May 2003

For the Bush regime, the war didn’t end with the U.S. taking of Baghdad. Now they want to “take back” Havana. For the last four decades, American rulers, Republicans and Democrats alike, have shown their unrelenting hostility to the Cuban Revolution, seeing its very existence as a direct threat to U.S. domination of Latin America. The purpose of the vicious 40-year-old U.S. embargo, which has cost more than $70 billion in lost trade, has been to strangle the rebel Caribbean island economically. But the Yankee imperialists have manifestly failed in their attempt to bully and starve the Cuban people into submission.

Now the White House and Pentagon are gearing up for more “robust” action against Havana. The escalation of imperialist hounding of Cuba is directly tied to the invasion and colonial occupation of Iraq. And while the Bush gang gnashes its teeth over the Castro regime’s suppression of counterrevolutionary plotters, a layer of liberals and left intellectuals in the U.S. and Europe have been bleating over repression in Cuba. This hue and cry demonstrates that their objections to the Iraq invasion were only tactical: they want a “soft” version of imperialist domination – in the Cuban case, a kind of “counterrevolution light.”

It is precisely to this layer that Fidel Castro has appealed over the years in pursuing the pipe dream of “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism. But as the war hawks in Washington rampage, the pacifist doves have taken flight. The fickle liberal bourgeois “friends of Cuba” are friends no longer. Various reformist leftists and Latin American nationalists have responded by calling for support for Cuba’s sovereignty and right to self-determination. Posing the issue in purely “democratic” terms misses that what is at stake is the fate of revolutionary gains, however bureaucratically deformed.

What is posed here is not just intensified U.S. hostility but a very real threat of war on Cuba. Many in the current administration in Washington would make the overthrow of “Castro’s Cuba” the centerpiece of a second Bush term. Attempts to conciliate them are illusory. Genuine communists call for all-out defense of Cuba against counterrevolution from without and within. Trotskyists fight to smash the imperialist stranglehold by international socialist revolution throughout Latin America and extending into what José Martí called the “belly of the beast,” the heartland of Yankee imperialism.

Escalation of U.S. Provocation

The current uproar began with a reevaluation of Washington’s Cuba policy undertaken by the White House a year ago. The point man was Otto Reich, an ultra-rightist Cuban exile who in the 1980s was in charge of stonewalling Congress over the Reagan administration’s “contra” war against Sandinista Nicaragua. Last year Reich was caught conspiring with Venezuelan contras in the failed coup against bourgeois nationalist colonel Hugo Chávez. In their policy review, Bush & Co. decided to push for a “transition to democracy” in Cuba. These are code words for counterrevolution. What they mean by democracy is the dictatorship of capitalism; their talk of freedom means “free markets” and enslaved workers.

One result of the policy shift has been to sharply restrict Cuban immigration to the U.S. Although Washington agreed with Havana in 1994 to accept 20,000 Cubans a year, only 7,200 entry visas were issued last year and barely 500 so far this year. This is a deliberate attempt to provoke the kind of hysteria that the Democratic Clinton administration instigated at the height of the economic crisis in 1994, leading hundreds of  balseros (“raft people”) to sail out into the Florida straits. Over the last seven months there have been seven hijacking incidents, a sharp increase. Meanwhile, a new chief of the U.S. Interests Section (equivalent to an embassy, since Washington broke diplomatic relations with Havana in the early ’60s), James Cason, has been ostentatiously conspiring with pro-U.S. “dissidents” in Cuba as a deliberate provocation.

When he took over last fall, Cason vowed to “bring freedom and democracy” to Cuba. He told a press conference in Miami that he regularly meets with the National Cuban-American Foundation and other organizations of the gusano exiles (the counterrevolutionary “worms” who fled Cuba after the revolution overthrew the U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Bastista).

• In early February, Cason held a meeting in the ambassador’s residence with 21 members of Cuban counterrevolutionary groups which are on the U.S. payroll.

• On February 24, he staged a press conference at the home of one of the “dissident” plotters to denounce the Cuban government for violating “freedom of conscience,” “freedom of expression” and “human rights.”

• On March 12, another meeting in the ambassador’s residence with 18 counterrevolutionaries.

• On March 14, yet another meeting, this time an all-day session at the Interests Section (embassy) itself.

In addition to provocatively turning its diplomatic representation into the headquarters of a counterrevolutionary conspiracy, Washington has been pouring dollars into the effort to overthrow the Cuban government. More than $22 million has been funneled to Cuban anti-Communist groups since 1997 by the U.S. Agency for International Development, including $8 million for promoting “solidarity with activists in Cuba,” $1.6 million to “non-governmental organizations” in Cuba, $2.3 million to a Center for a Free Cuba, $1.2 million to a Center for Support of Dissidents, etc. Some 7,000 radios have been distributed set to receive the CIA’s “Radio Martí,” on which the U.S. spends over $25 million a year. 

Liberals Go Balistic Over Repression of Counterrevolutionaries

On March 19, as Bush was about to launch the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Cuba arrested 75 of the plotters who had been conspiring with the U.S. “diplomats.” Almost immediately, as if on signal, a Cuban DC-3 aircraft was hijacked to Key West by terrorists who held knives to the throats of the pilots. American authorities announced they would grant bail to the hijackers and refused to return the aircraft, as required under a 1995 agreement with Cuba. With this encouragement, on March 31 another Cuban plane was hijacked. Then on April 2, a ferry boat was seized with 50 passengers on board and headed toward Florida. When the boat ran out of fuel, the hijackers threatened to shoot two passengers, who then jumped overboard in rough waters to escape their tormentors. As Cuban navy boats rescued them, other passengers jumped from the ferry as well. 

In early April, summary trials were held of the 75 arrested conspirators and the ferry boat hijackers. Ten Cuban intelligence agents who had infiltrated the counterrevolutionary groups testified about the plotting in the U.S. Interests Section. Proof was given of thousands of dollars received from the U.S., including receipts. Official passes were exhibited giving the defendants “free passage” at any time of day or night to enter and move about the U.S. diplomatic enclave. Evidence was shown of their collaboration with well-known CIA agents. These mercenary “dissidents” were given sentences ranging from eight to 26 years in prison for secretly receiving funds from their U.S. paymasters and collaborating with the former colonial masters to reassert Yankee control of Cuba. Ten people were found guilty of hijacking the ferry, and the three main hijackers were sentenced to death; they were executed on April 11.

Washington predictably howled over the repression that it had brazenly provoked. But the Bush administration’s feigned outrage soon received reinforcement from a chorus of condemnation by a number of prominent liberals. On April 23, the Cuban Policy Forum, a group headed by former U.S. secretary of state William Rogers which opposed the embargo, disbanded in protest over the executions and jailings. Leftish intellectuals began circulating statements denouncing Cuba’s supposed suppression of dissidence. Portuguese Nobel Prize-winning author José Saramago, a former friend of Castro, wrote that “from now on, Cuba can follow its own course, and leave me out.”

Saramago was followed by the Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano and the Mexican Carlos Fuentes. Prior to the court verdicts a letter from 62 American and European intellectuals had called on the Castro government to release the so-called “peaceful opponents and independent journalists.” Among the signers were the writers Günter Grass, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jorge Edwards and the Mexicans Carlos Monsiváis, Enrique Krauze and (former foreign minister) Jorge Castañeda. After the sentences, 50 Spanish artists and intellectuals signed a statement condemning the repression, including Joan Manuel Serrat, Pedro Almodóvar, Ana Belén and other reputed “progressives.” They professed their “solidarity with the Cuban people” while joining the hue and cry instigated by Washington.

In the U.S. at least two different petitions have been circulating. One, promoted by The Nation magazine, denounced Cuba’s “brute repression” of “independent thinkers and writers, human rights activists and democrats” which supposedly showed that the Cuban government is “just one more dictatorship.” Its signers include prominent social democrats, Greens and red-baiters, including Bogdan Denitch, Stanley Aronowitz and Todd Gitlin. A second petition, circulated by a newly formed Campaign for Peace and Democracy, adopts a more leftist-sounding tack, declaring that they oppose the occupation of Iraq, U.S. intervention in Latin America, etc., and also protest the repression in Cuba. This includes some of the same signers but also a roster of “progressives” including Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Michael Lerner, Immanuel Wallerstein, James Weinstein, Cornel West and Howard Zinn. 

Like Washington’s provocations against Cuba, these petitions are closely connected to the war on Iraq. The first petition doesn’t even mention the U.S. invasion (thus including those who support the war), and the second one “even-handedly” declares “we condemned the brutal Saddam Hussein regime, and we oppose the United States occupation of Iraq” (but not the war). This “third camp” position is no accident, for the main writer and organizer of the petition was one Joanne Landy. During the Cold War, this right-wing social democrat and follower of the anti-Trotskyist renegade Max Shachtman played a leading role in organizing support for  the U.S.’ favorite anti-Soviet counterrevolutionaries, putting out a bulletin in support of Solidarność and backing the CIA’s mujahedin against Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. She opposed the Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions and has long advocated the violent overthrow of the Cuban government. As a reward for her counterrevolutionary services to U.S. imperialism, she has been made a member of the Council of Foreign Relations.

Yet another petition is circulating internationally, this one in support of Cuba. It was read at the May Day celebration in Havana by Pablo González Casanova, former rector of the National University of Mexico, and was signed by Gabriel García Márquez and other leftist intellectuals of a more nationalist bent. This appeal “To the Conscience of the World,” warns that the present war of words against Cuba could easily become the pretext for an invasion. Yet its defense of Cuba is purely on the basis of “universal principles of national sovereignty, respect of territorial integrity and self-determination” and of defense of “the international order” threatened by the domination of “a single power” as a “consequence of the invasion of Iraq.” U.S. imperialist hegemony of course predates the invasion of Iraq, but this is an appeal to supporters of other imperialist powers (such as France and Germany) who hesitated over the Bush government’s blatant go-it-alone policy summed up in the “doctrine” of “preemptive war.”

In fact, many of the signers of the petitions denouncing the Cuban government’s actions have supported various of Washington’s wars in the name of “human rights,” such as recent wars on Yugoslavia and Afghanistan, while others waffled. (Indeed, Cuba abstained in the UN in the vote on Gulf War I.) In contrast, revolutionary Trotskyists called on the Viet Cong to take Saigon, hailed the Soviet Army’s fight against the CIA’s “holy warriors”  in Afghanistan, called for stopping Solidarność counterrevolution and have defended Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq against imperialist war. We fight for the defeat of the imperialists across the globe by seeking to mobilize the power of the working class for international socialist revolution. And contrary to the Castro bureaucracy’s illusory policy of “peaceful coexistence” with the imperialists, as followers of Trotsky and Lenin we stand four-square for the internationalist defense of the Cuban Revolution against imperialism.

Fake Lefts Split: Pro-Imperialist “Democrats”  and Castro Cheerleaders

It is not only the openly social-democratic reformists and liberals who have joined the chorus against repression in Cuba. In France, the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR) of Alain Krivine published a disgusting article titled “Cuba: We Know, So What?” (Rouge, 24 April), in which these pseudo-Trotskyists say they know that imperialist “democrats” denounce the lack of democracy on the island and that the Bush government practices state terrorism. “We know all that, so what?” They declare that “defense of elementary democratic rights and freedoms are not dishes à la carte,” that they are “against any crimes of opinion,” that they are against the death penalty which is “morally intolerable and politically ineffective,” and that they “totally condemn the parody of justice that has just taken place” in Cuba. There is not even a hint of proletarian class program in this statement. It has nothing in common with Trotskyism and everything in common with bourgeois liberal “morality.” And not surprisingly, like the liberals, the LCR called on the NATO imperialists to intervene in Yugoslavia in the name of “human rights.”

The decaying “international” the LCR is part of, which calls itself the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USec) although it is neither united nor Trotskyist, has a slightly softer version of the same pro-imperialist policy in a May 14 declaration. In that statement, the USec declares the Cuban government’s methods to be “unacceptable from a revolutionary democratic point of view.” Their self-definition as “revolutionary” democrats speaks volumes about the social-democratization of the followers of the late Ernest Mandel. A few years ago the French LCR debated changing its name to something more appropriate, but couldn’t decide whether to strike the word “communist” or the world “revolutionary,” and ended up doing nothing, out of lethargy. “Undeniably, Cuba is in an even more difficult situation than in the past,” the USec admits, but this does not permit using the “unacceptable death penalty” and other “extreme repressive methods.” So here we have the ostensibly Trotskyist USec, which apologized for and defended the jailing of the Cuban Trotskyists in the 1960s now objecting to extreme repressive methods against counterrevolutionaries openly working with U.S. spy agencies.

In standing for military defense of Cuba against counterrevolution, the Internationalist Group declares that the repression against the U.S.-linked conspirators and terrorists in Cuba is utterly justified. They are imperialist agents, not “dissidents.” They are not exercising the freedom of opinion or right of expression but plotting the restoration of capitalism in cahoots with the U.S. ambassador, working out of the U.S. embassy and receiving bundles of U.S. dollars for their efforts. As Trotskyists we have long opposed the death penalty in Cuba, as we do in the United States and everywhere in the world. We give no political support to the Castro bureaucratic regime and have denounced the 1990 Stalinist show trial and execution of Cuban general Arnaldo Ochoa, carried out in an effort to curry favor with the U.S. in the “war on drugs.” But the masterminds of the ferry boat hijacking were engaged in a counterrevolutionary act of war as part of escalating U.S. threats against Cuba. Not to have responded decisively to this provocation would have facilitated U.S. attempts to whip up hysteria such as led to the wave of raft launching in the early 1990s, or the Mariel exodus a decade earlier. Only this time, in the wake of the war on Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. is poised to use such a frenzy to intervene militarily seeking to extirpate the Cuban Revolution with blood and fire.

Our communist program is counterposed to the vast bulk of the self-proclaimed socialist left, which politically supports the Cuban government while constantly seeking to gain popularity by building “popular fronts” with precisely the layer of liberals who are now howling about repression in Cuba. Thus Nat Weinstein of the ostensibly Trotskyist organization Socialist Action laments that “Chomsky’s proud antiwar record has been marred by his anarchist bent toward equating the heinous deeds of the oppressor imperialist state to the defensive actions of its victims in the Cuban workers’ state” (Socialist Action, May 2003). Yet despite his sometime “anarchist” pretensions, Chomsky has been trumpeted by the Democratic Socialists of America as one of their members and is at bottom a petty-bourgeois liberal who wants the United States to pursue a different policy. That is in fact the program of the various “antiwar” coalitions which seek a more “humane,” more “people-friendly” imperialism.

Groups such as the Workers World Party, Socialist Workers Party and Socialist Action who regularly hail the Castro regime praise the fairness of the trials of the counterrevolutionaries. They were defended by 54 lawyers, many of their own choosing, more than 3,000 people attended. Certainly this compares favorably to another 624 prisoners in Cuba … the detainees being held by the United States in a prison camp in the base the U.S. illegally occupies in Guantánamo. Their names have not been released, they have not been charged with any crime, they are held incommunicado and are denied contact with any legal defender, and (if they are not simply held indefinitely) they will face a military tribunal where they have no rights. But that comparison hardly makes Cuba a model of socialist rectitude. For example, the Castro regime jailed the Cuban Trotskyists for a decade and a half, briefly released them, and then jailed them again in a prime example of Stalinist bureaucratic arbitrariness and repression of revolutionaries.

Marginally more “critical” than the Castro cheerleaders of the SWP and WWP, Socialist Action notes that Bolshevik rule was based on soviets, or councils, directly elected by the working people, while “Cuba has yet to create similar institutions of direct working class rule.” But the absence of revolutionary workers democracy is not simply a blemish on the regime. The Cuban deformed workers state which was established through the expropriation of the foreign and domestic capitalists in 1960-61 is a state qualitatively similar to that of the bureaucratically degenerated Soviet Union under Stalin and his heirs. The fight to establish genuine soviet rule of workers councils that defend the gains of the revolution and seek to extend them requires a political revolution by the Cuban proletariat against the narrow Castro bureaucracy which grew out of the petty-bourgeois guerrilla army and has monopolized political power ever since.

This struggle can only be successful if it is led by an authentically Leninist-Trotskyist party, which fights on the basis of the Bolshevik program of international socialist revolution. Castroism, like all other variants of Stalinism, embraces a nationalist and conservative ideology of building “socialism in one country.” But as communists from Marx and Engels to Lenin and Trotsky have insisted, socialism can only be built internationally, at the highest level of development of the productive forces. As long as the revolution is nationally limited, particularly in an economically less developed country, it will be prey to the tremendous economic pressures of imperialism – whether through an economic blockade or through the operation of the “free market.” In Cuba, the machinations of the Miami gusano mafia and their agents or the intrigues run out of the U.S. Interests Section may be contained by an efficient intelligence apparatus. But as the collapse of the Soviet Union and Soviet bloc deformed workers states underlined, repression cannot indefinitely stave off the economic power of imperialism.

As Trotsky wrote of Stalin’s Russia, “Military intervention is a danger. The intervention of cheap goods in the baggage trains of a capitalist army would be an incomparably greater one” (The Revolution Betrayed [1936]). Or as Karl Marx put it 90 years earlier, “this development of productive forces…is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old crap would necessarily be reproduced.” He added that the universal development of the productive forces “makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others” (The German Ideology [1847]).

The economic pressures of imperialism on Cuba are seen not only in the millions of dollars which enter the country from relatives in Miami or the U.S. government in Washington. They also encourage the development of pro-imperialist elements in the Castro bureaucracy itself. The recent May Day march in Havana, which again drew a million participants, had as its main slogan “defense of socialism.” Yet a year ago, Roberto Robaina was purged as foreign minister on charges of hobnobbing with foreign capitalists. Robaina became foreign minister in 1993, at the time that Castro decided to permit the free circulation of the U.S. dollar, a step constituting a grave threat to the collectivized Cuban economy. Robaina was closely identified with that policy of “opening” the island to capital, which exacerbated social tensions on the beleaguered island. Together with Robaina a number of upper-level functionaries involved with these policies were expelled from the Communist Party, the political organization of the bureaucracy. But they are only the tip of the iceberg, and more pro-capitalist elements undoubtedly exist.

Because of the island’s small size and exposed location, just “90 miles from Florida,” Cubans are acutely aware that their fate depends on world developments. But while the Castro regime occasionally dabbled (several decades ago) in promoting petty-bourgeois guerrilla warfare elsewhere in Latin America, its Stalinist-nationalist program was frontally opposed to proletarian internationalism.  It looked to the peasantry, not the working class, whose power it feared, and when struggles took on a mass character posing the possibility of revolution, such as in Brazil in the early ’60s, Castro (and Guevara) cut them off in order not to inconvenience friendly popular-front governments. Moreover, while showing interest in the situation of blacks in the U.S., Cuba never sought to encourage revolutionary struggles in the United States, which is key to any revolution in the hemisphere.

So long as Cuba remains in national isolation (far greater now than when the Soviet Union still existed and Havana benefited from substantial Soviet supplies of oil), it will be constrained to play on and exploit contradictions between the imperialist powers. But following the demise of the Soviet Union, the core of the Castro regime’s policy has been to look to the European and Latin American bourgeoisies as a counterweight to the United States. Havana also sought to offer its services to the U.S., first in the “war on drugs” and later in the “war on terrorism,” in a vain attempt to “peacefully coexist” with the imperialist giant next door. But the Washington Cold Warriors and Miami gusanos are bent on counterrevolution, and to stop them it is necessary to defeat them. This cannot be accomplished by appealing to the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois “friends of Cuba,” who are now up in arms over the repression of counterrevolutionaries, or by looking to other bourgeois governments.

In contrast to Stalinist-nationalist illusions of “building socialism in one country” and its programmatic counterpart internationally – “revolution in stages” (beginning with a “democratic” bourgeois stage) and “popular fronts” to head off workers revolution – Trotsky put forward the perspective and program of permanent revolution. Summing up the experience of two Russian Revolutions (1905 and 1917), Lenin’s comrade-in-arms and the founder of the Red Army noted that in the imperialist epoch, the period of capitalism’s decline, even elementary democratic demands cannot be accomplished by the bourgeoisie, as at the time of the great French Revolution. Instead, achieving national liberation from the yoke of imperialism, agrarian revolution against the latifundistas, and democracy for working masses can only be brought about by the victory of workers revolution, supported by the impoverished peasantry and other oppressed sectors.

Such a revolution requires the leadership of a Leninist-Trotskyist communist party to come to power, and it must be extended to the advanced capitalist (imperialist) countries if it is to go forward to building a classless socialist society, which can only be built internationally on the basis of plenty and not the penury of a besieged island. In contrast to the impossibility of a “socialist Cuba” alone, Trotskyists fight for a federation of Caribbean workers republics in a socialist united states of Latin America. Rather than looking for “alliances” with the likes of Mexico’s Coca-Cola capitalist president Vicente Fox or others of Washington’s neo-colonial satraps, revolutionaries look to the millions-strong proletariat throughout the continent. In the face of  threatened invasion of Cuba by the Bush war hawks and their gusano partners, it is necessary to look not to the liberal intelligentsia but to working people, blacks, Latinos, immigrants and other sectors oppressed by the same bourgeoisie as threatens Cuban workers.

Cuba has made important social gains compared to any other country of Latin America. The lowest infant mortality rate in the continent, equal to that of the United States, and substantially less than that in New York City or Washington. Universal literacy and education. Universal health care far better than that available to the poor of the U.S.’ inner cities and even than that available to the middle classes of much of the continent. But these gains are mortally threatened by the advance of counterrevolutionary forces from within and without.

A revolutionary workers party must be built in Cuba that can defend and extend these gains. It can only be built in the struggle for a reforged Fourth International, the continuation of the Communist International of Lenin and Trotsky. It must be infused with the internationalist spirit of the founder of Cuban communism, Julio Antonio Mella. In a letter from Havana prison in December 1925, Mella wrote:

“The unity of America has already been made by Yankee imperialism. The Panamerican Union is the International of the future political empire whose only capital is Wall Street and whose royalty is made up of the kings of the various industries. The unity of America which the most elevated minds dream of at present is the unity of our America, of America based on social justice, of free America, not of exploited America, colonial America, America which is the fiefdom of a few capitalist companies served by a few governments that are simply agents of the imperialist invader. This unity of America can only be realized by the revolutionary forces who are enemies of international capitalism: workers, peasants, Indians, students and vanguard intellectuals. No revolutionary at the present time can cease to be an internationalist. That would be ceasing to be revolutionary. No program of renovation, or for the destruction of any tyranny, can take place without a joint action of all the peoples of America, including the United States….
“Considering that the enemy called imperialism outside the United States is capitalism inside that nation, it is necessary to extend this united front beyond the Rio Grande. It is necessary to form a single army of all those exploited by Wall Street.”
–Mella: Documentos y Artículos (Instituto Cubano del Libro, 1975) n

Read also: Decades of Biowarfare Against Cuba (May 2003)