The Cuban Revolution and Its Leadership
By Doug Lorimer
Resistance Books, 2000
62 pp., $5.95.
REVIEW BY ALLEN MYERS
The movement that is fighting against the program of the major multinationals known as "globalisation" do not have many allies among the powerful. Calling for the abolition of the International Monetary Fund or for a sizeable "Tobin tax" on international financial speculation is not something that appeals to government leaders.
With one notable exception. Cuban President Fidel Castro, at the G77 Third World governments' meeting in April, raised both demands in the course of a powerful speech which pointed out that the alleged benefits of globalisation are enjoyed by at most 20% of the world's population.
This is not merely a matter of words — although it would be nice to have even mere words from other heads of government. The Cuban revolutionary government acts in the interest of working people and the poor, both within Cuba and internationally.
For instance, Cuba leads the entire world in numbers of doctors and teachers per capita. It provides medical training for large numbers of students from other Third World countries and has sent thousands of volunteer doctors to help in other countries. (In the early 1990s, Cuba had more doctors aiding the Third World than did the entire World Health Organisation.)
There are other things which make Cuba and its government stand out from virtually every other country in the world. Take the attitude of imperialism.
Imperialism, especially United States imperialism, of course has many enemies, because the interests of imperialism are opposed to the real interests of the overwhelming majority of the world's people. It's a matter of course for imperialism to seek to overthrow governments, especially in the Third World, which get in the way of its plans, either accidentally or deliberately. Consequently, not every government that finds itself in the Pentagon's or the CIA's gun sights is a revolutionary government.
Still, when a government is the target of Washington's unbroken hostility for four decades, it must be doing more than a few things right. The Cold War has been over for a decade, yet Washington risks strife with its imperialist partners over its blockade of Cuba and submits to the humiliation of collaborating with kidnappers of children, as in the Elian affair. Clearly, US imperialism sees something "special" in Cuba.
Given these facts, it is strange that some on the left view the Cuban Revolution and/or the Cuban Communist Party with considerable suspicion and in some cases even hostility.
In some cases, this attitude is based on nothing more than sectarianism: Fidel Castro and his team didn't follow our recipe for making revolutions; the Cuban CP is not part of our international grouping; therefore they can't be real revolutionaries.
But it is sometimes based on, or combined with, little more than ignorance about the real history of the Cuban Revolution. This vacuum is easily filled with myths and impressions generated by the unrelenting imperialist propaganda: maybe it's true that the Cuban government represses dissent, or that Castro is just a dictator like the Soviet leaders were, or that the Cuban workers are exploited by a bureaucratic Communist Party.
While ignorance is no more commendable than sectarianism, it does have the advantage of being much easier to cure. Doug Lorimer's new pamphlet provides a convenient antidote in the form of a concise but rigorous discussion of the accusations of those who regard the Cuban revolutionary leadership as Stalinist.
The pamphlet takes the form of a criticism of an earlier pamphlet by Peter Taaffe, the leader of the Socialist Party (formerly Militant) in Britain. Taaffe views the Castro leadership as Stalinist from early in the revolution, and so provides the occasion for examining the history of the revolution from the very beginning.
There is a mythology, especially among parties and groups from the Trotskyist tradition, that Castro and his initial team were essentially democrats (Taaffe says that before 1961 Castro was "no more than a radical middle-class democrat") who were forced on to the path of socialist revolution by the refusal of US imperialism to tolerate a democratic government in what it considered its "back yard".
Lorimer refutes this myth with material from several sources, including Castro's famous (but too little read!) defence speech, "History Will Absolve Me!", at his trial following the unsuccessful attack on the Moncada Barracks in 1953; and Castro's prison diary, which recorded the development of his views as he studied revolutionary theory. Among the books he read in prison were Marx's Capital, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and The Civil War in France, and Lenin's The State and Revolution.
Even more decisively, Lorimer shows that the actions of Castro and the July 26 Movement were part of a revolutionary strategy of mobilising the working class in struggle. This is what enabled the guerilla forces to defeat an army that was never less than 10 times their number, and what formed the social base for the development of the revolution after the victory of January 1, 1959.
The notion that the Cuban Communist Party represents or consists of privileged bureaucrats analogous to the Stalinist bureaucratic castes of the Soviet Union or China is also thoroughly refuted.
First, Lorimer cites the reports and studies of observers, such as US sociologist Maurice Zeitlin, who find that administrators in Cuba are anything but privileged. In fact, it has sometimes been difficult to find people willing to serve as factory officials because skilled workers in the factory have a higher standard of living.
Secondly, the pamphlet describes the development and structure of workers' democracy in Cuba, in particular the Organs of People's Power. "These are not legislative bodies on the parliamentary model", Lorimer points out, "but working bodies that combine legislative and administrative functions. They are the same type of representative institutions as the early Russian soviets."
Thirdly, Lorimer briefly outlines the Castro leadership's struggle against bureaucracy. This section of the pamphlet may provide the most "new" information for younger activists, because some of the most important events that it recounts occurred in the 1960s and are not widely recalled by the left today.
There was a layer of Stalinists in the Cuban leadership in the 1960s. It was organised by and around Anibal Escalante, a longtime leader of the pro-Moscow Partido Socialista Popular. Escalante and his followers were denounced by Castro for their bureaucratic and anti-democratic actions in 1962. The struggle continued until 1968, when Escalante and eight others were jailed for their attempts to have the Soviet government use its aid as a lever to advance their cause within the Cuban Communist Party.
Equally interesting is the final section of Lorimer's pamphlet, which discusses Cuba's revolutionary foreign policy. The greatest part of this looks at Castro's position on the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. It explains the Soviet pressure on Cuba to support the invasion and provides enough of the content of Castro's speech on the matter to make it clear why none of the Stalinist regimes involved ever reprinted it.
This section also recounts the history of the 1975 Cuban assistance to Angola, when the government of that country requested that Cuban forces help it resist a South African invasion.
Lorimer points out that, a few months earlier, the US government in secret talks had "held out the promise of the full restoration of diplomatic relations and the lifting of the embargo on direct trade between the two countries if the Castro leadership joined in the US-Soviet detente". Despite this, the Cuban revolutionaries didn't hesitate to respond to the Angolan plea, sending troops that were to prove decisive in turning back the invasion.
The Cuban Communists couldn't be persuaded to betray their revolutionary internationalism for the sake of more peaceful relations with the US. Their refusal to behave like Stalinists is what makes them a special enemy of imperialism.