Ever since the victory of the 26th of July Movement, a struggle for the national liberation of Cuba led primarily by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, the sovereign state of Cuba has been a thorn in the side of US-led imperialism. Revolutionary Cuba’s unforgivable original sin, in the eyes of the US state, was the overthrow of Batista’s US-backed comprador regime in 1959, which cut the US off from its flow of sugar plantation profits. But perhaps the deeper grievance that haunts the capitalist class and its allies is what came two years after the revolution.
In response to the US-sponsored attacks preceding the Bay of Pigs coup attempt, Fidel Castro spoke in front of hundreds of gathered Cubans:
What the imperialists cannot forgive is that we are here. What the imperialists cannot forgive is the dignity, the firmness, the courage, the ideological integrity, the spirit of sacrifice, and the revolutionary spirit of the Cuban people.
This is what they cannot forgive: the fact that we are here right under their very noses. And that we have carried out a socialist revolution right under the nose of the United States!
And we are defending this socialist revolution with these guns! We are defending this socialist revolution with the same courage that our anti-aircraft artillerymen showed yesterday in riddling the attacking planes with bullets!
Castro’s speech was met with riotous applause. For the international Left, this moment has been a site of theoretical debate for decades. What does it mean for a revolutionary leadership to proclaim to the masses that a living, progressive, national liberation revolution was (and is) socialist in character? In early 20th century Russia, the programme of the socialist vanguard was hotly debated for years and always challenged by brutally-honest Bolsheviks, while in Cuba, the character of the revolution was proclaimed by Castro and supported by the masses two years in. Perhaps what matters more is the form that the political economy takes – is the expropriation of imperialist capital, followed by the implementation of a planned economy administered by a state bureaucracy, enough to call that nation socialist in the Marxist sense, even without direct workers’ democracy?
For the Right, however, no such lively theoretical discourse exists. Cuba is spoken of in cartoonish language as a “Communist Dictatorship”. While taking different forms over the decades since US president Eisenhower’s leadership, all US administrations have in one form or another upheld the trade embargo designed to suffocate and destabilise Cuba. With the Helms–Burton Act of 1996, the US political class seized on the opportunity provided by the collapse of the Soviet Union to effectively offer the ultimatum to the nations of the world: you can trade with the global hegemon, or a small Caribbean nation, but not both.
For international socialists like us in the ISO, socialism is about democratic, organised power from below. Socialism is about those workers taking power themselves, not being freed by guerillas who later become communists. That said, the national liberation of Cuba was heroic. The embryonic organs of working-class power in Batista’s Cuba did not coalesce into proletarian revolution. Rather, history unfolded in the direction it was pushed by revolutionaries, buoyed by fighters from the oppressed working and peasant classes. The legacy of Castro, Guevara and the revolution looms large over history and it echoes today both in Cuba and abroad, and we owe it to the workers of the world to preserve Cuba’s gains and critique its failures, rather than abandoning imperfect revolutions or building false idols of Cuba’s national heroes.
But we cannot stop at theoretical analyses and intellectual engagement. The US’ imperialist chokehold over the Republic of Cuba is tightening. Resource and military overstretch in a time of its economic decline has forced the Trump administration to undertake an imperial realignment, in the form of a renewed Monroe Doctrine. That is to say, the US is declaring the Western Hemisphere to be its own “backyard.” Notably, this has so far taken the form of the brazen abduction of Venezuela’s president, and economic threats against Mexico, the two sovereign states supplying Cuba with the vast majority of its oil resources.
In recent weeks, we have seen anti-Government demonstrations occur in response to discontent towards the prolonged economic crisis caused by the trade embargo, power outages stemming from oil shortages and ageing infrastructure, and economic mismanagement in these conditions. Simultaneously, we see pro-Government and anti-US demonstrations opposing the collective punishment imposed upon the Cuban people by the US. Predictably, the anti-Government demonstrations have been seized upon by the right-wing opportunists in the US and beyond, to push a familiar interventionist narrative.
The lesson being meted out by the US and its allies is that there is no alternative to US hegemony, resisting will only result in death and economic barbarism. National political self-determination as a principle is irrelevant; all that matters is the hard power to effect political will over other polities. This is, obviously, at irreconcilable odds with the socialist politics of political self-determination of nations. It is no secret that the purpose of the embargo is to cause collective harm, starvation, death, and devastation to Cubans, to cause collapse or inspire regime change.
So then, what is our task as internationalist socialists in Aotearoa? Theoretical discourse guides action, but whether positions on the Left proclaim Cuba to be a Stalinist bureaucracy or a struggling socialist state, it is not difficult to arrive at the conclusion that we must strike together against US imperial aggression. As always, our task is to organise and build power. In conditions of a relatively tiny revolutionary Left, this means building not only our organisations but consciously building an anti-imperialist social movement and all the challenging anti-sectarian organising that this entails, while acting as a pole of attraction for our socialist politics within this movement. The fear of creating a social movement of which one’s political tendency is a minority is an unhelpful fear, particularly to those Cubans facing hunger, infrastructure collapse, and blackouts. A social movement that is powerful enough to make real gains will attract socialists organising against imperialism, as well as NGOs drawn in on humanitarian grounds, electoral parties hitching their cart to the movement’s politics, and plenty more.
Our task is to build this social movement and aim it at the spaces where our own state supports the US-led imperialism that targets Cuba, from our state’s willing cooperation in the Five Eyes network, military agreements with the US Department of War, and the FBI’s presence on these islands and in the South Pacific. While we build, we remember our Cuban compañeros who we are in solidarity with: the doctors, the poets, the fighters, and every dignified person who refuses to be reduced to a profit-generator for their bosses, at home or abroad.
Banner Image: Cuban rumba dancers in the workers’ square of Camagüey, Cuba. Photo credit: Manuel Díaz Reyes CC BY 4.0
