Now-more than ever-Cuba needs defense of its revolution

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The Feb. 25 defeat of the Sandinistas in the Nicaraguan elections is a brutal blow to the Cuban Revolution.

Spokespersons for U.S. imperialism— Democrats and Republicans alike-are all openly bragging that Cuba will be the next "domino" to fall.

As Julie Sommer states in her letter [see box], the Cuban Revolution is in mortal danger today. Socialist Action agrees 100 percent with her call for making the defense of the Cuban Revolution against imperialism and Stalinism a major campaign.

No revolution is more hated—and feared— by the U.S. capitalist class than the Cuban Revolution—which 30 years ago established a workers' state just 90 miles off the coast of Florida.

As Castro often points out, Cuba was the last colony to win independence from Spain, but the first to win independence from U.S. imperialist domination in the Western hemisphere.

But U.S. imperialism has not abandoned its goal of overthrowing the gains of the Cuban Revolution. Lately, military threats and provocations against the Cubans have been escalated.

On Dec. 7, 1989—two weeks before the U.S. invasion of Panama-shots were fired from the U.S. Navy's Guantanamo Bay base at two Cuban sentry posts (fortunately, no one was killed). In early January, the battleship U.S.S. Wisconsin was dispatched to the base, located on the eastern coast of Cuba, as aircraft carriers steamed nearby.

On Jan. 31, the U.S. Coast Guard fired on a Cuban merchant ship in international waters under the pretext of searching for drugs. And in March, TV Marti, based in Miami, began broadcasting its propaganda of lies and distortions—a clear violation of Cuba's sovereignty over its own air waves.

This is certainly not a new situation for Cuba. The Cuban Revolution has faced off and beaten back numerous threats to its existence in the past-the 1961 CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion, the 1962 Cuban "missile crisis," a 30-year-long U.S. economic embargo, and an atmosphere of constant U.S. sabre-rattling punctuated by the October 1983 invasion of Grenada and the December 1989 invasion of Panama.

But today, the U.S. offensive against the Cuban Revolution has a new and powerful ally—the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Gorbachev pressures the Cubans One ominous outcome of the BushGorbachev "accords" at the Malta summit meeting last December was the agreement of the Soviet bureaucracy to put pressure on the unsubmissive Cubans.

This is because Castro and the Cuban leadership have continued supporting the freedom fighters in El Salvador and strongly oppose Gorbachev's perestroika "reforms" in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev, on the other hand, is committed to help U.S. imperialism resolve "regional conflicts," which means ensuring capitalist stability in Central America.

Unfortunately, the Soviet bureaucracy, ever-eager to carry out its part of the BushGorbachev "accords," is in a strategic position to economically blackmail Cuba. And Cuba is already feeling the squeeze.

Pay in hard currency At the Jan. 10, 1990, meeting of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) in Sofia, Bulgaria, a majority of delegates favored a move toward instituting a trade system based on the capitalist market system, using hard currency as a means of exchange.

[COMECON is an economic union of Bulgaria, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Mongolia, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam.] Such a move would have a severe effect on the economy of Cuba (as well as Mongolia and Vietnam). In the past, trade was coordinated among COMECON counIN! dramatic speech at the closing session of the 16th Congress of the Central Organization of Cuban Trade Unions, held in Havana on Jan. 28, Castro laid out the challenges-and the stakes involved.

"We hope that in 1990," Castro explained to the thousands of assembled trade-union delegates, "some of the trade agreements will still be honored, signed by virtue of earlier plans. But we don't have any certainty that this will be so, nor can we have any....

'This is as far as 1990 is concerned. What about 1991? Can you imagine the 19911995 five-year plan? On what basis, with whom are we going to sign those plans? What products can be guaranteed; what markets will there be for our products?"

Castro realizes that the future is fraught with danger and uncertainty. He told the union delegates that the government is planning for all eventualities, for what he called "a special period in peacetime" or, in the case of a U.S. blockade, "a special period in time of war."

"What does a special period in peacetime mean?" Castro asked. "It means that because of our relations with the Eastern European countries or because of certain processes or factors in the Soviet Union, we would have such grave economic problems that we would be faced with an extremely serious lack of supplies.

"Keep in mind that all our fuel comes from the Soviet Union. And it might be reduced by a third or a half because of problems in the USSR. Or it could be cut completely, which would be equivalent to the situation we call a special period in time of Furthermore, Castro stressed that Cuba will increasingly have to depend on its internal resources to face the problems ahead.

"We don't even know what problems may confront us in 1990. We're trying to anticipate them, but some things are beyond our control, out of our hands.

"Looking a little farther ahead, nobody knows what problems may develop after 1990, yet we must be resolutely determined to confront whatever they may be.

"The food programs musn't be halted; they are strategic. We're also working to promote water conservation, find new sources of water, dig canals, and create irrigation systems. And this shouldn't be halted, no matter what."

War for survival

Revolutionary Cuba, its back to the wall, is now waging a fight for its survival on three interconnected fronts: military, economic, and political (ideological).

On the military front, it faces the colossus of U.S. imperialism. Here the Cuban Revolution is probably strongest. The whole population is armed; and should the United States attempt an invasion they'll be confronted with 10 million heavily armed and trained workers and peasants.

"We have organized the country in defense zones," Castro stated in his Jan. 28 speech. "Men, women, and children—young and old—are organized. The whole country is organized to make the price of aggression too high for the aggressors to pay; to do them so much damage and cause them so many casualties that they will be forced to withdraw. It will take as many U.s. troops as it did to invade Panama to hold onto just one Cuban province."

On the economic front, however, Cuba is vulnerable. And the goal of U.S. imperialism, with Gorbachev's decisive assistance, is to slowly starve the Cubans into submission.

But the Cuban Revolution has a decisive political and economic advantage that the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, unfortunately, consciously rejected.

The Cubans carried their revolution to its logical end by expropriating the property of the capitalists and big landowners and established the dictatorship of the proletariat in 1961. The basic conquests of the revolution—a planned economy, monopoly of foreign trade, and nationalization of industry— (continued on page 12)

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