Cuban Rebels Must Choose between Communist Revolution and Capitalist-Imperialist Enslavement
Mass rebellions broke out in Cuba on July 11. Angry youth and workers, many Black, protested racist police terror, mass unemployment, and lack of food and medicine. The pandemic has made living conditions even worse.
The government, like all capitalist governments, attacked the demonstrators viciously with tear gas and live munitions, killing at least one worker.
Conditions began deteriorating for the Cuban masses in the 1960’s because of the embargo imposed by US imperialism to get the masses to overthrow the anti-US Cuban government.
But Cuba’s main problem is internal: In 1961 Fidel Castro declared Cuba socialist. Socialism is state capitalism. It keeps wage slavery and the exploitation of the masses for profits. It creates a new capitalist class which reaps profits exploiting the masses as wage slaves and enslaves them to the ups-and-downs of the capitalist-imperialist world market.
Thus, Cuba’s survival depends on exporting sugar, doctors, and attracting foreign tourists. The worldwide capitalist economic crisis and the pandemic has devastated Cuba’s tourist industry throwing millions into crushing poverty.
In the early revolutionary years, Cuban workers were inspired to work collectively for the good of everyone. Castro called this doing “communist work.”
But it was just a ploy by Castro and the dominant section of the party to motivate workers to work harder, while using individual incentives and wage differentials. Higher paid government officials got rich.
Today, the Cuban masses, like hundreds of millions of workers worldwide, are in motion against capitalism’s racist and inhumane attacks.
Working class rebellions either serve the working class or the capitalists-imperialists
If working class rebellions – spontaneous or not – don’t mobilize the masses for communism, they end up supporting one or another group of capitalist-imperialist exploiters.
Without a mass communist party to mobilize the masses for communist revolution, the Cuban masses’ discontent with capitalism is being channeled to support either the Chinese-Russian or US imperialists in their dog fight for world domination.
Strategically located, if controlled by a hostile power, Cuba could become an existential threat to US imperialism. Aware of this, in 1898 US rulers sank their warship the Maine in Havana Harbor, blamed Spain and started the Spanish- American War to take Cuba from Spain.
Possessing Cuba enabled the US to consolidate its control of the Caribbean, its position as the dominant hemispheric power, and eventually rise as the world’s dominant imperialist power.
Cuba is geopolitically important because it lies near the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico, the transit route for huge quantities of US exports and imports, especially to Europe, the Caribbean and South America.
A hostile power’s navy in Cuba could blockade the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico restricting US access to these areas.
It could cut off trade and access to oil, metals and other natural resources crucially needed for military production, especially in wartime.
Cuba could be to the US what Taiwan is to China: an unsinkable aircraft carrier. The Chinese and Russian imperialists know this. Both are expanding and consolidating their economic, political and military ties with Cuba. They support the Cuban government, which in turn is pushing its citizens to patriotically defend the “Revolution” from those “right wing rebellions.”
The US imperialist press is using them to build anticommunism, screaming that “communism doesn’t work.” Socialism or state capitalism is what failed in Cuba, not communism.
Biden’s government is supporting the rebellions, calling on them to fight for capitalism’s “freedom and democracy.” The goal is to organize a “Color Revolution” to put a puppet in power that would align Cuba with US imperialism.
That is why Biden is tightening sanctions against Cuba, while calling for rebellions against the worsening conditions they help create. This exposes the hypocrisy of US imperialism.
Whether the Russian and Chinese imperialists or the US imperialists win out, the working masses in Cuba and internationally lose.
Cuban workers, like workers everywhere, need a revolution for communism, not socialism. Only by ending capitalism and imperialism, can workers produce and share the product of our labor to meet the masses’ needs.
Many angry protesters in the streets aspire for a different life. Their aspirations can only be met by a communist society. Only communism can offer us a world without racism, sexism, wage slavery, police terror, unemployment, inter-imperialist rivalry and war.
Only a communist society based on collectivity, without money, markets or profits, with no special privileges for anyone, can make real the slogan “from each according to their commitment and ability, to each according to their need.”
This requires building the International Communist Workers’ Party among the angry masses in motion to fight for revolution and communist workers’ power.
Racism in Cuba: Rooted in Capitalism
Racism came to Cuba with the Spanish conquest in the 16th century. First the Spanish rulers stole the land of indigenous Taino and Guanahatabey people. They destroyed the egalitarian indigenous societies. They enslaved the people and worked them to death on plantations to produce sugar to sell in international markets. Then they enslaved millions from West Africa and their descendants to keep increasing their profits.
Capitalism was the root of racism in Cuba. It rebuilt anti-Black racism after legal enslavement finally ended in the 1880s. Plantation owners like the father of Fidel and Raul Castro brought in more Black laborers from Haiti and elsewhere to keep sugar profits flowing into the 20th century.
US imperialism brought with it legal racial segregation. Buildings displayed signs saying, “no dogs or blacks.” Most Black people were excluded from better jobs and schools.
The 1959 revolution promised to end this official racism, winning the support of many AfroCubans. And in 1962, Fidel Castro pronounced it over.
But it wasn’t. It couldn’t be, because the Cuban revolution didn’t end the capitalist system of money, wages and markets. (See article) That system remained the material basis of racism, as it is everywhere.
Raul Castro’s “liberalization” (2007-2013) intensified racism. “The new policies produce losers, because their chief concern is economic growth,” commented a US analyst. “None of these policies is racially defined, but they produce new forms of social inequalities [that] tend to be racialized quickly.”
Today, AfroCubans are much less likely than white Cubans to get dollar remittances from relatives abroad. Fifty percent of whites but only 11% of Black Cubans have bank accounts. Whites control 98 percent of private businesses. Dark skin is widely seen as a social liability.
Almost all Black Cubans are wage-slaves – if they can find jobs. The huge tourism industry preferentially hires whites. Few AfroCubans have professional jobs. Urban Black men often find no way to make a living except for the illegal underground market, which subjects them to police harassment.
Cuban police “stop and frisk” Black and mixed-race young men far more often than whites. They refer to them with the racist term, “citizens with characteristics.” Incarceration rates are small compared to the US, but Black people are also disproportionately represented in Cuban prisons. So, it’s not surprising that one of the causes of the July 11 rebellion was the June 24 police murder of Hansel Hernandez, 27, an unarmed Black man they shot in the back.
To end racism, the Cuban masses – like workers and youth everywhere – need to mobilize for real communist revolution. It’s the only way to dig racism up by the roots.
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