Celia Hart: a Trotskyist icon?

Submitted by Anon on 26 September, 2008 - 10:27 Author: Sacha Ismail

Celia Hart Santamaria, the well-known Cuban Communist Party activist who died in a traffic accident in Havana at the start of September, was feted on the international left as a representative of Trotskyism in Cuba.

Both the Fourth International centred on the French LCR and the International Marxist Tendency centred on the British Socialist Appeal group have promoted Hart, had her to speak at their events, and so on. (You can read tributes at the FI-linked liammaccuaid.wordpress.com and at the IMT’s www.marxist.com.) But even the generally more critical Permanent Revolution group, for instance, has printed an obituary in which it describes her as a “critical voice who supported genuine socialism”.

Hart learnt about Trotskyism from her father, a leading member of Fidel Castro’s inner circule, who, after she returned from studying as a physicist in East Germany in the 1980s, responded to her disillusionment with the regime there by lending her Revolution Betrayed and Isaac Deutscher's biography of Trotsky. As the Cuban-American Third Camp Marxist Samuel Farber put it in a recent interview:

“First, what Celia Hart Santamaria has written is overwhelmingly for the foreign left. Very few people in Cuba know about it. That aside, her ‘Trotskyism’ is a peculiar sort that says nothing about workers’ democracy. It’s a ‘Trotskyism’ that worships Fidel Castro and talks about the expansion of the revolution without talking about the question of democracy in the revolution...

“I would submit that Trotskyism minus workers’ democracy is very, very close to Third-Period, left-wing Stalinism. In other words, she’s projecting the line of a more militant Stalinism as opposed to the Popular Front kind.”

It is worth mentioning that the actual Cuban Trotskyist movement was suppressed and its members imprisoned by Castro in the early 60s.

Hart talked about the “nightmare” of capitalist restoration, China-style, in Cuba — a process which, under the leadership of Raul Castro, now seems under way. She also believed that there was a Stalinist faction in the Cuban CP — but that Fidel Castro was not part of it! She looked to self-reform by the bureaucratic regime, not to mass action to overthrow it in a workers' revolution from below.

For more, including a link to the interview with Sam Farber, see www.workersliberty.org/cuba2007.

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