14. The Question of Revolutionary Leadership in Cuba Today¶
Core Argument¶
The chapter confronts the question of revolutionary strategy in Cuba amidst the ongoing transition to capitalism, rejecting the application of ready-made formulae to what it describes as a complex, contradictory, and unprecedented process. Its core argument is that Marxists must engage directly with the living experience of the Cuban people, entering into dialogue with workers, peasants, students, and honest Communist Party members, rather than imposing abstract schemas. The central problem identified is the character of the Partido Comunista de Cuba (PCC), which, as both the party of government and the state apparatus, is predicted to become the arena for all the centrifugal forces that in Western democracies are expressed through multiple parties. The chapter anticipates serious divisions within the party tops, while arguing that rank-and-file members, delegates to People’s Power Assemblies, and union officials—those closest to workers’ struggles—will recoil from capitalist restoration and the inequalities it brings. It cites letters and articles in the Cuban press and internet as evidence of such currents, noting that while many hark back to Fidel’s Cuba, they will be forced to confront the question of workers’ power and Soviet democracy.
The chapter draws on the historical precedents of Russia’s return to capitalism, where the Communist Party fractured, and China, where the CCP remained in control and transformed into a mass bourgeois party. It argues that the Cuban party tops will attempt the Chinese path, but notes that the PCC has not been as repressive as the CCP, and predicts that the intensifying class war will be reflected within the party. In the event of an open struggle between a restorationist tendency and a wing of the PCC, Marxists would fight for the defeat of the restorationists as the main enemy, while patiently explaining that only Soviet democracy can solve Cuba’s problems. The chapter insists that Marxists must not defend the privileged positions of bureaucrats, but instead mobilise the masses to take power into their own hands through workers’ councils or factory committees, initially as organs of struggle and then as Soviet organs of power. It emphasises that Soviets were the spontaneous invention of the working class, not of any party.
A notable polemic runs against the idea that Cuba has ever had a real Bolshevik party, while acknowledging a very real desire amongst Party activists and young people to discover the true ideas of Marxism. The chapter critiques the isolation of Cuban leftists, but sees this being overcome through internet networking. It argues for a programme of transitional demands, drawing on Trotsky’s conception, to bridge day-to-day struggles with the socialist transformation of society. Such demands would include defence of the conquests of the revolution, democratic workers’ control of production, no privileges for the bureaucracy, freedom of expression for defenders of the revolution, and freedom to bargain collectively. The chapter concludes that a governmental slogan—perhaps ‘All Power to the Soviets’—would be required to bind these demands into a coherent programme, built on freedom to form action committees in every factory, workplace, college, street, army barracks, and village, forming the cores of a new generation of democratic Soviets.