Out of Puerto Rico
1985 1985-02Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 13 →
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Fair Play for Cuba Committee demonstrates in front of United Nations during Missile Crisis in October 1962. WashingBut in Cuba we still have reason to be optimistic. The Cuban revolutionists of action have nothing to fear from mass mobilizations and the extension of socialist revolution.
Unlike the Stalinist bureaucracies in Eastern Europe and Asia, the Cuban leadership rules with the highest degree of consent and support from Cuban workers and peasants. They systematically mobilize their people by the millions in enthusiastic defense of the considerable material gains of the Cuban revolution.
Unfortunately, however, direct forms of workers' rule that would permit Cuban workers to decide domestic and international policy, have not yet been institutionalized in Cuba. Workers' democracy would be the best guarantee for advancing the Cuban and world socialist revolution.
While repression of worker dissidents is rare, the workers in Cuba still do not have the right to politically organize independently of the Cuban Communist Party-the only legal party there. Neither do they have the right to organize themselves into a tendency or current within the Cuban CP so as to be able to systematically put forward and argue for a point of view and policies that may be at variance with the official ones.
This right, including the right to elect and recall the delegates to the highest decision-making bodies of the state, is still denied the Cuban workers. This denial of institutionalized forms of workers' democratic control over all aspects of economic, political, and social life in Cuba is a serious shortcoming that weakens the Cuban revolution and the workers' state on which it rests.
Still, the Cuban bureaucracy has not hardened into a parasitic and privileged caste with a deadly fear of its own people, such as exists in the other workers' states.
The Cuban revolutionaries of action are in a rare historic position to give a major impetus to the concept of world socialist revolution such as was di one by the Bolsheviks at the time of the October revolution. The Bolsheviks saw their own revolution as both an end and a means to the higher goal of a worldwide proletarian victory over capitalism-the only final consolidation of their national victory.
In the words of Lenin, the Bolsheviks saw their victorious workers' state as the "advanced outpost of the world socialist revolution."
They understood that the workers' conquest over Russian territory must be subordinate to the extension of the revolution, particularly to the developed countries of the world.
The Communist International, under the leadership of Lenin and Trotsky, saw every advance of the world's workers as a victory for the Soviet state, and every defeat of the proletariat as a defeat for the Soviet Union.
The Communist International, whose traditions and principles still live in the Fourth International, fought to construct sections of the world party of the working class in every land, fighting to overthrow capitalism everywhere. This is the road that should also be followed by the Castroists in Cuba and Central America.
V FEBRUARY 1985