Cuba

No excuses for Cuban labour fronts

Bernard Reagan, national secretary of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, has eulogised the Cuban ″trade unions″ in a laughable piece of semi-Stalinist sophistry (Morning Star, 9 February). Reagan makes out that Cuban workers have been struggling continuously since the Cuban Workers’ Confederation was founded in 1939. It is true that workers fought to overthrow the dictator Batista during the 1950s – something every socialist supports. The disagreement comes after the Castro movement took over and linked up with the old (Stalinist) Communist Party. In early 1959, workers replaced the old union...

Socialism is not Cuba

Fidel Castro’s 26 July Movement overthrew the corrupt Batista regime, and took power in Cuba sixty years ago, at the start of January 1959. The early period of the Castro regime improved social provision and living standards for the poorest in Cuba. Increasingly it did that while also suppressing the independent trade unions and political pluralism which existed, even though harassed and weak, under Batista. Sixty years later, the Morning Star is celebrating and excusing Cuba’s lack of democracy. It is pointedly silent about the economic inequality which has grown there since the Cuban...

With the Cuban workers, not the Cuban police state!

(The following text was printed as a leaflet; that leaflet was ripped up by the organisers of the Cuba Solidarity fringe meeting to whom it was addressed, in a half-hearted attempt to emulate the Cuban police state...) A Letter to Delegates It is a disgrace that over the last two years the National Union of Teachers [now National Education Union] has spent £48 000 subsidising delegates on “solidarity” visits to Cuba. This is an enormous waste of money, and politically it is positively harmful, too. Cuba is a police state with no free elections, free speech or free trade unions. ‘Solidarity’...

Letters

I’m entirely with David Pendletone ( Solidarity 452) that we should seek to win the labour movement and the Labour Party to a programme for a workers’ Europe. But what if we fail to win a majority for that before March 2019? We should assume no “inevitability of gradualness”. But even if we, around Solidarity , increase our forces twenty-fold in the next year — twenty times more activists, twenty times more readers, twenty times more influence — we may not win Labour conference 2018 to that programme. And, even if we do, a workers’ Europe is not a programme that can realised by action in one...

Letters

I agree with the front page and the vast majority of the editorial "Stop Brexit" ( Solidarity 451). However, I disagree that revolutionary socialists should advocate a second referendum. Unlike the situation with the first referendum, I don’t think we should necessarily oppose others who call for a referendum or oppose a referendum if it is called, but we ill serve our politics by championing the demand. As the editorial recognises, referenda are “a poor form of democracy”. In a second referendum our politics: for a workers’ Europe, more democracy within the EU and a levelling up of benefits...

Cuba: the role of the working class

What role did the Cuban working class play in the 1959 revolution? This is the key question discussed in Steve Cushion’s provocative book, A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution: How the Working Class Shaped the Guerrillas’ Victory , (Monthly Review, 2016). Whilst the book demonstrates the active role workers played in Cuban history during the 1950s, the author is soft on Castroism and inflates the role of the Stalinists. Cuba in the 1950s was ruled by the dictator Fulgencio Batista. His regime was propped up through the trade union bureaucracy, led by Eusebio Mujal, who ruled the Cuban...

Guevara is not our hero

Che Guevara is lionised as a revolutionary icon by wide sections of the global left. Even those claiming some Trotskyist heritage, from the various “Fourth Internationals” to the British SWP, publish mostly uncritical appreciations of the individual and his politics. Yet Guevara was never a working class socialist nor even a revolutionary democrat. He helped overthrow the hated dictator Batista in Cuba, but only to replace it with a Stalinist regime. Clearing away false messiahs and Stalinist blind alleys is a central task if the Marxist left is to revive. Samuel Farber is the most outstanding...

Trump freezes US-Cuba relations

Donald Trump has introduced new restrictions on travel to Cuba and on US companies trading with Cuban businesses owned by the state’s military and intelligence services (which includes most of the tourist sector). Trump has revised, but not as he originally threatened reversed Obama’s policy on Cuba. At the end of 2014 Obama reopened diplomatic relations with the island’s government, a one-party dictatorship overseen by Raul Castro. This began a period of “normalisation”, largely ending the economic blockade. Although a ban on US tourism remained in place, US tourists were able to get around...

Fidel Castro — no hero of ours

Fidel Castro, one of the last remaining leaders of a Stalinist state, died last week at the age of 90. Among sections of the left there is near-hysterical outpouring of eulogy, while bourgeois commentators blithely dismiss him as a communist despot. A third camp socialist assessment of Castro’s politics is needed. Fidel Castro was undoubtedly the central historical figure of modern Cuban history. The 1959 revolution that brought his 26 July Movement (M26J) to power was a bourgeois political revolution which smashed Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship, but replaced it with their own Bonapartist...

Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution

Cuban socialist Sam Farber surveyed the story of Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution of 1959 in an interview a few years back. The revolutionary struggle against Batista was very brief. And this is the remarkable thing about the Cuban Revolution. Fidel Castro landed in early December 1956 with his eighty-two people in the boat Granma–meaning grandmother–an American boat. Not much progress was made for the first six months or so. Then, after May 1957, the rebels began to make progress in the Sierra Maestra mountains. An important step in the evolution of the struggle was the failure of the...

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