For some time, the SWP leadership has been struggling to maintain its increasingly reactionary stance on Cuba. However, on 13 January 2007, Socialist Worker published a debate article by Diana Raby of the Institute of Latin American Studies at Liverpool University. Raby is also the author of Democracy and Revolution: Latin America and socialism (Pluto Press 2006). Possibly for the first time ever, the pages of Socialist Worker entertained the idea that Cuba might be a leading revolutionary force and, as Raby says in her book, ‘a beacon of hope’.
The article examines the role played by Cuba as a model for Venezuela and Bolivia, with a government based on the working class and popular movements, constructing an ‘alternative social and economic order’. Raby clearly understands the role of the 26 July Movement grouped around Fidel Castro and the dynamic between the pressure of the mass movement and Castro’s own revolutionary leadership. Like Chavez, she writes, he ‘gives voice’ to the ‘aspirations of the masses’. She ends her article with a call to ‘overcome yesterday’s sectarian divisions and sterile debates and unite to support it’ [revolutionary Latin America]’.
If only. The immediate response in Socialist Worker was a spate of opportunist SWP apparatchiks clumsily parroting the leadership line: ‘Cuba is not a socialist country. It is a dictatorship run by Castro and his party’ writes one. Far from inspiring Bolivia and Venezuela, Cuba is ‘restraining other struggles in the region’. ‘Raby is wrong to imply that socialism exists or is being created in Cuba’, another tells us. Raby is accused of promoting charismatic leaders and ‘socialism from above’ at the expense of the ‘mass activity of working people in transforming their daily lives’. A week later, the heavy artillery weighed in with a full-page article by Chris Harman, trashing the idea of Cuba as a revolutionary model for Latin America.
‘Today, despite talk of socialism, Cuba is marked by enormous disparities of wealth and income…supporters of the Cuban model might try to use the movement from below to establish state control of industry and control of the state by a single party. But they would stop the movement in its tracks if the mass of the people took decisions into their own hands’ (Socialist Worker, 27 January 2007). As the people of Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia get on with the real business of creating revolutionary change, the SWP remains mired in sectarianism.
FRFI 195 February / March 2007
