Workers' Liberty

The Chinese road?

Samuel Farber, Cuban “Third Camp” Marxist and author of The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered, was interviewed about the book in US socialist journal Against the Current (November 2006). Here we reprint an extract with his predictions for Cuba without Castro.

The Evening Standard phoned me for a comment on Castro’s retirement yesterday. This is what they printed today.

Paul Hampton of Workers' Liberty debated with Bernard Regan, a leading member of the Socialist Teachers' Alliance, at a London Workers' Liberty meeting.

By Paul Hampton

Paul Hampton assesses Fidel Castro’s legacy — the nature of the 1959 revolution and the social and political changes Cuba is now experiencing.

The overthrow of Batista in the last days of 1958 was a popular revolution that socialists and radicals everywhere supported. Batista had made Cuba a vassal of the US and held down the Cuban working class with repression and a compliant union bureaucracy.

Paul Hampton Reviews "Cuba: Socialism and Democracy" by Peter Taaffe
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)

In a recent interview with the US socialist magazine Against the Current, exiled Cuban Trotskyist Sam Farber details the indications that after Fidel Castro's death Cuba may follow the path towards the world capitalist market initiated by Deng Xiaoping in China.

A new left-wing consensus is emerging, a “common sense” that takes Latin America as its point of departure and which combines many of the worst features of previous versions of “socialism from above”.

Harry Glass reviews The Fidel Casto Handbook by George Galloway

This is pure hagiography of the last grand Stalinist autocrats by one of his most loquacious apologists.

It is the modern equivalent of a biography of Josef Stalin by Stalinist Albanian supremo Enver Hoxha.

The Fidel Castro Handbook by George Galloway is a hagiography about one of the last grand Stalinist autocrats by one of its most loquacious apologists.

It is the modern equivalent of the biography of Josef Stalin by Albanian tankie Enver Hoxha.

“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”.

On Saturday I went to Socialist Resistance's Latin America dayschool, which had sessions focusing in particular on Bolivia, Venezuela and Cuba. While there was open discussion where members from other groups could say what they thought - all too rare for many left "schools" - I felt that key questions about the character of these governments were ignored, and it had little focus on independent, working class politics.

Writing about the V&A exhibition of the famous Che Guevara photo in this week’s Socialist Worker Tim Sanders writes:

“The power of this image ultimately comes from the fact that Che was a genuine revolutionary, a fighter against capitalism and injustice. It is this authenticity that gives the image its force and is the one thing the image makers cannot hope to manufacture.

The key test of Castro’s movement was and is its relationship to the working class in Cuba. Farber’s book does not contain much new information on workers struggles during the period, though it clearly identifies the control Castro attained over the labour movement as a crucial turning point on the road to a Stalinist regime.

Farber tries to explain the evolution of the Cuban regime by grounding his interpretation in the context of the period. By the late 1950s, many people had the perception that the USSR was catching up and even surpassing the US – symbolised by the first Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile and the Sputnik launch in 1957.

If US-Cuban relations were neo-colonial in the 1950s, US policy was essentially one of “law and order and business as usual”. In the context of the Cold War, support for any Latin American government professing anti-Communism, whether they had been democratically elected or were military dictatorships. Hence US backing for Batista during the 1950s. (2006 p.73)

Fidel Castro was undoubtedly the central historical figure in the Cuban revolution. Farber locates Castro within the long Cuban and Latin American tradition of populist nationalism - as a caudillo with particular political ideas and organisational practices that “transcended” that tradition.

Any Marxist account of the Cuban revolution has to be rooted in an analysis of Cuba’s political economy, to explain the relative weight of the contending classes and of the existing state, and to understand what drove millions of Cubans to support Batista’s overthrow.

Review of Samuel Farber, The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered (University of North Carolina Press, 2006)

What was the class character of the Cuban revolution of 1959-61? More than any other Marxist over the last forty-five years, Sam Farber has tried to tackle this question from the standpoint of Third Camp working class socialism.

USA

New York’s bus and subway workers, who shut down the US’s largest transit system for three days last month, have voted down the contract they were offered by seven votes.

In March 2003 75 Cuban dissidents were arrested, charged with treason, and given sentences of up to 26 years.

Bruce Robinson reviews The Motorcycle Diaries.

Leeds AWL public meeting

Paul Hampton reviews Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution by Mike Gonzales (Bookmarks, £8.99)

By Joan Trevor

In March and April the Cuban government arrested dozens of oppositionists for allegedly working with the US to overthrow Fidel Castro's regime. Many of those arrested were quickly tried and have received long prison sentences. Human rights organisations have protested against the crackdown on these 'dissidents', who range from opposition leaders to grassroots human rights activists. The Campaign for Peace and Democracy, the US based organisation that originally developed the 'No to war, no to Saddam Hussein' statement circulated by the Alliance for Workers' Liberty, has protested as well.

In Workers’ Liberty 42 , Helen Rate rightly criticises the Socialist Workers’ Party’s opportunistic attitude towards Che Guevara. The thirtieth anniversary of his murder, this October, prompted much discussion of his legacy, both on the left and in the bourgeois press. Although I agree with Helen’s overall assessment of Guevara, I think that certain issues about his life and politics need to be drawn out more sharply than an article which focuses on the SWP is able to do. Recent biographies of “El Che,” particularly one by John Lee Anderson, have shed new light on his place in history and allow us to make a more balanced assessment.