FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
	International Communist Workers Party
To Contact ICWP, send an email to: icwp@anonymousspeech.com            Tweet

December 2014—The romance was announced between the “dictatorship and the empire,” after 18 months of dating “in the shadows,” with the blessing of Pope Francisco. This takes place in a world marked by groups of capitalists fighting for profits, markets and raw materials.
Raul Castro has accepted Panama’s invitation to the OAS Summit of the Americas 2015, from which Cuba was banned in 1962. (Even though the sanctions were lifted in 2009, Cuba refused to return to the “colonial ministry”).
The capitalist crisis in Venezuela, and Russia’s inability to continue subsidizing state capitalism in Cuba as well as the preference of Chinese capitalists to invest in less risky and more profitable economies (like the Nicaragua Canal) have influenced in this new diplomacy.
For the US capitalists, Cuba alone does not represent a threat. For years the US has been its main supplier of grain, despite the useless embargo imposed in 1960. “Business is business…” A few months ago the Cuba’s exit visa requirements were relaxed, there was no massive emigration as some had expected.
However, due to increasingly sharp inter-imperialist rivalry, with Russia and China increasing their political, commercial, and military relations in Latin America, Cuba again becomes for the US and these rival imperialists a bone of contention due to its strategic geographic position.

In 1959, after armed uprisings and massive strikes against the Bautista dictatorship, the July 26 movement displaced its competitors and, collaborating with others, like the pro-Soviet Socialist Party of Cuba, established a capitalist republic and sought the recognition and support of the US imperialists. But the US tried to impose conditions that the Cubans considered unacceptable.
The pro-Soviet collaborators then allied itself with the USSR, already then a state capitalist power, and in 1960 the Cuban government declared its adherence to Soviet “communism,” ranting about “anti-imperialism.” A hatred of US imperialism by workers around the world gave Cuba a revolutionary, mythical aura, increased by Ché Guevara’s adventure in Bolivia.
But it was never communism. It did not eliminate wage labor but instead the government became the capitalist boss paying the wages. Following the Soviet model, the Cuban government believed in and spread the idea that nationalizing businesses was the first, socialist, step to communism, to the elimination of the private appropriation of what was produced. But as in the Soviet Union and China, the rulers appropriated and enjoyed the value workers produced beyond what they received in wages. At the end of the twentieth century, Forbes magazine featured Fidel Castro as one of the richest people in the world. He replied that he had no property. But deeds to property are not essential the enjoyment of the value produced by the workers.
Administering that wealth, the Cuban government established a better system of social security than the capitalist “welfare state,” ended illiteracy, and forged an exemplary medical system (by capitalist standards), which was still based on doctor “experts.”
Cuba’s supporters around the world presented these as achievements of communism, but communism is the elimination of exploitation, of the use of the worker’s labor power by the capitalists and an end to commodity production, buying and selling, and money and wages. The expropriation of the factories and estates, which became property of the state, only produced state capitalism, in which the rulers appropriate the surplus.
This was justified with explanations from Marx, that communism in its first phase will not eliminate the injustice of the bourgeois right of payment according to work, and that only in a higher stage will each contribute according to their ability and receive according to their need.
However, the masses mobilized for communism can share scarcity and abundance. When we get rid of the bourgeoisie, the proletariat will disappear as wage slaves and we workers will willingly associate to produce to fulfill the needs of society.
Nothing about the changes in the relationship between US imperialism and Cuba will help the working class that still needs to liberate itself from capitalism on the same island, for which workers need to join our fight for emancipation in the ICWP.

Obama’s Cuban diplomacy corresponds to his master’s imperialist needs: In the short term, to stem the decline of their global empire; in the long term, to recapture their position as the world’s top imperialist dog. This can only be achieved by war, world war.
This war already looms on the horizon. The US War College’ Strategic Study Institute (SSI) states it starkly: “The rise of China and its projection onto the global stage, coupled with Russia’s increasingly bold reassertion of its imperial ambitions, increases the undesirable possibility of a serious conflict between the United States, and one or both of these actors.”
The SSI article adds, “it unthinkable that a power with global political, economic, and military ties, such as Russia or China, would allow the United States to engage it in its own region without taking the fight to the U.S. ‘backyard’ as well.” Thus, it is imperative for the US to safeguard its backyard, especially Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.

Cuba is crucial. It became strategically important when the US bought the Louisiana territory from the French in 1803. The Mississippi River system and the Port of New Orleans allowed US farmers to ship their grain to Europe. This trade was fundamental to the rise of US imperialism. It was second only to the slave trade and the riches enslaved persons generated in giving US bosses the capital accumulation needed for their rapid and mass industrialization.
To safeguard their profits, the US needs to control the Gulf of Mexico, the adjacent territories and the choke points to the Atlantic that lie between Cuba and Florida, and between Cuba and Mexico (see map). The US fought the British navy in New Orleans during the War of 1812, to defend this and other trade routes. With the defeat of the British in that war, and with the French defeated in Haiti and bought off on the continent, the only European rival left was Spain. 
Taking Florida and Cuba from Spain was a must. Under pressure, Spain ceded Florida to the US in 1819. Full control came only after the US bosses waged three genocidal wars (1816-1858) against the Seminole (native Americans and escaped African-American slaves) that lived in Florida.
Cuba, however, remained in Spanish hands. Although Spain was weak and not a threat, if a hostile power captured Cuba, it could impose an almost impregnable blockade of the US Gulf ports, crippling the US economy. The US bosses had to eliminate this existential threat.
In 1898, the US warship, The Maine, “mysteriously” exploded in the Havana harbor, killing nearly three quarters of its crew. The US blamed Spain, and declared war. When the war was over, Cuba was firmly in US hands and the New Orleans-Atlantic transit was secured until the rise of Fidel Castro in 1959.
The Soviet Era. When Fidel nationalized a billion dollars of US property and began flirting with Soviet imperialism, US bosses organized the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961  to overthrow him. They failed miserably, driving Fidel further into the Russian imperialists’ arms.
When the Russian bosses began building nuclear missile bases there, the US bosses blockaded Cuba in 1962, bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war.
The crisis ended with the US promising to never again invade Cuba, and the Soviets promising to withdraw their missiles. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian imperialist withdrew from Cuba.

Today, sharpening inter-imperialist rivalry is again changing the situation. Responding to economic sanctions imposed over the Ukraine, Russia is moving more aggressively into Latin America. It is negotiating with Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to establish refueling sites for its visiting warships and long-range strategic bombers.
Russia has also signed agreements with Cuba for joint oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Russia is also a signatory, together with China and Nicaragua, of the agreement to build the Interoceanic Grand Canal through Nicaragua.
Russia’s main role is to militarily: guard the construction site against possible acts of provocation. To do this, Russian warships and aircraft will be present in Nicaragua until June of this year, patrolling its Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea coastlines.

Cuba is once more in the eye of the storm. Obama’s Cuban diplomacy goal is to reassert US imperialism’s absolute control over Cuba, Central America and the Caribbean.
Obama calls for reopening the US embassy in Cuba and making it easier for hundreds of thousands of Cuban-Americans to travel and set up businesses there.
US bosses hope to use these Cuban-Americans to trigger a US sponsored “color revolution,” like in the Ukraine. Unthinkable? “The Associated Press recently revealed that in 2009 the U.S. ran an operation…sending young Latin Americans into Cuba in ‘hopes of ginning up rebellion.’” (Newsweek, 8/12/14)

Capitalism-imperialism’s history is one of ever more deadly wars for empire and profits. To end it forever, we must destroy it with a communist revolution and build a communist world based on production for human needs, not for enriching a handful of capitalists-imperialists.

Next Article