Cuba today faces an unprecedented level of imperialist threats and aggression. The US blockade has now extended to prevent the import of any oil from abroad. US Attorney General Todd Blanche has issued a warrant indicting Raúl Castro for ‘conspiracy to kill US nationals’ for the downing of planes operated by Miami counterrevolutionaries 30 years ago. The Trump administration is clearly preparing to launch some form of military operation against the island and attempt to destroy Cuban socialism. This is the time for socialists and anti-imperialists to escalate the campaign to defend the achievements of the Cuban revolution, and to stand fully with its socialist character.
Yet the SWP is determined to prevent anything like this happening. At a public meeting on 10 June in Liverpool entitled ‘Why is Trump attacking Cuba?’, SWP Central Committee member Hector Sierra spent virtually his entire speech vilifying the Cuban revolution. There was scarcely a word about US aggression – he dealt with it in a few asides, dismissing several times the illegal, genocidal US blockade as no more than an ‘embargo’, the favoured technique of those who want to blame Cuba’s desperate situation as the responsibility of the Cuban government.
Throughout his speech, Sierra treated US aggression as incidental, because his purpose was not to stand against US imperialism but to rip Cuban socialism apart. He found no room to speak about the achievements of the revolution, dismissively claiming that Cuba only ‘adopted’ socialism to curry favour with the Soviet Union, and any achievements since then were down to Soviet (of course, ‘Stalinist’) support.
Lies about homophobia and racism
Sierra got into his reactionary stride with a claim that Cuba has a long history of oppression against black people, women, and LGBT people – and that this ‘still exists today’. He did not offer any evidence for such a statement and censored the role Cuba’s National Centre for Sex Education played in organising the passage of a Family Code which allows for same-sex marriage, or the ground-breaking all-round support for those seeking to transition. Meanwhile, 55% of National Assembly deputies are women, as are 55% of Municipal Assembly deputies; 47% of Municipal deputies are also black or mixed race. But the SWP has such chauvinist contempt for Cuba that it could never bring itself to cite any statistics produced by the Cubans themselves.
Following the reactionary Cuban Mafia exiles, Sierra talked of the ‘Cuban ruling class’ – to the titters of SWP members in attendance. Cuba was never socialist he claimed; it was always ‘state capitalist’. The origin of this concept lies in the 1940s with those who would decades later form the leadership of the SWP. It never had anything to do with Marxism: applied to the Soviet Union, the purpose of such a notion was to curry favour with the Labour Party left who at the time were bitterly hostile to the Soviet Union. Fawning over the Labour Party was already second nature to these people! Even today the SWP spares no effort in building support for a racist, imperialist, genocidal and war-mongering party – hence it is sending members to Makerfield to campaign for Labour candidate Andy Burnham against Reform UK (see below).
Lies about a Cuban ‘ruling class’
There was no end to it. Sierra declared that the response of the ‘Cuban ruling class’ to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Special Period, was to introduce ‘neo-liberalism’ and attack the Cuba working class. ‘Neo-liberalism’ is in part a financial policy that imperialism imposes on under-developed countries to force them to cut and privatise already inadequate health care and education. Sierra offered no evidence for this – it was just idle slander. He then claimed that Raul Castro was justifying such ‘neo-liberalism’ when Castro according to Sierra said ‘Socialism is not about equality, but about equality of opportunity’. He did not date this – it was from 2008. Sierra then said that this sentiment was not too dissimilar from the likes of Blair or Starmer. But of course it was sleight of hand; Castro in fact said ‘socialism means social justice and equality but equality, equality of rights and opportunities, not salaries. Equality does not mean egalitarianism.’
What Sierra also neglected was the context of Raul’s speech – which was about maintaining social gains while improving productivity, a precondition for preserving and developing socialism. In the same speech Castro pointed to the extraordinary gains for older people the Revolution had brought ‘where geriatric life expectancy – in other words, how long one lives after 60, which at present is 20.8 years for men, the 8th place in the world with United States in 10th place. For Cuban women, the geriatric life expectancy is 23.4 years, 16th place on the planet and ahead of countries such as the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Norway.’ These are astonishing achievements in an underdeveloped country subject to an imperialist blockade – but of no consequence to the bourgeois Sierra.
Sierra concluded by elevating the 2021 protests in Cuba to the level of a ‘working class uprising’ and saying that unlike other Marxists, the SWP does not view them as a CIA-backed attempt at intervention. But Sierra ignores the facts when they are inconvenient – for instance, the fact that the Cuban leadership acknowledged the seriousness of the issues that the protestors were demonstrating over and did not claim that the CIA had instigated them. That they were fanned by Miami counter-revolutionaries who certainly wanted to make an uprising out of them is a fact. What Sierra prefers are precisely those Miami Mafia conspiracy theories because he is determined to see the destruction of Cuban socialism.
Socialism and the gains of the Revolution
As ever with the SWP, there was the canard: there was no socialist revolution in Cuba because the working class was never involved. Clearly from Sierra’s reactionary perspective it is vital to ‘disprove’ any historic existence of Cuban socialism because if there had been, there would also had to have been a violent counter-revolution to replace socialism with his mythical Cuban capitalist class. Obviously there was no such violent uprising. But then we have this astonishing peculiarity of a capitalist state which a revolutionary bourgeoisie created – by overthrowing the yoke of neo-colonialism and with it a terrible legacy of underdevelopment, and managing to:
- Abolish illiteracy across the island within a year;
- Set up a universal health service free at the point of use and maintained it throughout the supposed Special Period of neo-liberalism;
- Even more, set up and guaranteed universal free education to university level;
- Provide conditions in which women flourished to the extent that they make up 60% of university-qualified technical professionals;
- Send hundreds of thousands of healthcare professionals on brigades to serve populations across the poorest countries in the world;
- Establish a biomedical industry which created vaccines among which was one that stopped mother-baby AIDS transmission and five for COVID. This was unprecedented for an underdeveloped country;
- Despatching tens of thousands of troops to defend revolutionary Angola against apartheid South Africa and then were central to Namibian liberation;
- In the supposed depths of ‘neo-liberalism’, implement the most progressive Family Code which embraces trans liberation.
How does one explain all this if one starts from a concept of a ruthless, brutal and racist capitalist class ruling Cuba? Some conspiracy involving the Soviet Union? It is patent nonsense.
SWP and US imperialism both want to destroy Cuban socialism
It may be beyond absurdity, but Sierra thinks and speaks like an arrogant bourgeois Guardian journalist and so can justify anything, and in particular, deceive his audience that his desire to destroy Cuban socialism is totally different from the aim of US imperialism – even though that is also to destroy Cuban socialism. That he does so by blaming the Cuban government for its current situation because all it has faced is a US ‘embargo’ makes his position all the more reprehensible. So, let us be quite clear: Sierra and the rest of the SWP leadership are serving as willing accomplices of US imperialism and no amount of dissembling about workers’ uprisings can change this fact.
After Sierra’s speech a comrade from the RCG intervened to defend Cuba against Sierra’s lies, stating that Sierra’s attack on Cuba served the interests of imperialism. The response from an SWP member was that ‘we can have unconditional but critical support’ for Cuba, a complete dishonesty. The SWP has never supported Cuba, it has never organised a single event against the blockade or participated in such an event. It is not ‘critical’ of Cuba, it is utterly condemnatory, and it teaches its members to be the same. Another SWP member said that ‘We want Cuban trade unions to take back power from the neo-liberal Cuban state’ as if he knew anything about the position of trade unions within a socialist state let alone whether they are organs of state power. Another showed their ignorance by adding that Cuba cannot be socialist because ‘Cuban workers don’t control the factories, the managers do’, seemingly without recognising that factories employ only a small fraction of Cuban workers – far more work in health, education, governmental and research facilities. It showed how much rubbish about Cuba is stuffed into brains of SWP members. In assessing their supposed right to offer ‘critical support’ to Cuba we need to remember that the Cubans have defied imperialism for nearly 70 years, whereas the SWP have achieved nothing.
Sycophantic support for Labour and Burnham
This naked chauvinism towards Cuban socialism should be enough for any self-respecting socialist to have the deepest contempt for the SWP. But there was even more when at the end of the meeting, the local chair declared without a shred of embarrassment that the SWP would be campaigning for Andy Burnham in the forthcoming nearby Makerfield by-election on 18 June to ‘stop Reform’. Such support was always implicit given that the SWP-run Stand up to Racism is calling on residents to ‘vote to stop Reform’ but has avoided giving any open support to the one candidate who could defeat Reform – Burnham. Now the SWP are urging voters to vote for a Labour candidate who:
- Makes a deliberate point of refusing to describe the genocide of the Palestinian people as what it is – a genocide;
- Fully supports the brutal migration proposals and actions of the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, but also wants to expand the use and number of detention centres. He agrees with Reform leader Nigel Farage that the country needs to ‘get back to a sense of order’;
- Supports the Labour government’s fiscal rules which are driving a new round of austerity but wants an exception to be found for defence spending.
The ruling class supports Burnham since he could restore the credibility of the Labour government, and that is important now because it does not yet want to run the risk of allowing Reform to form a government. But this does not matter to the SWP, nor that Burnham wants to screw migrants even harder and make life even more intolerable for asylum seekers and refugees. Reform terrifies the SWP not because of what it could do to refugees – it actually cannot do anything because it is not in government. No, the SWP is terrified first and foremost for themselves and their class of privileged workers. Never mind that supporting Burnham makes a mockery of their slogan ‘refugees are welcome here’ as they are desperate to support a candidate who wants to make refugees even less welcome than they are now. It shows that in the end they prefer to vote for a racist candidate and a racist party than to fight state racism. Their hatred for Cuban socialism is at one with their desperate need to cling on to the coat tails of the Labour Party. How can members of the SWP justify their organisation’s defence of the interests of the ruling class?
