Displaying items by tag: cuba

Friday, 16 July 2021 16:09

Cuba, once again at a crossroads  

 

To put an end to the imperialist blockade and defeat the CP's policy of capitalist restoration, the intervention of the working class of all America is urgent.

 

The outbreak of protests in San Antonio de los Baños last Sunday, which spread to Havana and other Cuban cities, has taken the unaware by surprise. Starting with the “gusanos” in Miami, who came out to demand US military intervention from Joe Biden, not only to take advantage of the crisis but also frightened to see no clear leadership of the protests. It also takes Biden focused on other problems, mainly domestic, but also of foreign policy: his relations with Latin America and the Caribbean (assassination of Jovenel Moïse, president of Haiti) show great disorientation. On the Cuban side, President Díaz Canel also showed himself to be completely disoriented, coming out with a hard line against the protests and then having to recognize the problems legitimately claimed by the demonstrators, and calling a sector of these "confused revolutionaries".

The confusion of these counterrevolutionary leaderships is based on a real element: the disorder generated by the pandemic worldwide and the lack of clarity of imperialism to lead a process of fulminating defeat of the working masses, starting from the reactionary general rehearsal launched last year, opens up all kinds of political processes. In the case of Cuba, we must consider the difficulties of the process of assimilation of the former workers' state, which is showing, as in Belarus and other countries, tendencies towards capitalist chaos in the face of the leadership weakness of the bureaucracy of that state, this element accentuated by the very weakness of the economic structure of the island. Imperialist decomposition makes assimilation more difficult, but it cannot stop the process ad eternum, rather, it aggravates the decomposition and the tendencies towards confrontation between the social forces present. We have seen this in Eastern Europe (Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia), in the Caucasus (Nagorno-Karabakh), in China (Hong Kong), all with their own particularities but all determined by a whole historical stage marked by a process of decomposition of a social system that undermines the bases of the nation-states as political form. All this, as we said above, accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic.

In the case of Cuba, it’s evident how the pandemic hit the State structures already decayed by years of rotting since the fall of the USSR and the beginning of a tortuous transition towards full capitalist assimilation, where the bureaucracy and a social base linked to the State try to maintain their position, against the sector that intends to sweep away those structures with a program that, rather than "homeland and life", is summarized in "semicolony, yes; 51st US State, better". The lack of medical care, food and electricity, also show their awful silhouette against the backdrop of the reforms voted in the last congress of the CCP, which advanced in a savage devaluation with the unification of the exchange rate. The living conditions of the working masses are contrasted with the dollar-valued merchandise on display in the tourist stores and the privileges of the "communist" bureaucracy. These elements are the driving force behind the protests, of which heterogeneous sectors are part, who for years have identified the ideas of socialism and communism with a State that in reality is trying to impose capitalist restoration with repression. But it’s clear that the US imperialist blockade, imposed for decades with the aim of pressuring the bureaucracy to accelerate the restorationist measures (a goal it has more than fulfilled), is the main cause of the hardships of the Cuban working class. Díaz Canel, Biden, the Republican Party and the “gusanos” are all in agreement in taking the counterrevolution in Cuba to the hilt.

 

The intervention of the proletariat of all America is urgently needed

To collaborate in the task of setting up a revolutionary leadership capable of confronting the imperialist leadership and the leadership of the CP bureaucracy in Cuba, the intervention of the American proletariat is necessary, in Latin America and the Caribbean as well as in the US. Because it’s also evident, and it has been proven by historical experience, that the program of the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be realized within the narrow borders of any Latin American country, but that it acquires its political form in the Federation of Socialist Republics of Latin America and the Caribbean.

To carry out this task, we revolutionaries must fight within the trade unions so that the working class takes action with clear goals: Down with the imperialist blockade! Especially in the US, we must impose the opening of trade with the island, with our methods, the occupation under workers' control of ports, warehouses and factories, the seizure of control of ships and workers' confiscation to take to Cuba the hydrocarbons, food, medicines and vaccines needed by the workers and the poor people. No to imperialist military intervention! At the slightest sign of threat of military intervention, let us impose a strike in the US and the stoppage and occupation of all US-owned companies in the region. Down with the repression of the CCP bureaucracy, freedom for the prisoners! We must impose that the Latin American and US trade unions pronounce themselves for the freedom of the socialist fighters who were arrested on Sunday, July 11th, among them Frank García Hernández, Leonardo Romero Negrín, Maykel González Vivero and Marcos Antonio Pérez Fernández.

 

For an international revolutionary leadership

Far from what the Latin American Centrists postulate, it’s not a matter of developing a democratic program to take the demands of the masses towards a solution from the (national) State based on more or less "radical" reforms, it’s a matter of regenerating the foundations of the Cuban revolution with the extension of the revolution in the region and the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship under a revolutionary leadership. Capitalism is in frank decomposition and can offer nothing more than repression, in increasingly open confrontations with the working class, to try to modify in its favor the relation between capital and labor with the intention of giving itself a survival. The need for an international revolutionary leadership, the reconstructed Fourth International, becomes palpable and cannot be a simple declamation for party congresses and conferences. We have before us the great task of preparing the reconstruction of the IV taking the programmatic debates to the heart of our class, giving political battle to the trade union bureaucracy and fighting to recover the trade unions. We propose, with new emphasis given the events in Cuba, to organize a Latin American Conference of the currents that claim for the dictatorship of the proletariat, to debate the policy, tactics and program to intervene in the situation with that objective. As a step towards a world conference that allows revolutionaries to face the task of the moment: to begin to settle the crisis of leadership of our class, the only revolutionary class, the working class.

Published in TRCI