The Cuban revolution is one of the greatest examples of a people who seized power, overthrew capitalist rule and built socialism despite unrelenting imperialist aggression. Since 1959, Cuba has survived invasion, sabotage, terrorism, assassination plots and the longest economic blockade in history. Yet the Cuban people refuse to surrender, defending their sovereignty and the social gains of the revolution, including universal healthcare, education and planning for human need.
The RCG’s solidarity with Cuba is rooted in these achievements. The revolution destroyed a capitalist state imposed by colonialism and sustained by US imperialism. Through expropriation, nationalisation and land redistribution, Cuba directed resources away from private profit towards social need, transforming the class character of the state itself. The dictatorship of the proletariat established a workers’ state based on the power and participation of the working-class masses, ending comprador rule.
The 1961 literacy campaign eradicated illiteracy within two years, while healthcare and education became universal rights and housing, culture and sport were developed as social priorities rather than commodities. A poor country under constant imperialist attack, Cuba has built one of the world’s best healthcare systems, trained tens of thousands of doctors and sent medical brigades around the globe. Cuba proves that an oppressed nation can not only defeat imperialism, it can deliver social advances unseen anywhere else. Cuba has stood alongside liberation struggles in Southern Africa, helping defeat apartheid and colonial rule. While the world has stood by, Cuba has materially and politically supported the Palestinian liberation struggle.
In 1915, Rosa Luxemburg argued that humanity faced a choice between socialism and barbarism. Cuba makes that choice clear. Tightening the blockade, US imperialism has deliberately created shortages of fuel, food and medicine to force political surrender. The hardships endured by the Cuban people are a calculated product of imperialist barbarism: the collective punishment of an entire people for daring to build socialism.
Led by the Communist Party of Cuba, the Cuban people refuse to abandon the gains achieved by generations of workers’ struggle. Their determination to defend the revolution under the most difficult of conditions is not a struggle fought for Cuba alone. The oppressed masses of the world look to Cuba as proof that another world is possible. In Fidel’s words, ‘Humanity can learn from those who have broken their chains. Those who have chained humanity for centuries cannot teach humanity anything’. At the centenary of his birth, Fidel’s words continue to exemplify the unwavering revolutionary spirit which animates the Cuban people.
Yet at precisely the moment Cuba most needs international solidarity, the majority of the British left has chosen to join the chorus against it. Under the thinnest of revolutionary glosses, they attack the Communist Party, condemn the defence of socialism under siege as ‘capitalist restoration’ and repeat imperialist propaganda. They have not organised on the streets against the blockade or done anything in solidarity with Cuba’s right to self-determination. Their role has been to isolate the Cuban revolution under attack and lend credibility to the forces they claim to oppose.
Their suggestion that Cuba’s central contradiction is between its people and its revolutionary leadership is immediately disproved by Cuba’s vibrant and popular democracy, which puts power directly in working-class hands. The principal contradiction is between the Cuban revolution and imperialism. Every attempt to separate the Cuban people from the Communist Party and the Cuban state serves the strategic objectives of imperialism. Communists must stand unequivocally with the Cuban people and the Communist Party that has defended socialism for 67 years.
The task for communists is to build solidarity, defend Cuba’s sovereignty and stand with those fighting for socialism in practice. Our position is clear: we stand with the Cuban revolution because we stand with the struggle against imperialism. To abandon Cuba under attack is to abandon the principles of internationalism and the struggle for socialism itself.
