CUBA: 50 years since a revolution that expropriated the bourgeoisie

From www.ft-ci.org

Cuba: 50 years since a revolution that expropriated the bourgeoisie
By Facundo Aguirre, Thursday, January 8, 2009

January 1 marked 50 years since the Cuban revolution. On that date, the fall of the dictator Fulgencio Batista and the victory of the Rebel Army are commemorated.

The Cuban revolution was the first, and until now, the only victorious socialist revolution in Latin America. The expropriation of the bourgeoisie and the landowners was an extraordinary event that inspired a generation of fighters from workers and the people to fight against imperialism under the slogan that the duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution.

Much has been written recently about the events of the revolution of 1959. We Trotskyist militants of the PTS unconditionally defend Cuba against the imperialist blockade, and we defend the conquests of the revolution, but we clearly point out our differences with Castroism. In this article, we wish to recover the historical meaning of this revolution and the lessons that it has left for the workers and campesinos of Latin America.

The social conquests of the revolution of 1959

The expropriation of the bourgeoisie explains what the even the most hostile capitalist press must recognize, the enormous social conquests on the terrain of health ahd education, that allowed Cuba to eradicate illiteracy and, practically, infant mortality.

To give an idea, in 2006, the infant mortality rate in Cuba reached 5.3 per thousand, while in Bolivarian Venezuela the rate was 22.02 for every thousand. The Cuban revolution gave a big boost to public health. Although in 1958 there was one doctor for every 1,076 inhabitants, in 2007, there was one doctor was every 159 inhabitants, who receive personalized attention, as well as one dentist for each 1,066 inhabitants. The illiteracy rate is the lowest in Latin America, with 1.7%. Argentina occupies second place on the scale of literacy in the subcontinent with 4.7% illiteracy, while Venezuela reaches 6.0%. We must take into account the fact that Cuba achieved these conquests in spite of the criminal blockade of almost 50 years by the US.

Keys of the Cuban revolution

To recover the historical importance of the Cuban revolution, we must separate it from an ideological operation carried out by the supporters of chavismo and the same Castroism that connects it with the so-called "twenty-first century socialism" of Hugo Chávez.

The differences between the Cuban revolution and Bolivarian Venezuela are substantial. The Cuban revolution put an end to imperialist domination by destroying the armed forces of the bourgeoisie, through the popular insurrection and the expropriation of private property in the means of production in the cities and the countryside. For its part, Chávez' government (which has had almost 10 years in power) has kept the armed forces intact; although they have been reformed, they continue to be the pillar of the capitalist state. In addition, private ownership is still in force, although rhetorically condemned, under the idea that socialism must be built together with businessmen. Let us recall that the nationalizations announced by Chávez in recent years were really purchases that the state made by compensating groups of capitalists, while in the Cuban revolution, expropriation had a violent character and put an end to private ownership of the means of production in fewer than two years. In May 1959, the first Agrarian Reform Law, which eliminated large estates, was announced. In January 1960, a second series of expropriations began. In February, 14 sugar companies were nationalizd. Shell and Texaco were expropriated in June. In August, it was the turn of all the US companies in the oil, sugar, telephone and electricity sectors. In October, banking (Cuban and foreign-owned) was nationalized, as well as almost 400 large firms (sugar companies, factories, railroads), and the Urban Reform Law was approved, giving thousands of tenants ownership of their dwellings.

Socialist revolution or a caricature of revolution

Unlike the rest of Latin America, Cuba ended imperialist oppression by having carried out a socialist revolution. The Cuban revolution went beyond the program of reforms originally set forth by Fidel Castro and the Movimiento 26 de Julio [M26], that aimed at overthrowing Batista and restoring he 1940 Constitution. Over the course of the struggle, they added the idea of a very moderate agrarian reform to their demands. Once the bourgeois state was defeated, Manuel Urrutia, former chairman of the Supreme Court and representative of the oppositional bourgeoisie, was set up in the presidency, at the request of M26. Why was M26 unable to carry out its program of democratic demands in the framework of an independent capitalism, as it sought to do? Because the bourgeoisie and imperialism quickly went over to the camp of counterrevolution, out of fear of the workers' and campesinos' mobilization. The absence of a repressive apparatus of the bourgeoisie, which had been destroyed by the popular insurrection, pushed the masses to fight decisively for their postponed demands and punish the killers from the former regime. The combined pressure of both forces radicalized the revolution, that ended by breaking with the bourgeoisie and liquidated private ownership. Che Guevara defined this process as revolution by counter-attack and concluded that for Latin America, socialist revolution or a caricature of revolution was posed. At that time, this reality meant a tremendous ideological blow against the Stalinism of the Latin American Communist Parties, that were preaching revolution by stages (one stage of an alliance of workers and campesinos with the bourgeoisie and another stage of fighting for socialism for the indefinite future) and the institutional road inside the bourgeois regime.

The chavistas -- and the supporters of Castroism -- are now preaching the same type of thinking defeated in its time by the Cuban revolution: collaboration with the national and progressive bourgeoisies. But the 1959 revolution taught that the only way to carry out to the end the struggle for national liberation, for the end of large estates and radical distribution of land and the resolution of the housing problem through urban reform, is not through allying with the bourgeoisie, buy by fighting against it, by destroying its military and repressive apparatus, by expelling it from power and expropriating its properties.

A bureaucratic workers' state

But in spite of its enormous conquests, the Cuban revolution did not signify the creation of a state based on the democratic government of councils of workers, campesinos and militiamen, where all the revolutionary tendencies participate, that would take the construction of socialism in their hands, and promote the class struggle on a continental and international level. On the contrary, the revolution gave rise to a deformed and bureaucratic workers' state that imposed the doctrine of socialism in one country and one-party control, stifling popular freedoms and blocking the revoluionary road in Latin America.

In order to comprehend this dynamic, one must understand the origin of the revolutionary process. As we have pointed out, Fidel and M26 were not a socialist leadership that thought about destroying the bourgeois state and the construction of a workers' state. If they accepted that dynamic of the revolution, it was by getting on the popular revolutionary wave to confront the imperialist threats, but curbing popular tendencies towards self-determination. From the beginning, the Castroist leadership was Bonapartist, and its methods, plebiscitary and paternalistic. Fidel embodied a new type of Bonapartism sui generis that changed its petty bourgeois social content to the tempo of the fall of the old semicolonialist capitalist state. For that reason, when Castroism adhered to socialism, it strengthened its alliance with Cuban Stalinism and the Kremlin, which, after the ebbing of the revolutionary tide, advanced the stifling bureaucratization of the political regime and blocking the revolution's permanent dynamic, both in the sphere of building new social relations and in extending revolution towards Latin America.

Socialism on one island

For a period, and under the central inspiration of Ernesto Che Guevara, the Cuban state promoted the development of guerrilla movements and the idea of revolution in Latin America. Those were the times of the Tricontinental, OLAS and the call to make the entire Andes mountain range a Sierra Maestra. However, with the passage of time and under the growing influence of the Kremlin, Castroism began to play a role of containing the Central American and Southern Cone revolutionary processes. In the first years of the 1970's, it openly supported Salvador Allende's peaceful road to socialism in Chile, which culminated in bloody defeat at the hands of Pinochet. In the 1979 Sandinista revolution, Fidel stated that Nicaragua should not become another Cuba and supported the FSLN policy of surendering the military victory over the CIA-financed Contras at the Contadora negotiations, which led to the defeat of the revolution. He played a similar role in El Salvador as a promoter of the peace accords. But, in addition, Cuba' strategic alliance with the Kremlin -- which Che fought against, but Fidel promoted -- involved on the economic terrain keeping the island dependent on the sugar monoculture, in exchange for Moscow's aid (a line opposed by Che Guevara, who raised the need for industrialization through a centralized plan), which brought Cuba to the verge of collapse after the fall of the USSR in 1991.

The alliance with the Kremlin ended by compromising the international legitimacy of the Cuban revolution, since it collaborated in the antisocialist role played by the Stalinist bureaucracies of Eastern Europe and the former USSR. Castroism declared itself against the workers' and campesinos' mobilizations and the political revolution that sought to end the totalitarian power of the governing bureaucracy and regenerate socialism in that part of the world. Thus, Fidel condemned the Prague Spring led by Czech workers and students in 1968 as an uprising provoked by the CIA; he suported Jaruzelski's coup in Poland in rebellion against the Stalinist bureaucracy in 1981. He backed the Chinese bureaucracy's repression against the workers and students in Tiananmen Square, and he supported the Stalinist bureaucracy of Erich Honecker and the Stasi in the former GDR, to the final moment. The result was tragic for the masses, capitalist restoration and the transformation of the former bureaucracy of those countries into a capitalist oligarchy; meanwhile, Cuba suffered international isolation and weakness in the first years of the 1990's during the so-called "special economic period."

But today still, the international policy of alliances that Castroism proposes is at odds with the defense of the revolution, since it appeals to the national bourgeoisies instead of the masses of workers and campesinos of Latin America. The so-called "battle of ideas" that Castro proposes joins this line of class collaboration and support to the long since failed bourgeois national experiments on our continent, by granting legitimacy to the rhetorical demagogy of "21th century socialism," next to the businessmen and capitalist monopolies, like that of Chávez in Venezuela or Correa in Ecuador.

Conclusion

The Cuban revolution shows the people of Latin America, much more in the current scene of world crisis, the potential of socialist revolution, that is, of the struggle to destroy the political, military and economic power of the bourgeoisie, to win national liberation and achieve improvements in the conditions of life of the masses. On the other hand, the defense of the conquests of the 1959 revolution and the strategy of the Latin American and international socialist revolution in the twenty-first century needs to be separated histoically from the politics and inheritance of Castroism, to restore the Cuban workers' state as a trench of the international revolution through struggle against the bureaucracy and its privileges and by imposing rule by workers', campesinos' and soldiers' councils.