The fact that Celia can now write freely about Trotsky and Trotskyism, and discuss many of the historical crimes of Stalinism appears to reflect a much more relaxed attitude from the Cuban CP leadership which is now freed from any shackles of Moscow control. John Lister When George Bush latched on to the illness of Fidel Castro, and the temporary handing of power in Cuba to Castro's brother Raul, as a pretext to urge "regime change" on the island, revived memories of a long and inglorious history of US intervention in the affairs of Latin American countries.
In no instance during more than a century of involvement has the USA sided with popular, democratic forces against
military dictatorship: instead, time and again, the US has dispatched troops or pulled strings to repress any movement that might unseat vicious, corrupt, but pro-US,
In the case of Cuba, the history of US intervention goes back to the end of the 19th century. In 1895 the US made a bid to buy the island. Three years later, alter defeating Spain in war, the US took over Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines - and American troops occupied Cuba for three years.
In that time they took the opportunity to alter the constitution with the 1901 Platt amendment, giving the US perpetual rights to intervene in Cuban affairs, and limiting "independent" Cuba's rights to deal with other countries.
Only when Cubans elected a president to the liking of Washington was the US military presence scaled down in 1902, but US Marines were back for three years from 1906 LO suDDress mols.
The country was run by a succession of brutal and dictatorial regimes, culminating in a coup in 1934 led by former sergeant Fulgencio Batista, whose blend of authoritarianism, violence and brazen corruption established him as the militarv strongman and dominant figure in Cuban politics for 25 years.
Batista was shrewd enough lo recognise lne polentlal benefits to him of legalising the (Stalinist) Communist Party in 1938 (then embroiled in the collaborationist politics of building "Popular Fronts" with so-called 'democratic' bourgeois formations) and trade unions in 1939, and was rewarded by CP endorsement of his election campaign in 1940. In 1942 two leading Stalinists took office as ministers in Batista's government.
But the other key prop to Batista's rule was the USA, and especially the financial groups which grabbed the chance for rich pickings from Cuban investment, and the US Mafia, which stepped up is overanons on woe islano with the arrival of top mobsters including the "Mafia's banker" Meyer Lansky who lived in Cuba from 1937 to 1940, establishing a growing empire of casinos and hotels.
When Batista handed over the presidency in 1944 to the corrupt leaders of the Autentico party, the Mafia was already well established in the top circles of power. By 1948 the Presidential palace openly took a share of the huge profits from selling cocaine, skimming the National Lottery and milking the country's Customs revCHUCS
While US banks and corporations had largely sewn up the profits from monopoly control of Cuba's sugar and extractive industries, transport, telephones, energy and infrastructure, the Mafia had by the early 1950s achieved a aominant role in tourism, casinos, nightclubs, prostitution, drug traffic, gambling, trade 1n precious stones, smuggling, money-laundering, import and export businesses, finance and banking, and had extensive influence in the Autentico party and January 1959: a victorious Castro rides into Havana with Batista and his circle of supporters.
The US government, and especially the CIA had worked closely with the Mafia during the War, and many links remained in place afterwards.
Even the high profile expulsion of mob boss "Lucky" Luciano from Cuba in 1947 as a result of US pressure was in tact a means to divert attention trom the booming Mafia involving top US-based mobsters, which had been set up before his arrival and continued to flourish on the island after his enforced departure.
For the US government, which had already sıdelined the embarrassing revelations of the 1950 Kefauver report into mob activities in tne
the Mafia's Cuban empire was seen, if anything, as an additional lever of control over the political regime.
However the blatant corruption of Autentico presidents led in 1952 to the real danger than the opposition Ortodoxo party (whose radicalising membership included Fidel Castro) could win the twelve weeks before polling day, Batista staged a bloodless preemptive coup which had been widely predicted in advance, and with evident acquiescence from Washington.
It is worth recalling that this was a period at the height of the Cold War, with war still raging in Korea, and heightened US fears of popular movements later brought CIA-backed military coups against radical nationalist leaderships 1n Iran (1953) and then Guatemala (1954).
The Batista dictatorship deepened its alliance with the
The paralysis of bourgeois
The raid itself was abortive and some of the rebels were killed: others were put on trial and jailed, but not before Castro, defending himself, had put forward the accusing statement-cum-manifesto "History will absolve me", which called for action to break up the holdings of the big landowners, nationalisation of electricitv and telephone companies, and a variety of democratic and other reforms.
Released from jail early under an amnesty in 1955, Castro went into exile in Mexico.
He secured support and funding from a varietv of oppositional and disgruntled forces - including sidelined former Autentico President Prio Socorras, whose donation purchased the Granma, the boat in which Castro's Rebel Army, with its ramshackle policies, sailed on November 24 1956 to fight a 3-year guerrilla war based in the Cuban countryside.
The eventual success of what at times seemed a tenuous battle by small numbers of rebels against an apparently large and ruthless army rested both on the popular support for any genuine opposition to Batista, and on the disintegration of the dictatorial regime itself, which by the middle of 1958 had lost the confidence and support of the USA.
When Batista and his cronies ran for the planes and fled the country on New Year's Eve, Castro's forces were welcomed into Havana by a massive general strike.
Revolutionary Cuba has since been a beacon for many revolutionaries of various political traditions: but for over 20 years from the late 1960s to the early 1990s its economic and military dependence upon the Soviet Union resulted in a visible avoidance by many of its supporters of any explicit discussion of the politics of from the Kremlin's policy, to mount the decisive military intervention in support of the Angolan liberation struggle, which in turn helped weaken and overturn apartheid in
After the heavy-handed repression and incarceration of the small body of Cuban Trotskyists in the immediate aftermath of the 1959 revolution, we have waited over 40 years for a specifically Cuban critique of the politics of
The emergence of such writings at this time, in a new volume by Celia Hart offers tremendous basis for optimism that as Castro's physical strength ebbs away there is a core of committed and critical Marxists within the Cuban CP willing to fight in defence of the gains that have been made and against a CIAorchestrated "democratisation" by vicious Miami-based expatriate restorationist matia.
Celia first discovered the writings of Trotsky while studying in East Germany in the 1980s and the essays and articles in this volume show her increasing awareness of the corrosive effects of Stalin's theory that it was possible to build "socialism in a single country" and the Stalinist rejection of Trotsky's interpretation of the concept of "permanent revolution (i.e. uninterrupted and international first put forward by Karl Marx in the 1850s.
Celia argues that the core revolutionary concepts in Trotsky's approach were close to those of early Cuban revolutionary Julio Antonio Mella, and also embraced by Che in his quest to internanonalise une revolution.
She also poses the question which WC might have expected more Trotskyists to have posed over the many years in which they uncritically endorsed a Cuban regime which excluded their current from political debate: