While we may not agree with everything presented in this
analysis, it is on the whole a sign of the increasing political maturity of the
Marxist left opposition in Cuba, acknowledging the important contribution of
Trotsky’s analysis of Stalinism. It is
written by a courageous leader of that movement Frank García Hernández, who
organized the first International Conference on Trotsky in Havana, Cuba in May
of 2019. See our coverage of the conference:
http://forum.permanent-revolution.org/2019/05/first-international-academic-meeting-on.html
http://forum.permanent-revolution.org/2019/06/first-international-academic-meeting-on.html
by Frank García Hernández
In addition to the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution, the birthday of Leon Trotsky was commemorated on November 7. His analysis on the degeneration of the Soviet bureaucracy is an essential instrument to understand the political crisis that Cuba is going through. Similar to the Soviet bureaucracy, the Cuban government has been moving away from the reality experienced by the working class. The most resounding example of this is the very fact that the July 11 protests took place. [1] Added to this, as another sign of disconnection, is the way in which the official discourse has handled the protests, criminalizing them and reducing them to supposedly having been functional to the counterrevolution.
After the July 11 demonstrations, the Cuban government did not realize the urgent need to create new mechanisms for citizen participation. The way the government understood how to approach the working class was not by stimulating socialist democracy but by making visits to the popular neighborhoods. In general, these visits, planned vertically from above and announced in advance, end up putting on makeup over the area where the high official will pass, and later everything remains the same.
In a recent interview to a foreign media, a high Cuban leader declared
that in Cuba there was neither hunger, nor unemployment, nor poverty. This
serious case of a break with reality can only have two motives. Either, the
most dangerous one: the bureaucracy is unaware of the reality of the country;
or, it knows about it but transmits a triumphalist discourse which causes
discontent among broad sectors of the Cuban working class. In December 2020,
the Minister of Economy Alejandro Gil informed that in 2021 the Gross Domestic
Product would grow by 6%. Contrary to this, in the past sessions of parliament,
Gil announced that the GDP had fallen by -13%. The same official announced in
May 2021 that this year Cuba would receive at least 2 million tourists.
According to Cuba's National Statistics and Information Office, as of September
the country had not exceeded 190 thousand tourists and health restrictions for
foreign visitors will only be lifted on November 15. In three months, of which
only 45 days will be without restrictions for international travelers, Cuba
will not be able to receive the 1 million 810 thousand tourists it needs to
meet the figure announced in May by the Minister of Economy; even if Gil knew
that up to that month only 120 thousand tourists had entered Cuba.
To this worrisome scenario, it should be added that an important sector
of the Cuban youth is becoming increasingly depoliticized, identifying
socialism with the stagnant official discourse. Young people contrast the
triumphalism of the Communist Party with an increasingly critical daily
reality, marked by a deep shortage, long lines to buy basic foodstuffs and an
important concentration of basic necessities offered in stores where one can
only pay with cards backed by foreign currency. In this way, an important
sector of the Cuban youth ends up repelling Marxist ideas, falling into
political apathy, and in the worst cases, turning to the right.
At the same time, this deep economic and political crisis has produced
the emergence of new and young figures in the Cuban critical left. Most of them
share a common denominator: they find Trotsky's book, The Revolution
Betrayed, a useful analysis to understand the Cuban crisis. Except for
the Stalinist purges, the complexities involved in a multi-ethnic state, and
the distance in time, those young people who publicly position themselves to
the left of the Communist Party, discover how in the Cuban bureaucracy
dangerous features of the Soviet bureaucracy are reproduced.
That young socialist left sees that Cuba is increasingly marked by the
separation of the Cuban bureaucracy from the reality of the majorities, the
stagnant and empty ideological discourse, the rise of young opportunists to
public office, the unequal standards of living between the bourgeois leaders
and the working majorities, as well as the political double standards, among
other factors typical of a socialist project that has degenerated politically.
The new Cuban Marxist left finds, therefore, a scenario very similar to the one
described by Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed.
This November 9 marks another anniversary of the fall of the Berlin
Wall, an event that preluded the disappearance of the so-called Eastern
European Socialist Camp and the final disintegration of the Soviet Union on
December 25, 1991. Thirty years ago the Soviet working class did not know how
to defend its rights, to lead the fall of the bureaucracy towards a new
revolutionary process and to carry forward the construction of a truly
socialist system. The hundreds of young people who crossed the Berlin Wall that
November 9, 1989 did not do so to carry the red flag of revolution and
overthrow capitalism to their fellow Germans in the West. They did so in
pursuit of a bourgeois society where they were promised high levels of
consumption. At the cost of predatory financial policies -where Greece appears
as the most critical case-, Germany is one of the main economic powers of the
world; but if the Cuban government falls, Cuba will fall towards an
underdeveloped capitalist system corresponding to the most serious economies of
the third world. The supposed fall of the Cuban government will only produce
the enthronement of an anti-communist regime, with neo-liberal economic
policies and bent to the political interests of the United States. The
neoliberal economic project of the Council for Democratic Transition presented
for a future socialist Cuba, only shows what would be the fate of the Caribbean
nation under a capitalist regime.
In the midst of an ever worsening political crisis, it is an urgent duty
of the Cuban critical left to act, or at least to raise awareness. Every young
socialist must expand their ideas in their range of action. To demonstrate to
their fellow students and workmates that the errors committed by the Cuban
government are not intrinsic to the socialist project, that another socialism
is possible, thus stopping the expansion of political apathy, which is
functional to the counterrevolution.
Trotsky is not Marx's prophet. To see him as such is to destroy him.
Trotsky is a defining Marxist tool to understand and apply to the current Cuban
political crisis. The difference in lucidity between the young Cubans who have
incorporated him and those who either represent the bureaucracy or proclaim a
class conciliatory socialism is quite perceptible. The political lucidity of
the new Cuban Marxist left is expressed in that they assume socialism as an
emancipatory project only viable if it is built in freedom; but freedom and
democracy built and led by the working class. The naivety that economic and
political power can be shared equally between the bourgeoisie and the working
class is something that, by the fact of being Marxist, the young Cuban
socialist left has rejected.
This explains the position of the new Cuban Marxist left regarding the
November 15 demonstration: it defends the right to demonstrate for those who
decide to march on that day, but at the same time refuses to march on November
15, since it understands that it is a serious political error to share space
with representatives of neo-liberal organizations such as the Council for
Democratic Transition. This is the great difference between Trotsky's united
front and Stalin's popular fronts. The former grouped the revolutionary forces,
while in the latter the communists could even ally themselves with characters
such as General Fulgencio Batista. [2]
The Cuban government has declared the November 15 demonstration illegal.
It warned from official media that those who participate in the demonstration
will be punished by law, however sometimes some legal decisions do not bring
with them the necessary political legitimacy. Although the November 15
demonstrations have almost no popular support, they do have an important
political weight. To repress them would therefore be a serious political
mistake and a violation of the right to peaceful protest. It is true that the
Marxist critical left should not participate in the November 15 demonstration,
but if it positions itself in favor of repression it will be making the same
mistake of marching with the Council for Democratic Transition. This is another
of the great differences between Stalin's project and Trotsky's political
proposal. The former has repression as the central axis of his political
program. Trotsky's socialism is grounded in freedom.
In this hour of definitions that Cuba is living, let us have the
political lucidity and militancy to be and do two, three, many Trotsky.
[1] See
the previous statement on the events of July 11 from the Communistas blog:
http://forum.permanent-revolution.org/2021/08/concerning-july-11-protests-in-cuba.html
[2]
The reference, well-known to students of Cuban history, is to the support
offered to the dictator Fulgencio Batista by the Cuban Communist Party. Support for Batista was sanctioned by the
Stalinist controlled Communist International in 1934 basing itself on the new
policy of a “Popular Front” between the “progressive” elements of the bourgeoisie – represented in this case by
Batista - and the working class. The Cuban Communist Party’s support for
Batista continued, more or less uninterrupted, for over 20 years.
