new, Soviet-like economic policy, abandoning the primacy of moral incentives as ‘idealist mistakes’, and publicly acknowledged and defended pay differentials (which are quite acceptable in a workers’ state) into which category they placed the privileges that accrued to elite office-holders in the Party and state hierarchy (which are quite unacceptable in a workers’ state).

However, Fidel’s reputation did not suffer in the way that Mao’s did after the collapse of the Great Leap Forward, for two reasons; he frankly and honestly admitted that mistakes had been made, and there was no mass famine as in China. Nor did Cuba’s reputation suffer internationally – if anything, it was enhanced by the efforts of the Cuban people to rise to the challenges facing them. However, it was the undeniable failure of the ten million-ton harvest, which gave the USSR and its supporters the specific weight to pull Castro into line and place its own adherents into positions of power.

9. The ‘Grey Years’ – Restructuring Cuba in the Russian Image

The failure of the harvest meant the domination of Moscow escalated. Increasingly, Russian technicians, economists, academics and diplomats flooded into Cuba. By the summer of 1972, it was estimated that there were ten thousand Russians in Havana alone.67 English, the traditional business language of Cuba was replaced by Russian. Kosygin, the Russian premier came, and toured factories being built with Russian aid. In July, Cuba formally joined COMECON, accepting full integration of the Cuban economy with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In December, a fifteen-year deal was signed in which the Russians agreed to pay an increased price for sugar, provide US$350 million in credit spread over three years, and allow debts to be repaid over twenty-five years, interest free.

The economic and political changes were accompanied on the cultural level by ideological subjugation. These were the dreadful Five Grey Years (Quinquenio Gris; 1971-1975). It was at this time that homophobia, discrimination and harassment of gay men became institutionalised. The Philosophy Department of Havana University and the journal Pensamiento Critico were closed, social sciences were practically banned. In the field of arts and culture, there was repression and censorship to impose Stalinist thinking. Any difference of opinion with official thinking was suppressed, and self-censorship became the norm, laying the base for future indifference or aversion to official ideology.

On 27 April, in the evening, at the headquarters of the Cuban Writers and Artists Association (UNEAC), the poet, Heberto Padilla and his wife (the poet Cuza Malé), surrounded by members of the security forces, were made to publicly humiliate themselves, in a scene that was all too reminiscent of the Moscow show trials. Padilla, repented his recent book Out of the Game (Fuera del juego) declaring himself a “bourgeois writer, unworthy of being read by the workers”. He implicated other artists and writers, who then had to criticise themselves for their poor relationships with the “historical moment that the country was living through.” As a result, many leading intellectuals who had supported the revolution, including Nobel laureates in literature Jean Paul Sartre, Octavio Paz, and Mario Vargas Llosa, and distinguished writers Jorge Luis Borges and Carlos Fuentes, angrily and publicly condemned the actions of the Cuban government. This obscene event marked the beginning of a new policy of state control of the island’s artists.

The Grey Years brought into the open the bureaucratic tendencies of a layer of cadres and leaders who, thanks to their posts in the structures of the state, army and party, benefited from social privileges. Structures and mechanisms which favoured bureaucratisation were endorsed and amplified, reflecting the practices in the USSR.

In strictly economic terms, Cuba benefited, with a growth rate of about four per cent per annum for the next decade. But the Soviet ‘advisors’ had the parallel task of creating new political institutions, the most important of which was – naturally – an invigorated and enlarged PCC, and a Russian-style constitution. The first change was to streamline the Council of Ministers and concentrate power in a new, eight-member Executive Committee. Of these eight, three (Raúl Castro, Osvaldo Dorticós, and Carlos Rafael Rodríguez) had strong and direct links with Moscow, and it was generally accepted that they were spokespersons for the Russians.

The second change was the introduction of a new (1976) constitution, which closely resembled the pyramidal structure of the USSR and was promoted as ‘Popular Power’, supposedly providing a means of ventilating grievances against bureaucracy. According to Fidel, the People’s Power Assemblies (also called Organs of People’s Power) would:

[G]ive the masses decision making power in many problems… genuinely democratic principles replacing the administrative work habits of the first years of the Revolution. We must begin to substitute democratic methods for the administrative methods that run the risk of becoming bureaucratic methods.68

However, in Cuba, it was well understood that this new structure placed power firmly in the hands of the new Communist Party.

Experimental municipal elections to assemblies of Popular Power were held in Matanzas province during August 1974, with as many as eight candidates standing against each other for particular seats. The candidates were elected by secret ballot, at neighbourhood meetings organised by the CDRs. The local PCC did not officially nominate candidates, but the reality of the process was that all successful candidates were PCC members, or one of its constituent organisations such as the Young Communist League.

In the Matanzas elections only 7.6 per cent of the candidates nominated were women and less than half of those were elected. In a follow-up speech, Fidel drew attention to this and condemned the fact that more women had not been elected. A survey found that prejudice was a significant factor and the PCC declared it would address this at its forthcoming First Congress.

At the local level, there appeared to be a genuine decentralisation of Popular Power, in sharp contrast to the centralisation in the upper levels. The members of the decision-making Provincial and National Assemblies were not directly elected but were, instead, elected by those candidates who had been successful in the municipal elections. The latter could vote for one of a list of candidates pre-selected by party functionaries and the ‘Mass Organisations’ controlled by the party, which were listed in Article 7 of the new constitution: “the Committees for the Defence of the Revolution, the Cuban Women’s Federation, the National Association of Small Farmers, the University Students’ Federation, the High School Students’ Federation and the Union of Cuban Pioneers”.

Hierarchical voting had been introduced by the Stalinist party apparatus in the faction struggles in the Russian party in the 1920s, to sieve out the Opposition. In Moscow, for example, the supporters of the Opposition claimed they were in a majority in the party cells, but they attained only thirty-six per cent of the vote in the district conferences, which was further reduced to sixty-one votes against 325 in the provincial conference.69 The structure was intended to superimpose the PCC on the new state edifice. Subsequent analysis of election results showed that three-quarters of the municipal delegates were party members and almost all 614 national deputies were members of the party or the Communist Youth. However, in Cuba, there was an additional safeguard; forty-five per cent of the National Assembly deputies, including Fidel and the whole central government team, were not subject to popular election.

At the time of writing, the local People’s Power delegates did not receive salaries, they had day a week off work without loss of pay for their duties, they lived in and among their constituents and so have close personal contact with them. They represent very small districts, typically between 1,000 to 1,500 voters and must report back to their constituents every six months at open public meetings. They are subject to recall if twenty per cent or more of their constituents petition for it. Only local delegates can be recalled by popular demand. The elected provincial and national representatives are subject to recall only by the delegates of the municipality they represent. Given that the great majority of delegates and representatives are PCC members the matter is, de facto, a Party, not a popular decision. Only if the relevant body determines that a recall is justified, is the matter referred to the electorate.

Naturally, some people took the declaration that Popular Power was the highest authority in Cuba at face value, and presented their problems and complaints (predominantly concerning housing) to their local municipalities. They were then confronted by the obvious fact that there was no real control over the central state, which defined its priorities with little or no reference to the rank and file. The Cuban people soon understood the deficiencies in what was called “the most democratic system in the world”. (There was a sense of déjà vu here, this being the very same description used by Stalin for the USSR’s 1936 constitution.)

Fidel’s justifications for a new constitution were dressed up in radical rhetoric and spelled out in November 1973. The core of his argument had been developed nearly forty years previously by Joseph Stalin when launching the 1936 Soviet Constitution: “The principle (is) ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his work’”.70 In the USSR, this formula was intended to justify the inequalities existing. “From each according to his ability” meant the extraction of the maximum labour by any means possible, including the whip of police intimidation; and “to each according to his work” meant the majority of the working population living in general want and on near starvation wages while preserving privileges and luxuries for the tops.

Fidel put it thus:

Logically, every worker’s remuneration should be linked to the quality and quantity of the work he does. If he is in a responsible job, an important job, he should be paid more… (the wages of) personnel in charge of directing production must compare favourably with those of tractor drivers and operators of other equipment.71

About this time, there was a distribution of refrigerators, electrical appliances and 100,000 TV sets to those workers recommended by union and party organisers. The criteria for distribution should have been open to public scrutiny, but the organisers had their own criteria, and while these may have been quite correct and proper, they were not subject to democratic control.

The moves towards material rewards were not only due to pressure from the Russians. The expected improvements in productivity were not happening (in 1979 it was expected to be four per cent when, in fact, it was 0.8 per cent) and the response was to link wages more closely to productivity through a bonus system paid by the individual enterprise in money or consumer goods. In parallel, wage differentials were allowed to increase; the number of administrative and managerial staff rose rapidly, and the bonuses they paid themselves reduced the profitability of the enterprises, while increasing wage inequality between workers and management.

In any such system, egalitarianism can be left far behind. This, of course, is not to deny that post-revolutionary Cuba had largely wiped out pre-revolutionary social inequalities, for example, life expectancy has risen by twenty years – from fifty-three years in 1959 to seventy-three in 1984. Despite this and other important gains, the US embargo had imposed a system of generalised want on Cuba, a condition that invariably sows the seed for a self-seeking bureaucracy, which places its own interests above those of society generally. Control of the distribution of consumer goods is an important stage in the development of such a bureaucracy as had been demonstrated forty years earlier in the USSR.

The third change was to re-configure the PCC along the lines of the Russian Party. This was a necessary preparation for the 1976 constitution because, in Article 5, the Cuban CP was defined as “the superior leading force of society and the state, in charge of organizing the common effort towards the goals of building socialism and advancing towards a communist society”. The fourth change was to legitimise certain small-scale craft activities on payment of a license fee. This was recognition that the public sector was failing to supply certain essential services such as repair of domestic appliances: fridges, washing machines, and so on. About 50,000 workers took out these licenses, as plumbers, mechanics, joiners, dressmakers, etc.

The PCC had been established in 1965 but there was a ten-year delay before its First Congress in 1975. Both the Fidelistas and PSP had a policy of top-down decision-making, where differences in the leadership were covered up, where decisions already made were presented to the membership for approval, not discussion. The long delay was a sure sign that there were serious differences within the Cuban leadership that were proving difficult to resolve.

A recruitment drive preceding the Congress had more than doubled the CP’s membership from about 100,000 in 1970 to just over 200,000 in 1975, and would rise to over 400,000 in 1980.72 The PSP leaders were now old men, of diminishing importance with no prospect of making a come-back. They were handed a few posts of lesser importance. The Fidelistas dominated the new Political Bureau, Secretariat and Central Committee that were unveiled to the membership. The reformed party was warmly welcomed by the Soviet bureaucracy and acclaimed by Brezhnev as evidence of the ‘growing maturity’ of the Cuban Revolution. No doubt the almost complete elimination of any reference to Che was a factor in this. A very important decision at the Congress was to incorporate a ban on factions into the Party statutes. Such a ban is a defining character of a Stalinist party, it acts as and is intended to be, a barrier to both internal party, and soviet, democracy.

Even Fidel’s staunchest supporters had to admit:

The Cuban Communist Party is not a Leninist party. It allows no democratic internal life in the Bolshevik sense. There are no organised tendencies and factions around programmatic points that could advance the clarity of discussion and contribute to solving the problems facing the Cuban Revolution… Moreover, to a certain degree the Cuban Communist Party is not a political party as we think of one, so much as a part of the administrative apparatus. It suffers from the same bureaucratic degenerations as the rest of the governmental apparatus.73

These factors notwithstanding, the First Congress took time to discuss how to advance women’s equality. Their proposal was in two parts, the first was to reduce the burden of domestic housework by, amongst other things, greatly expanding child care (e.g. providing crèches in workplaces), more laundries, more workplace cafeterias, and setting up ‘plan jaba’ (literally, plan shopping-bag, drop your shopping list at the store and come back later to pay and collect your shopping). The second part was to launch a wide-ranging ideological debate across the island on women’s rights. This was centred around proposed changes to the Family Code, Articles 24-28, that men and women were equal in marriage; that men should share in housework and raising children; that both members of a couple should have an equal right to pursue an education or have a job; and that the couple should co-operate with each other to make that possible.

One of the most revolutionary aspects of Cuban society was the diverse and creative manner in which Cubans had socialised the responsibilities previously assumed by the family. At their peak, these gains of the revolution included: free medical care; free dental care; free child care; rents which are a maximum of ten per cent of a family’s income; free meals in schools; supervised after-school activities; inexpensive lunches in workplaces; socialised care for the elderly, including day-centres, meals and pensions; free amateur sports programmes; free museums and cultural activities; state support for amateur poets, artists, musicians and writers.

Before the revolution, marriage was a matter of economic survival for women and divorce was not easy. Millions of women remained married to husbands they may have hated, because they had no economic alternative. Many women of the older generation believe the right to freely choose a marriage partner and leave one with whom they did not want to live, was one of the most important gains of the Revolution.74 It was at this time that the PCC, in its theses on women’s equality, pointed out that views inherited from capitalism on women as sexual, decorative and passive objects whose highest aspiration was marriage, were a major obstacle to the realisation of equality between men and women. Beauty contests, in particular, were seen as encouraging objectification and sexist attitudes in society and were singled out as “negative and absurd”, “vulgar and grotesque” hangovers from capitalism not in keeping with revolutionary Cuba’s view of women. With direct, mass interventions by the FMC, beauty contests were soon banned.

The Family Code, in its entirety was endorsed by the majority of the population and passed into law on International Women’s Day, 8 March, 1975. The document around which the debate took place was titled: ‘On the Full Exercise of Women’s Equality’.75 This document says many fine things that all progressive people will applaud, but it was silent on the central question of a woman’s right to control her own body, i.e. to decide whether or not to have an abortion.

In all major countries in 1917, women were enmeshed in a thick web of discriminatory laws and sexist oppression. The Soviet government of October 1917 took swift action and women in Soviet Russia achieved full legal and political rights, including the right to abortion. But, with the growth of the bureaucracy, the marriage and family laws established by the October Revolution were re-written. The clock was turned backwards; in 1934, homosexuality was made a criminal offence, punishable with up to eight years of imprisonment. In 1936, legal abortion was abolished, except where life or health was endangered.

It is possible to detect the dead hand of Stalinism reaching out to corrupt the present, in the influence of the PCC on abortion law in Cuba. Before the revolution, abortion was illegal under the Civil Defence Code except “to save the life of the mother, when the pregnancy was the result of rape, and to avoid birth defects due to hereditary sickness or contagious disease”. This aspect of the Code remained in force during the first five years of the revolution, and for reasons that have never been explained, the Castro government opposed changes in the abortion law during this period. In form, the law was highly restrictive, but the reality was that most middle- and upper-class women were able to afford private abortions when necessary, outside of the law. With the revolution, the number of private abortions climbed, but so did the mortality rate, and in 1965 the Ministry of Public Health (Ministerio de Salud Pública, MINSAP) stepped in to ‘institutionalise’ abortion, extending the scope of legal abortion, no longer restricting it to extreme cases, and agreeing that abortions should be carried out by public doctors free of charge rather than by private practitioners. After 1965, despite the formal restrictions, Cuban women were largely free to exercise their right to choose.

It took until December 1979, when Article 267 was inserted into Cuba’s Penal Code, before abortion became legal. Or, to be more precise, ceased to be illegal, since Article 267 did not legalise a woman’s right to choose, but instead it defined what constituted an illegal abortion and set down prohibitions and punishments. In December 1987, Cuba updated its Penal Code but made no substantive changes to the section on abortion: if gestation is less than five weeks the woman concerned (including minors) need show no proof of pregnancy and menstrual regulation is used; for gestation of ten to twelve weeks, abortion requires confirmation of pregnancy (women under eighteen must have parental approval and women under sixteen must have approval of a medical committee); abortions after week twelve require the authorisation of a committee comprising doctors and a social worker.

Stone has observed how, after the 1975 Congress, the position of women in Cuba did improve, reporting that between 1975 and 1981, in terms of per 100 households the number of refrigerators rose from fifteen to thirty-eight, the number of washing machines from six to thirty-four, the number of childcare places almost doubled, and the percentage of women in the workforce rose from twenty-five per cent to over thirty per cent. Today, that figure is forty-two per cent, a high figure for an underdeveloped country, but it also means that a large proportion of Cuban women are primarily housewives. Cuban women also benefit from a level of maternity care that has reduced infant mortality to four per 1,000, lower than the six per 1,000 of the USA. Contraception is available to all women, who also have the de facto right to abortion free of charge, as are all medical services. Black women, poor women, and peasant women have benefited most from these processes. In terms of representation, in 2013, Cuban women comprised just under fifty per cent of the members of the National Assembly (ranked third in the world), while, in the USA, the senate and congress had just twenty per cent women (ranked 101 in the world).

Trade with COMECON, where Cuba was the sugar and tropical fruits provider, inevitably brought with it further adoption of Soviet economic norms, material incentives and growing autonomy for managers. In the same way that Russian had become the new business language to facilitate trade, so a new Soviet style ‘Management and Planning System’ was adopted. In all the productive branches, there was a general mood of discontent. This showed itself as high levels of absenteeism from work, and other ‘unrevolutionary’ attitudes such as slovenly work, bad time-keeping, high levels of waste, and lack of care of expensive machines. Dr Jorge Risquest, Minister of Labour, gave an inkling of the real causes of this malaise. He attributed “the country’s economic problems to widespread passive resistance by the workers”, admitting that “there was no proper rapport between workers on the one hand and the state administration, the officials of the Communist Party and the trade unions on the other”.76

Party pronouncements began to reverse the theory proposed by Che Guevara, regarding the sources of the revolution’s bureaucratisation. Che had argued that the institution should reflect the changes in society, not society reflect the new bureaucratic structures; that the state bureaucracy could, in itself, be a source of bureaucratisation. This theory was turned inside out. Now it was an insufficiency of bureaucrats that was the source of bureaucratisation. What was needed was more bureaucrats, more dead-end bureaucratic channels where individuals with problems would be passed from one branch of the bureaucracy to another until so exhausted by the process, they gave up. Without Soviet democracy there was no forum where these workers could be heard.

In an attempt to increase productivity, in 1980 the government passed law number thirty-two, limiting the authority of the workers’ councils (set up by Che) and gave greater authority to the managers to increase workplace discipline. In a single decree the government eliminated twenty years of workers’ power, even if of a very limited form. By 1984, the CTC itself was moved to protest that the new law was being used arbitrarily and excessively, sometimes as a cover for bonus payments which increased inequalities. However, the Cuban government justified its measures by pointing to the fivefold increase in the incomes of the poorest section of the population between 1960 and 1982.77

Workers in agriculture, the lowest paid sector, left in their thousands, reducing the production of food just when it was needed. In 1980, the government experimented with private farmers by allowing the sale of surplus produce at free farmers’ markets according to the laws of supply and demand. The experiment was short-lived because, just as in Russia under the New Economic Policy (NEP), a layer of ‘kulaks’ allied to wealthy ‘middle-men’ soon emerged to dominate the market. With agricultural prices rising not falling, the experiment was terminated in 1986, and land re-allocated to the co-operatives.78

10. Cuba and Africa

Today, Fidel Castro is revered throughout Africa because he did so much to assist the overthrow of the white, racist regime in South Africa. In 1961, Cuba sent a shipment of weapons to the Algerian National Liberation Front during its war for independence against French imperialism, and for nearly three decades afterwards, Cuba was active in Africa supporting national liberation struggles; Algeria in 1961-63, Congo in 1965, Ethiopia in 1974 and, most important, Angola 1975-89. By 1975, Cuba had provided more than 30,000 doctors to work in over forty countries, providing humanitarian aid. But the sending of tens of thousands of ‘internationalist volunteers’, from 1975 onwards, to Angola is considered by many an even greater achievement. In Angola, Cuban troops fought the invading South African apartheid army and, for the first time, inflicted a military defeat on it. Cuban forces were crucial in freeing Angola from South African rule and, in doing so, helped inspire the youth of Soweto to rise in rebellion, hastening the fall of the apartheid regime.

The collapse of the Portuguese empire in Africa placed guerrilla leaderships in power, particularly in Angola. Cuba swiftly offered aid. Such an intervention had strong resonances amongst the Cuban people, many of whom could trace their roots back to Africa. There were no complex issues involved in the initial intervention. The MPLA, which had been supported by the Cubans in its battles against Portuguese colonial rule for over ten years, was in de-facto control of most of Angola including the capital, Luanda, and had expected to officially take over the government when the Portuguese left. Now they were challenged by armed resistance from rightist forces; the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) led by Holden Roberto, who was on the CIA payroll,79 and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) led by Jonas Savimbi, who was well known for his collaboration with the Portuguese colonialists during the civil war.

The situation in Angola was complicated by the role played by China. At that time, China’s foreign policy in Africa was dominated by its determination to oppose ‘Russian imperialism’, even if that meant supporting openly counter-revolutionary forces. As the MPLA developed ties with Moscow, so Peking supported the FNLA. In May 1974, 200 Chinese instructors arrived in Zaire to start training FNLA guerrillas, despite the FNLA being firmly under the thumb of Mobutu and, behind him, US imperialism. There is some evidence that the Chinese flirted with the idea of supporting Savimbi, but his links with racist South Africa were too much for them to swallow.80

The independence movement in Angola had a profound effect within South Africa itself, as would soon be shown by the Soweto uprising of 1976. South African imperialism, therefore, had every reason to want a client regime in Angola, to be obtained by supporting UNITA. It decided in 1975 to intervene to assist in the military overthrow of the MPLA. This had the tacit support of the major world imperialist power, the US, but a defeat for the MPLA would have represented a severe humiliation for the diplomatic, military, and strategic interests of the Russian bureaucracy.

The strategy behind the interventions (orchestrated by the US) had the intention of dividing Angola between Zaire and South Africa. The first intervention was from Zaire to the north by the FNLA, supported by the CIA. Zaire’s pro-imperialist dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, was to annex the oil-rich province of Cabinda (and whatever other Angolan territory he could) so that US oil companies would have control of the largest oil and gas reserves on the African continent. The second, and of more immediate danger to the MPLA, was by UNITA in the south, where Savimbi was being used as a front for the South African Defence Force (SADF).

Gott has claimed that, in July 1975, President Gerald Ford authorised covert assistance of US$24 million to Roberto and Savimbi. In August, South African troops moved into southern Angola under the pretext of protecting its investment in the massive Cunene hydro-electric project. Fidel phoned the Kremlin and announced Cuba was going to send help to the MPLA, but Brezhnev was more concerned with peaceful coexistence and refused to assist. That Fidel went ahead can be taken as an indication, both of his personal commitment to the African liberation struggle, and that Brezhnev did not categorically veto the enterprise. In early October, 480 Cuban instructors arrived in Angola and quickly dispersed to four training camps.

On 14 October, the SADF went onto the offensive and, with about 1,000 UNITA guerrillas, moved deeper into Angola. They soon reached Benguela, a coastal town half way to Luanda and the road to Luanda looked open. Fidel chose not to consult the Russians (using the excuse there was no time), and sent Cuban troops to defend Luanda. Operation Carlota was launched. The Cuban effort inspired Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nobel Prize-winning author, to write Operation Carlota,81 which provides details of the mechanics of the operation. In it, 250 Cuban troops were flown to Angola in planes so antiquated that their brakes were completely shot. The first 100 troops arrived just in time to play a key role in the successful defence of Luanda against an attack by the FNLA, and British and American mercenaries paid for by the CIA. The Cuban troops now moved south to help block the SADF/UNITA advance, and together with MPLA forces made their stand just outside Sumbe (then known as Novo Redondo), halting the apparently inexorable advance on 13 November, 1975.

At the same time, some 3,500 Cuban civilian volunteers travelled to Angola and played a major role in repairing destroyed bridges and restoring road and rail links. In fact, most new construction was undertaken by Cubans or under Cuban supervision.

President Ford’s administration in the USA was still shaking from the Watergate scandal, which had forced the resignation of President Nixon, and was well aware that the Vietnam syndrome made it impossible to give more than logistical support to the FNLA, UNITA and South Africa. The US media and its allies launched a barrage of propaganda accusing Cuban and Soviet Russia of ‘expansionism’ in Africa. But the involvement of South Africa was enough to unite the leaders of the Organisation of African Unity in support of Cuba’s actions. Nigeria, the most pro-Western of the black African states, praised the role played by Cuba. Worldwide, sympathy for the struggle against the South African apartheid regime spilled over into support for the Cuban intervention: “The only non-African country that fought and spilled its blood for Africa and against the odious apartheid regime”.

The political benefits of Cuba’s intervention were too obvious to be missed, and the Kremlin was soon providing extensive economic and military support. The sending of combat troops to Angola in 1975 was a Cuban initiative, but its extent, both in terms of the numbers of personnel (some 50,000 troops) and duration (about fifteen years) was possible only because of large-scale Soviet logistical support and Soviet subsidies; cut-price petroleum and free supplies of weapons. This would not have been the case had Cuba been violating the Kremlin’s wishes.

By early 1976, the emphasis was on stamping out the counter-revolutionaries in the North, driving the FNLA back across the border into Zaire. However, from bases in occupied Namibia, South African-backed UNITA forces and regular troops of the SADF maintained a programme of sabotage, rural guerrilla warfare and economic disruption, which cost billions of dollars. Instead of being swiftly withdrawn, Cuban troops became an integral part of the defences of the Angolan regime.

If Cuba (and the Soviet Union) had not supported Angola, it would have been partitioned between South Africa and Zaire. It was, then, no surprise that, after independence, Angola declared itself a ‘People’s Republic’ and officially adopted ‘Marxism-Leninism’ of the Russian Stalinist variety, as state ideology. The MPLA was modelled on the Soviet bureaucracy; it had adopted the theory of stages, and was hostile to taking the first steps towards socialism that were needed to ensure the victory of the bourgeois democratic revolution. However, the only viable way of preventing total economic collapse in Angola was wholesale nationalisation, rationing, subsidies and price controls. Under the pressure of events, the MPLA was forced to take emergency measures to prevent the complete breakdown of society. When the Chinese Communist Party had taken similar measures, it had led to the formation of the Chinese workers’ state, but such an outcome was not the only one.

The Angolan authorities had responded to the flight of the settlers by seizing their assets, along with the property of those who had collaborated with the South Africans. Portuguese farms were nationalised, as were the manganese, steel, sugar, textile, and timber industries, and most of the coffee, cotton, sisal, and tobacco plantations. Steps were also taken to bring wholesale trade under state control. Transport became a state enterprise. With the destruction of the bourgeois state in Angola and the “bodies of armed men” being the guerrilla forces of the MPLA, many argued that, at this time, Angola had a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government. The Cubans had moved forward to a workers’ state through the determination of the Castro team to solve the problems that the great majority of their fellow citizens faced, irrespective of any personal gain. This would not be the direction taken by the MPLA leaders.

There were already worrying signs of what the future might hold. In 1976, after the wave of nationalisations had begun, the MPLA’s Political Bureau pointed out that, while state enterprises were projected to play a leading role in the economy, “this does not mean that capitalist private property is finished, nor is an immediate end being put to the development of capitalist production”. The all-important oil industry, bigger than the rest of the economy combined, remained under imperialist ownership.

The exports from Gulf Oil’s Cabinda fields accounted for three-quarters of the value of all Angolan exports. The Angolan government did talk about eventually nationalising oil and transferring its assets to SONANGOL, the state oil company, but stressed that this was not a short-term possibility as it had neither the finance to pay compensation nor the trained personnel to oversee production. The MPLA urged Gulf Oil to continue its operations in Cabinda province and guaranteed the safety of American staff and property while the fighting was ongoing. IP of 24 May, 1982, reported how the oil industry was shielded from the political changes taking place in the country.

By 1987, the MPLA decided to drop any pretence of Angola being a Workers’ and Peasants’ Government when it joined the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Without the perspective of moving towards a workers’ state, without a planned economy prioritising production for need not profit, the country was soon reduced to an economic shambles, in which the multinational oil and mineral companies coined in the cash, with kick-backs to the families of MPLA leaders. Today, the daughter of Angolan President José Eduardo dos Santos, is named by Forbes magazine as the “richest woman in Africa”, with a fortune of some US$3 billion. The MPLA government of Angola, runs the country as if it were a family business.

The military situation climaxed in 1988, when 18,000 troops of the Angolan armed forces, supported by 3,000 Cuban regulars, moved to take control of the important military airfield of Cuito Cuanavale and occupy UNITA’s primary operating bases. They faced over 60,000 UNITA regulars and irregulars supported by 3,000 SADF troops. This was the largest battle on African soil since World War II. Both sides claimed victory, but the SADF quit Angola, retreating into Namibia, leaving the UNITA forces within Angola to disintegrate under the MPLA/Cuban offensive.

This battle had a major impact on politics throughout Southern Africa, greatly boosting the confidence of South Africa’s black majority. Three years later, on 26 July, 1991, Nelson Mandela, in a speech made in Matanzas, a centre of Black culture in Cuba, thanked the people of Cuba for their “unparalleled” contribution, and explained the defeat of the South African army at Cuito Cuanavale was “a victory for all of Africa… a turning point in the struggle to free the continent and our country from the scourge of apartheid!”

After 1988, differences appeared between the MPLA and the Cubans over what policy to adopt towards UNITA. The Cuban forces had joined with SWAPO (the South West Africa People’s Organisation), which was fighting a guerilla war for the liberation of Namibia, to attack and inflict significant defeats on UNITA without the consent of the Angolan leadership. By this time, the MPLA leaders were pocketing US financial support and it was only a matter of time before they struck a deal with UNITA.

With the SADF ejected from Angola, the US offered to broker a deal between the MPLA, the remnants of UNITA and South Africa. The offer was for Namibia to become a notionally independent country on condition the Cuban troops withdrew. The Soviet Union informed Fidel that arms supplies for the Angolan war were to be discontinued. The tripartite deal was signed in December 1988 and, as part of the deal, SWAPO would be kept north of the sixteenth parallel, well away from Namibia.

It would have been quite wrong for the Cubans to have attempted to use their military presence to attempt to impose a workers’ state on Angola. But the Cuban leadership could have, and should have, made political criticisms of the MPLA’s policies. Instead, the Cubans restricted their advice to within the constraints set by the Stalinist theory of stages. In the national liberation struggles in Africa and the successful revolutions in Latin America, such as that of Nicaragua in 1979, the Cubans offered invaluable practical and material support and solidarity, but the political advice given by the Cuban leadership was not to follow the same path as the Cuban Revolution in abolishing capitalism. This advice not only had a negative impact on the Nicaraguan and Venezuelan revolutions, it also compounded the problem of the isolation of the Cuban Revolution.

11. The Fall of the USSR, Cuba and the World Market

However, despite the process of Stalinisation, the Cuban Revolution was not dead, and its vitality and roots amongst the masses came back to the surface at the end of the 1980s, with the collapse of the USSR. For nearly two decades, the Cuban economy, blockaded by the US, had become completely dependent on that of the USSR and the Eastern European countries. The collapse of the Stalinist regimes was catastrophic for the Cuban economy.

The first sign of the trouble ahead was when Raúl Castro was summoned to Moscow in March 1983 and informed that the USSR would no longer commit ground forces to the defence of Cuba, with the added warning that Russia now had a “new strategic reality”. Sensing trouble ahead, the National Assembly passed a law enabling tenants to become house-owners and encouraging the people themselves to become active in building their own homes. There were at least three targets here: to reduce the financial burden on the state by placing greater responsibility on individuals to both provide and maintain their own accommodation, to solve the housing shortage, and to revive the mass mobilisations of the early 1960s, which had been successful in tackling many entrenched problems. In immediate terms, this initiative was a great success, over 100,000 dwellings were constructed in 1984-85, most by private initiative. But Cuba was a poor country and, almost immediately, large quantities of construction materials began to be stolen. This was followed by private construction for sale, and a consequent growth in corruption.82 The construction boom spotlighted the differences in income that existed, with luxury apartments being built for top earners. The experiment was brought to an end in 1987.

At a Conference, ‘Foreign Debt of Latin America and the Caribbean’, in Havana on 3 August, 1985, Fidel announced that Cuba’s debt was unpayable, and that Cuba would have to re-orient its economy. In February 1986, at the Third Congress of the PCC, Fidel announced a new economic plan to reduce reliance on imports (which included more centralised control of foreign trade and an austerity programme), to deal with the balance of payments deficit (servicing foreign debts was suspended), and to reduce reliance on material incentives (place greater emphasis on exhortation).

The crisis in the Cuban economy led, of course, to a political crisis. The Third Congress was held in two parts; Part one in February, and Part two in November-December 1986. The Party responded to the new situation with wholesale changes in the personnel holding Party posts; those who had played any leading role in steering the Cuban economy into the whirlpool of the Russian economic collapse were unceremoniously sacked. In an effort to prepare the Party for the coming economic shocks, one third of the Central Committee were replaced and, later, so too were nearly half of municipal Party secretaries.

The economy had never really recovered from the rupture with the US, made worse by the chaos of the ten million-ton harvest, and now there was the coming break with the Soviet Union. On 11 January, 1987, the first round of austerity measures were announced, including: an end to free meals in works’ canteens, increased fares on public transport, replacement of the evening meal served at playschools by a snack, and the elimination of the traditional work breaks at 10 am and 4 pm, which took about two hours out of the working day. To offset these unpopular moves, the lowest wage rates were increased and a brake put on increases at the top. The bureaucrats had their expenses cut by fifteen per cent, and the provision of official vehicles substantially reduced but, despite Fidel’s personal intervention these latter measures were largely a dead letter.

Mikhail Gorbachev visited Cuba in April 1989, when he warned that Russian subsidies to Cuba would soon be phased out. Those in positions of authority such as enterprise managers or local party secretaries could and did use their positions to overcome the shortages, to acquire scarce goods and food.83 The level of corruption was small beer compared to the Stalinist states, but it was an affront to the sense of equality that had been a bulwark of Cuban society against US imperialism.

Symbolic of the turbulence of these times were a number of high profile anti-corruption cases, in particular the Arnaldo Ochoa affair. General Ochoa, one of the best known and most decorated soldiers in the Cuban army, had commanded Cuban forces in Angola and had imported Cuban sugar and sold it on the local black market to raise funds to feed his troops. Part of the payment was in diamonds, some of which stuck to Ochoa’s fingers.

Angolan diamonds began to be sold in Panama. Very rapidly this illicit enterprise escalated into the extremely lucrative field of drug smuggling. The first shipment, in April 1987, was 300 kg of cocaine bound for Florida. The consignment was intercepted by US coastguards and the subsequent arrests netted Reinaldo Ruiz, a petty criminal who was party to the Cuban end of the deal and turned informer in exchange for a lighter sentence. On 25 June, 1989, Ochoa, and fifteen others stood trial in Cuba. All were found guilty and Ochoa was sentenced to death and executed on 13 July. The Minister in charge was dismissed, tried, found guilty of negligence and sentenced to twenty years in prison where he died in 1991.

Naturally, the US and European media built the story as a major scandal: Ochoa was about to launch a popular coup and unseat Castro; this was a purge of those supporting a Russian course for Cuba; that Castro had personally approved the drug smuggling. But the scandal was short-lived and came to nothing, drowned out by the political tsunami caused by the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and Russia.

In Panama, General Noriega’s drug dealing activities had made him unacceptable to a US administration launching an international war on drugs. The May 1989 elections in Panama appeared to give the US-sponsored candidate three quarters of the votes cast. Noriega simply declared the results null and void, and continued in office. In December 1989, the US instructed its large garrison stationed throughout the Canal Zone to begin manoeuvres and military exercises with the express purpose of provoking Panamanian troops, in which they succeeded. Protection of the lives of US citizens in Panama then required the take-over of Panama with the installation of a more compliant regime. This US intervention was a clear warning to revolutionary forces throughout Latin America that Uncle Sam believed direct, limited actions by US troops would now be acceptable to the American people.

In the February 1990 elections, the Sandinista government in Nicaragua was defeated by a US-sponsored coalition and Cuba lost an ally. This was a double blow, bringing not just the loss of economic and political support but also coming at a time when Russian sponsorship would soon end.

After eight months of negotiation on 19 January, 1991, Cuba and Russia signed a trade deal. Unlike previous accords, the Soviet side insisted that the prices of Russian goods should be based on world market prices and, very significantly, after 31 March, 1991 payments would have to be in US dollars. There was to be a one year stay of execution during which a preferential rate for sugar would be maintained. In September 1991, Gorbachev announced to the Cubans that they were militarily on their own. The remaining Soviet troops stationed there were being withdrawn.

The new trade accords came at a time when supplies of goods and food from the Soviet Union and Eastern European governments were already faltering. Cuba was now deprived of trade on favourable terms, access to finance for industrial development and the purchase of products on the world market was cut off. Immediately prior to the collapse of the USSR, eighty per cent of Cuba’s trade took place with the USSR and the Eastern European block, sixty-three per cent of Cuba’s imports of food came from the USSR and eighty per cent of imported machinery. All of this vanished almost overnight. This led to a collapse of Cuban GDP between 1989 and 1993 of forty per cent (comparable to the 1929 crash in the US), the fall in exports was seventy-nine per cent, the fall in imports seventy-five per cent, and the fall in gross investment was sixty-one per cent.84

The human cost of the collapse of the economy was horrendous: lack of food, lack of fuel for power generation (with accompanying blackouts) and almost complete lack of transport. To these must be added the political impact, the collapse of a system which had been a point of reference for Cuba for twenty years, and of which no serious criticism had been made. There was also the colossal campaign of the ruling classes worldwide to the effect that socialism had failed. And yet, despite everything, Cuba survived what became known as the ‘special period in peace time’.

To help lessen the impact of the shortages, the Cuban government took a series of steps including a food programme to encourage local production of foodstuffs to replace food that could no longer be afforded, a big reduction in the number of state employees, a recycling campaign, increased rationing of basic food items and other goods, a reduction in the printing of newspapers, and energy conservation measures. An American, Margaret Randall, in Havana at the time, reported an adult food ration of one quarter of a kilo of meat (1/2 lb) a week, three eggs per week, one tin of condensed milk per month, fruit and vegetables that varied with the season, but were adequate.85 Children under twelve had, in addition, one litre of milk every day but children were also fed at school, and Randall claims they “ate well”. Other sources, however, tell a different story, of villages where food was so scarce that there were outbreaks of optical neuropathy.

In the USSR, the leadership of the misnamed Communist Party led the restoration of capitalism, attempting to become capitalists themselves, through the theft, looting and plundering of state property. In Cuba, the revolution resisted and rejected the restoration of capitalism, despite all the hardships. It was a time in which the spirit of struggle of the Cuban Revolution was reborn.

Russian oil supplies to Cuba dropped from 13.1 million tons in 1985 to 8.1 million tons in 1991 to 5.5 million tons in 1993. The cause of this was not Cuba’s failure to pay its bills on time. With privatisation, the Russian oil industry suffered its steepest decline in crude oil production since World War II. Russian shipments were delayed or failed to materialise altogether, with severe disruption of the Cuban economy. In fact, the period of transition back to capitalism was the most catastrophic peacetime economic collapse in history. In only six years the Russian economic production fell by over fifty per cent as ‘uneconomic’ enterprises were shut down.

But the collapse of the USSR should not have been a shock to the politically aware. Lenin and Trotsky, the leaders of the Russian (1917) Revolution, had both warned that the Soviet Union could not survive without a socialist revolution in the advanced capitalist countries. Before Lenin’s death, Lenin and Trotsky had united in a struggle against the bureaucracy that was forming within the Party and the state machine. The analysis of the Stalinist bureaucracy was one of Trotsky’s greatest achievements. As early as 1936 Trotsky’s analysis foresaw the direction the bureaucracy was heading and the eventual outcome:

One may argue that the big bureaucrat cares little what the prevailing forms of property are, provided only they guarantee him the necessary income. This argument ignores … the question of his descendants. … Privileges have only half their worth, if they cannot be transmitted to one’s children. But the right of testament is inseparable from the right of property. It is not enough to be the director of a trust; it is necessary to be a stockholder … a new possessing class.86

In the end, the Russian and Chinese Revolutions were defeated not by external enemies but by the pro-capitalist wings of their own bureaucracies.

In May 1992, a new Russian government led by Boris Yeltsin made clear the new relationship with Cuba: work on a Russian nuclear power plant in Cuba would continue only after Cuba agreed to assume all hard currency expenses associated with the project. The plant, when fully operational, would have replaced over a million tons a year of imported oil. Work ended in September, when the Cuban government announced it could no longer afford to meet the demands of the Russian government to finish the plant.

The heroic resistance of the Cuban Revolution after the collapse of the USSR is truly impressive; it was the will of a people who had conquered freedom and were determined not to be enslaved again that carried the country forward. Fidel and the Cuban leadership defended the gains of the revolution. A generation was alive which still remembered what life was like before the revolution and many others who had served abroad could compare their own living standards with those of neighbouring countries under capitalism. The Cuban people collectively found ways and means of overcoming the economic hardship.

The Castro team fully appreciated that the ‘special period in time of peace’ would be one in which Cuba’s economy suffered severe contraction. To minimise disruption and de-fuse opposition it was decided to launch ‘Workers’ Parliaments’ (Parlamentos Obreras) sponsored by the CTC-R in which workers were invited to receive reports on the situation, discuss them and present their own measures to help solve the problems faced. These took place over three months between January and March 1994, eighty-five per cent of the workforce participated – about three million workers in 80,000 workplaces. Summaries of the workers’ suggestions which, of course, contained many comments about their specific work situations, were forwarded to municipal and provincial meetings of the CTC at which delegates from the municipal, provincial, and national assemblies were present.

While it is obviously true that the general public was being asked to make proposals to ease an already agreed policy, it is also true that this was a national census without precedence anywhere in the world, and helped provide the basis for the discussions at the special session of the National Assembly held on 1 and 2 May, 1994, and the regular session held on 3 and 4 August, 1994. In some factories the workers expressed considerable scepticism at the start of the process, since they had raised similar issues at workers’ meetings for years. But it was soon clear that this was a serious attempt to gather information that would be acted upon. Roman claims that by mid-February these ‘Workers’ Parliaments’ had the support of about eighty per cent of the workers.87

Generally the issues discussed fell into four categories:

The venting of grievances such as the poor quality food served in the factory canteen, or wanting the authority to reject defective raw materials. Occasionally these issues took up the majority of the meetings. A recurring theme was bad management and mismanagement; the covering up of theft from the factory, allowing those faking illness to receive their wages and engage in other jobs. In this context about half of workers wanted collective or individual productivity bonuses, and for managers to stop letting slackers ‘get away with it’, which pulled average productivity down.

Considerable anger was expressed against the small private sector, because private vendors such as stall owners were seen to pay no taxes, despite earning much more than those who worked for a wage. Again and again, there were calls for action against the thieves who stole products, speculators and macetas – those who amassed fortunes through illicit activities. State employees who closed their eyes to what was going on (police officers and inspectors) received strong criticism.

There was little willingness to shoulder higher income tax while the relatively wealthy got away with paying nothing or next to nothing. Nearly three-quarters of the workers favoured eliminating subsidies for other than basic items and it was generally agreed that cigarettes and rum should be removed from the ration books and sold at higher prices. Throughout the meetings a clear thread was protection of the basic gains of the Revolution; free education and healthcare, and an opposition to any growth in economic inequalities. Great concern was shown for the fate of ‘surplus workers’, the effects of the proposals on low-income workers and their families.

In some meetings, workers raised the demand for more openness and honesty in the news and media on the problems being faced. Often it was said that the official news reports were not believed, that people were turning to the Miami radio stations for their information.

As expected, the National Assembly was unanimous in its resolutions and, obviously, made its decisions sound as though they were derived from the consultation process. There were many references made to the Workers’ Parliaments during the debates and Roman goes so far as to claim that the most frequent demands made by the workers were met, with the exception of no income tax on workers’ salaries.

On 4 May, 1994, the Council of State passed Decree 149 for “confiscation of goods and earnings obtained by unjustified enrichment”, including theft, speculation, diversion of state resources, and black market activities. In July, the Council of State increased penalties for crimes related to the national economy and empowered the state to seize goods stolen from the state. US and Western observers greeted these measures as a witch hunt, though later, the UK and USA did much the same thing when they respectively introduced the Proceeds of Crime Act, and Asset Forfeiture.

On 20 May, 1994, the prices of cigarettes and cigars, beer, rum, brandy, gasoline, electricity, inter-city public transportation, water and sewage services, postage and telegrams, and lunch in workers’ cafeterias were all increased. On 7 July, 1994, many items that had formerly been free, including lunch for boarding students, language schools, sports and cultural events, and higher education now charged a fee. The resolution did, however, provide for extra assistance for low-income families.

It is undeniable that workers were consulted, and it is notable that this consultation occurred in the depths of a serious economic crisis. Much of what the workers requested and suggested was adopted, mostly because they fell within an expected framework. While consultations with workers regarding problems had long been a regular part of union activity in the workplace, the suggestions made in the Workers’ Parliaments were given much more weight and publicity, and were taken up by the National Assembly. The whole exercise was judged a magnificent success. It would be used again at the time of the Sixth PCC Congress in 2011.

There were also changes to the political structures to help retain popular loyalty, including: in July 1992, the (1976) Constitution was amended to allow direct election of delegates to the National Assembly, making it more responsive to the electorate (though the list of candidates had to be approved by the PCC); rewording of the Constitution to make it more explicitly ‘Cuban’ and less ‘Soviet’; dropping the ban on Christians joining the party and reinstating Christmas as a national holiday (there had been three priests with the guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra who performed, marriages, baptisms, confirmations, and burials); and military assistance from Cuba was a thing of the past, Cuba’s military capacity was to be dramatically reduced.

People’s Councils (between the street-level CDRs and the municipios) were introduced to assist in generating a new grass roots-based spontaneity, returning to the days immediately following the revolution. This was a comunitario movement, which encouraged the development of all positive activities from growing your own vegetables to the reconstruction of buildings in Old Havana which, Kapacia argues, made as great a contribution to ‘saving’ the system as any of the economic reforms.

11.1 The Cuban Economy in the World Market

The Castro leadership had before it the history of the Chinese communes, a disaster that led to the deaths of some 20 million people. But they also had the example of the Beijing leadership introducing a New Economic Policy in 1978 in which there was de facto restoration of personal responsibility for land and livestock followed by a huge expansion in food production. This had been achieved by allocating land to individual households that were then free to sell produce over and above their assigned quotas, as they wished. This was accompanied by a revival of individual enterprises in the form of handicrafts, which had virtually disappeared.

Constitutionally in China, urban land was state-owned and rural land owned by collectives, but the 1978 measures allowed land to be treated as private property under the slogan of ‘collective land ownership but individual land use’. This was accompanied by the removal of state control of prices to help ensure the profitability of the more efficient farms. These moves were eminently successful in increasing production of agricultural produce. The Cubans thought they could learn from this experience.

Isolated by the US blockade, the actions taken had proved insufficient and further liberalising measures were agreed: legalising small businesses such as cafés, bars and restaurants that had emerged to service the tourist trade; allowing private farmers, small peasant cooperatives, and state farms to sell above-quota produce at free market prices at non-state agricultural markets. As in China, small scale agricultural production flourished and soon every city block in Havana had its own market stall selling fruit, salads, vegetables, and even meat.

Virgilio Díaz, a co-operative beneficial owner growing garlic, maize, sweet potato, papaya and sorghum on a twenty-two-acre plot leased to him for twenty years, claimed his income rose by over seventy per cent: he was able to build a new house and request a lease on more land. Díaz claimed he and his five fellow co-operative workers would, between them with favourable weather, produce 200 tonnes of food a year.88 Such initiatives were welcome after the straight-jacket of bureaucratic control, which feared any sign of independence. But bureaucratic mismanagement continued to obstruct private agricultural producers who still had to negotiate with a bureaucratic state system to determine their quotas and purchase their produce, with delays in payments and problems in accessing fertilisers and seeds.

It is quite acceptable within a workers’ state for individual peasant families to farm state-owned land and sell anything produced above their quotas on the free market. This was the New Economic Policy introduced by Lenin into the Soviet Union. In China, however, the acceptance that land could be treated as private property while formally remaining state-owned became the first step in the return to capitalism. The Chinese bureaucracy was blinded by the increased production achieved, and became convinced that if privatisation worked for the peasants it should be extended to industrial enterprises.

The Cuban leadership also introduced a series of measures to enable the economy to participate in the world market, inevitably meaning important concessions to capitalism. These were unavoidable, determined by the immediate need to survive, but at the same time were a source of dangers for the planned economy. Among the measures was the acceptance of foreign investment in, and promotion of, tourism as a source of hard currency (with all the contradictions it brought, such as decriminalising possession of dollars).

After the fall of the Soviet Union, with the Cuban economy on the ropes the US administration went on the attack. First, the so-called Cuban Democracy Act of 1992 sought to give the USA the right to decide the form of ‘democracy’ to be introduced in Cuba. Then the Helms-Burton Act of 1996, ruled that any person who bought or used confiscated property in any way, could be tried in an American court for ‘trafficking in property’. This was to scare off Canadian and European companies from trading with Cuba. The Cubans rightly replied that the property of those Cubans who chose to emigrate could not be included in any negotiations, and negotiations on nationalised North American properties must include the costs imposed on the Cuban economy by the US embargo.

Tourism became a major source of income, but an important negative effect of this was the reinforcement of a layer of relatively better-off Cubans, such as managers of the new tourist hotels, many of whom now look to capitalism as the solution to Cuba’s problems. Tourism, especially, was used to launch joint ventures with overseas partners who were given permission to take their profits out of the country as hard currency. The Havana Times, at the end of October, 2013, reported that, while a foreign investor was limited to owning forty-nine per cent of the venture, this constraint was more apparent than real. The foreign investors always supplied the finance and often supplied the know-how so, for the most part, the final decisions were left in their hands.

The participation of Cuba in the world market was taking place on very unequal terms. Based predominantly on raw materials and services, the Cuban economy needed to import almost all manufactured goods. The role of industry in the Cuban economy was, and remains, extremely weak and oriented to service tourism. The economic measures taken at the time meant the inevitable penetration by the world market and threatened to unleash an unstoppable movement towards capitalism. The decisive factor was the weakness of the Cuban economy, which was then based on the export of services (mainly doctors, nurses and teachers), income from tourism, and the export of nickel, cigars, and sugar. Cuba’s nickel reserves are fifth largest in the world and production volumes are tenth largest; nickel became Cuba’s largest merchandise export with the collapse of sugar in 2002.

Dependency on tourism generated contradictions and unevenness within Cuban society; a large part of the limited agricultural production had to be channelled towards this sector, to the detriment of the needs of the Cuban population in general. Those in contact with the tourist industry have access to dollars with which to supplement their monthly budget. But these supplementary payments could be relatively huge; a taxi driver paid in US$, a hotel doorman tipped in US$ or someone renting out a room for US$, could get in one day more than the monthly wage of, say, a health care worker or a teacher. This not only reduces the relative value of the wages for essential jobs but also creates a situation in which an important section of the population earn their living through lucharla, semi-legal or openly illegal methods, promoting the idea of individual solutions to social problems as opposed to collective ones.

By 1994, the Cuban economy was picking itself up by its bootstraps, the GDP had stopped sliding downwards and started to edge upwards. The military were given economic responsibilities. For example, the Havana Times of 16 June, 2017 carried the headline ‘Cuba’s Largest Company: The Revolutionary Armed Forces’. It appears that Grupo de Administración Empresarial SA (GAESA), a holding company of the Revolutionary Armed Forces chaired by Brigadier-General Luis Alberto Rodríguez López-Callejas, ex-son in law of President Raúl Castro, owns a forty per cent share of the tourism market, many of its activities are partnerships with foreign companies such as the US Marriott chain. Possibly more important, the sending of remittances to Cuba is monopolised by GAESA’s Financiera Cimex (Fincimex), which also controls the processing of Visa and Mastercard on the island.

At the same time, we find the children and other relatives of the Cuban leadership being allocated important roles in many different areas. It has now been made public that Raúl’s son, Colonel Alejandro Castro Espín, was the official representative of Cuba in the secret negotiations with the US that ended with the decision on 17 December, 2014, to open a new stage of bilateral relations. As part of these secret negotiations, the Cubans, to show their good intentions, released a number of so-called political prisoners. The Americans were deaf, however, to demands for the closure of the only prison on Cuba that systematically degrades, tortures and dehumanises its inmates – Guantánamo.

In 1993, the Cuban government launched the convertible peso (CUC) in parallel to the peso in common use. The CUC was pegged equal to the dollar and to twenty-four ordinary pesos. In joint ventures, foreign firms pay a government agency in CUCs for the services of Cuban staff. The agency then pays the workers in Cuban pesos at the rate of one-for-one, making a gain of ninety-five per cent on the deal. This currency system is economically corrosive, because in some government transactions, the two kinds of peso are valued equally, which means that dishonest officials can manipulate the system to fraudulently acquire huge sums of money. More seriously, it made many Governmental accounts nonsensical, with the state unable to accurately identify which of its initiatives were efficient and which were not.

In economic terms, it would be true to say that Cuba limped through the 1990s, but it did not collapse nor did its revolutionary spirit disappear. Tourism and joint ventures halted the decline in GDP, but distorted the economy with an accompanying black market, which increased the division in wealth between those with access to dollars and those without. Exacerbating the problem for the government was that by 2002, overseas investment in Cuba was drying up.

Faced with yet one more crisis, the Cuban leadership launched the ‘Battle of Ideas’. The launch pad was the Elián González case and the resulting mass nationwide campaign. Six-year-old Elián González was taken by his mother on a boat across the Florida Straits (without his father’s consent). He and his mother were shipwrecked, his mother died but he was rescued by the US Coastguard. Since he was found at sea, US regulations required he be returned to Cuba. However, his relatives in the US took legal measures to prevent this, which generated a mass, sustained campaign of marches and rallies in Cuba for Elián to be returned. Elián’s return was seen as a political success, not least because, after years of demoralisation, it reminded Cubans of the power of mass action.

The government seized the opportunity and presented its Battle of Ideas, a multi-faceted social, ideological and cultural campaign, as a continuation of the Elián mobilisations. The form was to challenge the corrosive effects of capitalist penetration of Cuba; with the influx of foreign tourists and US dollars there had been a noticeable rise in petty crime and prostitution, a weakening in the sense of collective solidarity and a worrying increase in levels of inequality. The campaign also sought to revive the energy of the early 1960s, when mass mobilisations had successfully tackled many deep-seated problems. Additionally, the campaign was used to justify the previous economic policy of austerity and the proposed reforms, including the creation of a new layer of petty traders and artisans (in many respects the genesis of a new petty-bourgeoisie).

It was during the Battle of Ideas that individuals on the left of the PCC took the opportunity to publish their own analysis of the fall of the Soviet Union. Ariel Dacal and Francisco Brown Infante, two outspoken intellectuals, began publishing articles such as: ‘The USSR, The Thwarted Transition’89 in which they introduced the idea that Stalinism was a “rupture of the Bolshevik project”; that the Russian Communist Party, despite claims to the contrary was, in reality, a block on the road to socialism. Their ideas were systematised in a book, Russia: From Real Socialism to Real Capitalism, published by Editorial Ciencias Sociales. This book explained the why and how of the development of the Russian bureaucracy, its accumulation of privileges and perks, and the growing difference in the standard of living between the nomenklatura and the workers. Because what had happened in Russia had obvious lessons for Cuba, the book was influential in introducing into the Battle of Ideas the notion that the major danger to the Cuban Revolution came not from the American blockade but from internal contradictions.

Hugo Chávez, President of Venezuela, offered Cuba an economic lifeline via an exchange of Cuban doctors, nurses and teachers for Venezuelan oil. This rekindled the enthusiasm of the Cuban masses, seeing a new revolutionary upsurge of the masses in Latin America. Economic difficulties and the exhaustion of the revolution in Venezuela (precisely because it did not go all the way and expropriate the property of the oligarchs and imperialists as Cuba had done) means that this assistance is now coming to an end.

With the support of Venezuelan oil, the Cuban government felt more confident and turned towards re-centralising the economy: foreign trade was brought more under central control with the resulting closure of around 200 joint venture companies and a drop in the inflow of capital. The circulation of the dollar was banned; concessions to the self-employed and small businesses were limited. The emphasis moved towards prioritising investment from the Venezuelan and Chinese governments to prepare Cuba for a more independent role in the world market.

When Fidel fell gravely ill in July 2006, he provisionally delegated his dual posts – President of the Council of State and First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba – to his younger brother, Raúl, head of the Revolutionary Armed Forces and Second Secretary of the Communist Party. As Fidel’s health further deteriorated, the National Assembly declared Raúl President in February 2008.

By this time, the Cubans had experienced how the petty-bourgeois regimes of the Angolan MPLA and Nicaraguan FSLN had failed to carry their revolutions through to a workers’ state and degenerated. So it is all the more astounding that, given the experience of their own revolution, the Cuban leadership did not advise Chávez to deepen the Venezuelan revolution. Instead, Fidel, Raúl and the other Cuban leaders followed the Stalinist path: the theory of stages internationally and bureaucratic control at home.

In contrast, the political sensitivity of Cuba’s intellectuals and left-wing activists can be demonstrated by an incident at the start of 2007. On 5 January, 2007, an elderly poet, Luis Pavón appeared on Cuban television celebrating the achievements of artists and intellectuals. Pavón had been head of the National Cultural Council (Consejo nacional de cultura) where he had acted as censor on behalf of the regime during the five grey years, and oversaw a cultural policy in which gay or otherwise ‘problematic’ artists were fired from their jobs, when long-haired young men were picked up off the streets and brutally subjected to forced hair-cuts, and so on. The following morning, the writer Jorge Pérez emailed friends and acquaintances denouncing the re-appearance of this Stalinist hard-man, and expressing his fears that this could be a signal of a return to a more repressive cultural policy. The email went viral and an intense debate (the ‘war of the emails’, so-called because, for the first, time such a debate had been carried out on the Internet) ensued. That ended on 30 November, with a statement by the Minister of Culture, Abel Pietro, that neo-Stalinist censorship had no place in Cuba.

How much genuine freedom of expression and actual power the Cuban working class and the population as a whole can exercise is a vital matter for the survival of the workers’ state and its development towards socialism. This was, and is, a question openly discussed by university students, academics, professionals and revolutionaries. Ever since the revolution, the PCC and government have had a policy of unity around the top leaders. That Cuba had resisted the attempts by the US to smash it apparently confirmed the correctness of the top-down party structure. Cuba could not afford the luxury of any significant level of divergence in deciding the direction of the country’s politics and economy. The leadership maintained that any meaningful broadening of freedom of expression in the political sphere could place the nation’s sovereignty in peril. But voices on the left observed this was the same argument used to justify the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and Russia, right up to their collapse.

Workers’ democracy is not a luxury which one can choose or not; it is an essential pre-condition for a socialist economy. Without workers’ democracy any workers’ state is deformed and will, ultimately, perish. In Cuba, strict government control of the channels of information and debate cripple the ability of the common man and woman to obtain the information and ideas necessary for them to become politically empowered. Leftists, including students from the University of Havana and Cujae University, began to hold regular workshops to discuss the future of socialism in Cuba and other questions. So far, the government has allowed these discussions to continue, and its opposition has been of the ‘soft’ kind: confining the meetings to indoor locations, meeting rooms being double-booked, failure to deliver resources to produce leaflets, events with big name speakers organised to clash with the student meetings, etc.

The state closely monitors those who raise criticisms, but discussions about the future of the Cuban revolution are taking place at all levels. There is a growing interest in Trotsky, his books have been sold at the Havana Book Fair where The Revolution Betrayed was officially presented, Trotskyist speakers have been officially invited to conferences, there is open criticism of Stalin, etc. In this context, those who advocated the need for workers’ democracy and proletarian internationalism as the best way to defend the Cuban revolution express their viewpoint openly as members of the PCC, University Students Federation, supplemented by meetings and the use of the internet.

Possibly the most important event was a workshop in 2007 to celebrate the ninetieth anniversary of the Russian revolution and to discuss its trajectory and collapse, organised by a group of students in the FEU. Twice the expected number turned up (some 500 people) to celebrate the October Revolution and hold a vigil for ‘Ninety Years of the Silenced Revolution’. Speakers included Ariel Dacal, who addressed the question of Stalinism as a counter-revolutionary force, and Fernando Rojas of the FEU, who argued that a new interpretation of the past was necessary for participants to be ideologically equipped to deal with the coming discussions on change in Cuba.

The meeting launched a website, www.cuba-urss.cult.cu, which now has several hundred articles and essays submitted by activists and such authorities as: Lenin, Trotsky, Gramsci, Luxemburg, and Guevara. Since then, this current has met monthly at the Ministry of Culture’s, Juan Marinello Centre in a meeting hall with a capacity of just under 100 people. The hall was packed at the end of January, 2009, for the initial workshop: ‘The significance and meaning of the revolution in our lives’. Other workshops followed, one being of particular note: ‘The political system of the revolution: participation, popular subject and citizenship’, which focused on how citizens participated in the political system and how they made the revolution their own. On one wall were posted words by Paulo Freire: “If the structure does not permit dialogue the structure must be changed”.

At the time of writing, the last such meeting was in February 2017; a seminar attended by some 200 people to celebrate fifty years since the founding of Pensamiento Critico. At that meeting, punningly entitled, ‘Critical Thinking and the transition to socialism’, Frank Josué Solar Cabrales, a Cuban communist and lecturer at the Universidad de Oriente, Santiago de Cuba, made a presentation, stating:

[T]he only way to increase productivity and generate economic growth by socialist means, is through consciousness, education, the formation of new men and women, with new social relations of production among them. In this sense, genuine workers’ control over politics and the economy is not secondary, but the necessary condition for the transition, and the only way it can develop the productive forces in a socialist sense.90

After describing essential similarities between the Cuban and Russian Revolutions; particularly the release of the creative energy of the masses, and the freedom of discussion that occurred, he explained how the gains of the Cuban Revolution could not have been achieved under capitalism, that a socialist revolution was necessary. Cabrales explained that the reason why almost nobody talks about the transition to socialism in Cuba is due to:

…a widespread misconception … socialism is very fair and works wonders to secure cultural and social rights, but economically it is a disaster, it is inefficient and does not create wealth, nor does it stimulate production and growth. Therefore, it seems clear that the solution should be to combine the best of both systems … capitalist economic mechanisms to produce wealth, and the socialist political model to distribute it as fairly as possible … (but) socialism is not a mere system of more or less fair distribution of wealth, but rather is the creation of a new culture, with new social relations, new human beings – along with the material basis necessary to satisfy people’s needs. This purpose cannot be served by just any kind of economic development, much less one that is based on the exploitation of the labour of others, which engenders selfishness, inequality, and poverty … We cannot use the old whips of capitalism if we wish to achieve true emancipation.91

Cabrales presented his alternative to the official views:

… genuine workers’ control over politics and the economy is not secondary, but the necessary condition for the transition (to socialism) … Left criticism … is not dangerous to the Revolution, but to the bureaucracy. … Today, this left criticism is more necessary than ever to avoid capitalist restoration in Cuba. The unity of all revolutionaries is a precondition for the strengthening and defence of the Revolution from attacks by imperialists and the right wing. … but unity alone is not enough to further its development and prevent its defeat. Revolution must come with popular control over the bureaucracy, that is, as an effective exercise of popular power and a purposeful act of critical left thought.

He explained the kind of socialism that Cuba should aim for:

… most of the regimes that called themselves socialist in the 20th century had nothing to do with real socialism. Mistaking the Stalinist model … for true socialism is like mistaking the Inquisition for primitive Christianity – which was revolutionary, collectivist, and tied to the popular masses. The socialism that we strive for here and around the world is in favour of freedom and equality; the kind of socialism which points to a society of free associated workers, where the free development of the individual is the condition for the development of all, and where power and property belong to all. A new world, with no Caesars and no bourgeois. A revolutionary cannot settle for less.

12. The Sixth and Seventh Party Congresses, Obama and Trump

The long-delayed Sixth Congress of the PCC was held in April 2011, on the fiftieth anniversary of the victory at the Bay of Pigs. Despite party rules requiring a Congress every five years, the previous party Congress had been in 1997. The reason for the delay was obvious. Cuba had faced a sequence of serious problems, each one requiring the state taking action, and which had required the party tops to thrash out disagreements and make decisions. Such discussions took place behind closed doors with the masses excluded.

The central document, ‘Draft Guidelines for the Economic and Social Policy’, which contained 291 proposals for consolidating or amending social and economic policy, was published earlier to allow for public discussion. The Congress itself was expected to be limited to endorsing and legitimising the policies proposed and, indeed, when Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez visited in December of 2010, he was presented with a large bound volume containing the resolutions and decisions of the 2011 Congress.

The thirty-two-page document, although focused on economic restructuring, mentioned neither the workers nor their unions; there was no mention of bureaucracy; popular, democratic organisms of control and planning, were noticeable by their absence. Rather than democratisation there was to be an increase in the powers of the state, an admission of increasing divisions within Cuban society. Missing from the document was any self-criticism by the party of its actions, neither since its foundation nor between the Fifth and Sixth Congresses. Cuba had made mistakes but the lack of any self-criticism underlined the bureaucratic and undemocratic nature of the document and the Congress. Nor was there any assessment of the likely dangers from strengthening the bourgeois sectors and capitalist values, of the likely impact of the world economy on Cuban society, or of the social and political dangers of opening Cuba to the world market.

The introduction affirmed that only socialism was capable of overcoming the difficulties facing Cuba and preserving the conquests of the Revolution. “Socialism” the document stated meant “equality of rights and opportunities … Work is both a right and a duty; the personal responsibility of every citizen, and must be remunerated according to its quantity and quality”.

The package as presented by Raúl Castro was a Cuban version of the ‘Four Modernisations’ announced by Deng Xiaoping after his election as Vice Premier in January 1975. Both Deng and Raúl had the same goal, to introduce economic reforms to save their revolutions. Raúl, aged 79, appeared a Cuban version of the geriatric Chinese Stalinist as he announced:

• The incomes of workers in the state sector will depend on the profitability of their business (Point 19). Shedding workers was one way of increasing profitability, increased pay would be a means to persuade staff to accept the deal.
• Each enterprise to be empowered to set the prices for its products and services (Point 23), the market to decide the price of goods, i.e. supply and demand (Point 177). A strengthening of market forces within the country.
• Control of production to be decentralised and administered by local municipal councils (Point 35), weakening the state plan.
• To expand the services provided by the self-employed, and the granting of credits to individual, self-employed workers (Point 158). 
• Investments will be concentrated “on the most efficient producers”, i.e., not on the most socially useful sectors (Point 184).
• To continue the programme whereby land declared ‘idle’ is transferred as a rent-free loan to those agricultural producers with outstanding results. Between 2008 and 2014, over 1.5 million hectares (nearly 4 million acres) would be transferred in this way, nearly a quarter of Cuba’s total arable land.

These measures were, objectively, a significant step towards the restoration of capitalism. To divert attention and channel the discussion, the leadership included a series of proposals that were deliberately provocative. The cost of the proposed economic changes would be shouldered largely by the Cuban workers by such measures as the “orderly elimination” of the ration book (Point 162), removal of subsidies from workers’ canteens (Point 164), and an increase in the price of electricity (Point 230). As would be expected, it was these points, which had an immediate and direct effect on people’s lives, that generated most heat and gained most attention in the Congress discussions.

Despite the enormous difficulties Cuba faced, there were important social compensations that improved the living standards of every Cuban, in particular, access to education. Minister of Culture, Abel Prieto, explained that Cuba, a blockaded Third World country with one-thirteenth of the per capita GDP of the US, could still guarantee conditions for a decent life, rich in spiritual and cultural terms. He was convinced “that culture could be an antidote against consumerism and against the oft-repeated idea that only buying can create happiness in this world”. There were two problems here: such a perspective can only work if inequality is limited and not allowed to flourish, and Raúl had just announced the removal of grants and subsidies for workers wishing to enter Higher Education, which would still be open to them, but only on a self-financing basis.

The Guidelines were widely discussed amongst the population, every Cuban having access to the document and invited to participate in open debates on its content. People were genuinely interested in what they regarded as a crucial discussion on Cuba’s future. The questions of capitalism, private property, personal property, self-employment, etc., were all included in this discussion. Granma reported that between 1 December, 2010, and 28 February, 2011, 163,000 meetings, were organised by work or study centres, political and residential groups, so that every Cuban regardless of political or organisational affiliation, was able to attend. It is claimed that, of a total population of 11.2 million, nearly 9 million people participated, and over 3 million comments were received.92

However, while the discussion was genuine, no democratic mechanism existed for processing the proposals and comments so they could be voted and acted upon. These proposals were sent ‘up’ to a bureaucratically-appointed committee which analysed, classified and modified them, placing a bureaucratic lid on the process. 

The Sixth Congress was attended by almost 1,000 delegates, who approved the Guidelines and passed them to the National Assembly of Peoples’ Power for legislative ratification with only minimal changes. The Congress also acknowledged that the existing full employment was based on systematic overstaffing of government enterprises and endorsed the decision to cut more than a million government jobs. This was coupled with the approval of a series of policies intended to promote co-operatives and self-employment. The measures resulted in a decrease of government employees, down from four and a quarter million in 2009 to just over three and a half million in 2012 with a consequent peak of 3.5 per cent in unemployment.93

Raúl also announced an increase in the proportion of women, black and mixed-race people in leadership positions; women were to be forty-two per cent of the new Central committee, up from fourteen per cent; black and mixed race people were increased from ten per cent to thirty per cent (around one-third of the Cuban population are black or mixed race). Breaking with accepted practice, Raúl recommended to the Congress that public officials be limited to a maximum of two five-year terms, and the unstated requirement that only a PCC member could hold public office be eliminated.

As part of the discussions around the Sixth Congress, Frank Josué Solar Cabrales presented an article entitled, ‘Cuba, the traps on the road’, declaring:

The socialist solution (to Cuba’s problems, requires) workers’ democracy in the party and the state structures and government; the democratic participation of the workers in the planning of the economy and an internationalist policy promoting the extension of the socialist revolution throughout Latin America and the world.94

Another current within the PCC raised the important question of workers’ self-management; the participation of workers in the management of the economy and the decision-making processes at all levels. The suggestion was that ownership of companies was to be handed to their workers who would receive their wages as a share of the profits made. These proposals were parallel to the Chinese government’s measures for small and medium-sized enterprises introduced in 1982. Experience showed that, whatever the intentions of the proposers, such measures accelerated a return to capitalism.

The system proposed also had strong similarities to the ‘socialist self-management’ implemented in Yugoslavia and which was a significant factor in the economic collapse of that country. This type of ownership did increase productivity at a local level but, because of its unplanned nature, also created unemployment, sharp trade cycles and regional disparities that played a substantial role in the break-up of the country and its reversion to capitalism. Experience has taught that, within a capitalist world market, self-management for profit within an unplanned economy, may improve production, but inevitably leads back to capitalism, and in a very short time.

In the discussions, those who proposed moving Cuba towards capitalism emphasised the practicality of their schemes: obtaining foreign investment, developing small and medium-sized enterprises, decentralising economic activity, and emphasising market forces in the economy, and so on. Omar Everleny Perez, the most renowned of the academics favouring pro-capitalist economic reforms, an economist with the influential Centre for the Study of the Cuban Economy (CEEC) at Havana University, wrote:

Of course, there are people who will lose as a result of these reforms. Of course, some people are going to be unemployed. Of course, inequalities will increase … what we have today is false egalitarianism. What is at stake is who really deserves to be on top.95 (Emphasis in original.)

These people can claim one success: the Cuban government is moving away from the system whereby products are subsidised, and moving towards a system which provides subsidies to the poorest and most disadvantaged. This will reduce government expenditure but at the cost of introducing means-testing. All experience shows that, over time, this will result in the stigmatisation of the poor with a consequent loss of social cohesion.

The Sixth Congress opened the door to procuring from countries that received solidarity aid from Cuba at least the equivalent of the cost of this aid, a proposal which transformed solidarity into service provision. Also announced was the first Special Development Zone to be created in port Mariel, forty-five kilometres west of Havana. Here, as in China’s Special Economic Zones, foreign companies would be able to transfer their profits abroad without paying the usual taxes or tariffs for ten years. The initiative, backed by US$900 million of Brazilian capital, would cover more than 465 square kilometres, and be managed by a Singapore-based firm, PSA.

The international capitalist media speculate about whether Raúl Castro is proposing a ‘Chinese way’ for Cuba, that is, the progressive introduction of market measures that will ultimately lead to the restoration of capitalism. Obviously, this would be the preferred option for the capitalists internationally, but the official Cuban media insists that Cuba is not China, that conditions are different and models cannot be copied. However, Cuban economists are indeed proposing exactly the same kinds of market reforms which in China led to the restoration of capitalism.

Raúl Castro’s challenge over the past decade has been to place the Cuban economy on what he believes are firm foundations. The question of economic performance is clearly central to that task. Raúl claims to see ‘market socialism’ as a way to strengthen Cuba’s economy without abandoning its Castro-era ideals. But it remains to be seen how long – and if – this ideological limit will survive. In this Raúl, stands shoulder to shoulder with Deng Xiaoping who, intending to preserve a bureaucratic system based on a nationalised, planned economy, actually began the march back to capitalism.

After being elected president in February 2008, Raúl accelerated the economic reforms and began to re-structure the cabinet he had inherited to head off opposition and smooth the process. A number of ministers, including the two (Carlos Lage and Felipe Pérez Roque) seen as likely to cause problems, were replaced by younger, more docile, more efficient and reform-minded ‘specialists’.96 It was this new cabinet which approved the plan to shed a million public sector jobs and is likely to approve future changes necessary to commit Cuba to something like the Chinese economic model.

The income from export of medical services, based on about 37,000 Cuban doctors and nurses serving abroad, is possibly as high as US$5 billion annually, much more than the income from tourism. For example, in 2013, the Brazilian Ministry of Health signed a deal for the services of 4,000 Cuban doctors, for which it pays US$270 million a year to the Cuban government.97 The programme, Mais Medicos (More Doctors – also known as Castrocare), was to redress the shortage of doctors in communities in Brazil’s interior and in the poorer districts on the outskirts of major cities. The deal was extended for three years commencing September 2016 and, up to the date of renewal, 11,429 Cuban health professionals had participated. Those they had treated were overwhelmingly (eighty-one per cent) low-income and ninety-five per cent of those said they were satisfied with the treatment they had received. Brazil pays Cuba about US$4,000 per month for each doctor. The doctors get US$400 per month while in Brazil, and – as an inducement to return home – a lump sum at a rate of US$600 per month for the time served abroad when they return to Cuba. The money earned while working abroad is, relative to the salaries of those remaining in Cuba, a huge amount.

Remittances from Cubans abroad are worth US$3 billion annually, with over half of all Cuban families receiving this benefit. While these payments are an important source of revenue, they do not reach all sections of society equally, increasing social inequality and reducing the status of wages as the main source of income.

12.1 Obama, Trump, US-Cuba rapprochement and foreign debt

The resumption of diplomatic relations between the USA and Cuba was a victory for the Cuban people. Obama recognised the failure of fifty years of US attempts to destroy the Cuban Revolution. Military intervention in 1961 at the Bay of Pigs, terrorism and economic sabotage, conspiracies to assassinate Cuban leaders, an economic embargo to strangle the life of the island, everything has been tried to break Cuba. But Cuba held fast, not without difficulty, not without suffering. Cuba held on to become the anti-imperialist reference for the entire Latin American left.

Cuba’s resistance has successfully withstood the politico-military confrontation with US imperialism, but has not been so successful resisting the pressures of the capitalist world market. Once more, it is confirmed that socialism cannot be built in one country. But Obama did not lift the US embargo, and no-one should be fooled that the US administration was changing its goals; its aim remains the destruction of the Cuban Revolution because, while it exists, it is a serious threat to US interests in Latin America. The US was simply changing its tactics, using the possibility of rapprochement to launch a three-pronged attack. The most obvious was the call for economic changes within Cuba in return for lifting the blockade. The second was to dangle the carrot of US investment in, particularly, tourism, agribusiness, pharmaceuticals and telecommunications to draw Cuba back into its zone of influence. Thirdly, it wielded the big stick by repealing the US policy of giving Cuban migrants favoured immigration status and thus eliminating an escape route for dissatisfied citizens, hoping they will generate additional pressure on the regime, and pose an additional financial burden.

Obama made his first overtures at the end of 2009, when he announced measures that ended restrictions on the amounts that American citizens could send to family members in Cuba. This move was intended to complement Cuban government measures taken in September 2010 relaxing its control of the economy. Many of the three-quarters of a million public sector workers who lost their jobs were expected to become self-employed. Obama’s measures were intended to help finance a petty-bourgeois layer friendly to the US.98 In 2007, eighty per cent of Cuban workers were state employees, by 2015 this had fallen to seventy-one per cent, as reported by Cuba’s National Office of Statistics. The number of (mostly urban) self-employed workers has grown from 141,600 in 2008 to about one-third of a total workforce of five million by 2017.

Secret negotiations were held between the Cuban leadership and the Obama administration on several issues. Raúl and Obama used their influence and political authority on the warring sides in Colombia to bring about the end of the FARC’s armed struggle, leading eventually to a peace agreement. The Colombian deal was key in the re-establishment of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the US. After spending thirty-three years listed as a state sponsor of terrorism by the US State Department, Cuba was formally, and silently, removed in May 2015. In July the same year, the USA allowed the Cubans to re-open their embassy in Washington DC. During the two years of secret negotiations, Cuba increased its cooperation with the US on anti-narcotics efforts, and now forms an integral part of the US defensive wall against drug smuggling.

In May 2013, Cuba amended its Penal Code and Proceedings to make its treatment of foreigners more ‘flexible’. The courts are instructed to pay “special attention … where the accused are foreigners or individuals with permanent residence abroad”, to guarantee they receive “essential” consular assistance. Those arrested for a crime should be held in jail (“preventive, temporary imprisonment”) prior to their trial “only in such cases where it is absolutely necessary”, “the least number of individuals should be imprisoned” and then “only in highly serious cases”. The “policy of granting early prison release” will be applied whenever possible. Cynics might say Cuba was preparing for an influx of capitalist entrepreneurs.

In early 2014, the Cuban government passed Law 118 enacting the key points agreed at the Sixth Congress. In certain important areas, this new law was an extension of the Congress decisions; foreign investment was to be allowed in all economic sectors, including: utilities, real estate (including houses), hotel management and professional services. There will be an initial eight-year exemption on taxes after which tax on profits will be half the current rate (fifteen per cent compared to thirty per cent), tax exemption when profits are re-invested in Cuba, and 100 per cent foreign ownership permitted. Health, education, and the armed forces are excluded. These moves parallel the changes introduced in China in 1983 when, to boost the performance of the Special Economic Zones, wholly foreign-owned companies were freed to operate in the country. This was followed by actively encouraging foreign owned enterprises to set up in China and, within two years, it had abandoned the monopoly of foreign trade.

In Cuba, all investment must be authorised by the Ministry of Foreign Trade and it remains the case that no foreign investor may hire labour directly. That continues to be done (as in China) by a government employment agency which both charges a fee for its services and insists the employees are paid in US dollars. This is such a lucrative activity that doubtless it will continue as a state monopoly.

Cuba is a country in which environmental issues are taken seriously and the new legislation does provide for strict environmental controls with any environmental damage having to be made good. This has been cited by some on the left as a mechanism which will control the degree of capitalist exploitation that can take place. However, as China found, to maximise profits, many firms decamp overnight, leaving an empty factory, unpaid employees and without redressing environmental damage. How Cuba deals with such situations remains to be seen.

For ordinary Cubans, a major change will be the ability to buy and sell their homes on an open market, classified by the Wall Street Journal (3 April, 2015) as a “real-estate revolution”. Here, it was noted that the asking price for luxury apartments in Havana is as high as US$1.2 million and, using Air BnB, the daily rental rate for a room in a family house is between US$16 and US$50 per day, the latter being about the average monthly wage in Cuba. If anything can deal the CDRs their coup de grace, it is this new dawn of private property. Cuba is seeing the division between those who use their own homes for some commercial purpose – as a restaurant, or workshop or simply to rent out – and those who do not. These divisions will deepen, bringing the danger of the polarisation of the cities into well-to-do neighbourhoods and shanties. Already in wealthy neighbourhoods, private forms of security are becoming the norm.

In August, 1985, Fidel had announced that Cuba’s debt had become unpayable. Some thirty years later, in December 2015, there was an historic agreement between Cuba and the Major Creditors of Cuba (also known as the Paris Club) including Canada, France, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom to restructure its debt following its default in 1986. The terms of the agreement provided that the Paris Club wrote off the penalties that had accumulated, totalling some US$8.5 billion, and Cuba would pay US$2.6 billion (corresponding to the original principal) by 2033. There is a moratorium on interest levied until 2020, after which there will be an interest rate of 1.5 per cent per annum until the debt is fully repaid. But all is not as charitable as it might seem.

Creditors are using debt as a vehicle to obtain trade and investment advantages. The possibility of re-establishing diplomatic relations with the US and of a gradual weakening of the blockade, created a race between international investors to obtain the best conditions for accessing Cuba’s high growth sectors of tourism, mining, and pharmaceuticals. It is in this context that Cuba concluded agreements with China, Japan and Mexico to write off billions of dollars of debt, and to restructure the remaining debts over ten to twenty years on much easier terms. With Russia, ninety per cent of Cuba’s debt, estimated at US$35.2 billion was written off and in return, Cuba will pay the remaining US$3.2 billion over a ten-year period. The settlement of Cuba’s debts is central for attracting foreign capital, for the country’s re-inclusion in international financial markets, and will greatly reduce obstacles to capitalist investment.

In each of these agreements trade concessions were central in obtaining debt cancellation. For example, both the Canadian and the Spanish are active in the tourism sector and wish to protect their position in the face of possible increased competition from US companies. Canada heads the countries sending tourists to Cuba, with 1.2 million visitors in 2016, while Spain is expected to be the major holiday destination for the Cuban nouveau riche. Another example of the kind of deals being struck was seen in May 2017, when the South Korean technology giant, Samsung, opened a store in co-operation with the Cuban retail chain, Caribbean TRD, owned by the Cuban Armed Forces, and which has over fifty per cent of the Cuban electronics market. On sale will be Samsung products, including smartphones, TVs and fridges.

However, the surprise election of Donald Trump in November 2016, has created a situation of considerable uncertainty for the Cuban leadership. They had a deal with Obama which they thought would lead towards the lifting of the US embargo at a time when the crisis in the Venezuelan revolution had already started to cut off what had been Cuba’s oil lifeline for ten years. In July 2016, for example, a twenty per cent cut in promised Venezuelan oil shipments meant blackouts and short-time working in offices and factories.

It is not yet clear to the Cuban leadership what policy Trump will follow. On the one hand, he is a businessman and the change in policy by Obama was based on the pressure of a substantial sector of US capitalists who did not want to lose investment opportunities to Canada, China, and the EU. That sector still exists and will attempt to push Trump to maintain the same policy as Obama.

On the other hand, there are powerful interests within the Republican party, many in the Trump camp, that remain ideologically committed to banging the anti-Communism drum. On 16 June, 2017, before a cheering crowd of Cuban émigrés at the Manuel Artime Theatre (named after the leader of the Bay of Pigs fiasco) in Miami’s Little Havana, Trump vowed that he would not be silent in the face of “Communist aggression”, and “cancelled” Obama’s initiative.

However, behind the scenes, the actions of the Trump camp are not as anti-Cuba as they appear in front of the cameras. Deliberately giving the appearance of reinstating a ban on Americans going to Cuba as tourists, what Trump actually did was to demand US tourists avoid hotels and villas, and tour companies owned by the Cuban military. For the moment, key parts of the Obama initiative remain intact, in particular the ability to remit money to the island, and commercial deals in the pipe-line can continue as planned (even those with GAESA). Cuba has some of the best and most inventive biotech and medical research in the world, and trials of the Cuban lung cancer drug Cimavax, the success of which would mean big bucks for the Cuban government, have been underway in the US since 2015. Roswell Park Cancer Institute has an agreement with Cuba’s Centre for Molecular Immunology to begin clinical trials in the US for approval by the Food and Drug Administration.

However, the National Security Presidential Memorandum on Cuba signed by Trump on 16 June, 2017, could deprive millions of Cubans of remittances from their US relatives. By the end of his presidency, Obama had reduced the restrictions on remittances to a narrow layer of state officials and senior officers of the Cuban armed forces. Trump has potentially extended the ban to hundreds of senior officials in every government agency, Cubans who act as leaders of their local CDR, and every one of the 60,000 employees of the Ministry of the Interior. If employees of the two big holding companies, GAESA and CIMEX, are included, then as many as a quarter of the Cuban labour force will no longer be eligible for remittances. Hidden in the small print of an obscure piece of legislation, because of their undoubted unpopularity in the Cuban-American community, these measures could deny clerks, truck drivers, and privates doing national service in the Cuban army help from family members in the USA. Now it is the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control that will interpret and enact the new regulations. But people are very resourceful and unofficial remittances have jumped in value by a factor of five. That said, even without any change to remittances, Trump’s actions will mean a drop in Cuban GDP and a small but significant drop in family consumption.

Whether Cuba’s leaders can balance the incentives offered to foreign capital, and the consequent impact within Cuba, with protecting the social gains made in the revolution remains to be seen. There are grounds for optimism: there is Cuba’s high level of educational attainment, there is a real anti-imperialist sentiment amongst the people, there is a high level of technological development in sectors such as mining, medical services and pharmaceuticals, and tourism. To discard these special characteristics in the pursuit of a form of development dictated from abroad would be the worst course of action.

12.2 Seventh Party Congress, April 2017

In contrast to previous congresses, PCC members were kept in the dark about the key programmatic and strategic documents to be placed before the Seventh Congress. On 23 February, Granma, had reported the Central Committee Plenum announcement of “a popular consultation” on the Congress documents. But with just weeks to go, only the 800 or so delegates, the 280 guests, National Assembly deputies, high-level PCC cadres and some academics and consultants had been given access to the drafts. From many parts of the country rank and file members asked: Did the PCC leadership not have sufficient confidence in them to allow them to help decide the destiny of their country? If not, what was the point of them being Party activists? This questioning was a welcome sign of life within the PCC.

The response of the PCC leadership, an editorial in Granma on 27 March, was, frankly, an embarrassment to all those who defend the Cuban state against imperialist aggression. The paper informed its readers that the Seventh Congress on 16-19 April, 2017 was being held only to fulfil the Party Statute that a Congress should be held every five years. Party-wide consultation on the Congress documents was unnecessary, because such consultation had occurred five years previously for the Sixth Congress, and the decisions of that Congress were still being implemented. The unanswered questions: Were the measures agreed those being implemented? Were the measures being implemented taking Cuba towards a more democratic form of socialism or to a Chinese-style capitalist restoration? That the leadership did not consider it worthwhile to bring these issues into the open was a clear warning of the degree of differences among PCC tops on where Cuba might be heading.

A sprightly, eighty-four year-old Raúl Castro presented the main report to the Congress and hinted strongly that divisions within the leadership made free and open debate an impossibility in a party which forbade factions. In the code so often used in the Russian and Chinese Communist Parties, Raúl stated that the “great technical complexity” of the main document to be presented to Congress meant it had yet to be completed. He confirmed the “sanctity” of the socialist basis of the Cuban state while declaring that capitalist reforms would proceed.

A number of apparently secondary events confirmed Raúl as a firm supporter of the capitalist initiatives. His re-affirmation that the PCC would remain the only party allowed in Cuba is, while factions are banned within the PCC, a serious block to party democracy. Such a declaration is an attempt to stifle democratic debate just when it is essential. Other changes show that he is determined to reduce the number of guerrilla fighters on the Central and Political Committees. In his opening address he stated: “We propose establishing 60 as the maximum age for joining the party’s Central Committee … and 70 for leadership jobs in the party”, adding that the goal was the systematic rejuvenation of all party posts so that “we are never surprised by developments” and succession “flows naturally”.

Such moves would, normally, be welcomed by socialists but here we see an attempt to remove from the Party leadership those most opposed to pro-capitalist policies. The Political Committee, came to the Congress with a membership of fourteen, two members were dropped and five new members elected. All the new members are too young to have been directly involved in the revolution and, generally, are technocrats such as Miriam Nicado García, age fifty-four, Director of the University of Information Sciences, and Marta Ayala Avila, age fifty, Deputy Director General of the Engineering Centre for Genetics and Biotechnology.

Raúl called for Congress to accept the Central Committee document in principle, take it back to their local areas and continue the discussion, saying that in this way it could be the basis of a wide, deep and democratic process that would extend to society at large, and the results of the discussions would then be submitted for final approval by the Central Committee. This would not be on the scale of the discussions around the Sixth Congress because matters had already been decided in principle. The proposal was, most likely, a device to defuse a situation where there could have been extensive criticism of Party policy. Despite the appearance of continued and extended democratic discussion – in the Party, in the Communist Youth, in the mass organisations, etc., the reality was that, in the end, there would be a myriad of suggestions and comments, far too many to consider, and nobody would hear of them again. The Central Committee would then be free to make its own policy decisions, claiming the support of the Cuban people, present them to the National Assembly, formally the highest institution of state power, which would then gave them legal status.

The Seventh Party Congress appointed Raúl to be First Secretary, a post that he can legitimately hold until 2021 when he will be ninety years of age. In 2018, Raúl was replaced as President and, for the first time, the PCC top and President is not the same person. At his advanced age, Raúl could not expect to hold two demanding jobs.

13. Bureaucracy and corruption: what way forward for Cuba?

Currently, the market is a junior partner in Cuba’s central planning. The Seventh Party Congress approved continued controlled liberalisation, accepting market socialism as PCC doctrine, stating that “the State recognises and integrates the market into the functioning of the system of planned direction of the economy.” The similarities with China are too obvious to ignore.

The Deng wing of the CCP coined the phrase ‘market socialism’ in which the main levers of the economy remained under state control guided by a state plan including a monopoly of foreign trade. Deng and his co-thinkers knew that bureaucratic attempts to achieve economic self-sufficiency had failed and recognised that China could not develop in isolation from the world market. ‘Socialism in One Country’, previously basic Stalinist dogma, while remaining official ideology, was finally, though quietly, buried.

When Deng and the other leaders of the CP in China began their programme of reforms, they had no inkling that they were preparing the way for capitalist restoration. But the incremental introduction of market measures (in the name of efficiency) led to the restoration of capitalism, with a massive increase in inequality, the destruction of the social welfare system, etc. At each stage of the process, the bureaucracy considered how to proceed, convinced it was doing the best for the country. In fact, the bureaucracy took those decisions which benefited itself, the CCP, state bureaucrats and hangers-on, because it falsely identified its own interests as those of China. It is no surprise, therefore, that sections of the bureaucracy in Cuba are looking to China as a model. These people point to the growth in China’s GDP and the continued rule of the CCP, and are blind to, or choose to ignore, the massive accompanying social contradictions.

Aid from Venezuela, the delivery of oil at below world market prices, is coming to an end and hence a worsening of the Cuban economic situation is anticipated. Cuba cannot wait around. China is making Latin America, especially Cuba, a priority area for investment and shipped US$1.8 billion of exports to Cuba in 2016. Plans are in place for projects encompassing tourism (US$460 million in golf resorts), telecommunications (a computer assembly plant funded by Haier with capacity for 120,000 laptops and tablets annually), and infrastructure (Shanghai Electric is funding development of bioelectricity plants).99 China is selling its products on ‘soft credit’, making Cuba China’s largest creditor. But capitalist China does not have the same priorities as the former Soviet Union and, sooner rather than later, it will be asking Cuba to settle its debts.

There is a strong current amongst Cuban economists, supporting measures that, taken as a whole, can be called the ‘Chinese way’, with the aim of developing the economy but which will inevitably end up with the restoration of capitalism. Because of the strong criticism of China from left-wing intellectuals, the term preferred by the rightists is the ‘Vietnamese model’. Recent proposals include emulating the Chinese example by changing the basis of Cuban law to expand reliance on the private sector, to enlarge the free trade zone around the port of Mariel, and offer even greater tax exemptions to new business.

Everleny argued the Cuban economy’s urgent need for deep structural transformation, emphasising decentralisation and the necessity for non-state forms of property, not only in agriculture but also in the manufacturing and service sectors. He insisted that time would show that reform of the economic system must include the rise of the market. But Everleny was moving too fast, and in April 2016 was fired from his University post for sharing information with Americans without authorisation.

In the same month, Julio Antonio Fernandez Estrada, Professor in the Faculty of Law at Havana University, wrote an article for the online magazine OnCuba, which was posted on 16 April, 2016. The article contained calls for greater democracy in Cuba:

Our people want to talk about and feel the emotions of socialist Cuban politics; which means democratically, intensely, with no holds barred and without any taboos – the only way to lay the first stone in the walkway to true popular sovereignty.

The article raised demands for opening the books on the personal wealth of Party tops:

[T]he Cuban people want to know what our politicians eat. If they ever go to a ‘paladar’, we want to know how many CUC they have and what tastes they have.

To cap it all the article ended by challenging Raúl’s perspective of a mixed-economy:

Obama will not give us happiness, nor will those who want to divide the country up among big businesses, nor the bureaucracy which does not understand the people …

A few months later, Estrada’s contract with the university was not renewed. He was told that this was because of what he wrote in OnCuba. He replied:

[M]y fault has been telling the truth, being trustworthy and honest, to defend socialism and criticise the opportunists and the impudent ones. These are my crimes and I will continue to commit them.

The introduction of market mechanisms in the Cuban economy has been encouraged by the growth in self-employment, which has increased with the layoffs of public sector employees. Inequalities in society have been strengthened between those with access to privilege, such as elements of the state apparatus linked to the military hierarchy, often in business with big capitalist companies and multinationals, and those with access to the dollar (those who have relatives abroad, or work abroad, or work in the tourism industry), and the rest of the Cuban people. Inequality was the determining factor in the development of the Soviet bureaucracy, and its growth in Cuba would strengthen the evolution of a Chinese-type state capitalism with an authoritarian, bureaucratic Communist Party, with specific Cuban characteristics, in charge.

However, the concrete conditions in Cuba today are completely different from those in China under Deng. China is a huge country with over a billion inhabitants to provide capitalist enterprises with a vast reserve of cheap labour, where one factory can employ over a quarter of a million workers most in the age range seventeen to twenty-five years. Such measures cannot be adopted in Cuba, with or without the restoration of capitalism. Cuba might attempt to emulate China, but there can be no comparable economies of scale. In a world beset by a crisis of overproduction, a capitalist Cuba would resemble neither China nor Vietnam, but rather Nicaragua after the victory of the counter-revolution. It would soon revert to a similar situation that existed before 1959, one of misery, degradation, and semi-colonial dependence.

There is much advice being offered on how to remedy Cuba’s economic problems; within Cuba there are those from the Centre for the Study of the Cuban Economy, Havana University, who argue for a free market economy, those who argue for legalising all forms of self-employment excluding only the military, those who argue for workers’ control over their individual workplaces, those who call for an alliance of PCC activists with fundamentalist Christians to launch agricultural co-operatives outside of any government control, those who call for constraints on government subsidies and the introduction of means-testing. All these views can be read in official and semi-official publications. One line of argument, now gaining support in Cuba is the call for Soviet democracy.

In his brilliant analysis of the USSR, Leon Trotsky insisted that “the planned economy needs workers’ democracy as much as the human body needs oxygen”. The workers should be, and really feel themselves to be, owners of the means of production and the state, and participate directly and effectively, in the running of the economy and the administration of public affairs. The programme, which faithfully reflects these needs, is the programme of workers’ democracy and democratic planning of the means of production, the programme of Lenin and Trotsky.

The Internet’s arrival in Cuba has considerably opened political discussion and weakened the hold of the censors. The process used by Esteban Morales100 for raising and publicising his arguments on the reasons behind the collapse of the Soviet Union and possible parallels in Cuba, was to first discuss the issue within his local branch of the PCC, then informally with others using emails and other means of communication, and finally to publish his articles on websites inside and outside Cuba. Today in Cuba, websites and blogs are accessible and are a means by which those with positive criticisms of the regime are able to spread their ideas. In parallel is the publication of the printed word, such as: From Real Socialism to Real Capitalism by Ariel Dacal and Francisco Brown.

Early in 2016, Cuban journalists received verbal instructions prohibiting them from publishing in non-government media. The authorities deemed the matter so sensitive that they would not put their instructions in writing, and provoked a hornet’s nest. In July 2016, Esteban Morales, in his widely-read blog, alerted his readers to a serious struggle against this and other forms of censorship taking place within Granma itself, led by the deputy editor Karina Marron. At a closed meeting of the Congress of the Cuban Journalists’ Union, Marron made a biting criticism of the censorship that existed in Cuba. Her intervention was briefly mentioned in the official reports of the Congress, but her more incendiary comments, including criticism of the leadership of the PCC, were airbrushed out. However, a full report of Marron’s comments was uploaded onto the personal blog of one José Pantoja, a journalist working for Radio Holguin (who was sacked almost immediately). This went viral and resulted in a storm of controversy.

Because Raúl Castro has a much less interventionist style than his brother, preferring to work behind the scenes, Granma has assumed greater importance. Many in Cuba, such as Marron, believe a greater role for the media now exists, and this has brought into the open the differences between those in the leadership who favour rigid subordination to the Party and those who argue that policy must be the result of discussion and democratic agreement.

Marron’s comments were explosive, not only because of her position, but because they were demonstrative of the politicisation of a layer of Cuban youth and the issues concerning them. Since Obama’s visit, the Young Communist League (Union de Jovenes Comunistas, UJC) has experienced a steep growth in membership as more and more young people become interested in politics, and the ideas of communism. In July 2017, the UJC announced its membership had risen to over 300,000, reversing the trend of previous years. Many of these young people have been drawn into activity in order to participate in determining the future of their country, and are a receptive audience for ideas on soviet democracy.

For example, on 26 September, 2014, forty-three college students disappeared in the Mexican town of Iguala. University students in Cuba were determined to show their solidarity with and support for the Mexican students, and on 1 October, 2015 a group of about thirty youth marched from Havana University to the Presidents’ Avenue in Havana in solidarity with the Mexican students. This was a left-wing demonstration in Cuba, which had not been organised, nor sanctioned, by any official organisation, and the University authorities used this to try to prevent them from gathering on the institution’s steps, an historical gathering point for revolutionary marches in Cuba before 1959.

Amongst those who organised the protest were a group of students who had been following a course on Marxism at the Juan Marinello Institute. In November 2015, they, and students from Santiago and other universities, formed the Anti-Capitalist Youth Network, aiming to combat the “growing de-politicisation of wide layers of the population” and increase the “participation of the people in controlling” economic policies. They want to “stimulate the critical appropriation of Marxism” and insist that it is necessary to “relaunch socialism and anti-capitalism”. This is a welcome sign that there are those amongst the young generation who are worried about the possible restoration of capitalism in Cuba, want to fight against it, and are looking towards Marxist theory to give them the tools to wage this struggle.

13.1 Bureaucracy and corruption

The superiority of a nationalised planned economy was demonstrated by the colossal successes of the early USSR and its rapid recovery after the devastation it suffered during WWII. But the Stalinist bureaucracy, from its earliest stages, retarded economic development and, as industry and commerce advanced technologically, the bureaucracy became an unqualified and absolute brake on economic development. The bureaucrats’ protection of their own interests had higher priority than the performance of soviet industry, so they never considered introducing the most effective measure for solving the problems of the Soviet economy – workers’ democracy. The only kind of state-owned industries they could imagine were those that existed under a Stalinist state bureaucracy, with all the mismanagement involved. They could not envisage efficient state-owned industries under workers’ control. Soviet democracy is the death knell of bureaucracy, the Soviet bureaucrats had more to lose from workers’ control than a return to capitalism; with the latter, they were more likely to retain their privileges.

A centralised bureaucracy cannot determine every aspect of production, and terrible distortions and inefficiencies are inevitable. A centrally-planned economy can work efficiently only if there are checks at every level by the workers involved. Workers’ democracy, workers’ control, and workers’ management are essential for determining the optimum goals and the efficient functioning of any proletarian regime. The workers, who are also the consumers, have a material interest in ensuring that the plan works efficiently at all levels. Bureaucrats are only interested in meeting their quotas, regardless of quality of output, so that they will get their bonuses and retain their privileged positions.

In 1967, Guevara had cause to comment on the problem of absenteeism, today the problem is low productivity (particularly in agriculture) which, generally, lags well below the rest of Latin America. The reason for both failings was, and is, a bureaucratic system that systematically generates disorganisation and disorder, that fails to motivate workers by providing them with either a say and/or control over what they do, or with material incentives. How can moral exhortations work when the worker sees a regime of corruption, back-handers, and privileges? Such appeals are seen as a way of getting the workers to take responsibility for improving the operation of the system while denying them the power to take the decisions necessary, and to work harder without getting any material benefits.

Mismanagement, corruption and swindling are the inevitable consequence of a bureaucratic regime. By the 1980s, the workers in Eastern Europe and the USSR no longer had any memory of the revolutionary upsurge that established the first workers’ state. Their experience was of a self-serving, incompetent, oppressive regime that was mismanaging the economy to a state of collapse. In Cuba today, the situation is not yet the same; there is economic mismanagement, there are serious constraints on freedom of speech, there is no internal party democracy, but there have been no mass purges as in Russia and China, PCC members who criticise are not killed but expelled from the Party, and even then are often re-admitted, and the US embargo has generated a strong sense of a country determined to be free of imperialism. The leadership must tread carefully, the Cuban people have shown no great desire for increased inequality and strongly oppose corruption – both of which are integral to any attempts to restore capitalism.

All those in Cuba who consider themselves revolutionary or communist are duty bound to actively protect the gains of the revolution, and to do so must study the lessons of the degeneration of the Russian revolution. It was the parasitic excrescence that was the bureaucracy, itself a consequence of the isolation of the revolution in a backward country, which finally led to the restoration of capitalism and the catastrophic social collapse which accompanied it.

Trotsky warned that, as the bureaucracy developed, the more senior the bureaucrats, the more they would want to pass their privileges on to their children and grandchildren. And this was best done through private ownership. He predicted that the bureaucracy could and would adapt very easily to capitalist restoration. Transforming the workers’ state into a bourgeois regime would be realised largely by the bureaucrats themselves, who would become the captains of capitalist industry or its favoured servants. Few bureaucrats would have to be purged. On the other hand, a political revolution would impose on those bureaucrats a worker’s wage and remove their privileges. For most bureaucrats there was, and is, a bigger conflict with workers’ democracy than capitalism. Trotsky’s prognosis of capitalist restoration was almost a blueprint for the actions of the Chinese Stalinists and a warning to Cuban socialists:

… The chief task of the new (bourgeois) power would be to restore private property in the means of production. First of all, it would be necessary to create conditions for the development of strong farmers from the weak collective farms … In the sphere of industry, denationalization would begin with the light industries and those producing food. The planning principle would be converted for the transitional period into a series of compromises between state power and individual ‘corporations’ – potential proprietors, that is, among the Soviet captains of industry … and foreign capitalists.101

The dynamism of the Chinese economy and the chaotic collapse of the Soviet Union are very powerful factors in the thinking of Raúl and the other PCC leaders. There is every likelihood that at least a section of the PCC has concluded that the Chinese route should be followed, especially the retention of tight party control. The steps already taken are in this direction. Will the PCC, like the Chinese Communist Party, stagger from one empiric measure to the next, thinking it is avoiding the collapse that occurred in Russia, only to end up with a capitalist Cuba? One major factor stands in their way: fear of how the masses will respond.

The problem of corruption and bureaucracy in Cuba was denounced by Fidel himself, in an important speech to staff and students of Havana University on 17 November, 2005. More recently, the matter was taken up in a sharp way by Esteban Morales. In an article published on the UNEAC website, he clearly identified the main counter-revolutionary threat in Cuba today:

We can have no doubt that the counter-revolution, little by little, is taking positions at certain levels of the state and government. Without a doubt, it is becoming evident that there are people in positions of government and state who are preparing themselves financially for when the Revolution falls, and others may have everything almost ready to transfer state-owned assets to private hands, as happened in the old USSR.

Yes, the black market and corruption exists but it is not the individuals standing outside shopping centres selling small amounts of black-market goods who are the real criminals, rather, it is those in the state bureaucracy who are supplying goods wholesale from government warehouses. Morales is keen to demonstrate that corruption at all levels of the bureaucracy is more dangerous to Cuba than so-called dissidents, who are being scapegoated.

Morales is a Communist with more than fifty years of struggle behind him, but shortly after publishing an article, entitled ‘Corruption: The true counter-revolution?’ (April 2010) he was expelled from the PCC, despite protests from his local branch. His article was removed from the UNEAC website, prompting Morales to write a further article denouncing these methods and continuing to insist on linking the problem of corruption to the question of bureaucracy. He appealed to the rank and file members of the party to wage a campaign against both, arguing that the rank and file of the party should not limit their actions and discussions to purely local issues, but consider problems in their totality. The current situation, he said, prevented the rank and file of the party from effective criticisms of the tops, something necessary for democratic control of the activities of the higher bodies, and which cost the working masses in the USSR very dear. Clearly, Morales is addressing a central problem facing the Cuban revolution. In 1930’s Russia, Morales would have been summarily shot, in China today, he would be in prison, but in Cuba the situation is more contradictory and fluid. Morales was expelled from the PCC, but has since been re-admitted. Freedom of speech is certain to feature prominently once leftists begin to build an audience of workers.

The lack of genuine workers’ democracy, in which ordinary working people participate directly in managing the state and the economy, is one of the main threats to the revolution. It breeds demoralisation, scepticism, cynicism and generally undermines the revolutionary morale of the people. If it is combined with a situation where everyone is aware of corruption and theft going on at the top of the state while basic needs are not met and the purchasing power of wages decreases, then it becomes a counter-revolutionary danger of the first order. There are now many amongst the members of the PCC who share the concerns of Esteban Morales fearing that sections of the bureaucracy will use people’s dissatisfaction to lead the restoration of capitalism, as happened in the USSR.

Those on the left must convince the masses that they have a practical answer to the critical question of how a socialist and democratic Cuba could emerge from poverty and economic stagnation, that the mobilisation of the people and the constitution of a genuine socialist democracy is the best way to protect Cubans from US capitalist pressure. To do this, it is necessary to create the conditions of democratic debate in all the popular organisations in Cuba. This requires the acceptance of forms of pluralism in the PCC and in the popular movement (with limitations on pro-capitalist parties).

For most Cubans, the chance to improve their material conditions is a necessary condition for supporting political change. Much could be achieved simply by removing the dead hand of the bureaucracy, for example, allowing local organisations such as the branches of the CDR to use their ingenuity to solve immediate problems. All over the island old, antiquated and poorly-serviced water pipes are leaking but not repaired, leading not only to a massive loss of scarce, clean water, but the larger water spills (ponds) provide breeding grounds for mosquitos which transmit fever. Given the authority to use their natural inventiveness this is a problem that could be readily solved by local people with minimum need for additional resources.

This loss of potable water is occurring while Cuba is experiencing the worst drought of the past 115 years. There is no quick fix for the problem of Cuba’s declining rainfall, and drought will continue to impact negatively on the island, but a mass mobilisation tackling a real problem and achieving meaningful results will greatly boost morale and social cohesion. The limits of bureaucracy are exposed but, dialectically, the opportunity for demonstrating the power of state planning is demonstrated. Just as the Soviet planned economy was able to re-organise and quickly move giant factories from one part of Russia to another to avoid destruction by the advancing German armies, so the Cuban workers’ government can provide a national response to the drought it faces. State planning can develop an integrated strategy to ensure the water remaining in the reservoirs is monitored and rationed to maintain an adequate supply to people and crops. Likewise, it can enact emergency measures such as installing new water distribution systems redirecting water to the worst hit zones (e.g., in Santiago); initiating more efficient irrigation systems to reduce the impact of the drought on agriculture, replacing sprinklers (the most inefficient means of irrigation), and substituting more efficient drip systems; introducing water-saving technology in the tourism sector for use in local irrigation and toilets.

13.2 The way forward – a New Economic Policy for Cuba?

In the very early stages of the transition to capitalism in China, it was customary to refer to Lenin and the NEP to justify the changes being made. As a general proposition, it is undoubtedly correct that sometimes a tactical retreat is necessary, and when the Russian Revolution became isolated in conditions of frightful backwardness, a retreat was inevitable. Lenin clearly presented the NEP as a setback necessary because of the delay in the world revolution, not as the way forward. He pointed out many times that, to consolidate the gains of the revolution and advance to socialism, the victory of the socialist revolution in one or more advanced countries was necessary. That would have happened in the years after World War I, had it not been for the betrayal of the leaders of European Social Democracy.

Lenin and Trotsky continued to stress the need for international revolution to come to the aid of Soviet Russia and fought against the creeping bureaucratisation of the state institutions, and for the preservation of workers’ democracy. All their hopes were based on the perspectives of the international socialist revolution, which is why they paid so much attention to building the Third (Communist) International. In the same way, Che Guevara understood that, in the last analysis, the only way to save the Cuban Revolution was to spread the revolution to Latin America, a cause for which he sacrificed his life.

Today in Cuba we are faced not with a temporary retreat, but the very real danger of the subversion of the workers’ state. The changes being proposed for the Cuban economy pose a threat to the continued existence of the workers’ state. To defend the revolutionary gains it is necessary that (i) the key sectors of the economy (banks, heavy industry [e.g. mining], tourism, pharmaceuticals and the wholesale distribution of food and goods) remain in the hands of the state, (ii) the state and industry remain in the hands of the working class (e.g., national economic plan based on production for need not profit, and state control of foreign trade), and (iii) the problem of bureaucracy and corruption is addressed (e.g., an end to social differentiation and special privileges) through the introduction of workers’ control and soviet democracy. Within that context, a relatively small private sector that meets designated needs could and should be allowed. The key is the bureaucracy, since it is the drive to protect its privileges that led the bureaucracies in Russia, China, and Eastern Europe to return to capitalism. Cuba desperately needs soviet democracy, whether rank and file committees, organisations of worker’s councils or revitalised CDRs, to effectively combat the growth of corruption and privilege and halt the slide back to capitalism.

At the Twelfth Congress of the CCP in September 1982, Deng Xiaoping announced the building of socialism with Chinese characteristics; of a so-called ‘planned commodity economy’. To increase productivity, managers of small (and medium) state businesses were given much greater autonomy, encouraged to produce goods outside the state plan for sale on the market, and permitted to introduce individual bonuses. From that time on the planning element of the economy was restricted to only major projects. However, the official position of the Party was that the state sector of the economy was, and would remain, dominant. In Cuba we have Points Nineteen and Thirty-Five in the Guidelines presented to the Sixth Congress which, when enacted, will empower each enterprise to set its own prices and give control of production to local municipal councils.

The discussions on updating Cuba’s economic and social goals, launched for the Sixth Congress and then continued after the Seventh Congress, were brought to a conclusion at the National Assembly of People’s Power on 1 June, 2017. Three documents were approved: the ‘Guidelines of the Social and Economic Policy of the Party’, the ‘Conceptualisation of the Economic and Social Model of Cuban Social Development’, and the ‘Basis of the Plan of Economic and Social Development up to 2030’. The time taken to produce these documents was, according to President Raúl Castro, due to their being “the most studied, discussed and rediscussed documents in the history of the revolution”. He might also have added that this reflected both their importance and the depth of the disagreements within the top layers of the Party on the direction the Cuban economy was heading, and the speed of that development. That this was the last gasp of the historic generation that carried out the revolution, made the infighting all the more intense.

The three documents define where Cuban socialism is going and how it will get there, updating the Cuban model to improve economic efficiency and productive capacity within a socialist framework. Helen Yaffe in her analysis102 lists three core elements to the updated economic model:

• The primacy of a planned economy which takes into account the functioning of the market.
• The introduction of diverse forms of non-state management and ownership.
• Consolidation of the socialist nature of the Cuban state through its socialist welfare and cohesion policies, its political structures which contain organs of people’s power and workers’ representation, and economically through communal ownership via the state.

Yaffe emphasises that no details are given about the policies to be adopted to achieve these goals, nor how they might be implemented:

The real test, however, will emerge in the practice of formulating, implementing and enforcing the policies required to achieve their aims. In practice, how can market forces be both encouraged, as a means of increasing employment and enterprise, and constrained, which is imperative to maintain the dominance of non-exploitative social-relations? These are the difficult challenges facing Cuban socialism

We know that the Deng and his allies had the same goal as Raúl, and they too felt that they could control the processes they introduced. The Chinese government allowed small and medium state businesses to pay a tax on their profits and retain the balance for reinvestment and distribution as bonuses. Here we had the bureaucracy of a deformed workers’ state, using capitalistic methods to revitalise part of the state sector but, in so doing, took a significant step in downgrading the importance of the national economic plan. Determined to increase the number of private companies in China, the government encouraged management buy-outs with the managers urged to rationalise their companies to make them more profitable. This has strong similarities with Point Nineteen of the Guidelines, whereby the incomes of workers in the state sector will depend on the profitability of their business. If China is the example that is being followed, we must recognise that Deng’s reforms were a first decisive step towards capitalism. The main threat to the planned economy did not come from taxi drivers and hairdressers, but from those elements in the Party and state bureaucracy who favoured the market as opposed to a socialist planned economy, and used the successes of small businesses to promote more extensive privatisation measures.

The decisions made by the National Assembly on 1 June, sparked considerable comment and discussion in the Cuban media. The Havana Times, for example, carried a number of articles on the theme that legalising private ownership of modes of production threatened that the national economy will no longer be regulated by ‘socialist laws’; that wealth will become concentrated in the hands of a few, and social inequality similar to that in the rest of Latin America will result.

Others claim that the legislation only recognises what already exists. The new measures will allow a better distribution of wealth because the government will be able to charge taxes on people who have never previously paid them. That inequality won’t be a result of ‘updating the system’, because it already exists and has been growing since the 1990s due to factors such as family remittances, opening the national economy to foreign investment, tourism, and the children of the elite reaching adulthood and inheriting their parents’ privileges. The claim is that the meritocracy – those who have gained positions of trust and authority for their dedication to, and work for, the revolution – are acting as though their privileges are hereditary, to ensure their children enjoy those same privileges, even though they have no record of making any contribution of their own. It is claimed that, with the new changes, the national economy will bring this world into the open, which has been operating clandestinely for years.

Some economists claim that if you don’t allow the self-employed to accumulate wealth, they will never be able to become business people; that, without accumulation of capital, the only people who can become owners of small and medium-sized companies are those who receive money from abroad or those who are corrupt and/or criminals. These commentators accept that, in one way or another, the concentration of wealth will lead to deepening social differences between Cubans and this can lead to a few people taking so much of the national cake for themselves, that they leave others without even a taste.

The guidelines offer little or no protection to the economic base of the workers’ state. The Chinese bureaucracy claimed to uphold the primacy of the planned economy even as it introduced diverse forms of non-state management and ownership. As for people’s power and workers’ representation, they noticeably lack any real substance. However, the truth is that there is still much to be determined: What are the limits on the accumulation of capital? What government mechanisms will redistribute wealth? How many employees can a medium-sized company employ? How will the government ensure that there are equal opportunities for all Cubans in this kind of society?

In both Russia and China, with the growth of capitalist enterprises, the rules on foreign travel were relaxed and the newly wealthy were able to holiday abroad. On 3 August, 2017, the Havana Times reported on how the newly-accumulated wealth of a section of Cuban society was showing itself in the same way. For summer 2017, Spain was the international holiday destination for those Cubans who enjoyed greatest purchasing power. Holidays were offered at about 2,500 Euros and the package included: a Schengen visa so they could enter Europe, the plane ticket, four days in Madrid and two in Barcelona, four-star hotels, visits to the Royal Palace in Madrid, the Real Madrid stadium, and Gaudí’s Crypt at Colonia Guell.

Cubans who travel abroad are the tip of an iceberg. There are now many more (though still only a small part of the population) who can afford the forty Euros per night per person to stay at Cuban tourist hotels. These are predominantly members of business cooperatives, employees of foreign companies or ‘independent labourers’. Prior to Raúl Castro’s reforms, especially opening the economy to independent labour, nobody would have believed there would be people on the island able to pay to stay at five-star hotels in Varadero, much less that there would be thousands of people travelling to Europe as tourists.

The Chinese Communist Party was (and is) renowned for its corruption, and local CCP officials seized the opportunities offered by Deng’s initiatives and used the authority given to them by their Party status to launch their own private businesses. All too often these had sweetheart deals with local authorities and were officially described as state run, but the profits went into private pockets. These moves weakened state planning but simultaneously, and, more importantly, generated a layer within the CPP of active capitalists, the so-called ‘red capitalists’; a layer that grew with each subsequent reform, helped by generous state loans and economic decentralisation, all of which downgraded the importance of the national economic plan.

Historic comparisons can be useful but what is needed is a concrete analysis of Cuba today. The first problem we see immediately is that Cuba still has a serious level of debt and a weak economic base, which has been weakened further by years of bureaucratic mismanagement. More importantly, the workers have no sense of controlling the industries in which they work and thus little interest in productivity and efficiency. In fact, in the face of the government’s policy of shedding jobs, the workers’ immediate interests are in reducing productivity to maintain staffing levels. There is a general and growing sense of malaise and discontent which generates alienation, a serious danger to the future of the revolution, as was found in the USSR. Everybody agrees that the present situation cannot continue, that something must change and something must be done. The question of questions is: what is to be done?

In many ways, the Cuban economy is typical of a Third World country, heavily dependent on the export of raw materials and the provision of services. Its exports of, e.g. nickel and sugar are subject to the volatility of the market. In 2007, nickel peaked at US$50 per kilogram, by 2016 the price had dropped to below US$10 per kilogram, while the sugar crop in 2014 was twenty per cent below expectations due to disastrous weather. These are the sources of hard currency to purchase on the world market all the goods Cuba needs and which it does not produce (from food to buses for public transport). The need for hard currency is periodically increased by hurricanes which destroy crops, infrastructure, and houses. For example, 2008 was a particularly bad year and Cuba was hit by three hurricanes: Gustav, Ike and Paloma, collectively causing damage worth US$10 billion (twenty per cent of GDP).

Believing that the problems of the Cuban economy can be solved by pushing state employees into starting their own businesses is an error posing serious dangers for the future of the revolution. However, the leadership appears determined to move in that direction. Cuba’s 2014 Labour Code specifies a maximum forty-four hour working week and a minimum of seven days paid holiday but, importantly, removes previous restrictions on the number of employees that a self-employed individual can hire. This will create a sizeable layer of tens of thousands of small capitalists and will open the door to the creation of larger capitalist enterprises; this step was extremely important in China’s return to capitalism.

Deng and his fellow Stalinist bureaucrats staggered towards capitalism, pushed by the ‘red capitalists’, opposed by the section of the bureaucracy representing the old, capital-intensive, loss-making industries. In Cuba, there is little heavy industry so there will be a smaller proportion of the PCC with vested interests in opposing moves towards capitalism and the rate of change could be very rapid. Ariel Dacal claims that the US is confident that, with a free hand, it would take just 15 days to carry through the economic changes it wants.103

No doubt sections of the Cuban bureaucracy are taking measures and positioning themselves to take advantage of any loosening of state controls. Some will already be eyeing up the foreign multinationals from Brazil, Canada, China, Mexico, Spain and others already operating in Cuba, preparing to act as compradors in the re-colonisation of the island. But there is no certainty that the “Chinese way” would lead to economic growth for Cuba, far from it. Given the size of the Cuban economy, it is far more likely to lead to a rapid and catastrophic collapse. The restoration of capitalism in Cuba is more likely to throw the island back to the 1930s, dominated by foreign capital, a playground for tourists rather than an industrial dynamo. The first signs of this can be seen in the new capitalist enterprises. These often promote themselves on their pay rates being higher than in the state sector, but the extra money comes from the abolition of maternity and paternity benefits, ending equal pay for equal work, the use of the equivalent of zero hours contracts, and black market activities.

It is clear that the status quo cannot be maintained indefinitely. Within Cuba there are many who do not see a solution to Cuba’s economic problems along market lines. A clear alternative based on revolutionary internationalism and workers’ democracy could rally thousands of honest communists, intellectuals, youth and workers, who are not prepared to let the revolution be destroyed. Before making concessions to capitalist tendencies, the Cuban Revolution should be setting an example of soviet democracy and workers’ control.

At a political, theoretical level, Cuba needs to dump the false, Stalinist theory of stages, and argue clearly on the basis of its own experience that the democratic revolution can be carried through to completion only if the revolution takes the first steps towards socialism: the expropriation of the oligarchs, the major capitalists and imperialists (but without the bureaucratic extreme of nationalising every bootblack and hairdresser). The real way forward for the Cuban Revolution is workers’ democracy and revolutionary internationalism. The fate of the Cuban Revolution is intimately linked to the fate of the Latin American revolution in the first instance, and to the world revolution more generally. The objective conditions for the victory of the socialist revolution in Latin America are a thousand times more advanced today than in 1967. Cuba can provide a rallying point for revolution across the continent.

In Cuba, the island’s economic heavyweights (banks, etc.,) must remain in the state sector under workers’ control and subject to a national plan based on need as determined by a soviet democracy. This is doubly necessary because, as the Cubans themselves admit, most of the public sector is inefficient and functions badly. This can be corrected only if the problems are brought into the open, responsibility allocated and remedial measures taken. This is an essential condition for improving the lives of most Cubans. An essential part of this struggle must be a fight against Cuba’s growing inequality. Such a scenario is only possible with independent trade unions and workers’ control.

Starting from the rejection of any possibility that socialism can be developed in one country, and accepting the present integration of Cuba into the world market as a Third World economy, the task becomes one of protecting the workers’ state that presently exists. It will be necessary to combine a revolutionary internationalist policy with specific measures to solve the present economic problems in Cuba, but how? Class-conscious workers and peasants will welcome reforms if they appreciate they are in their interests. Labour productivity will improve once the workers feel that they are the ones in charge, that is, by introducing the widest measures of workers’ democracy into industry, society and the state.

The Cuban people have shown repeatedly that they are prepared to make sacrifices to defend the revolution. But it is essential that the sacrifices should be made by everybody. There must be a serious and effective campaign against privilege. Cuba must return to the simple rules of Soviet democracy that Lenin proposed in State and Revolution, not for communism or socialism but for the day after the revolution: that all officials be elected and subject to recall, that no official should have a wage higher than that of a skilled worker. However, we know from the history of Stalinism that the privileges of the bureaucrats came not from their salaries but the perks of the job (luxury accommodation, chauffeur-driven limousines, access to exclusive restaurants, etc.) This emphasises the importance of the ability to recall representatives, for workers’ control and collective decision-making, for accountability of officials, and so on. The workers themselves will determine what measures are required, because no mechanism can substitute for the vigilance of the masses themselves, there is no bureaucratic solution to bureaucracy. It should be remembered, Stalin built his personal base within both party and state when Commissar in charge of Rabkrin (the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate) which was set up in 1919 to eliminate bureaucracy.

The Cuban people have repeatedly shown an indomitable spirit, they have been heroes for fifty years, but for how much longer? Cubans draw much of their strength from two sources: winning national sovereignty, and with it national dignity; and the ending of hunger and poverty, and the provision of healthcare and education for all. Any programme for the survival of the Cuban workers’ state must emphasise these features.

However, never-ending adversity under a regime over which they feel they have no control will lead to a decline in consciousness. Che Guevara insisted on the importance of the moral element in socialism. That is obviously true, but it can only be sustained in a regime when all workers feel that they are equally responsible for taking the decisions that affect production and every aspect of life. Because the worker’s state is a transitional regime between capitalism and socialism, for some time the principle applied will be “From each according to his ability, to each according to his work”. This is a capitalist principle that implies the existence of wage differentials, as was the case in Russia immediately after the revolution. But the levels of the differentials between skilled and unskilled labour, between a nurse and a doctor, should be democratically determined by the workforce through whatever bodies are in place exercising soviet democracy, not by bureaucratic diktat. The goal would be the gradual reduction of differentials, to the degree that production increased and with it, the wealth and well-being of society.

But the biggest incentive is clearly when the workers feel that the country, the economy and the state belongs to them, and that can only be achieved if the workers themselves take control of the decision-making process and all elected officials are accountable to them. Only on this basis, of popular power, can the socialist base of the Cuban Revolution be defended and the capitalist counter-revolution defeated.

14. The Question of Revolutionary Leadership in Cuba Today

What are the tasks of Marxists and revolutionaries in this situation? Obviously, the immediate one is to continue to analyse what is happening, to present an explanation of events that corresponds to the real situation in order to enter into a meaningful dialogue with workers, peasants, students, and honest Communist Party members. It would be a serious error to try to deal with complex, contradictory and unprecedented processes on the basis of ready-made formulae which do not accurately correspond to what the Cuban people are living through.

The PCC, being both the party of government and state apparatus, will be subject to all the centrifugal forces that in Western democracies are represented by a whole range of parties and other organisations. Depending on the relative strengths of those forces there could be serious divisions between the party tops. It is to be expected that many rank and file Party members, delegates directly elected to People’s Power Assemblies or union officials, and thus closest to the workers’ struggles, will look with horror on the transition to capitalism and the inequalities it is bringing. These currents are confirmed by letters and articles that have appeared in the Cuban press and internet. Many hark back to Fidel’s Cuba but as they find themselves forced to confront the question of workers’ power and Soviet democracy it is to be expected that they will build on his positive contributions to the establishment of a workers’ state in Cuba.

When the working class begins to move, it invariably expresses itself through its traditional mass organisations, although these can be in surprising and unanticipated ways. The first step taken by many workers who find themselves in conflict with management, is to visit the local union branch office for advice and support. It is absolutely necessary for Marxists to find a way to engage with the rank and file of the Cuban trade union movement.

As Russia returned to capitalism the CP fractured, but that did not happen in China; instead the CCP has remained in control and successfully transformed itself into a mass bourgeois party. It is clear that the Party tops in Cuba will attempt to follow the Chinese path. However, the PCC has not been as repressive as the CCP and as the class war in Cuba heats up we can expect it to be reflected in the PCC. To what degree and to what extent cannot be predicted. However, in the event of an open struggle between a wing of the PCC and the restorationist tendency, Marxists would fight for the defeat of the main enemy, the restorationists, while patiently explaining that only Soviet democracy can solve the problems facing Cuba.

While struggling in a united front with those who oppose capitalist restoration, the aim would be to mobilise the masses, but not to defend the privileged positions of bureaucrats. Marxists would explain to the workers the need to take power into their own hands through, for example, workers’ councils or factory committees, initially as organs of struggle and then as Soviet organs of workers’ power. It should never be forgotten that Soviets were not an invention of the Bolsheviks or any other party, but rather the spontaneous invention of the working class.

An important consideration is that, in Cuba, there has never been any real Bolshevik party, but there is a very real desire amongst many Party activists and young people to discover the true ideas of Marxism. The great weakness of these Cuban leftists is that their struggles tend to be isolated, but this is gradually being overcome as they network using the internet. There is a sense amongst many that the left is on the verge of a leap forward, but this will only occur if workers, peasants and intellectuals find issues that unite the different forces of opposition to capitalist restoration. Socialists should, of course, fight for immediate demands but pose them in a way that links day-to-day problems to the socialist transformation of society. Such demands, transitional demands as Trotsky referred to them, act as a bridge between actions taken in the struggle for bettering the condition of the masses and the idea of the socialist revolution.

The ‘partial’, ‘minimal’ demands of the masses must be supported, as every successful struggle raises the combativity of the workers involved. It might be necessary to start with small demands that are relatively easy to win in order to build up a dynamic, because when workers are in struggle events tend to unfold fast. As the international capitalist system becomes ever more degrading and decadent the most advanced workers should propose a platform of transitional demands, the essence of which is that they are directed to protect the foundations of the workers’ state and the planned economy. In their totality, these transitional demands would seek to systematically mobilise the masses for a regime of genuine workers’ democracy.

In their struggles, the workers need mass organisations and these will be, in the early stages, trade unions. It is necessary for revolutionaries in Cuba to be active in the Cuban Confederation of Workers, because in Cuba it is in the CTC-R that class relations are expressed most directly and immediately. Every attempt to subordinate the union to a capitalist enterprise must be opposed: instead workers must demand it supports their claims. Initially, at least, it will not be possible to replace the leadership of the CTC-R at the top or regional level because of the way these leaders are chosen. However, it is quite possible to militate in local union branches for the election of shop stewards, to argue that the good practice of co-opting strike leaders onto local branch committees be universally adopted, and to form local, even if unofficial, committees to represent the workers in individual enterprises.

A campaign for transitional/democratic demands could provide the basis for a powerful mobilisation of workers and peasants. The precise demands, the way they are posed and the means by which they are realised are extremely important so they must be determined by those directly involved. But, in the context of a bureaucratic regime and the threat of capitalist restoration, such demands would likely be based on the workers’ right to organise and almost certainly would include:

• For the defence of all the conquests of the revolution (health care, housing, education, etc.);
• Democratic workers’ control of production through elected and recallable representatives;
• No privileges for the bureaucracy, for the election and right of recall of all public officials, no public official to receive a wage higher than that of a skilled worker;
• Freedom of expression and association for all those who defend the gains of the revolution;
• Freedom to bargain collectively and to take industrial action on such issues as unemployment, low pay, health and safety.

Such a programme would rekindle the enthusiasm amongst the masses because it would start to address the key problems of the economic crisis. It would have to be supported by the self-organisation of the people in the working class and poor neighbourhoods, their armed self-defence, and close fraternisation between the armed workers and peasants and rank and file soldiers, especially army reservists. Clearly, a governmental slogan will be required to bind these demands into a coherent programme. In Russia this was given substance in ‘All Power to the Soviets’, and this may be one path for Cuban revolutionaries. Such a slogan would have to be built on freedom to form action committees in every factory, workplace, college, street, army barracks, and village, and for aggregates of such committees to form the cores of a new generation of democratic Soviets.

15. Postscript

In April 2018, on the day before his fifty-eighth birthday, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, replaced Raúl Castro as President of Cuba, while Raúl remains General-Secretary of the PCC and head of the armed forces. The President is not elected by the Cuban people, but by the Council of State, and is responsible to the Council of State. Díaz-Canel was the youngest ever member of the Political Bureau of the Cuban Communist Party and had been senior Vice-President of the Council for five years before his promotion to president.

Díaz-Canel came to the fore as part of Raúl’s reformation of Cuba’s economic model; opening the doors to foreign investment, allowing Cubans to open small-scale private businesses and decentralising decision-making. He has shown himself to be fully committed to the reform wing of the party and is seen as a safe pair of hands providing continuity of leadership. He was and remains Raúl’s protégée, and is expected to continue implementing the ‘Guidelines for Economic and Social Policy’ under Raúl’s guidance, with no ideological changes expected.

As the New York Times (19 April, 2018) put it:

After opening up the economy to private investment and entrepreneurialism, expanding travel in and out of the country and re-establishing ties with the great enemy, the US, Raúl Castro has selected Mr. Díaz-Canel to fill his shoes.

He faces the same challenges as when the ‘Guidelines’ were first introduced: to increase productivity and efficiency in state enterprises, to bring in foreign investment, to oversee privatisation while limiting displays of inequality, but with the additional problem of how to handle Trump.

The debate which is taking place on the reform of the Cuban Constitution gives very clear indications of the direction the leadership wants to go to. As Ariel Dacal has pointed out in a very sharp criticism (¿A dónde van las palabras que no se quedaron? Ariel Dacal, La Tizza, https://medium.com/la-tiza), a number of very significant words and formulations have been deleted from the new draft, including: the aim of “building a communist society”, as well as the commitment that “in Cuba capitalism will never be restored”. Of course, the wording of the Constitution does not determine the character of the regime, but the fact that these sentences are to be removed tells us a lot about the socio-economic direction in which those who propose the changes wish to go.

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