07.06.2000

Cuba and socialism

Tom Delargy questions the commitment to revolutionary democracy of supporters of the Castro regime within the Republican Communist Network

The Edinburgh Marxist Forum held a day school on Cuba on Saturday May 27.

Although invitations went out to the Socialist Workers Party, they did not show. The International Socialist Movement - the Committee for a Workers International in Scotland - was represented by Murray Smith, one of the Scottish Socialist Party's joint international secretaries. Members of the Alliance for Workers' Liberty and the Revolutionary Communist Group put in an appearance: the first organisation being consistent revolutionary opponents of the Castro regime; the latter unconditional and uncritical supporters.

The Republican Communist Network was, as previously, split down the middle, with a growing minority now prepared to accept that we were mistaken in voting at the SSP conference to salute a representative of 'socialist' Cuba, and that a workers' revolution against the existing regime might be called for. Yet, fully three months after conference, the number of the RCN's intransigent anti-Castroites are few in numbers.

I intend to prove that we are faced with a stark choice: either we shed our illusions in Castro's dictatorship or we cast aside most of the slogans upon which our organisation was founded. Comments on this article (as critical as you like) from the Castrophile wing of the RCN would be most welcome.

The RCN's Castrophiles recognise that the working class played no part in the Cuban revolution. They further recognise that it was led by people - Castro's July 26 Movement - who insisted their revolution had nothing to do with socialism. Nevertheless they argue that it would be ultra-left to advocate a workers' revolution in Cuba. They argue that Castro might have changed his mind! They argue that perhaps the working class has become an actor in Cuba subsequent to the revolution.

What they fail to appreciate is that this is to argue for abandoning Marxism. It is to argue that the utopian socialists were right all along: workers can have their liberation handed to them on a plate by others, by an heroic, dedicated and intellectually superior elite. It is dispiriting to learn that so many RCN members are as unaware as is Alan McCombes of the fact that the emancipation of the working class has to be the act of the working class itself. This is no add-on extra, comrades. It is the key concept in the whole of Marxism.

Murray Smith argued against describing Castro as a Stalinist. After all, Stalin massacred all Trotskyists in the USSR. Castro, by comparison, is a pussycat. Trotskyists in Cuba were not killed. They were 'merely' locked up and then released when they agreed to abandon all political activity. Only when they broke this promise, as any self-respecting Marxist would, were they subject to re-arrest and eventually sent into exile. Judging from one or two nodding heads at this point, it would appear that the RCN's Castrophiles think revolutionaries should be grateful for this 'kid-glove' treatment, treatment which was, incidentally, identical to that dished out to revolutionaries on the eve of Stalin's counterrevolution. Admittedly there was a qualitative difference between the levels of repression in 1930s Russia and post-1959 Cuba. But that in no any way invalidates the description of Cuba as Stalinist. In Brezhnev's time, revolutionaries would not have been killed. They would 'merely' have been sacked and sent to an insane asylum. Should they have been grateful for that, comrades?

RCN members who still claim to be Leninists (Mary Ward, for instance) argue that workers do not need trade unions independent of the state. If they could be bothered to read Lenin on this subject, they would notice he took an exactly contrary position. Cuban workers tried in 1983 to set up an independent trade union, having been inspired by the Solidarnosc movement in Poland. For their troubles, they were rounded up and, at one point, threatened with the death penalty. That was not Lenin's idea of workers' power. And it should not be one associated with the RCN. This might be a good point at which to challenge the most firmly entrenched set of illusions about Castro: his allegedly consistent anti-imperialism.

There is an old saying: he who pays the piper calls the tune. Well, Castro has played his part to perfection. Not only did he repress supporters of Solidarnosc in Cuba; he supported the military coup that crushed the organs of workers' power in Poland (organs that have never once existed in post-revolutionary Cuba) when general Jaruzelski did the bidding of their mutual sponsors: Russian imperialism. And this was no aberration. Castro backed Russian tanks in 1968 when they crushed the Czechoslovak workers and students. The latter were taking advantage of a brief thaw after decades of Stalinist authoritarianism. Surprisingly, the Czechoslovak government did try to resist their imperialist masters. While revolutionaries and other socialists around the world rallied solidarity with the Czechoslovak people, Castro gave them the thumbs-down. What about that great libertarian icon, Che Guevarra? Well, we do not hear much these days about how he applauded when Soviet tanks pulverised one of the greatest revolutions in world history: in Hungary 1956.

It goes without saying that Castro has been consistently anti-US imperialism. But Marxists, real Marxists, never take bribes from one counterrevolutionary imperialism in return for turning a blind eye to its crushing the democratic aspirations of oppressed nations or workers' struggles. The RCN's Castrophiles should also take a hard look at the role of Cuba in the struggle of the Eritrean people. Castro backed their wholly legitimate war of liberation against the brutal Ethiopian despot, Haile Selassie. At least he did until the Derg regime of Mengistu switched the allegiances of Ethiopia from the US to the USSR. That was all it took for Castro to do his about-turn. The Eritrean people were, to Castro, a mere pawn in the game of imperialist geo-politics.

The RCN's Castrophiles are as hypnotised as your typical Stalinist illiterate about Cuba's 'miraculous' reforms. Repeatedly, they turn a deaf ear to the USSR's aid to Cuba: $9 million per day. A truly colossal sum. Concentrated on such a small population, is it really surprising that healthcare, education provision and other aspects of the social wage were far greater than in other 'third world' countries? Such aid bought the world Stalinist movement a 'utopia', something with which to attract radical workers and peasants in the colonial and neo-colonial world, something to which they could aspire. But the USSR could afford but one Cuba and, as economic collapse beckoned, even that was one too many.

At the day school, Bob Goupillot appealed for more information about the reality of democracy in Cuba, to which I replied: there isn't any. Our Castrophiles seem to accept this one moment, only to insist the next that Cuba is more democratic than a bourgeois democracy like Britain today. They then claim that anyone arguing differently has been duped by CIA propaganda.

Let us look as the facts. Candidates in all Cuba's elections are vetted. It is true that non-CPers are allowed to stand. However, all such candidates are forbidden to coordinate any opposition to the regime. Indeed, they are not allowed to stand on a political platform at all.

I have in the past objected to the slogan of revolutionary democracy. I have done so on the basis of its inability to capture the class content of different types of democracy. However, since I have always recognised that Marxists have to fight for the democratic rights of all oppressed groups regardless of their class position, perhaps I am a revolutionary democrat after all. That said, when I see those who have lambasted me in the past for my resistance to this slogan legitimise the discrimination of gays in Cuba, I have to cast doubt on their commitment to it.

One of the RCN's Castrophiles, Bob Goupillot, has distributed an article containing a quote from a 1992 Castro interview. In it Castro appears to distance himself from all discrimination against gays. However, the article itself acknowledges that until 1988 (ie, 30 years after the revolution) Cuba had a piece of legislation written in terms almost identical to that of Section 28. They are to be distinguished only in that the Cuban version is all-embracing and is backed up by much more repressive measures. Anyone "appearing to be homosexual" was "risking arrest at any time" ('Gay life in Cuba').

RCN comrades should take a look at how the Bolsheviks responded to reactionary prejudices after October 1917. Russia was the home of the anti-semitic pogrom. Yet, the Bolsheviks did not kow-tow before these centuries-ingrained prejudices. They challenged them. Many Jews held prominent government posts. This set an example. Laws were passed to enshrine the democratic rights of all, regardless of sex, nationality, religion and, incidentally, sexual orientation. Education programmes were launched to ensure that the laws did not remain a dead letter. Tragically, the Bolsheviks of 1917 failed in their attempt to, once and for all, free the people from reactionary prejudices. But, unlike Castro, at least they tried.

One of the RCN's Castrophiles, Mary Ward, is mystified by the extraordinarily high levels of absenteeism in Cuba: in the 1970s, it reached 20% until the regime cracked down on so-called loafers. I would remind her of how workers used to joke in the old USSR that, "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work." Here is our explanation, Mary. In any society where labour is alienated, people, individually or collectively, will put up resistance. Absenteeism is just such a form of resistance in Cuba. Given the levels of repression, it is one of the only forms available to them.

If the lack of any kind of democracy, lack of consistent anti-imperialism, lack of origins in a workers' revolution and self-evident alienation speak against Cuba having anything to do with socialism, what about wholesale nationalisation of the economy? Is that proof of the socialist credentials of comrade Fidel? Actually, no. In my report on the Cuban debate at the SSP conference, I recommended that Alan McCombes might benefit from reading Engels' Anti-Dühring or Socialism: utopian and scientific. I now find myself offering the same advice to my RCN comrades. Do so, and you will find that Engels took a dim view of those who lauded all nationalisation (even by states that were not controlled by workers) as being, by definition, "socialistic". He pleaded with such people to stop trying to pass themselves off as Marxists. They should, instead, come clean as devotees of Bismarck, Napoleon, Metternich, and Frederick William.

We need to examine the process by which the Cuban economy was nationalised. In the first place, we need to accept that this was not the intention of Castro prior to the revolution: far from it. It was only when, in 1960, the US overreacted to a rather mild set of land reforms by encouraging the oil companies (Texaco, Shell and Esso) to refuse to refine a limited amount of crude oil (exchanged by the Russians for sugar) that things escalated out of hand: "The oil companies were seized at the end of June. Within a week, Eisenhower had cancelled Cuba's remaining quota of sugar imports to the USA. This was followed immediately by the confiscation of about £800 million US corporation property - oil, sugar, electricity and mines.

"The USA responded with a total trade embargo to and from Cuba - a devastating economic blow, given Cuba's total dependence of the US connection. Finally the Cuban regime completed its hold on industry in October 1960 with the nationalisation of the banks, hotels, cinemas and most of the factories and shops" (P Binns and M Gonzales Castro, Cuba and socialism London 1981, p12).

Marxists are right to applaud Castro for not capitulating to US blackmail. That said, we must not paint his response to it as anything other than what it was: a nationalist one. Once again, we need to contrast Castro's policy with Lenin's.

The Bolsheviks led the workers to power in 1917. They found support, having built support, amongst the landless peasants and the oppressed nationalities. But they always pinned their hopes on their revolution being but the vanguard of the world revolution. The Bolsheviks were Marxists, materialists - people who appreciated that the economic basis for building socialism did not exist within the borders of the tsarist empire, nor, indeed, within any single country. Where Lenin's perspectives were global, Castro's were limited to Cuba.

When Castro discovered that Uncle Sam was not minded to let Cuba escape the tentacles of US imperialism without a fight, it never occurred to him to opt for world revolution.