Almost exactly 10 years ago, on June 24, 2009, we published a long commentary titled, The PSG and the EU elections. In that article, whose full text can be found here - The PSG and the EU Elections - we noted that the PSG ( Partei fur Soziale Gleichheit ) a German sectarian outfit affiliated with the World Socialist Web Site, was engaged in delusional thinking by touting its achievements in the elections that year when in fact its results showed a significant decline from previous electoral outings.
Here we are 10 years later and once more elections to the European parliament have recently concluded. And just as they did 10 years ago, the Partei fur Soziale Gleichheit fielded their own candidates in the recent elections.
What were the results?
Look as hard you wish at the World Socialist Web Site and you will not find much. In fact the only article that even mentions the results of the PSG's 2019 election campaign is this one, European elections: German voters register strong opposition to grand coalition. The only reference in this article to the PSG campaign is in the very last paragraph:
"To prepare these struggles and arm it with a revolutionary programme, the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (SGP) participated in the election campaign. At a series of election meetings in Germany and across Europe, the SGP, together with its European sister parties, advanced an international socialist programme, which now assumes decisive significance. On this basis, and despite a media blackout and efforts to censor the World Socialist Web Site and social media, the SGP won 5,300 votes and gained important new contacts and members."
This statement provides absolutely no context with which to judge the effectiveness of the PSG's election campaign outside of the blanket assertion that their participation in the election "now assumes decisive significance." However we received the following unsolicited comment providing us with the missing context.
Michael has left a new comment:
The PSG/SGP results in the last EU elections in Germany are as follows:
EU election 2014: 8924 votes out of 29355092 total votes, i.e. 0.030%
EU election 2019: 5293 votes out of 37389231 total votes, i.e. 0.014%
Compare this to the results of 2009 and 2004:
EU election 2009: 9646 votes out of 26333444 total votes, i.e. 0.037%
EU election 2004: 25795 votes out of 25783678 total votes, i.e. 0.100%
I
received the following note from Suzi Weissman - adding some qualifications to
my account - shortly after I published my review of the first two days of the
conference.
Just
for the record, I too, because of time constraints, was unable to develop my
arguments, but I certainly don't think Serge was at the level of leadership of
the revolutionary generation that Trotsky was, nor was he the kind of towering
theoretical giant. But his writings give us a real sense of the struggle of the
left opposition and he was its best chronicler and historian, not to mention
novelist. Serge lived his political life in Trotsky's orbit, though there were
real differences between them, that were exacerbated by Etienne.
Day
Three: Morning Session
The
third and final day of the Conference witnessed some fireworks.This was inevitable given that many of the
conference participants had diametrically opposed views and were very
passionate in defending their position.The only surprise for me was that the conference did not feature more of
these contentious dust-ups.Undoubtedly
that would have been the case had there been more time for discussion.As it was, much of these debates took place
during the question and answer sessions when many delegates, instead of asking
a question, used their time to make a speech defending their position or
opposing a rival position.This was
unfortunate but completely understandable as there was no other outlet for
airing disagreements.
The
morning session was largely devoted to the development of Trotsky’s views
during his period of exile in Mexico. Daniel Perseguim from Brazil gave a
fascinating presentation on how Trotsky’s experience in the New World led him
to explore new dimensions in art and culture.He began his talk by discussing Trotsky’s contributions to the Bulletin
of the Opposition when he was in Mexico. ( Being something of an amateur
archivist myself, I was very impressed by the fact that Perseguim had in his
possession the last issue of the Bulletin of the Opposition.)Paul LeBlanc provided the following excellent
summary of Perseguim’s talk.
Daniel Perseguim, commenting
that Trotsky’s ongoing contributions to a variety of journals over the years
(in a sense, his work as “a journalist”) reveal an evolution of
thinking and sensibilities, from the first issue of Iskra in
1900 to the last issue of the Russian-language Bulletin of the
Opposition. This has framed Perseguim’s own research project of tracing
Trotsky’s writings in his final period of exile, in Mexico, within which the
final issues of the Bulletin of the Opposition (from number
54-55 in 1937 to number 87 in 1941) were published. Trotsky’s emigration to
Mexico provided a relative freedom that, according to Perseguim, changed the
relationship of forces on the Left to the detriment of the Kremlin. One source
of enrichment in the thought of Trotsky and his co-thinkers was the influence
of the indigenous cultures of the Americas – an important assertion for which
there was an unfortunate lack of time to develop. A clear example of evolution
in Trotsky’s thinking on the relationship of art and revolutionary politics was
provided by comparing a formulation in his 1924 work Literature and
Revolution and the 1938 manifesto he drafted for the International
Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art (FIARI), the latter emphasizing the
absolute necessity for autonomous artistic creativity missing from his writings
of fourteen years earlier. Perseguim argued that further systematic research
into Trotsky’s writings during his final exile might change our understanding
of this revolutionary theorist. (Trotsky
in Cuba, 2019)
The
next speaker was José Alberto Fonseca Ornelas from Mexico. His theme was
Trotsky’s insistence on the independence of the working class in the struggle
against imperialism. He noted that the Popular Front policy of Stalinism in the
1930’s, when translated to the conditions existing in Latin America, meant the
subordination of the working class to the forces of bourgeois nationalism. He
discussed two examples where the Stalinist policy had a disastrous effect, that
of Cuba and of Mexico.He noted that in
Cuba the Stalinist Communist Party actually supported the dictator Fulgencio
Batista in the 1940’s. In Mexico the Communist Party urged the powerful trade
union movement to align itself with the radical nationalist regime of Lázaro
Cardenas.This eventually resulted in
the Mexican unions becoming little more than an appendage of the bourgeois
Mexican state and has had a debilitating effect on the class struggle in Mexico
to this day.He noted that whereas
Trotsky was grateful to Cardenas for providing him with asylum in Mexico and defended
the Cardenas government against U.S. imperialism when it expropriated the
foreign owned oil companies, he insisted that the Mexican working class needed
to form its own independent political party and never subordinate itself to the
PRI or Cardenas.
Kaveh
Bovieri from Montreal next presented a paper that attempted to explain the
difference between a historical account from a Marxist perspective and
conventional bourgeois historiography through the lens of Hegel’s Philosophy
of History. He noted that in the Introduction to the Philosophy of
History Hegel discusses three types of historical accounts: First is what
Hegel called “Original history”, which is an empirical account of events by
contemporary witnesses.Herodotus and
Thucydides are prime examples of this type of history. Next is what Hegel
called “Reflective History”. This type of history attempts to work up the
empirical material contained in Original History and find some kind of pattern
or lesson. At its best this type of history can give us genuine insights into
the historical process whereas at its worst it can become a rationalization for
an ideology. Christian historical accounts of the lives of the saints and
martyrs that justify the triumph of Christianity over the previous pagan
culture are a good example of the worst type of Reflective History.The best of Reflective History would be
accounts that look back into the records of historical events in order to find
the real patterns and separate those from myths and apologetics.Examples of this kind of history would be
recent accounts of the post-Civil War period of Reconstruction in the Southern states of the U.S. that depict its radical and democratic nature while disposing of the myths
propagated by historians sympathetic to the Confederacy that the period of
Reconstruction represented a corrupt takeover of Southern states by Northern carpet-baggers.
The
third type of historical account Hegel discusses is what he calls
“Philosophical History”. It is far from
obvious what is meant by this as philosophy deals with universal concepts whereas
history supposedly deals with contingent particulars.How can these two be put together?It is best to quote Hegel’s own description
of Philosophical History:
The only Thought which Philosophy
brings with it to the contemplation of History, is the simple conception of
Reason; that Reason is the Sovereign of the World; that the history of the
world, therefore, presents us with a rational process. (The Philosophy of
History,Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel, translated by J. Sibree, page 22, Batochie Books.)
After
briefly discussing Hegel’s classification of historical explanations, Bovieri
contended that Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution presents us
with a synthesis of all three types of accounts.Bovieri’s argument relied on a close reading
not only of Trotsky but of Marx’s statement,
No social order is ever destroyed
before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been
developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones
before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the
framework of the old society.(Marx, Preface to Critique of Political Economy)
I
cannot do justice to Bovieri’s presentation although I agree with his main
point.One illustration of his thesis is
the difference between the kind of historical explanation provided by Trotsky
and the kind provided by the best non-Marxist account of the Russian
Revolution, Alexander Rabinowitch’s 3 volume work, Prelude to Revolution,
The Bolsheviks Come to Power, and The Bolsheviks in Power.
Rabinowitch provides, in the lexicon of Hegelian terminology, a synthesis of
Original History and Reflective History. He presents a wealth of contemporary
material from the Russian archives, much of it new, and uses it to make the
point that the Russian Revolution was a genuine popular uprising led by the
Bolsheviks and not a coup by a tiny minority as legions of anti-communist
historians had long maintained. I interviewed Rabinowitch in 2017, the
centenary year of the Russian Revolution, when he summarized his findings about
the popular nature of the revolution.
Missing
in Rabinowitch’s account however is what Hegel called Philosophical History. It
is this dimension that Trotsky adds to the historical narrative. To quote from
his Preface to the History of the Russian Revolution,
The history of a revolution, like
every other history, ought first of all to tell what happened and how. That,
however, is little enough. From the very telling it ought to become clear why
it happened thus and not otherwise. Events can neither be regarded as a series
of adventures, nor strung on the thread of a preconceived moral. They must obey
their own laws. The discovery of these laws is the author’s task.
The
next presenter, Héctor Puenta Sierra, from the Socialist Workers Party in the
U.K., defended Tony Cliff’s analysis of the Soviet Union as a form of “state
capitalism”. He argued that Cliff’s analysis resolved some problems in
Trotsky’s original analysis of the Stalinist bureaucracy as a parasitical
growth on a degenerated “workers state”.Sierra’s
presentation triggered much contentious debates during the question and answer
session, particularly when he said that the classification of the Soviet Union
as “state capitalist” had the advantage that one need not equate the demise of
the Soviet Union with the death of socialism. Paul LeBlanc responded that no
Trotskyist ever equated the fall of the Soviet Union with the end of socialism,
regardless of one’s estimation of the class nature of the Soviet state.
S.
Sándor John, a supporter of TheInternationlist group, spoke
forcefully about the necessity to defend the gains of the Soviet Union against
imperialism and denounced those tendencies, such as Cliff’s andShachtman’s, that considered the Soviet Union
as just another variety of capitalism and imperialism, as a betrayal of
internationalism. In response Dan LaBotz defended Shachtman’s thesis, “Neither
Washington nor Moscow”, as being consistent with the position of Lenin and
Trotsky during World War I, that no support be given to any of the contending
imperialist powers.
The
final presentation of the morning session was by Gabriela Pérez Noriega,
Director of the Museo Casa de León Trotsky. Perez first introduced
a video featuring a recent interview by Alan Woods, the leader of the International
Marxist Tendency, with Trotsky’s grandson, Esteban Volkov. Volkov, now in his
nineties, was unfortunately not able to travel to attend the conference in
person.I had met Volkov at a conference
on Trotsky at Fordham University in New York back in 2008 and was gratified to
see that he is still politically active. Volkov greeted the conference and
noted its historic significance. He paid homage to his grandfather; whose ideas
are still relevant to the struggle for socialism.Following the video Pérez spoke. LeBlanc,
once again, has provided a nice summary:
After the short video, Pérez (citing
the Russian’s historian Dmitri Volkoganov findings of materials in the Stalin
archives) emphasized that the dictator was animated by great fear of Trotsky,
which is why he sent an agent with an ice-axe to destroy one of the greatest
brains of revolutionary Marxism. She observed that such enemies continued to
slander Trotsky viciously down to the present day, pointing to the recent
anti-Trotsky film series produced by right-wing filmmakers in Russia and
distributed globally through Netflix. Those at the conference and others, with
their own serious work, were pushing back against such assaults. Pérez then
discussed the development of the Museo Casa de León Trotsky, noting
that it had in recent years added to its mission an emphasis on defending the
right to asylum for the oppressed and the persecuted – which had been central
to the last chapter of Trotsky’s struggle. Revitalizing the Museo,
this commitment was reflected in its investigations of and support for the
recent migration movement that had surged through Mexico. Inviting everyone to
visit the Museo Casa de León Trotsky, she concluded with a quote
from Trotsky’s final testament: “Life is beautiful. Let the future generations
cleanse it of all evil, oppression, and violence and enjoy it to the full.”
Day
Three: Afternoon Session
The
afternoon session was packed with a number of presentations.The overall theme was Trotskyism in Latin
America and the struggle against imperialism.The final three sessions were devoted to an examination of Trotskyism in
Cuba.I can only mention a few
impressions from the afternoon session. I once more refer to Paul LeBlanc’s
summary for a more thorough description.
Ernest Tate,
a veteran activist from Canada, gave a presentation on the role of the Fair
Play for Cuba Committee in changing the political climate in Canada towards an
acceptance of the Cuban Revolution. His talk was largely a summary of a chapter
from his memoir, Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s and 1960s. (The
chapter is available online at Tate memoir Chapter 15.)
Tate
generalized the experiences of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee as an
example of the importance of international solidarity work for the defense of
anti-colonial revolutions not only in Cuba, but also Vietnam and Algeria. He
defended the politics of gathering political resistance around a single
issue.
Another
presenter, Burak Sayim, a member of the DIP (Workers Revolutionary Party) of
Turkey, gave a talk on Che Guevara and Trotsky’s theory of permanent
revolution. He maintained that Che subscribed in practice to the theory of
permanent revolution.I would have
questioned Sayim on this had there been time. While it is true that Che departed
from the Stalinists by devoting his last years to the expansion of the
revolution internationally, he at the same time failed to see the revolutionary
potential of the working class, concentrating his activity on the attempt to
create guerilla foci among the peasants in the countryside.Che’s ideas were based not only on the
experience of the Cuban Revolution, but on what he took to be the model of the
Chinese Revolution. While there may have been some outward resemblance, Che’s rejection
of the revolutionary role of the working class was, I would maintain,
completely at odds with Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution.
Rafael
Bernabé from Puerto Rico, gave a presentation on the role of the Communist
Party in Puerto Rico in defanging the labor movement on that island.To quote LeBlanc’s summary,
The Puerto Rican Communist Party – the
central force in building Puerto Rico’s powerful labor movement of the 1930s
and 1940s – was committed to building an alliance with the “progressive” and
“democratic” imperialism of the United States, particularly in the struggle
against fascism during World War II. To facilitate this, the Puerto Rican
Communist Party liquidated itself, which consequently facilitated the collapse
of the labor movement. An economic boom combined with Cold War anti-Communism
resulted in substantial political disorientation. Bernabé recalled that Trotsky
had emphasized the need, in the Americas, for an “Americanized” Bolshevism to
confront and defeat American imperialism. Instead, a bureaucratized Bolshevism
(in the form of Stalinism) ended up confronting American imperialism – and had
proved incapable of bringing victory. The struggle must continue, based on
lessons learned from the past.
Bryan
Palmer from Canada, the author of an important biography of the founder of
American Trotskyism, James P. Cannon, gave a presentation on Cannon that emphasized
that the stereotypical view of Cannon as lacking theoretical depth is
completely mistaken.I quote from Paul
LeBlanc’s excellent summary of Palmer’s remarks,
Bryan Palmer, drawing on new research
for the upcoming second volume of his James P. Cannon biography, discussed the
relationship of Cannon and another founder of US Trotskyism, Max Shachtman,
with each other and with Trotsky, from 1928 through the 1930s. Cannon has had
an misleading reputation of being provincial, weak on internationalism, and
“innocent of theory,” while his former young protégé Shachtman has often been
seen as cosmopolitan and theoretically sophisticated. Trotsky’s assessment in
the early 1930s was that Shachtman was overly inclined to place “chumminess”
above principle and too often unreliable on political matters; eventually he
placed greater trust in Cannon. In the early 1930s a generational divide had
opened up among US Trotskyists, with a younger group headed by Shachtman
impatient and hostile toward the older Cannon – bringing to mind a Freudian
sons-slay-the-father dynamic. Shachtman was soon reconciled with Cannon, a
close and fruitful cooperation being generated by several major developments:
the New York hotel workers strike; the Minneapolis teamsters strikes; the struggles
against fascism and Stalinism; merger with another left-wing group headed by
A.J. Muste; a battle against internal sectarian tendencies; and a decision to
merge the US Trotskyists into the Socialist Party. Yet differences between the
two reemerged: Shachtman was inclined to focus on negotiations and maneuvers
with an organized tendency of militants in the Socialist Party (with hopes of
perhaps taking over the Socialist Party), while Cannon (anticipating a split)
preferred to build Socialist Party branches outside the control of the
Socialist Party leadership, and helping advance labor struggles in California
and Minnesota. When Trotskyists were – as Cannon anticipated – ejected from the
Socialist Party, they took many labor militants and youth with them to form the
Socialist Workers Party, that was able to play a leading role in helping to
found the Fourth International in 1938.
S.
Sándor John from the U.S. provided a riveting account of the Trotskyist
movement in Bolivia in the 1950’s.Bolivia was one of the few countries in the world, the others being Sri
Lanka and Vietnam, where Trotskyism became a mass movement and captured a
significant following in the working class. In Bolivia, the most important
segment of society, the powerful the tin miners’ union, were solidly in the
camp of Trotskyism.Sandor described
several near revolutions in the 1950’s and both the heroism and the errors on
the part of the Bolivian Trotskyists. Those errors lead to the consolidation of
power by a bourgeois nationalist party that turned against the working
class.Sandor, a Latin American
historian, did a great deal of original research and interviews with veterans
of this struggle. It is not possible to capture the flavor of his presentation
in a broad-brush overview.
There
were three presentations on the history of Trotskyism in Cuba.I was only able to absorb a few pieces of
information from these presentations. Hopefully when all this material is
published it will open new doors to research in this area. There were two
separate periods in the history of Trotskyism in Cuba. The first was initially
inspired by Trotsky and the struggle of the Left Opposition in the 1920’s and
1930’s. This current of Cuban Trotskyism seems to have disappeared sometime in
the 1940’s as a result of repression by both the Cuban government and the
Stalinists. A separate current of Cuban Trotskyism emerged in the 1950’s that
originated out of the work of Juan Posadas.This current of Cuban Trotskyism survived sometime into the late 1960’s (there
are some disputes as to the exact date).While the Trotskyists were supportive of the Cuban Revolution, they ran
afoul of the Stalinist elements in the Cuban leadership. The upshot was the
proscription of their newspaper and the jailing of its remaining members in the
mid 1960’s. Rafael Acosta from
Cubaspoke about the last days of
Cuban Trotskyism after the revolution.Ricardo Márquezfrom Mexicospoke about one of the founders of the Cuban Communist
Party who became sympathetic to the Left Opposition, Julio Antonio Mella. Caridad
Massòn from Cuba spoke about an early leader of Cuban Trotskyism, Sandalio
Junco. Massòn questioned whether Junco
could really be considered a Trotskyist.She questioned whether Junco, who was murdered by Stalinist assassins in
1942, was killed for his political affiliation or for some other unkown
reason.
I may have misinterpreted her
remarks, but I thought this was a back-handed attempt to legitimize the history
of Cuban Stalinism.I was not the only
one who had this reaction to Massòn’s remarks.One of the panelists from Mexico got up and stated that while there may
be different currents within the Marxist tradition, Stalinism is not a Marxist
current in any sense. A lively discusion
was elicited by these presentations which touched on the hostility towards
Trotskyism in Cuba. Castro’s diatribe against Trotskyism at the Tri-Continental
Congress in 1966 was mentioned. But it was also mentioned that there were
periods in which the Cuban leadership evinced, if not a sympathy for Trotsky,
then a certain degree of respect. The turning point in the attitude to
Trotsky came with the publication in 2008 of Leonardo Padura’s novel, The
Man Who Loved Dogs, which for the first time depicted to the Cuban public a
sympathetic if not uncritical portrait of Trotsky.(See my Interview with Frank García
Hernándezfor more on this topic.)
The
conference formally ended with the singing of the Internationale by the
audience.
Farewell
to Cuba
Frank had planned one last event
following the conference – an original musical arrangement composed especially
for the Conference.The composers were a duo from Colombia and Cuba, Santiago Barbosa and Luna Catalina
Tinoco. Frank had arranged for us to convene in a bar and performance space
that evening, La Bombilla Verde, where we were treated to the world
premiere of a musical piece dedicated to Trotsky. This was truly a unique
experience, one that I will always remember fondly. Following the musical event there was some discussion
about making this an annual event, with the next edition possibly to take place
in Brazil next year.I said my goodbye’s
to Frank and the international friends I made at this conference.
I left Cuba the next day with a
positive feeling knowing that some seeds had been planted.We will see what fruit they bear.
A.S.What difficulties and obstacles did you run
into in arranging for the Conference?
F.G.H.The Germans say that the realization of every
enterprise involves 80% planning and 20% execution. The difficulties, which
were many, occurred mainly in that 80%. The planning was affected, to a large
extent, by the prejudices that still exist in Cuba about Trotsky. This caused
some decision-makers to have a certain negative predisposition and therefore at
the beginning it was very difficult to organize. But then, little by little,
the preparation began to move forward, much more so when the colleagues from
the Institute of Philosophy endorsed the project. And the other big problem we
faced was the economic issue that, in essence, was saved by the alliance made
by the Cuban Institute of Cultural Research Juan Marinello and the Institute of
Philosophy. Later, in practice, other problems arose, some unexpected, others
anticipated. But that is normal.
A.S. How
would you judge the success or failure of the Conference. (I thought it was a
great success despite some problem we
had like not enough time for all the participants.)
F.G.H.We made a big mistake: underestimating the
problems. Until the last moment, there were participants who changed the name
of their presentation; hence, the first day we did not have a printed program. As
a result of our over-confidence and also as a result of financial difficulties,
the panels were over-subscribed. I tried to accept all the proposals that were
sent. I did not want to put a brake on information coming to Cuba. I had
already gone through the bad experience of having to reject a large number of
applications from foreign countries: 192 requests from around the world. It was
ether that audience or the Cuban public. It was either the audience of
specialists or the public. We did not have room for both. If we had
better financing - which was not possible as we are going through a very
serious economic crisis in Cuba today - then we would have held a four-day
conference. There would have been time to open the exhibition of the photos of
Leon Trotsky that were provided courtesy
of the Leon Trotsky Museum in Mexico. Had we the funding we could have accommodated
an international academic audience of more than 200 or 300 people. In addition,
for economic as well as technical reasons, simultaneous translation was
impossible and the presentations took twice the time that had been planned. That
diminished the quality of the presentations of course. One consequence of the abbreviated
presentation time was that some of the moderators, without asking me, decided
to eliminate the question and answer sessions.
But in essence I think the event was a success. It laid
down the seed for something that will be most appreciated by the Cuban people:
the publication of the papers that were presented and the debates that they
provoked. For the first time in Cuba, a Cuban publishing house will publish a
book about Trotsky and the political, historical, social and cultural phenomena
that were generated around this Bolshevik.
A.S. How would
you characterize the attitude of the Cuban government toward this Conference?
F.G.H.The answer is the expected one. In Cuba it
has never been said that Trotsky is not what the Soviet comrades said he was. Yet
Fidel Castro, in his famous interview with Ignacio Ramonet in 2006, which in
Cuba we know as One Hundred Hours with Fidel, said in a positive tone
that, comparing Stalin with Trotsky, the latter without doubt, was the most
intellectual of the two. Coming from the Commander-in-Chief this was a very
important statement but at the same time it was largely unknown because it was
another phrase in a book of 800 pages where other topics grabbed more attention
from the Cuban public, for whom, moreover, Trotsky and Stalin represented
problems from another time and another place. I think it was one of the few times Fidel
talked about it. Then, as discreet as were those words of the leader of the
Cuban revolution on Trotsky, so was the attitude of the government towards the
congress likewise discreet.
A.S.Can you explain why there is a hunger for
reading the works of Trotsky among the Cuban people?
F.G.H.It is logical. Those works had been censored.
They were never published in Cuba. That's enough. And if it is true that in
reality there is nothing illegal about publishing Trotsky’s works, the simple
fact that in the time of the USSR Trotsky was anathemized creates a myth around
him: the myth of the forbidden. Later, Leonardo Padura published his
exceptional novel about Trotsky called The Man Who Loved Dogs. Padura is
well known in Cuba but everyone knows that he is not the favorite writer of the
establishment.
At that time, the novel served to create certain
expectations around the old Bolshevik. Many learned about the purges and
persecutions led by Stalin thanks to that text, which was also published in a
very limited print run - not as a result
of any action by the government - but because of restrictions established by Padura’s
Spanish publisher. On the other hand I am sure that the publishers on the
island were not very enthusiastic about this book. And among Cuban university
students the revelation that there is a censored Marxist, or at least one who
was ostracized, drew a lot of attention. That had previously happened with
Gramsci, Foucault, Bourdieu and Rosa Luxemburg, authors who were never banned,
but whose works disappeared from bookstores or, most of the time, were never
published.
Panel with (left to right) Robert Brenner, Suzi Weissman, Paul LeBlanc, Eric Toussaint.
The following is the first part of an interview I conducted
with the organizer of the First Academic Conference on Trotsky in Cuba,Frank García Hernández.
The Spanish version of this interview
is available here:
A.S. I know you wrote your dissertation on the history of
Trotskyism in Cuba. Can you tell me how you first became interested in this
topic?
F.G.H. About 10
years ago I was reading a book about Antonio Guiteras that my grandfather gave
me. At the end of the book there was a chronological table. Arriving at 1933 it
recorded that on September 12 of that year the Bolshevik Leninist Party (PBL)
had been founded. Pages later I read that Sandalio Junco, its founder, was
murdered by Communist Party assassins on May 8, 1942. It was quite a surprise
for me. Later I found another book but this time it was about some interviews
that the intellectual and friend Julio César Guanche had with other Cuban
intellectuals. The title was The Project
and the Power. I recommend it. He asked, among many other things, about the
PBL and another one of its founders: the Cuban surrealist and Trotskyist poet
Juan Ramón Breá. None of the interviewees could say much about them. Then, in
2013, I read another book of the collected memoirs of the Cuban intellectual
Grazziella Pogolloti. In one of his chapters he mentioned the wife of Juan
Ramón Breá: an English poet and Trotskyist of Australian parents who fought
alongside Breá and Benjamin Peret in the Spanish Civil War. She had lived in
Cuba until 1960 and had been well known in the most important literary circles
of the country. But there was not much bibliography about her either. On or
about 2014 my master's thesis was about the Movement of Rural Landless Workers
of Brazil (MST), but curiosity made me change the subject. Today apparently
there are new people interested in learning the history of Cuban Trotskyism,
but until a few months ago there were only a few people. In Cuba, the main
historian who studied the subject had died and left a work with important
errors that everyone later repeated. I decided then to write the complete
history of Cuban Trotskyism. Contrary to what some may believe, I had no
problem with the academic authorities. On the contrary, I was encouraged to
continue the investigation. My dissertation received the highest reviews. There
was no problem. I presented it on April 26, 2018. On June 1 I was already broadcasting
my decision to hold the 1st International Leon Trotsky Academic Event.
A.S. What
made you decide to organize this conference?
F.G.H.In November
2016 I taught a postgraduate course in Santa Clara about the life and work of Leon Trotsky. The room
was completely full. Thanks to Leonardo Padura's novel about Trotsky, The Man Who Loved Dogs, the interest was
immense. I had photocopied a copy of The
Revolution Betrayed and everyone asked for it. Many asked me about
Trotsky's writings on art and literature. In Cuba, students do not like to read
digitally. Although they are millennials, they prefer to make marks on paper
books. They asked me so many questions that I could not answer them all. They
were shocked to see the photo of Zinoviev beaten with the prisoner's poster.
The farewell letter from Adolf Joffe impressed everyone. One of them wrote a
poem to Joffe. He later published, in a
cultural magazine, a fragment, in January 2018, of the speech with which
Trotsky founded the Red Army.
Months later I met Yunier Mena, the Cuban philology
student who participated in the event. He is of peasant parents and lives in a
peasant cooperative. We wrote a manifesto about poetry and communism called Communist Poets. I realized that there
was a sector of youth, especially in Santa Clara with a big disposition towards
a Marxism that they did not know. Again, The
Revolution Betrayed caused a great impact. Among them was a young lady who
would later become my wife. I realized then that it would be a great
selfishness not to bring to Cuba a thought that had long since landed in our
libraries.
A.S. Can
you tell me something about the people and groups that helped you organize the
Conference?
F.G.H.In the
beginning I started this adventure alone. Most thought I would get tired. When I
explained my intention to organize the conference, they looked at me as if I
were crazy. Today some tell me that it was really something others could have
done, but at the beginning those others did not exist. Most did not believe
that many foreign guests were coming. They thought it would two or three at
most. No one ever believed that there would be 192 requests just from foreign
delegates. First, I asked for support
from the Cuban Cultural Research Institute Juan Marinello, where I work. They
were not very convinced, but they accepted. They suggested that I also make the
same proposal to sponsor the conference to the Institute of Philosophy. They
did have more interest. The project had much more to do with them. Afterwards
my friend Javier Ortiz, another university student and artist, suggested the
idea of doing the event at
Casa Benito Juárez. He made a strong presentation to the person who is
now my friend, the Co-Director of the Juárez museum, Miguel
Hernández. It is a beautiful and wide place. The other two institutions had
much smaller spaces.
Misunderstandings did not come from any of the people
of these institutions, rather they were from people who did not know the
subject. For those who have no knowledge of Trotsky, the old Bolshevik is still
the devil. Even more in Cuba. In addition, no State likes to introduce theories
that may cause certain discomforts. Actually, knowledge of Trotsky would not do
any harm to Cuba, rather, it would help us a lot. But prejudices without
knowledge do much harm. Sometimes prejudices are similar to faith.
Unquestionable
But the main help in the organization of the
conference came from my partner Lisbeth Moya González. She had suffered an
accident and her leg was in a cast. The plaster cast was removed just prior to
the conference so that she could participate in the event. And my companion
Yunier Mena Benavides. Thanks to him, countless tasks were solved. There was
also the student Eduardo Expósito who worked in silence solving problems that
nobody saw because they did not happen but they were potentially serious. He is
a student of mechanics and is very close to the workers. He comes from a very
proletarian neighborhood with big social problems. He is the proof that Marxism
is not exclusive to the intellectual elite. There is also the designer of that
beautiful poster that promoted the event, Yaimel López. He did not charge a penny
to make the design and he is today one of the best and most highly valued Cuban
designers. And to the Colombian and Cuban musicians who composed the farewell
musical theme: the friends Santiago Barbosa and Luna Catalina Tinoco. In
addition, credit is also due to the comrade and Basque nationalist, Guillén
García, who so graciously offered his bar La
Bombilla Verde and gave away a beer for each guest at the event. And my
family. Although it seems a bit sentimental, my family provided great support,
especially my mother and my grandmother. It is fair to recognize everyone. We
should also mention Verde Gil and Ana Isabel, two compañeras who came at their
own expense from Santa Clara. That's why they deserve honor. And they also did
some homework at the event. And always, very important: to all the Cuban
workers and the world that made the event possible. Without the working classes
and their struggle today we would not be talking about revolution behind our
desks.
A.S. Why
did you insist that this was an academic conference and not a forum for
political groups?
F.G.H.I insisted on
that because different Trotskyist political groups contacted me directly and,
in a direct way, very respectful, they told me that we had to politicize the
event. They maintained that an academic conference was not so important, that
we had to refound the Fourth International in Cuba. I respected their
considerations, but what would Cuba gain in bringing political groups that
would try to explain to us the Cuban reality? The worst of the limitations that
hamper those who are interested in Cuba, is that they cannot access the books,
the research and the theory that we do in Cuba. Today we are in the midst of a
very powerful debate within the Cuban left. We develop very good theory. But
our books are not on Amazon. Of the debates that can be found in our blogs
about and from Cuba, I want to mention Iroel Sánchez's Sleepless Pupil, Julio César Guanche's Thing. There is also La Tizza,
La Joven Cuba and Trinchera, three very combative young
groups, whose debates are invisible for the majority of foreigners. Foreigners
moreover are prejudiced by the criticism of the extreme right, the criticism of
the extreme left and the discourse of the left in solidarity with Cuba. I am
not even counting the mainstream media that never tell the truth or say it
half-heartedly, which is sometimes worse. Then it happens that sometimes from
abroad, it is thought that in Cuba there is a Stalinist dictatorship or a
communist paradise. I always say to the compañeros who visit Cuba: everything
you know about Cuba is a lie, but at the same time everything you know about Cuba
is true. I would love to speak with all the Trotskyist organizations in the
world, I admire them: The International Group, the Fourth International, the
American and British SWP, Allan Woods, the Turkish DIP, the Argentine FIT, the
Brazilian PSTU, the American PSL, anyone. I am willing, I would like to give
everyone a to-do list to make visible the Cuban reality. In fact, on May 9 and
10, I thought of giving a brief history course of the 60 years of the Cuban
revolution. A course that I had prepared years ago. I can send the notes for
this course to whoever is interested, but it would not be of the highest
quality. After two weeks of sleeping only three or
sometimes two and a half hours a night, my body was exhausted. I am willing to go anywhere without charging a
penny for that course. Although I am not a Trotskyist, all the Trotskyists of
the world, all the revolutionaries of the world, all those who fight against
capitalism and for socialism are my comrades.
Frank opening the Conference. The Co-Director of the Juárez museum, Miguel Hernández, is on his left.
