British ‘left’ shores up imperialist attack on Cuba
The defence of Cuba is a line in the sand for anyone, anywhere, with any pretensions at progressive credentials. At the most desperate moment in the revolution’s 67-year-history, where the survival of the world’s leading example of socialism is at stake, there is an urgent need for a mass international campaign to fight back against imperialist attacks and build a movement on the streets that stands squarely with the Cuban people and their communist leadership. Instead, we have seen the revolution left isolated, forced to find ways of mitigating the impact of a devastating imperialist blockade on the working class. The BRICS countries, including Russia, China and Brazil, touted by so many on the left as representing some kind of ‘multipolar’ resistance to imperialist hegemony, have stood aside or remained passive in the face of US aggression when it mattered, failing to provide any kind of meaningful political or material support.
Meanwhile in Britain, not only has there been no response on the streets from the self-styled ‘official’ Cuba Solidarity Campaign and its allies in the trade union movement and labour left, but even more shamefully what we are witnessing is the abject retreat from international class politics by the majority of the British left. They have used the crisis facing Cuba as an opportunity to amplify their long-standing reactionary positions on the nature of the revolution, using weasel words and fake concern for ‘the Cuban people’ in order to attack the country’s communist leadership and the nature of the socialist state itself.
The Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) are old hands at this. They have always attacked the Cuban Revolution as ‘a state capitalist society whose priorities are shaped by capital accumulation’ and have called on ‘the workers’ to destroy it – attempting to drive a wedge between the Cuban working class and its representatives in the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) and going as far as to support the anti-government protests that took place on the streets of Havana in July 2021. This summer, at the SWP’s Marxism Festival, the organisation devoted an entire session to arguing that Cuba is not socialist, accusing President Miguel Díaz-Canel of ‘imposing austerity’ with barely a mention of the US blockade and the desperate conditions imposed on the Cuban economy. But it had no answer for RCG comrades who countered their spiteful, anecdotal and abstract attacks on Cuba with hard facts about the nature of Cuban socialism and the imperialist onslaught, and denounced the hypocrisy of the SWP which can arrogantly grandstand on the failings of the Communist Party in Cuba while abjectly capitulating to the interests of the racist, pro-Zionist and anti-working class Labour Party in Britain.
The Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) is equally forthright in its attacks on the PCC, with its leading writer on Cuba and Latin America, Jorge Martin, accusing the party of attempting to ‘water down the system’ so that a ‘nationalist capitalism’ is created (The Communist, republished 14 April). Martin shared the classic opportunist playbook of trying to separate Cuba’s communist leadership from the masses, implying that a sinister – and of course ‘Stalinist’ –bureaucracy is at work to suppress critical thought, completely ignoring the reality of Cuba’s vibrant participatory democracy. This sleight of hand deliberately glosses over the fact that every state needs an apparatus, the question is whose interests does it serve, what opposition does it need to suppress? Martin ignores the facts of state power – that the PCC represents the will of the working class and the need to organise against imperialist-backed opposition, sabotage and the chokehold of the blockade. Meanwhile it carries out its functions in the interests of the masses – ensuring the provision of food, health, education and housing in the most straitened of circumstances.
With typical arrogance, Martin somehow blames Cuba for not leading a ‘world revolution’ while downplaying and critiquing the exemplary internationalist solidarity shown by Cuba across the world and particularly in Venezuela. The RCP turns reality on its head – blaming Cuba for the lack of an international solidarity movement that the petit bourgeois left has itself failed to build. After all this, Martin has the barefaced temerity to post ‘the RCP stands unconditionally with Cuba’ in response to criticism of RCP member Fiona Lali; Lali had failed to express any support for Cuba during a self-serving trip to Havana to promote a film of her own ill-fated election campaign in Britain in 2024… as if the RCP had anything to teach the Cubans about winning state power.
Meanwhile The Spartacist has gone as far as to join the imperialists in calling for the Cuban people to bring down their government. In an open letter published on their website they call on socialists to unite in an anti-imperialist campaign to oppose – wait for it – not the barbaric onslaught of US imperialist on Cuba and its constant, failed attempts to foment popular opposition – but ‘the disastrous course of the PCC leadership’ and stand united with some illusory ‘working class’ opposition to ‘the counter-revolutionary danger’ – in reality a tiny, fragmented, self-serving and CIA-funded opposition. And they dare to describe this as a ‘socialist alternative’! Where is the call for anti-imperialist unity in defence of socialism? The RCG has rightly denounced this initiative as crossing class lines in doing the imperialists’ dirty work for them.
We have always said the defence of Cuba is a litmus test for socialists. Time after time, it is one the majority of the British left has failed, parroting the arguments of the bourgeois press and performing semantic contortions to justify counter-revolutionary positions. These organisations, however much they profess to ‘support Cuba’, are false friends to Cuba, false friends to the international working class and false friends to socialism.
Ellie O’Hara
