Paul Abbot’s article of 21 January (Solidarity 759) gives a bleak but a pretty accurate description of the immediate crisis facing Cuba. Blackouts, shortages, deteriorating public health, and the loss of Venezuelan oil supplies are real, material facts. So too is the renewed aggressiveness of US policy in the region. Where the article goes wrong, I believe, is not in its description of hardship, but in how it explains it and what it treats as politically plausible outcomes.
The framework running through the piece is familiar: Cuba is presented as a single-party dictatorship consolidated early on, ruled by an elite that suppressed autonomous working-class politics, and now facing a crisis that may open space for “genuinely democratic working-class forces” to emerge in the event of collapse. That framing sounds radical, but it rests on a profound abstraction from power and history.
The US blockade is acknowledged but not treated as determinative. This is not a minor omission. Cuba has endured the longest and most comprehensive economic blockade imposed on any country in modern history. It is designed explicitly to produce scarcity, demoralisation, and political breakdown. To discuss Cuban bureaucracy, shortages, or “alternatives” without placing this fact at the centre is to misidentify cause and effect.
What kind of “capitalist” country responds to underdevelopment by abolishing illiteracy in the space of a single year? In 1961, under Education Minister Armando Hart, Cuba reduced illiteracy from roughly 23 percent to under 4 percent through a nationwide mobilisation of workers, students, and peasants. This was not welfare reform administered from above, but a mass social mobilisation rooted in the revolution itself. Capitalist states do not act this way. They manage inequality; they do not uproot it through collective action.
The article’s reliance on an abstract debate about whether the working class played the “correct” theoretical role in the revolution compounds the problem. Serious historical work has long challenged the idea that the Cuban Revolution was simply a guerrilla substitution for working-class struggle.
Steve Cushion’s A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution documents the decisive role played by workers through strikes, sabotage, urban networks, and logistical support that made the guerrilla victory possible. Armando Hart’s own account in his book Aldabonazo: Inside the Cuban revolutionary underground further illustrates the depth of underground organisation and popular involvement. These works do not present Cuba as a textbook proletarian revolution, but they decisively undermine the idea that workers were marginal or passive.
Insisting on measuring the Cuban process against an idealised model of proletarian revolution imported from very different social conditions turns theory into a veto. It has been one of the recurring dangers besetting socialist analysis of Cuba: endless argument about what the revolution should have been, rather than concrete engagement with what it actually was and is.
Trotsky once argued that socialists defend trade unions even when they are bureaucratised, conservative, or badly led, because they are products of the historical struggle of the working class. Their weaknesses do not negate their class character. When capital attacks them, we defend them not because they are perfect, but because they are ours.
The same method should apply to Cuba.
Dismantled
The Cuban Revolution dismantled the old ruling class, abolished capitalist domination, and created new social relations. Its institutions are deformed, bureaucratic, and often deeply frustrating, but they are not neutral instruments of a new exploiting class in the straightforward sense implied by Abbot’s analysis. They remain the outcome of a revolution that working people continue to identify as their own, even while criticising it sharply.
This point is reinforced by the concrete evidence contained in Helen Yaffe’s excellent book, We Are Cuba, which examines how participation, debate, and consent have functioned within Cuban society under conditions of permanent economic warfare. Yaffe’s account does not deny bureaucracy or repression, but it shows a society in which popular identification with the revolution has persisted precisely because its social gains are understood as collectively won and collectively defended. That reality sits uneasily with claims that Cuba has simply crystallised into a new class dictatorship.
This is also why the article’s conclusion is troubling. Collapse is treated as a possible opening. In reality, under conditions of blockade, US pressure, and Miami-based exile politics, collapse would not produce democratic working-class alternatives. It would produce a scramble dominated by pro-US, pro-market forces with vastly greater resources, organisation, and external backing. To suggest otherwise is not realism. It is hope substituted for strategy.
Framing the situation primarily in terms of “alternatives” also risks posing the problem incorrectly. In a society under prolonged blockade and external threat, the immediate question is not which political model might replace the existing one in the abstract, but how existing social gains can be defended and extended under worsening conditions. For Cuban workers, the alternative to the current system is not a menu of democratic options waiting to be selected, but the very real prospect of social collapse, mass privatisation, and the dismantling of universal provision under conditions shaped decisively by imperial power.
Economic debates within the revolution further complicate the picture. Carlos Tablada’s book Che Guevara: Economics and Politics in the Transition to Socialism and Helen Yaffe’s Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution both show that Cuban leaders were acutely aware of the dangers of bureaucratisation and market restoration. Che’s Budgetary Finance System was an attempt, however limited, to resist managerial self-interest and commodity logic, not an embrace of bureaucratic rule. These were not decorative debates. They shaped real policy choices under severe constraints.
Internationalist socialism does not mean defending everything the Cuban state does. It does mean opposing the blockade unconditionally and rejecting analyses that treat the weakening or collapse of a besieged post-capitalist society as politically neutral. In the present context, it is not.
The question is not whether Cuba has contradictions. It clearly does. The question is whether socialists respond to those contradictions by defending the historical gains of a revolution under siege while supporting struggles to deepen participation and accountability, or by theorising collapse as an opportunity. On that point, Abbot’s article, I contend, offers the wrong answer.
Further reading
Steve Cushion, A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution: How the Working Class Shaped the Guerrillas’ Victory
Armando Hart, Aldabonazo: Inside the Cuban Revolutionary Underground
Carlos Tablada, Che Guevara: Economics and Politics in the Transition to Socialism
Helen Yaffe, Che Guevara: The Economics of Revolution
Helen Yaffe, We Are Cuba (2020)
Cuban Ministry of Education data on the 1961 National Literacy Campaign
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