The ideological battle waged by imperialism against socialism didn’t end with Fukuyama’s proclamation of the end of history after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.* The disinformation campaign against any anti-imperialist struggle continues today, from the pages of The Guardian to schoolbooks and lecture theatres. We must patiently explain the need to fight for socialism here in Britain, and that socialist Cuba and the Bolivarian revolutionary process in Venezuela are at the forefront of a global struggle for justice.
Sovereignty and social justice are bound up with the question of socialism. The Cuban revolution triumphed in 1959 after decades of revolutionary war, from struggles against slavery and Spanish colonialism, to the 26 July 1953 assault on the Moncada Barracks. Defending himself in court after Moncada, Fidel Castro described the conditions facing the hundreds of thousands of Cubans without work, the farm labourers working four months of the year, almost starving the rest. At the time only 4% of Cubans ate meat; 90% of rural children had parasites and 43% of the population were illiterate.
After the rebels triumphed, they had to find solutions to these problems: how could they address problems of land, industrialisation, housing, unemployment, education, health in an island systematically underdeveloped by colonialism, then imperialism, and dependent on sugar exports?
Immediately, the revolutionary government expropriated US-owned companies, casinos were turned into schools, a major land reform expropriated estates over 1,000 acres. Transport, credit and industry were taken into state hands to fund social needs. These were radical steps, though the new government was not explicitly socialist, rather a multi-class alliance that included revolutionaries determined to meet the needs of the rural farmers and urban workers alongside representatives of the nationalist bourgeoisie who sought only reforms.
These first steps drew the wrath of US imperialism. It knew the Cuban revolution would have a deep political impact as the Americas watched eagerly. Washington therefore backed a campaign of terror, arming Cuban mercenaries to blow up hotels and assassinate literacy teachers. On the eve of the US-backed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, Fidel declared the revolution was for socialism, stating:
‘What the imperialists cannot forgive is the dignity, the firmness, the courage, the ideological integrity, the spirit of sacrifice, and the revolutionary spirit of the Cuban people. This is what they cannot forgive: the fact that we are here right under their very noses. And that we have carried out a socialist revolution.’
The struggle for social justice in Cuba necessitated a fight against foreign control of land and natural resources. The question of sovereignty was not just about political independence but also economic independence – imperialism would not give an inch, socialism was the only answer.
Four decades later, similar questions faced the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela. When oil was first struck in 1908, a string of US-backed dictators and puppet governments secured juicy profits for imperialism. Venezuela was left dependent on crude oil exports. 70% of the population suffered poverty and repression. In 1989, after oil prices collapsed a neo-liberal IMF austerity programme sparked a wave of protests that were brutally repressed. In response, in 1992 Hugo Chavez launched a military uprising. It was defeated, but only, as Chavez put it in a TV appearance, ‘por ahora – for now’. This slogan ‘por ahora’ was taken up by the masses – though for now they were defeated, tomorrow a new dawn would come. Under popular pressure, Chavez was eventually released and elected President in 1998 in a landslide victory.
In power, Chavez convoked an assembly to rewrite the constitution, resolving to plough oil revenues into poverty-busting social programmes. He was targeted by a short-lived coup in 2002, then an oil lock-out the following year. The working class defeated both, descending from the hillside barrios to surround the Presidential palace, taking over the oil refineries and restarting production.
This experience radicalised Chavez. He began his presidency searching for a ‘third way’ between capitalism and socialism. However, Venezuela’s comprador bourgeoisie and US-backed oligarchs blocked every move. Again, questions of food, housing, healthcare and social justice necessitated sovereignty over land and resources, bringing the Bolivarian revolution into direct conflict with US imperialism. Chavez sought to deepen working class mobilisation, launching the communal councils as an experiment in participatory democracy. In 2005 Chavez declared the Bolivarian revolution had chosen the path of socialism.
Today the human race faces crisis on all fronts, including war and climate change. Only socialism can confront these crises for the majority – a system of popular power, where a planned economy directs production to achieve social justice, a welfare-based development strategy, where goods are produced to meet human needs as opposed to commodities produced for private profit, where resources are used rationally, where systematic efforts are made to develop a popular consciousness which values solidarity, co-operation,, internationalism, environmental protection, confronting the selfishness and consumerism forced on us by capitalism and unlocking a sea of human potential.
Cuba and Venezuela again provide examples we can learn from. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba lost 85% of its trade overnight, GDP contracted by 35%. Rationing ensured no-one starved, children were guaranteed milk, energy planning protected hospitals and a drive for permaculture and urban farming meant cities began to produce their own food. Though US sanctions were tightened as the imperialists were desperate for Cuba to fall, the will of the people prevailed. Cuba today has the highest doctor-to-patient ratio in the world and universal free education. Healthcare and education are considered human rights. Cuba’s biopharma sector is state owned. Today, Cuba produces nearly 70% of its own medicines, including five domestic Covid-19 vaccines. It promotes internationalism in health care: since 1960 over 600,000 Cuban medical professionals have worked in around 170 countries. Cuba even sent doctors to Italy to fight against Covid-19 when the rest of Europe turned its back.
In the fight against climate catastrophe, socialism is the only solution. Capitalism, in its relentless drive for profit threatens the entire human race. In contrast, socialist Cuba is recognised as the most sustainably developed on the planet – combining a high level of human development with a low carbon footprint. 70% of the fruit and vegetables eaten in Havana are now produced locally. Solar panels power remote rural schools and health clinics, sugar mills burn sugar cane waste as biomass while the state works to expand industrial solar and wind farms. Cuba’s Tarea Vida – a 100-year ‘life task’ project – has begun its work to mitigate and protect the whole population from the effects of climate change.
Cuban socialism has achieved all this without exploiting other nations or launching wars for resources, and despite the criminal US blockade – the longest, most comprehensive set of sanctions in history. In 1961, the aim of the sanctions was described by then US Assistant Secretary of State Lester D Mallory: ‘to weaken the economic life of Cuba… to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government’. The blockade is extra-territorial – try sending money to Cuba, or any another country with the reference ‘CUBA’, and you will soon find your transaction blocked. Ships docking in Cuba are prohibited from docking in the US for six months; US investors systematically buy up shares in companies that trade with Cuba so they fall under blockade regulations. This economic warfare costs Cuba more than $13m per day: just 25 days of blockade costs enough to purchase all the basic medications required by Cuba for a year.
Yet the Cuban people continue to defend their socialist revolution. This consciousness and revolutionary determination to stand against imperialist aggression is the same determination that drives liberation struggles worldwide from Palestine to Burkina Faso.
Venezuela’s communal movement also holds lessons. Winning power through traditional bourgeois elections, the Bolivarian revolutionary movement inherited a capitalist, oil-rentier state, with key levers of the economy in the hands of oligarchs and monopolies. Against this backdrop, Venezuelan revolutionaries have constructed a parallel system of communal democracy and production, which Chavez envisaged as building blocks for a future socialist society.
Communal councils organise neighbourhoods to identify and address the needs of their communities. These link to form communes, which organise on a larger scale. Today, there are around 440,000 communal councils and 4,100 communes in Venezuela.
In the early 2000s when oil prices were high, increased public spending and purchasing power promoted consumerism. People received the benefits without committing themselves to the political project. As Chavez reflected at the time, the task of raising political consciousness was neglected.
This left Venezuela politically under-prepared for the hardships to come. Chavez died in 2013. Oil prices crashed in 2015 and the US Obama administration declared Venezuela an unusual and extraordinary threat to US national security, ushering in a raft of sanctions. Venezuela’s international bank accounts were frozen, transactions were blocked and international credit lines were cut off, resulting in scarcity and hyper-inflation. The US, Britain and EU backed a string of coup attempts and destabilisation efforts, including violent street campaigns in which revolutionaries were assassinated and thugs torched hospitals and pharmacies. The imperialists refused to recognise Venezuela’s elections, instead imposing their own ‘Interim President’ and making the democratically-elected Nicolas Maduro a target for assassination attempts.
The communes and social movements mobilised to defeat this violence and destabilisation, consistently taking to the streets in their tens of thousands. Facing down sanctions and scarcity, the communal movement evolved from an experiment in participatory democracy and distribution to a method of survival, actively finding solutions to the crisis. Urban communes built links with those in the countryside, to bring affordable fresh produce into the cities; they distributed state food boxes protecting the most vulnerable, they found ways to produce soap, cleaning products and nappies which were distributed to working class communities. They played a crucial role in the Covid vaccination programme and formed a workers’ productive army to keep production going. Today 80% of food in Venezuela is domestically produced, and non-oil exports are rising.
These lessons are key for us today – socialism is the only system able to safeguard human life on a mass scale and use the earth’s resources in a planned rational way. We defend the examples of Venezuela and Cuba, not as utopias devoid of contradiction and challenge, but as real societies constructing an alternative.
It is not coincidental that flags emblazoned with Che Guevara’s face fly in Gaza and the West Bank, nor that Palestinian doctors describe their gratitude to Cuba for their medical scholarships as they treat bomb victims in besieged hospitals. Ansar Allah in Yemen celebrate the legacy of Hugo Chavez alongside their own liberation heroes. Spearheading a new pole of anti-imperialist resistance in West Africa, Burkina Faso has set up cooperation deals with Venezuela and Cuba, resurrecting committees for the defence of the revolution to defeat counter-revolutionary terrorism, which the late revolutionary socialist leader Thomas Sankara modelled on Cuba’s example. Cuba and Venezuela are playing an important role in regional cooperation initiatives and global south-south coordination, from participation in BRICS to the regional development of ALBA – the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas. They have led calls to prosecute Israel for war crimes, sent aid to Gaza and Lebanon and trained their doctors and their leaders have led demonstrations through the streets in solidarity with Palestine.
We know which side we are on. We must have socialism. Hasta la Victoria siempre! Venceremos!
Sam McGill
* The political scientist Francis Fukuyama argued that with the fall of the USSR, humanity had reached ‘not just … the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.’
This is an edited version of the speech given by Sam McGill on Sunday 20 October. All speeches from the day will be published on our website at revolutionarycommunist.org
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 303 December 2024 /January 2025
– Fight racism! Fight imperialism! Fight for socialism! – RCG National weekend
– Communists and anti-imperialists on the march in London
