Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism No. 89, September 1989
CUBA – VANGUARD IN DEFENCE OF REVOLUTION
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! has consistently focused upon the achievements of the Cuban revolution, and the contributions of its leader Fidel Castro. We do this because Cuba and Castro provide the clearest expression of revolutionary principles in practice. Furthermore, Fidel Castro’s intervention in the global debate about socialism is the most creative and thorough defence of Marxism-Leninism in the midst of barely disguised liberalism and revisionism everywhere. For this Castro and Cuba are vilified in the bourgeois press. Imperialism knows what it is doing: for 30 years it has sought to destroy the Cuban revolution.
In these selections from Fidel Castro’s speech made on 26 July, the 36th anniversary of the attack on Moncada Garrison, he discusses developments in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and how they affect Cuba. One of these consequences is the increased confidence of imperialism and its mounting belligerence against Cuba. This is illustrated by the US government’s response to Cuban offers of cooperation against the drug trade. Another consequence is the dissemination of anti-Marxist, anti-Cuban propaganda within the socialist countries themselves. These selections from the Cuban weekly newspaper Granma show the Cuban communists fighting back against those who would peddle imperialism’s message from within the socialist camp.
Marxism/Leninism and the socialist system itself are under attack both from within and without the socialist countries. Capitalism’s millionaire class and its ideologues can barely contain their glee. Instead of proletarian internationalism we see narrow national self-interest and racism threatening to tear the Soviet Union apart. The leading role of the party is surrendered in Poland and looks like going the same way in Hungary. Instead of the dictatorship of the proletariat, Communist officials praise the virtues of Western-style pluralist democracy. Rather than the pursuit of centralised planning, socialist states have recourse to the marketplace. Instead of voluntary labour, bonus systems and profit incentives flourish. The spirit of collectivism and socialist morality are reserved for special occasions, while capitalism’s consumer culture holds youth enthralled as crime steadily rises. The struggle for women’s equality gives way to part-time work and the ‘virtues’ of domestic labour. TREVOR RAYNE examines the crisis.
When Marx and Engels announced the principles of communism the bourgeoisie filled with hatred and bile. These principles guided the oppressed to their first great victory in 1917 and have reshaped the planet ever since. No wonder the millionaires are in ecstasy at the idea that their mortal foe is in trouble. But Marxism/Leninism is a science at the service of the victims of capital. For as long as capitalism exists so will its victims, and there is no other way for them to go other than to their ruin or to socialism. Marxism/Leninism provides the means to understand the problems that are afflicting the socialist countries, and to solve them.
Much of the British left claims that we are dealing with ‘Stalinism’ and its legacy in the socialist movement. This ahistorical and Eurocentric approach explains nothing. Its adherents blindly applaud every opposition to socialism from Solidarnosc to the Beijing students regardless of their programmes or class bases. No effort is made to understand the social relations of production in socialist societies, and no notice is paid whatsoever to the impact of imperialism upon the socialist states (see Socialist Worker, Militant, The Next Step, Seven Days etc.) It is the very feebleness of the Socialist movement in the imperialist nations that increases the problems for the working classes of the socialist countries.
Imperialism, with its higher productivity and huge exploitation of the Third World, has maintained constant pressure on the socialist countries since their formation. Economic underdevelopment has exacerbated their problems, particularly in agriculture, and made socialist development and planning difficult. In order to try and raise output several socialist countries have resorted to ‘market socialism’: Hungary, Poland and China for longer than the other socialist states. This process resembles the New Economic Policy introduced in the Soviet Union in 1921. Lenin understood that with its free markets, profit schemes and reliance on material incentives it was a retreat from socialism, forced upon it by dire circumstances, but necessary for future advance.
‘Imagine what would happen in the world if the socialist community were to disappear. This would mean… that the imperialist powers would set upon the Third World like wild beasts, they would divide up the oil, the natural resources, and the labour of billions; three-quarters of the world’s people would once again fall under colonialism.’
Lenin noted the favourable response NEP received from the Bolsheviks’ class enemies. He focussed upon a bourgeois exile publication Smena Vekh which supported Soviet power implementing NEP because it saw it as leading towards a bourgeois state. ‘This is very useful…’ remarked Lenin ‘It is much better for us if the Smena Vekh people write in that strain than if some of them pretend to be almost communists… We must say frankly that such candid enemies are useful. We must say frankly that the ‘things Ustryalov speaks about are possible. History knows all sorts of metamorphoses’. Lenin pointed out that Smena Vekh’s views were shared by thousands of Soviet employees who implemented NEP. People who were capitalists at heart could happily implement the Communists’ NEP line. ‘The fight against capitalist society has become a hundred times more fierce and perilous, because we are not always able to tell friends from enemies.’
When the Chinese People’s Daily announces that stock issuing companies are ‘precisely’ the form of common ownership envisaged by Marx (August 1986); when the Polish Communist Minister for Industry tells The Wall Street Journal that ‘There haven’t been communists in Poland for a long time. Nobody wants to hear about Marx and Lenin anymore’; when George Bush can exalt that Das Kapital has been removed from Budapest’s Karl Marx University compulsory reading list, real communists know that the danger envisaged by Lenin has been realised: the bourgeoisie has entered the Party.
Free markets now control 70% of domestic trade in Hungary, 50% in Poland and a large proportion of goods traded in China. The private sector has been expanding in all three countries. At the same time commercial banks are able to set their own interest rates and lend on a profitable basis in each of the three countries. Socialised property is giving way to private property, inherited wealth and stock markets. This is the basis for expanded capitalist accumulation. The bourgeois class that it generates has every interest in exploiting workers, selling on imperialist markets and using the profits made to import cheap capitalist commodities. This in itself does not mean that the socialist state is deformed or out of the control of the working class and peasantry. But, when Communist Party officials privatise state property and take private shares in the newly’ formed enterprises, as has happened in China, Hungary and Poland, then the Party is becoming an instrument of the bourgeoisie and not the working class.
Following in the wake of the emerging bourgeoisie are the socialist countries’ petit-bourgeois intelligentsia. They have found an ally in European social democracy, and like it they collude with the imperialists to expand their privileges. This section of socialist society has been the most eager to exploit the space opened up by Glasnost to promote the virtues of the market, pluralism, incorporation into the EEC etc.
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! knows that capitalism cannot solve the problems of the socialist countries. Imperialism has meant death for 25 million people killed in its wars against the oppressed nations since 1945. It has left 70 million children homeless on the streets of Latin America alone. In its heartlands racism, poverty, drug addiction and crime are running rife. It is like a muscular athlete whose legs are rotting with gangrene. When President Bush toured Poland and Hungary in July he went to cheer the aspiring capitalists on. They, like Bush himself in Central America, Southern Africa, Palestine, Afghanistan and South East Asia will only bring misery and death.
‘THERE ARE TWO KINDS OF COMMUNISTS’
‘Never has any government, not eve that of Reagan, been so arrogant, never has anyone given such arrogant speeches. In the face of difficulties in the socialist camp, but fundamentally in some socialist countries, the Bush administration has given speeches that take the premise that the socialist community is in decline, that socialism is in decline, that socialism will end up in the trash heap of history, which is precisely the place those brilliant creators of the socialist movement reserved for capitalism.
‘In the face of these difficulties which are evident and which everyone acknowledges which have existed and exist in Poland, the difficulties in socialism which have existed and exist in Hungary, Bush. organised a triumphal tour, a triumphal trip to these two countries in recent weeks. It’s clear that there are, difficulties there, and Bush didn’t go to those countries by chance. He went there to encourage the capitalist tendencies developing there and the political problems which have emerged there.
‘In light of these phenomena, are we perhaps witnessing peaceful transition from socialism to capitalism? This is possible; we’re not against it. We defend each country’s and each Party’s sacred right to independence.’ This is what we ask for all the people’ in the world, for the right of each country to construct socialism if it wants, which is something the United States tries to prevent by force of arms . . .
‘I believe many mistakes have been made that have created these problems. Sometimes I even wonder if it wouldn’t be better if the new generations born into socialist Poland and: Hungary didn’t take a little trip: through capitalism, so that they could get to know it: the egoism, brutality and inhumanity of capitalist society. This is a very delicate point, but these are my sincere reflections on these problems.’
The imperialists and their allies within the socialist countries know that it is Lenin and the legacy of the Bolshevik revolution which provide’ the major obstacle to restoring capitalism.
‘During his triumphal tour, it is said that a multitude greeted Bush in Gdansk, Poland. And according to news reports from the biggest US news agency there were many placards . . . that said, “The best Communist is a dead Communist!” You see how profoundly fascist, how clearly fascist, these placards in Gdansk were during Bush’s tour. ‘Of course, there are two kinds of Communists: Communists who let themselves be killed easily and Communists like us who don’t let themselves be killed easily!’ (Prolonged applause and shouts of “Fidel, Fidel, give the Yankees Hell!’)
‘The imperialist news agency wire stories gleefully relate that other placards said, ‘Lenin, Jaruzelski, murderers!’ I’m not going to defend Jaruzelski, I think he can defend himself. But what does it mean that in a country whose liberation from fascism cost the blood of a half a million Soviet soldiers, people call Lenin, the founder of the first socialist state; a murderer? Lenin, who opened the road to liberation for the peoples of the world, the founder of the first socialist state, whose revolution made possible the disappearance of colonialism. When more than 100 states gained their independence, more than 100 former colonies gained their independence. I’m leaving aside whatever political errors the Soviet Union may have committed in other times in relation to Poland: I’m referring only to the fact that half a million Soviets died fighting alongside Poles for the liberation of Poland. How repugnant ii is to use the term ‘murderer’ for Lenin, whose people achieved victory, liberated the world from fascism with the sacrifice of 20 million of their best sons and daughters. To call Lenin a murderer is really distressing.
‘Mr Bush has a policy of peace toward the big powers and of war toward the small progressive peoples. His policy is based on the premise that if socialism disintegrates the Cuban Revolution would disappear. This reasoning increases the aggressivity and hostility of. US imperialism toward our people, toward our Revolution, toward our country.’
‘This is the truth. For this reason we now see the empire more insolent than ever, more villainous than ever, more threatening than ever. `Imagine what would happen in the world if the socialist community were to disappear. This would mean, this were possible – and I don’t believe it is – that the imperialist powers would set upon the Third World like wild beasts, they would divide the world up all over again like in the worst days before the victory of the first proletarian revolution. They would divide up the oil, the natural resources, and the labour of billions of people; three-quarters of the world’s people would once again fall under colonialism…
`There are difficulties and the tension between nationalities in the Soviet Union is increasing. Internal tensions are also evident in the Soviet Union, and we’ve seen the strike of hundreds of thousands of coal miners in Siberia, in Donetsk and other places. These reports fill the reactionaries worldwide and the imperialists with joy. `The problems of the Soviet Union are of great concern to the Third World countries, the former colonies, whose peoples don’t wish to be recolonised, because the Soviet Union has been their fundamental and firmest ally.
‘At the sight of these problems, the imperialists start to dream of a 1000-year empire, like the one dreamed of by Adolf Hitler with his Third Reich. He thought it would last 1000 years, but actually it lasted very little time indeed. It’s possible that in the most reactionary sectors of imperialism these dreams are being repeated, and I’m sure that they won’t last long either…’
POISON FROM WITHIN THE SOCIALIST CAMP
The processes of glasnost and perestroika launched by President Gorbachev in the Soviet Union have created space which counter-revolutionaries have exploited. Such elements have no place in Cuba and their poison will not seep into the masses. The Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party recently cancelled the circulation in Cuba of Moscow News and the magazine Sputnik.
‘It is important to stress that we know how to differentiate between the official viewpoints of the Party and government of the USSR and the opinions of their leaders, on one hand, and the ideas of a columnist, a journalist or any other citizen who expresses himself in Soviet publications, on the other hand.
‘But what we have no doubt about is our rejection of articles published in Moscow News and Sputnik which give the impression that the USSR has been left without any history. In one article after another, in a seemingly interminable wave, the idea is reinforced that it is necessary to start making history from scratch, overcoming years of errors, crimes, unfortunate incidents and stupidity; that all that has happened before must be renounced in order to move forward, with new concepts that have not been ideologically compromised, along the path of economic development, imitating methods of developed capitalist countries, with all the related consequences.
‘They forget that only as a result of what has been accomplished in these years of Soviet power and in the light of the strategic parity that has been achieved, is it possible for the current process in that country to take place.
‘Those who are not fully aware of the USSR’s history will lament 70 years of lost time. Those who are not firmly convinced of the historical need for socialism and its potential could come to doubt its viability and even lose hope. Those who dream of its dismantling applaud these efforts and collaborate with them.
‘These publications deny history and make chaos of the present. Hiding behind the shield of an indispensable diversity of opinion, formulas are propagated that promote anarchy. Their analysis of the way to act and utilise the guiding principles of Marxism/Leninism in line with new historical conditions introduces elements which lead to its negation. The necessary search for new methods of economic management attempts to deny the political and ideological component of all economic policies and seems to ignore the fact that running a socialist economy consists of something more than techniques and mechanisms.
‘Of course there are two kinds of Communists: Communists who let themselves be killed easily and Communists like us who don’t let themselves be killed easily’
‘The pages of these publications reveal a defence of bourgeois democracy as the highest form of popular participation, as well as a fascination with the American way of life. Imperialism has disappeared. Those in the Soviet Union who deny the guiding role of the Party and demand a multiparty system, advocate the free market, exalt foreign investments, have rediscovered private property, and question internationalism and solidarity aid to other countries are presented in these publications as democrats, leftist radicals and defenders of the public interest. There is even space for those who advocate domestic servitude for women in these publications. There is no doubt about the subversion of these values. Their analysis of past and present realities gives way to unilateral attitudes. There were no enemies of Soviet power, only victims. Moscow News and Sputnik open the way for those who have begun to impugn Leninism and stand out for their offences to the memory of V.I. Lenin … . . . It would be practically absurd to try to persuade or convince a Cuban Communist that it is not his duty to defend the work of the October revolution against the shameful and nihilistic attitudes so often expressed in Moscow News and Sputnik.’ Unfortunately, it is not just the capitalist ruling class that hates Castro and the Cuban revolution: there are those who would masquerade as socialists who snipe at the Cuban example from within the Socialist camp. Granma points to a Hungarian publication Magyar Memzet and an article ‘The General and the drugs’ by Gabor Nagy. This article used only US and counter-revolutionary sources and was read out over the US Radio Marti. The author accuses Che Guevara and Salvador Allende of linking up to establish a drugs traffic into the USA. Further he slanders the 300,000 Cuban volunteers who served in Angola by claiming that they have returned with drug addictions and AIDS ‘to find an economy in ruins and incapable of offering a job to all of them.’
‘It matters little whether Nagy is a flesh and blood reporter or someone hiding behind a pseudonym with perverse intentions. The staunchest enemy of Cuba, in any US intelligence office, couldn’t have done better.
‘The beautiful, centuries old revolutionary traditions of the Cuban people cannot be tarnished by these epithets, lies and slander. If he tried to read his article to any group of Cuban workers, Gabor Nagy wouldn’t be able to finish. The people’s indignation would be too great. Nor would he be able to finish reading it to Hungarian workers, historical heirs to Kossuth, Bela Kun and the Hungarian internationalists who fought alongside the Spanish people in the 1936 Civil War. Hungarian revolutionaries would quickly discover its true counter-revolutionary essence.
‘People like Nagy are letting themselves be used in the worldwide campaign carried out by the current US administration against socialism. And we must also consider the possibility that individuals like Gabor Nagy feel somehow obliged to pay back the empire for the weak promises of economic aid made by President Bush in his recent visit to Hungary.
‘If this is the case, he is trading his principles for a lousy bowl of goulash. With “drugs” from this idea trafficker such as “The General and drugs”, Gabor Nagy can make ‘his own personal “revolution” and, for example, become the Budapest bureau chief for Radio Marti. `The Cuban people will not quietly tolerate attacks of this kind, which are particularly repugnant because they are published in a newspaper in the Hungarian People’s Republic. Furthermore, Magyar Nemzet is not a counter-revolutionary rag or a bulletin put out by the so-called informal or opposition groups. It is nothing less than the publication of the Patriotic People’s Front. ‘Cubans have been faced with slander from the common enemy for three decades. If crossfire breaks out now from other latitudes, the Cuban people will know how to deal with it.’
THE GLITTERING RUBBISH HEAP OF US CAPITALISM
The British press, like its US counterpart, has revelled in the Cuban drugs scandal. Almost without exception they have used it to try and stain the image and reputation of Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution. None will report the obvious: that Cuba has been the only country in the Americas to deal with the drug racket seriously and successfully, that the criminals were tried in public and given exemplary sentences, and that Cuba has offered the USA cooperation if it wants to wipe out the trade.
In an editorial Granma (13 August 1989) responds to the attitude taken by the Bush administration towards* Cuba during a series of committee meetings held in the US House of Representatives and Senate at the end of July. The US government threw every obstacle it could lay hands on to prevent Cuban-USA cooperation. Cuba, it should be remembered, is critically located on the route from the Latin American cocaine laboratories to the southern USA.
‘Attesting to the magnitude of the problem are these hair-raising figures: 760 million doses of cocaine – valued at over 91 billion dollars – are annually consumed in the United States. The 25 million marijuana smokers in the United States, in turn consume nine to ten million kilograms, valued at over 27 billion dollars a year.
‘Those nearly 120 billion dollars a year – without counting the traffic and sale of other drugs like crack, morphine; and heroin – would be enough, for example, to pay off all of Latin America’s foreign debt in less than four years.
‘Or they would be more than enough to give Latin American’s 46 million unemployed workers twice the continent’s average minimum wage.’
Granma makes the telling observation that while the US government knew of General Ochoa’s participation in the cocaine runs it did not inform the Cuban government.
‘The truth is that because they failed to cooperate with Cuba by providing that information, six tons of cocaine – the equivalent to four million doses were smuggled into US territory. Although this represents less than one percent of the United States’ annual cocaine consumption, some teenagers in the United States may have died on account of these drugs or crimes related to them. Some families may be now in mourning just because President George Bush’s administration did not permit its specialised agencies to cooperate with the Cuban government.
‘In contrast, not a single word was said at those hearings about the fact that when Cuba once learned, through its own intelligence, that there was an assassination attempt being planned against then President Reagan, it took Cuba less than 48 hours to inform the pertinent US authorities.’
US capitalism puts the war against communism before the war against drugs. We saw in the Contragate scandal how Colonel Oliver North and the White House would even peddle drugs if it meant damaging the Nicaraguan revolution. Nevertheless, no matter how brazen the US government’s crimes, no matter how redhanded it gets caught the Big Lie must still be told – often and loudly.
‘One of the people who testified at the hearings, Michael Kozak, deputy assistant secretary for inter-American affairs, alluded to this problem and said, ‘In fact, Cuba is not afraid of the United States’ threats but of its example.’
‘For 30 years we have done without that “example”. But when that “example” consists of the largest consumer of drugs in the world, the society of pornography and child prostitution, with the greatest concentration of AIDS patients in the world, die country with 70 million illiterates and functional illiterates who proliferate at the rate of two million a year, the society where you can buy a powerful firearm freely in a hardware store, a world where US statistics shows that by the time they are 16, adolescents have seen 200,000 acts of violence on television in that case, we have the right to legitimate defence to protect ourselves from that “example”. No one could question this act of defence by Cuba, no matter how much it annoys Mr. Kozak.’
Granma concludes that the scandalously lenient sentence given Oliver North, combined with the rejection of Cuban assistance in the drug war show that, ‘The Bush administration, like its predecessor in the White House, has behaved like a vulgar accomplice of its own rabble’ … ‘Our offer has been made with the usual seriousness which characterises the Cuban Revolution. It’s up to Washington to respond: either it accepts Cuban intentions as they are, treats Cuba on an equal footing and fulfils its obligations to its own people, or it can be swept away by the triumphal hallucinations which it believes are a proper part of its historical destiny, while US society acquires more and more the tragic splendour of Sodom and Gomorrah.’
