FRFI 156 August / September 2000
On 9 July RATB and the RCG attended the Socialist Worker’s Party’s badly misnamed event ‘Marxism 2000,’ in particular the session ‘Cuba and US imperialism.’ For me it was a real example of the complete corruption and opportunism of the bulk of the British left, illustrating how they are part of the problem rather than the solution and how important our work is.
The speaker, Mike Gonzalez of the SWP, railed against the socialist Cuban Revolution for not being socialist, or in his words being ‘state capitalist’, as he regurgitated all the old lies about gays and people with HIV being persecuted on the island. He came up with new ones as well: apparently President Fidel Castro has secret bank accounts containing money from cocaine trafficking, and the Revolutionary Armed Forces directly run the tourism and prostitution industry. The CIA would really be proud of Gonzalez since they have always known the value of leftists who are pro-imperialist, and the SWP is certainly more viciously anti-Cuban than even the capitalist media.
Cuba’s amazing health and education achievements were downplayed and dismissed as the product of Soviet aid in return for Cuban military defence of Soviet ‘capitalist’ interests around the world. That is how the SWP dismisses the Cuban intervention against apartheid South Africa’s invasion of Angola. We have to ask what the SWP’s beloved Labour left was doing while Cuban soldiers were really fighting apartheid, why their government was selling radar equipment to the South African army and why Tony Benn, the most beloved of them all, was invited to Marxism 2000 after illegally buying uranium from occupied Namibia.
Gonzalez did not explain exactly how the gains of the Revolution have been defended since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and how the island has actually reduced its infant mortality rate to 6.4 per thousand live births in the incredibly difficult conditions of the Special Period. What sort of ‘capitalist’ society could achieve this in Cuba’s position, a small poor country surrounded by imperialism? Meanwhile as one comrade passionately argued, in the rest of the Third World one child under five dies every second because of the poverty imposed by imperialist super-exploitation, and even in wealthy imperialist Britain infant mortality in poorer areas is almost twice that of Cuba.
For Gonzalez, Cuba is ‘not socialist’ because the SWP does not consider that the Cuban working class are in power. He ignores the island’s democratic system and denies the fact that elections take place. RATB/RCG comrades pointed out how disgustingly corrupt this was from a party that finds the racist and imperialist Labour Party plenty socialist enough to ask us to vote for it.
So why is it that Cuba is not good enough for the SWP but the Labour Party is? It has to be that behind all the talk of Cuba not being socialist enough, it is actually the SWP that is not socialist, in fact it is a social democratic party completely tied to Labour. Talk of socialism may be acceptable to social democracy, but when it comes to real socialism and anti-imperialist struggle it is a different matter.
When I first started reading FRFI I thought the RCG’s criticism of the SWP was just an unimportant inter-left squabble. Marxism 2000 and the SWP attitude towards Cuba showed how wrong that was, and how important the difference is, it is the difference between socialism and social democracy, anti-imperialism and apology for imperialism. For the child who dies every second it is a matter of life and death. To defend socialist Cuba, the SWP would have to be anti-imperialist and that would mean breaking with the Labour Party and trade union movement which together represent the interests of people whose privileges are bankrolled by British imperialism. That is something the SWP will not do, and is the reason they have to resort to all these lies to hide their imperialist-dependent social democracy.
Ed Ralph
CSC Fiesta: another year, another sectarian manoeuvre
Over the last four years, Rock around the Blockade has regularly held a stall at the Cuba Solidarity Campaign’s main annual event, the summer Fiesta in north London. Yet every time, at a festival that should be a celebration of unity in struggle to support socialist Cuba, the CSC always finds a way to attempt to circumscribe Rock around the Blockade’s work. This year was no exception. With barely a week to go, the CSC returned Rock around the Blockade’s stall booking form and cheque and told us that neither RATB, nor the Revolutionary Communist Group, would be offered a stall this year. When we challenged this blatant sectarianism, we were told the RCG could have a stall so long as we signed a hastily cobbled-together set of rules – never before seen by us or any other organisation that we’re aware of. These rules appear specifically designed to limit where we can distribute our leaflets, petition against the US blockade and sell our newspaper. All our material directly supports the Cuban Revolution, for example through the Boycott Bacardi campaign, which is widely supported in Britain and elsewhere. In May, a Rock around the Blockade brigade returned from Cuba after inaugurating the fourth sound system we have donated to the Union of Young Communists. Our work has won us nothing but praise and support from the Cubans – what is the CSC’s problem?
