Submitted on 21 July, 2007 - 23:50 :: Marxism and Stalinism | Books |
Cuba | Workers' Liberty 2/1, September 2001
Paul Hampton Reviews "Cuba: Socialism and Democracy" by Peter Taaffe
This book is a pseudo-debate between Peter Taaffe of the Socialist Party
and CWI (formerly-Militant) in Britain and Doug Lorimer of the
Australian Democratic Socialist Party (DSP) It is also, I guess, an
attempt to check the recent rash of Castro-worship in the Scottish
Socialist Party, with whom Taaffe maintains a strained relationship.
The DSP, following the lead of the American SWP, rejects Trotsky's
theory of permanent revolution, preferring Lenin's blurred and outmoded
formula of a "democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants" as the
programme for revolutions in countries of less capitalist development.
It endorses Castro's leadership largely uncritically, and sees Cuba
since 1959 as a socialist state.
Taaffe subscribes to permanent revolution, and is thus more critical of
Castro. Yet Taaffe shares fundamentally the same framework as Lorimer,
believing that Cuba under Castro is, as Russia under Stalin and China
under Mao were a deformed workers' state, historically more progressive
than capitalism, and in some senses (nationalised property, planned
economy, welfare gains, absence of a bourgeois class) part of the
socialist alternative. More critical of Castro than the DSP, the CWI (in
a pamphlet by Tony Saunois) constructs a mythical version of Che Guevara
with which to associate itself. Despite some telling points, Taaffe
never manages to nail Lorimer's Stalinoid politics.
Why isn't Cuba socialist? The 1959 revolution was not made by the Cuban
working class but by the guerrillas of the July 26th Movement (J26M).
There were no Soviets in Cuba in 1959 and the general strike the
previous year had been a failure. There were no signs of workers seizing
the factories, establishing committees for workers' control. There was
no proliferation of independent unions challenging the Batista regime.
The J26M was neither rooted in the working class, nor advanced a
socialist programme.
The Castro regime, pushed into a corner by US imperialism, did indeed
overthrow capitalism in Cuba after 1959, but only to construct a form of
exploiting society on the model of the Stalinist USSR. Castro
constructed a one-party system. Only supporters or members of the Cuban
Communist Party can stand in elections. The trade union movement, purged
after 1959, is now bound hand-and-foot to the state. Dissident political
groups, even those opposed to the US blockade, cannot exist legally.
The welfare system in Cuba before the 1990s was indeed better than
Batista's, and on a par with the best of equivalent capitalist states,
such as Costa Rica and Taiwan. But Cuba was already one of the richest
countries in Latin America before 1959. In the 1980s it depended on an
annual $5 billion subsidy from the USSR, as well as on the exploitation
of Cuban workers and peasants. After Russian support was withdrawn in
1989, the economy collapsed, to be drip-fed only by the recent expansion
of tourism and business ventures.
In foreign policy, the Cuban state whistled to the tune of the USSR,
supporting the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the crushing of
Solidarnosc in 1981. In Africa, Cuba switched from the Eritrean national
liberation movement to supporting the Derg in Ethiopia. Closer to home,
Castro failed to condemn the slaughter of students in Mexico in 1968,
gave his stamp of approval to the recently ousted PRI regime, even when
it committed electoral fraud in 1988 to stay in power, and failed to
back the Zapatistas. Socialists support Cuba's right to
self-determination, and oppose the US blockade, but that does not commit
us to silence on Castro's anti-working class policies at home or abroad.
Taaffe mentions some of this, but does not draw the threads together.
Chapter Four asks: "Is there a privileged elite?" and shows that the
Castro leadership has all the attributes of a ruling class.
Taaffe evades the fundamental problem for his position — how can a
"workers' state" have been created without the active intervention of
the working class? — and expresses a "workers' statism" that dare not
speak its name.
The extent of Taaffe's illusions is indicated in passing when he implies
that Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan leader who recently orchestrated the
oil price rises through the OPEC cartel, might be the new Fidel Castro.
He also writes that it was wrong to support the Russian invasion of
Afghanistan in 1980. True, but what about some political accounting for
the nine years in which Taaffe's tendency supported the Russian troops!
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