7. Revolutionary Struggle, Cuba Becomes a Workers’ State¶
Core Argument¶
7. Revolutionary Struggle, Cuba Becomes a Workers’ State
The Cuban Revolution unfolded at the apex of the Cold War, and its break with capitalism propelled the leadership toward the Soviet Union, though not without friction. The USSR restrained US aggression, provided essential aid—including a February 1960 agreement for five million tons of sugar and US$100 million in credit—and offered a model of industrialisation. By February 1960, all private enterprise was placed under central planning, with the National Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA) driving economic transformation. US hostility escalated rapidly: Eisenhower authorised funding for exiles to overthrow Castro, sabotage attacks killed over a hundred in March 1960, and US refineries refused to process Soviet oil, prompting Cuban government intervention. Eisenhower cut the sugar quota by 95% in July; Cuba responded by nationalising all US-owned properties, banks, and refineries. Workers were intimately involved in these nationalisations. The Central Planning Board (Juceplan), led by Guevara, adopted a Soviet-style plan, while bureaucratisation grew within the unions. The Federation of Cuban Women (FMC) was launched, modelled on the Zhenotdel, and Revolutionary Defence Committees (CDRs) were established to combat CIA terrorism. By the end of 1960, the economy was 80% nationalised, foreign trade fully under state control, and the judiciary purged. The US blockade and diplomatic break followed. Cuba had entered the transitional phase of a workers’ state, yet it lacked democratic proletarian rule: the 26th of July Movement was not a Leninist party, and no soviets were established. The literacy campaign was launched in early 1961.
This trajectory confirmed Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution against the Stalinist theory of stages. The latter, promoted to protect the Soviet bureaucracy’s material privileges, argued that in backward countries the national bourgeoisie would not betray a bourgeois-democratic revolution, necessitating a ‘bloc of four classes’. This was disproved by the Chinese Revolution of 1925, where the national bourgeoisie sided with imperialism, leading to mass deaths. Trotsky held that genuine democratic and national emancipation in colonial countries required the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Cuban Revolution between 1959 and 1962 verified this: the national bourgeoisie were hostile or subversive, and US imperialist reaction forced the 26th of July Movement leaders to take socialist measures against their original intentions. Armando Hart stated that US policy compelled a faster revolution. Cuban Stalinists like Roca and Rodríguez advocated stagism, but their own prior attempts at agrarian reform and sovereignty had failed. Trotsky was further vindicated by national movements in India and Indonesia, which won formal independence but remain dependent on imperialist finance and investment, with ongoing peasant impoverishment and oppression of women.