“The United States respects your aspirations as citizens and we will stand with you to secure your rights — to speak as you choose, to think as you please, to worship as you wish and to choose your leaders freely and fairly in democratic elections”.
Or so Condoleeza Rice said recently — attempting to exploit Fidel Castro’s illness in order to promote a “peaceful transition” to “democracy”. Meanwhile US officials announce plans for a major deployment of Navy and Coast Guard to prevent refugees from reaching the US in the event that these plans are successful.
The US’s vision of a “free” and “democratic” Cuba is similar to its vision for Iraq — a free-market hell hole in which a compliant pro-US regime violates as many human rights as necessary to ensure profits for capitalism. Naturally this will mean abolishing the limited gains, such as free healthcare and education, which Cuban workers have made since 1959.
Meanwhile, the leaders of Cuba’s Stalinist “Communist Party” have moved to ensure a peaceful transition of their own sort. The regime’s official newspaper, Granma, has assured Cubans that Fidel’s brother Raul Castro is “at the helm of the nation”, printing pictures of him as young man and recounting his exploits during the Cuban revolution in heroic terms.
Raul, like his brother, is a committed and ideological Stalinist. The quasi-feudal way in which he has succeeded to the Cuban throne, the first time in more than forty years that Castro has not headed all the significant bodies of the Cuban state, tells you everything you need to know about the “communist” regime.
Revolutionaries need to find ways to make solidarity with the Cuban masses against both US aggression and Cuba’s Stalinist ruling class.
• For more on Cuba see Paul Hampton’s review of Samuel Farber’s The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered at www.workersliberty.org/node/6407
