As US imperialism mobilises to crush the Cuban revolution, self-proclaimed socialists in Britain pile in, spreading lies about Cuba which echo those peddled by Miami counterrevolutionaries. Foremost amongst them is the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), which has sought the destruction of the socialist Cuban state for decades. Its arguments may be dressed in socialist, even Marxist language, but they are always expressions of the most reactionary pro-imperialist opinion.
In building up for military intervention, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has repeated baseless claims that Cuban state companies are ‘stealing’ resources from the population and that state revenues do not benefit ordinary Cubans. Socialist Worker editor, Tomas Tengely-Evans, echoes Rubio, claiming that ‘Cuba’s current president, Miguel Diaz-Canel, has imposed austerity while the state capitalist bureaucrats live in mansions’. Then, branding Cuba as ‘state-capitalist’ he says ‘Socialist Worker supports class struggle against the state capitalist bureaucracy – and workers overthrowing it’ (24 May 2026). Rubio would approve.
Tengely-Evans repeats reactionary pro-imperialist opinion and presents it as established fact. He never asks himself how it is possible for a supposedly under-developed ‘capitalist’ society to establish free universal education to university level, create a health care system which enabled it to send health care brigades across the world for decades, and created world class pharmaceuticals.
What other under-developed country has remotely matched these achievements? Why would the supposed Cuban capitalist class not only undertake these reforms, but maintain them even during the depths of the Special Period in the 1990s when external factors lead to the economy contracting by a third? Every other ruling class across the world has prioritised health and education for cuts in periods of economic crisis, but not this Cuban ‘ruling class’. How can the Socialist Worker explain this? It cannot and it does not want to: it has a script of lies to peddle to its readers.
The US and Britain have always claimed that Cuba is a repressive society suppressing basic freedoms. So has the SWP, stating that after the Revolution, ‘Cuban society was marked by repression and the crushing of dissent’ (Socialist Worker, 16 July 2021). The imperialists have always belittled the impact of sanctions on ordinary Cuban people, claiming that the economic problems the island faces are primarily home-grown, a consequence of socialist organisation. So has the SWP, declaring that imperialist-stoked protests in Cuba in July 2021 were ‘a reaction to food shortages caused, in part [emphasis added] by US sanctions that intend to starve Cuba’ (16 July 2021). This deliberate ambiguity conceals an attack on the Cuban state within a token acknowledgement of the US blockade.
Tengely-Evans repeats this imperialist propaganda: ‘Today, the Cuban state can no longer guarantee people the basics of life. This is due to the tightening of the blockade imposed after 1959—but the actions of the state capitalist bureaucracy are to blame too.’ The Guardian is of a similar view: ‘The fact that Cubans enjoy neither freedom nor prosperity is less down to the US embargo than to decades of communist mismanagement that crushed economic initiative and freedom of expression, in the name of a lowest-common-denominator egalitarianism.’ (The Guardian, 29 May 2026)
FRFI is clear: every action of the Cuban state has been directed to preserving the gains of the revolution – a desperate struggle against the ever-tightening blockade, a blockade which the SWP has never opposed in practice.
Attempting to cover his tracks, Tengely-Evans declares at the end of his wretched article that ‘If the Cuban regime implodes amid unrest due to the oil shortage, there would be nothing progressive about its fall.’ But this is no more than an afterthought. Recall that the SWP cheered on the counterrevolution in the Soviet bloc in the 1980s-90s, even ghoulishly celebrating ‘the destruction of the statues of Marx and Lenin – those symbols of oppression for millions of workers’ (Socialist Worker 7 September 1991).
FRFI has full confidence in the ability of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) to lead the Cuban people in its resistance to the current genocidal onslaught. Its record of standing against imperialism has been exemplary. The cowardly reactionaries of the SWP have no such legacy. In fact, quite the opposite: throughout the decades of opposing and vilifying both the PCC and the Cuban revolution, it has given electoral support to the overtly capitalist, imperialist, racist Labour Party, promoted left Labour leaders and never led a single struggle against British imperialism.
With its willingness to echo the lies of US imperialism and the Guardian apologists for British imperialism, the SWP demonstrates the vileness of its reactionary politics.
Victory to the Cuban revolution!
