On 4-7 July the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) hosted its annual ‘Marxism – A Festival of Socialist Ideas’ in London. Featuring a range of speakers including Labour MPs, trade unionists, journalists and activists, the event sold 3,000 tickets according to the organisers. The SWP has long represented an opportunistic trend on the British left, consistently supporting the imperialist Labour Party in general elections, while criticising actual socialist revolutions, to ensure that no real working class opposition to British imperialism can materialise. The festival therefore always features a session dedicated to attacking socialist Cuba, openly aligning the SWP with the CIA. As communists in Britain, we recognise that defending Cuban socialism means countering the lies told about Cuba at the country’s largest regular ‘Marxist’ gathering. We last intervened at the 2022 Marxism Festival at a lecture called ‘Why Cuba is not socialist’, delivered by David Karvala, (see ‘SWP attacks Cuban socialism at Marxism 2022’ on our website).
This year’s session on 4 July 2024 was more cautiously titled ‘Is Cuba a model for socialism?’, delivered by Liam Winning of Edinburgh SWP. The same lies as always were regurgitated, with the central claim being that Cuba did not have an authentic socialist revolution because:
1. The leading revolutionaries ‘Che [Guevara] and Fidel [Castro] were middle-class’.
The background of individual revolutionaries is irrelevant – all that matters is the class interests for which the movement fights.
2. ‘They served middle-class interests and were isolated from the masses’, particularly from the urban proletariat.
The 26 July Movement was comprised of and supported by the urban proletariat and peasantry; the former participated in strikes called by the resistance, including the
general strike of 2-3 January 1959, which ended the US-backed Batista regime.
3. ‘Che and Fidel had no support from the trade unions.’
The Cuban trade unions were completely neutered under US neocolonialism: Eusebio Mujal, leader of the Cuban Workers Congress (CTC) until 1958, was a millionaire and rabid anti-communist, aligned with Batista’s government, and threatened workers who supported the strikes. The people built new organisations such as the United National Workers’ Front to drive imperialist influence out of the trade unions and reform the CTC.
Winning voiced support for the US-instigated violent anti-government protests in Cuba in July 2021, suggesting these were the fault of ‘an authoritarian government’ (that of Cuba, not the US) and had a black and LGBT character in opposition to ‘racism and transphobia in Cuba’. This repeated the distortions of the International Socialists’ counterrevolutionary handbook Cuba 11J, to which the SWP’s decidedly middle-class central committee member Alex Callinicos provided the foreword (see our review in FRFI 296).
In response to these attacks, a comrade who visited Cuba from December 2023 to January 2024, as part of the 15th RATB solidarity brigade, took the floor and refuted Winning’s lies about the Cuban revolutionary leadership. He also highlighted the immense achievements that the Cuban revolution has brought in empowering the democratic rights of LGBT people such as passing the Family Code in 2022, which involved country-wide explanatory sessions and local community debates, making Cuba one of the most progressive countries in the world for LGBT rights.
The collective gains of the revolution were only possible because of the socialist economic system. The SWP takes the side of British imperialism in the form of the Labour Party and allies itself with US and international imperialism when it chooses to condemn socialist Cuba in the midst of a punishing 62-year blockade. The only principled stance for socialists in Britain to take is to fight the imperialist blockade of Cuba and defend the example of Cuban socialism against these opportunists.
Cassius J Kalany
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 301 August/September 2024
