Is Cuba Socialist?

Submitted by Anon on 29 July, 2007 - 12:50 Author: Paul Hampton

This book is a pseudo-debate between Peter Taaffe of the Socialist Party and CWI (formerly Militant) in Britain and Doug Lorimer of the Australian Democratic Socialist Party (DSP).

It is also, I guess, an attempt to check the recent rash of Castro-worship in the Scottish Socialist Party, with whom Taaffe maintains a strained relationship.

The DSP, following the lead of the American SWP, rejects Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, preferring Lenin’s blurred and outmoded formula of a “democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants” as the programme for revolutions in countries of less capitalist development. It endorses Castro’s leadership largely uncritically, and sees Cuba since 1959 as a socialist state.

Taaffe subscribes to permanent revolution, and is thus more critical of Castro. Yet Taaffe shares fundamentally the same framework as Lorimer, believing that Cuba under Castro is, as Russia under Stalin and China under Mao were a deformed workers’ state, historically more progressive than capitalism, and in some senses (nationalised property, planned economy, welfare gains, absence of a bourgeois class) part of the socialist alternative. More critical of Castro than the DSP, the CWI (in a pamphlet by Tony Saunois) constructs a mythical version of Che Guevara with which to associate itself. Despite some telling points, Taaffe never manages to nail Lorimer’s Stalinoid politics.

Why isn’t Cuba socialist? The 1959 revolution was not made by the Cuban working class but by the guerrillas of the July 26th Movement (J26M). There were no Soviets in Cuba in 1959 and the general strike the previous year had been a failure. There were no signs of workers seizing the factories, establishing committees for workers’ control. There was no proliferation of independent unions challenging the Batista regime. The J26M was neither rooted in the working class, nor advanced a socialist programme.

The Castro regime, pushed into a corner by US imperialism, did indeed overthrow capitalism in Cuba after 1959, but only to construct a form of exploiting society on the model of the Stalinist USSR. Castro constructed a one-party system. Only supporters or members of the Cuban Communist Party can stand in elections. The trade union movement, purged after 1959, is now bound hand-and-foot to the state. Dissident political groups, even those opposed to the US blockade, cannot exist legally.

The welfare system in Cuba before the 1990s was indeed better than Batista’s, and on a par with the best of equivalent capitalist states, such as Costa Rica and Taiwan. But Cuba was already one of the richest countries in Latin America before 1959. In the 1980s it depended on an annual $5 billion subsidy from the USSR, as well as on the exploitation of Cuban workers and peasants. After Russian support was withdrawn in 1989, the economy collapsed, to be drip-fed only by the recent expansion of tourism and business ventures.

In foreign policy, the Cuban state whistled to the tune of the USSR, supporting the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the crushing of Solidarnosc in 1981. In Africa, Cuba switched from the Eritrean national liberation movement to supporting the Derg in Ethiopia. Closer to home, Castro failed to condemn the slaughter of students in Mexico in 1968, gave his stamp of approval to the recently ousted PRI regime, even when it committed electoral fraud in 1988 to stay in power, and failed to back the Zapatistas. Socialists support Cuba’s right to self-determination, and oppose the US blockade, but that does not commit us to silence on Castro’s anti-working class policies at home or abroad.

Taaffe mentions some of this, but does not draw the threads together. Chapter Four asks: “Is there a privileged elite?” and shows that the Castro leadership has all the attributes of a ruling class.

Taaffe evades the fundamental problem for his position — how can a “workers’ state” have been created without the active intervention of the working class? — and expresses a “workers’ statism” that dare not speak its name.

The extent of Taaffe’s illusions is indicated in passing when he implies that Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan leader who recently orchestrated the oil price rises through the OPEC cartel, might be the new Fidel Castro. He also writes that it was wrong to support the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1980. True, but what about some political accounting for the nine years in which Taaffe’s tendency supported the Russian troops!

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