A statement from the Committee for Revolutionary International Regroupment.
The 1959 Cuban Revolution was the event that achieved the most progress within any Latin American nation. Cuba emerged as first in the world in the number of doctors per inhabitants. It held a leading position in education. In the past, it was a major contender in the international sporting arena, despite its population of eleven million. Cuba also has a very low level of illicit drug consumption.
But today Cuba is mired in poverty and facing great hardship. Rock-bottom wages prevail. Electrical blackouts occur every day. There are doctors but no medicine and more than a million Cubans have left the island in search of a better future.
Cuba has suffered more than 50 years of economic blockade by the world’s most powerful country, the United States. Washington, D.C. has not forgotten or forgiven the fact that a small island defeated it in 1961 when more than 1,500 mercenaries organized by the CIA had to surrender after just 72 hours of combat. Today, Donald Trump has tightened the screws. He is threatening to punish the island nation by imposing tariffs on the countries that supply Cuba with oil.
There is another reason that explains the current bankruptcy of the largest island in the Antilles: Stalinism. As an anti-imperialist nation that was beginning to march toward socialism, Cuba fell under the influence of the bureaucracy that ruled the Soviet Union, which imposed on it the development of an economy typical of a colonial country, based on sugar production and not on manufacturing of consumer products, vehicles, services and other items.
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In its early days, Cuba developed a wing that attempted to extend its emancipatory experience to other corners around the world. Argentine commander Che Guevara, one of the great leaders of the revolutionary process, organized guerrilla groups in Africa and Bolivia. One of his slogans was “create two, three Vietnams.” This was a call to inflict a series of defeats on the U.S.A. (like the one it would later suffer in Vietnam in 1975), thereby facilitating the liberation of the oppressed around the world.
However, Guevara failed in his effort and died at the hands of the CIA in Bolivia in 1967. Cuba no longer sought to promote his example. Leaders not only abandoned Guevara’s project but also advised others in Latin America not to advocate socialist goals. This is what Fidel Castro told Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 1980s and Venezuela some ten years later. Fidel effectively told Mexicans not to seek liberation, not even from the dictatorship of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). In 1988, after a monstrous and blatant example of electoral fraud, perpetrated by the vote thief, Carlos Salinas de Gotari, Fidel visited the Mexican capital to support Gortari’s presidency. The fact the PRI lasted so long in Mexico, was partly due to support from Cuban bureaucrats.
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Yet Cuba rose with dignity and strength, despite the blockade and other acts of aggression from the northern empire and despite the subordinate economic structure derived from the “international division of labor” determined by the “Soviet” bureaucrats. For almost two decades, it was the most progressive country in Latin America, thanks mainly to the effort, sacrifice, and hard work of its workers, women, peasants, laborers, doctors, educators, and scientists—all guided by socialist principles. When revolutionary socialists were asked in the 1970s and 1980s what was their goal, they replied “Cuba + democracy,” that is, a society with great economic and social achievements in which workers enjoyed broad political freedoms.
Meanwhile, successive US administrations intensified their economic aggression, keen to see the only socialist experiment in our hemisphere fail as a spectacle before the eyes of the entire world. According to various sources, there are currently between 1.5 billion and two billion people living in severe poverty worldwide. Of these, one billion do not know what they will eat from one day to the next. However, the media focuses on the nine million Cubans who are currently living in great hardship, less than one percent of the legion of starving people. No one talks about those 1.5 billion (12 times the population of Mexico) who are victims of the capitalist and colonialist system. Instead, the capitalist and imperialist media revel in denigrating the Cuban Revolution.
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Today, President Miguel Díaz-Canel leads the Cuban bureaucracy. His government is utterly incompetent at improving the economy but adept at repressing the population and keeping it subjugated through fear. There are hundreds of political prisoners sentenced to harsh and unjust penalties. They must be released immediately!
In the February issue of the Mexican magazine Proceso, reporter Dalila Escobar, who was on the island, recorded what many journalists, visitors, and academics had reported before: the numerous and extensive privileges enjoyed by those in power. Dalila refers to “the mansions of the powerful” located in a residential area in Cuba, which she compares to the Versailles-like Lomas de Chapultepec in Mexico City. This is home to the embassies and the residences of the high-ranking bureaucracy. When the journalist approached one of these residences, guards appeared and shouted at her that she could not “set foot” in that area. High-ranking officials, ambassadors, and foreign tourists are also the main beneficiaries of part of humanitarian aid sent from different countries. The magazine Proceso recounts how Cuba has received tons of meat that never reached the population. We know who enjoyed it. With its insulting privileges, the Stalinist bureaucracy denigrates the socialist cause and is the best ally of Trump and the imperialists.
Cuba, its people hurt by imperialism and by its own rulers, needs the solidarity of workers around the world. Let’s mobilize to demand that governments, and especially those that call themselves progressive, send humanitarian aid to the island.
Committee for Revolutionary International Regroupment (CRIR)
Partido Obrero Socialista – México
Partido Socialismo y Libertad – Argentina
Movimento Revolucionário Socialista – Brazil
Freedom Socialist Party – U.S. and Australia
