Guevara and Cuba: Beyond Vilification or Romanticism

Hector R. Reyes

Written 22/08/1992

Revised 15/11/1992

Prepared for Web 07/02/2003 by Marc Newman

Cuba is facing today its worst economic and political crisis since the 1959 revolution led by Fidel Castro and Ernesto Che Guevara. After the collapse of the entire Soviet bloc, Cuba has been left without the financial, commercial, political and military support that it has depended on for the last 30 years. The results on Cuban society have been devastating. The economy grew only 1.1 % in 1989, while it shrank 3.6% in 1990 and a whopping 24.1% in 1991.[1] Many factories lay idle because of lack of spare parts or raw materials previously provided by Soviet bloc countries which now are either unable to provide them due to their own economic crisis or to their unwillingness to sell anything to Cuba unless Cuba pays in hard currency. Furthermore, the financial aid that the former Soviet Union used to send Cuba, more than $3 billion per year, now is a thing of the past.

The Soviet collapse has left Cuba politically orphan, defiantly claiming to be the last bastion of “socialism” in the world. The other countries which professed to represent an alternative to Russian-style Stalinism, namely China and Vietnam, have implemented or are in the process of implementing extensive market reforms and have long ceased to be the source of inspiration for those who want to fight against the injustices of capitalism. The disappearance of Soviet political patronage has consequently meant that Russian military assistance has been reduced to a trickle. This combination of political, economic, and military vulnerability has the pack of wolves to the north drooling. Many meetings have taken place among long-time Cuban exiles and “ American entrepreneurs” in cities like Miami, Florida and San Juan, Puerto Rico in which the topic of discussion has been how to split the Cuban pie once Castro disappears from the scene. Both former president Bush and the new president Bill Clinton directed their rhetoric during their electoral campaigns against Castro’s regime. Both endorsed the recently approved Torricelli bill which imposes tougher sanctions against American companies engaged in trade with Cuba. While Bush, Clinton and their advisors know that now it would be utterly stupid to attempt a military confrontation with Cuba-which would rally the majority of Cuba’s population around Castro in defence of Cuba’s self-determination-they have been trying to tighten the noose on Cuba’s economy. The idea is to let Cuba, isolated as it is, suffocate under the weight of its economic crisis, or at least to fracture its political infrastructure enough to allow for an attempt to retake it through the back-door. Thus any honest analysis of the Cuban Revolution has to take as a starting point the fact that the burden of the blame for the difficulties that the Cuban people have endured this century falls on U.S. imperialism, and in particular on the economic blockade imposed by the U .S. ruling class over the last 31 years.

It is within this context that the legacy and symbolism of Guevara has regained new life. Over the years, Ernesto Che Guevara has inspired millions of people worldwide who have been struggling and resisting abuse, poverty and exploitation. This was particularly true during the late 1960s and early 1970s, when radical movements sprung up in Latin America, the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Every young man and woman fighting as part of a guerrilla unit or a popular urban organization in Latin America despised the reality of imperialist capitalism, and fervently thought that they could succeed in defeating it and building a just society, a socialist society .For most of them, Guevara symbolized this struggle, especially in his willingness to engage the imperialist beast and to expose its moral bankruptcy. For many, the Latin American Communist Parties were associated with the stiff bureaucracies of Russia and Eastern Europe that sent tanks to crush the Czech workers uprising in 1968.[2] Most importantly, these Communist Parties, following Moscow’s policy of pacific coexistence, were not engaged in any kind of struggle and had a remarkably “cosy relationship” with their respective governments. Therefore, “the bearded Guevara, with gun in hand presented a road to change based on action. “If you are a revolutionary, make the revolution “ was the slogan, “Make two, three, four Vietnams “ the political message.”[3]

In many Latin American countries and other parts of the world there still are people who proudly describe themselves as revolutionaries, as fighters against oppression and exploitation-against the malaise of this “new world order” we have inherited from George Bush and company-who are looking back at Guevara’s thoughts, methods and example in an attempt to set a new political course for the struggle.

The economic crisis has also generated debate in Cuba and a resurgence of Guevara’s ideas, although for different reasons. The debate inside the Cuban Communist party (PCC) regarding the future course of the regime has sharpened over the last two years. One section of the party, led by long-standing bureaucrat Carlos Rafael Rodriguez[4] has traditionally argued-even against Guevara-for allowing each individual enterprise to operate on the basis of its efficiency and profitability (financial self-management), a concept otherwise known as the economic accounting system. The other section of the party, ideologically led by economist Carlos Tablada, wants the imposition on the overall economy of what Guevara termed the budgetary finance system. This system was in effect over a portion of Cuban industry under the direction of Guevara (the so called Ministry of Industries) and functioned on the basis of highly centralized financing, accounting and decision making. In this system, each individual enterprise did not have access to the proceeds generated by its products, and was supposed to receive only the capital and raw materials allocated to it by the “plan” generated by the Ministry of Industries.

Defenders of both sides of the argument have attempted to claim the mantle of Guevara to support their respective positions. It is no surprise then that over the last three years many books and articles have been published about Guevara and his ideas, together with many reprints of his speeches and articles. At the core of the discussion is, of course, the argument of moral versus material incentives. In fact, the government is currently involved in a campaign stressing the importance of moral rewards when such things as the building of houses, clinics, and day care centres are accomplished with voluntary labour. It should not come as a surprise either that precisely at this moment when the capacity of the government to deliver goods and services to the population is curtailed while imposing harsh austerity measures, it then decides that it is going to pay its workers with moral satisfaction. It was precisely during a similar period between 1965 and 1970, in which the economic capacity of the island stagnated and then shrank, that a heavy emphasis was laid on the virtues of moral incentives coupled with the imposition of a tighter labour discipline.[5] And from 1970 to 1986, Cuba’s economic system was modelled on Russia’s system.[6]

Everyone that is genuinely interested in fighting U.S. imperialism should unconditionally support the struggle of the Cuban people-regardless of the particular position one might have with respect to its government A victory of U.S. imperialism in Cuba, is a defeat for all of us interested in fighting oppression and exploitation, for it will boost the self-confidence of the American ruling class and make it easier for it to attack on other fronts. Equally as important as the issue of unconditional support is that of critical support because we have to provide answers to critical questions regarding Cuban society .We can not hope to convince the Puerto Rican working class of the need to fight for a socialist society if we do not address issues such as the lack of accountability to the Cuban workers by the Communist party, the extreme persecution of gays and lesbians, the lack of independence of the unions, etc.

The current difficulties of the Cuban government and the collapse of the Soviet bloc generate many important questions. Would Cuba have avoided the current economic troubles if it had continued on the path set by Guevara? How different were Guevara’s schemes from those of the Russians? Is Guevara’s road to socialism consistent with that of Marx and Lenin? Was it a new development designed to take into account the realities of the Third World? Or was it simply a national liberation strategy that was increasingly forced to come to grips with the necessity of an international solution? These questions are more far reaching than the context of Cuba, for their answers contain the strategy that we will have to pursue in the struggle against capitalist oppression on a world-wide scale. Therefore, the debate about Guevara’s path to socialism is a welcome one. In order to answer these questions, one first has to go back to the founders of revolutionary socialism, Marx and Engels, and to those that carried forward their ideas, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky.

The Socialist Tradition of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky

At the core of Marx’s theory of revolution and socialism is the concept of socialism from below. Based on his analysis of the history of humankind, he claimed that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.”[7] Therefore, Marx asserted, and along with him both Lenin and Trotsky, that socialism would be only the product of the self-emancipation of the working class. As opposed to other revolutions, the socialist revolution is the conscious act of an oppressed class, the working class, who needs to smash the capitalist state, build a workers state to defend their power and begin a gradual process of development of a classless society on an international scale. This conceptualisation of working class revolution has three main elements. First is the working class as the agent for revolutionary change. The working class is the producer of most of the wealth in capitalist society, and yet it is stripped of the fruits of its labour. By using its force at the point where it is the strongest, at the point of production – factories, offices, etc. – it can bring to a halt the capitalist system. And it is the only class that has an objective interest in a collective solution-it would not make sense for workers to begin splitting the factories among themselves: some screws for some workers, transmission belts for others, sprockets and gears for some others and so on.

After witnessing the events of the Paris Commune, Marx realized that workers could not simply take hold of the existing state. They had to destroy the capitalist state apparatus and build a new state with new organs of workers democracy. Therefore, the second element in Marx’s concept of socialism was detailed by him in The Civil War in France where he describes the workers councils as the basic organs of proletarian democracy. If the Paris Commune was crushed after a few weeks and did not encompass the whole of France, forty-six years later, Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks were able to lead the Russian working class to form the first workers state in which the workers councils were named soviets.

The third element in the Marxist concept of socialism is internationalism. Marx understood that capitalism was a world system and that it could only be replaced by socialism on world scale. This was an element that was vital in the Bolshevik strategy for socialist revolution. They were prompt in forming the Communist International (Comintern)[8], the grouping of Communist Parties from around the world, because they understood that unless the revolution spread to the rest of Europe, workers power in Russia could not be sustained for too long. Revolution in Germany was crucial if the Soviet state was survive. Unfortunately, the German revolution failed, largely because there was no mature mass revolutionary party to lead the way. Tragically, Rosa Luxemburg was murdered in 1919 when she set out to build this party.[9]

The failure of the revolution to spread proved to be catastrophic for the Russian revolution, for even if it survived the assault of the white army, 14 other imperialist armies, and the consequences of the civil war, it did it at a high cost. Much of industry was destroyed (economic output was reduced to 13% of the 1913 pre-World War I figures), hunger and disease were widespread, thousands fled the cities for the countryside, and the working class was decimated (St. Petersburg saw its working class decrease by more than 50% of its pre-civil war levels). What remained of the workers state was only a shell: the Russian Communist Party (RCP) holding on to power hoping for the revolution to spread to the west. During the course of the civil war the RCP and the state gradually swelled with bureaucrats and former Tsarist functionaries who had to be used to run the state because there were no qualified workers or no workers at all-most of the class conscious workers either died or were at the front defending the revolution. Thus the lack of international revolution and the bureaucratisation prepared the ground for Josef Stalin, in the late 1920s, to take hold of the administrative apparatus and set back all the gains of the revolution. From this point onwards, Stalin, representing a new burgeoning ruling class (the bureaucracy), turned upside down the tradition of struggle of the Bolsheviks, and while preserving a left-wing rhetoric set out to eliminate almost every Bolshevik who was involved in the 1917 revolution.[10] Against Marxism’s central argument of international revolution, Stalin put forward the slogan of “Socialism in One Country” as a cover for the bureaucracy’s aim of technological and industrial development of the Soviet Union in order to catch up with the west. The aim was to accumulate (capital as machinery) in order to compete militarily. The workers lost all control over their party, their state and their unions. The concept of the fatherland was reintroduced to justify the oppression of the different nationalities that comprised the Soviet Union-as opposed to Lenin’s defence of the right to self-determination of oppressed nations. Women, gays, ethnic minorities lost their rights, peasant land was forcefully collectivised, and forced labour was introduced. Supposedly, all in the name of socialism, but with the explicit purpose of competing with the west. Stalin’s new Russia, in spite of its rhetoric of socialism, functioned as a capitalist society, that is, a state capitalist society .The new ruling class was the bureaucracy, the company Russia Inc.

Such is the legacy of Stalinism. It distorted the true meaning of Marxism for decades to come. It turned the Comintern into a foreign policy instrument of Moscow. It betrayed many revolutionary situations such as the defeated revolution in China in 1927, and the Spanish civil war in 1936.[11] Then, after WWII the leaders of genuine and successful national liberation struggles, such as Mao in China tried to copy the methods of Stalin, but with less success.[12]

Of Stalin’s revolutionary opponents in Russia, only Leon Trotsky survived long enough to present a determined struggle against his dictatorship and to carry on the true Marxist tradition of socialism from below. One of his most important contributions to Marxism is the theory of permanent revolution, which is based on the experience of the Russian revolution. Trotsky argued that even if a country was underdeveloped by world capitalist standards, it was precisely the international character of capitalism which made it possible for a tiny working class, compared to the peasantry, to take state power, implement the democratic reforms proper of a bourgeois revolution (such as agrarian reform), organize the economy along socialist lines, within the temporary limits imposed by the country’s level of development, and hold on to state power on the condition that the revolution spread to other advanced countries in a process of permanent revolution.[13] Trotsky understood that the only class capable of leading the peasantry and other oppressed classes in revolting against the state was the working class. What he did not foresee was the fact that as a result of the world-wide dominance of Stalinism over the bulk of the left, when the working class movement was weak, middle class groups and individuals would fill this gap and lead national liberation (not socialist) revolutions, take state power and use socialist rhetoric and nationalizations to effect their national development strategies.[14] The Chinese, African, and Cuban revolutions are examples of this.

With the collapse of Stalinism on a world scale, it is now easier to rediscover the true meaning of Marxism: that socialist revolution is the conscious act of workers themselves, that the basic organs of workers power are the workers councils, and that socialism is only possible through international revolution.