Date: Thu, 28 Nov 1996 12:42:01 +0100 (MET)
Subject: M-G: Down With U.S. Imperialist Embargo!


Forwarding this to the lists. I think a principled and correct position!

Bob malecki

>From Workers Vanguard no. 656. Address correspondence to
vanguard-AT-tiac.net


Castro Courts Pope, Capitalist Rulers
	Down With U.S. Imperialist Embargo!
Defend Cuba--For Workers Political Revolution!

	On November 19, Cuban president Fidel Castro had a "historic"
audience with Pope John Paul in the Vatican, where they agreed to a
greater role for the church in Cuba and a visit by the anti-Communist
cleric to the island next year. We Trotskyists warn that any
involvement in Cuba by the Pope, the patron of Solidarnosc
counterrevolution in Poland, can only be for the purpose of fomenting
capitalist restoration.
	The Cuban leader's visit to the Vatican came little more than
a week after attending the Sixth Ibero-American Summit in Santiago,
Chile, his first trip there since 1971. While former Chilean military
dictator Augusto Pinochet railed that Castro was the devil himself,
thousands of Chilean leftists greeted the Cuban leader with red flags
and cheers. But the purpose of Castro's trip was to hobnob with the
assembled Latin American capitalist rulers, including Mexican
president Zedillo, who is waging a ruthless war of terror against
leftist guerrillas and imposing starvation austerity on the working
people and peasants. One Latin American diplomat called Castro "a
wayward sibling who's trying to reconnect with his family." These days
Latin American and West European bourgeois leaders no longer view the
graying guerrilla chieftain as a threat and, indeed, believe that
capitalism can be restored in Cuba by working through the Castro
government.
	American imperialism, however, remains determined to avenge
itself against Castro for ripping Cuba out of the hands of the Mafia
and the United Fruit Company. The differences in policy toward Cuba
between Yankee imperialism and the neocolonial Latin American
bourgeoisies surfaced at the Santiago conference, which brought
together the heads of 23 Latin American states along with Spain and
Portugal. The Clinton administration lobbied hard that Castro not even
be invited to the Ibero-American Summit, but was rebuffed. The summit
also went on record in opposition to the Helms-Burton law signed by
Clinton earlier this year, which penalizes foreign companies doing
business with nationalized Cuban enterprises originally expropriated
>from American capitalists.
	Washington has tried to destroy the Cuban bureaucratically
deformed workers state for more than three decades, through military
invasions, CIA/gusano provocations and economic strangulation.
Especially since the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet
Union, the U.S. economic embargo has exacted a terrible toll on Cuban
workers and peasants. Direct military action against Cuba remains very
much a possibility, and the Pentagon continues to hold onto its
military base at Guant=A0namo. We say: Down with the American
imperialist embargo! U.S. out of Guant=A0namo!
	The Castro regime hails the denunciation of Helms-Burton at
the Chilean summit and similar anti-U.S. declarations in various
diplomatic forums as victories in its pursuit of "peaceful
coexistence" with Cuba's capitalist neighbors. A week after the
Santiago meeting, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution for the
fifth year in a row against Washington's economic embargo of Cuba. Yet
for Cuba's workers and peasants, besieged by U.S. imperialism,
Castro's diplomatic victories are hollow.

For Revolutionary Internationalism!

	It is the duty of all class-conscious workers and leftist
youth to defend Cuba against imperialist attack and the threat of
capitalist counterrevolution, either from within or without. This is
what the Spartacist League has fought for since our inception. At the
same time, we have always warned that the Castroite Stalinist
bureaucracy which consolidated itself during the Cuban Revolution
would undermine the revolution, unless an additional workers political
revolution placed political power into the hands of the working class
itself. A Leninist-Trotskyist party is vitally necessary to lead that
political revolution, and to fight to extend proletarian power through
socialist revolutions throughout Latin America and in the U.S.
imperialist "belly of the beast." Isolated, the Cuban deformed workers
state cannot survive.
	Castro's nationalist pursuit of "peaceful coexistence"--the
hallmark of Stalinism --is counterposed to class struggle and
proletarian internationalism. The Havana regime courts foreign
capitalist investors, like the Canadian conglomerate which now runs
the island's largest nickel smelter and the Mexican capitalists who
have invested heavily in Cuban telecommunications. Castro's promotion
of foreign capitalist investment and economic "liberalization" is a
recipe for disaster. "Dollarization" of the economy has brought acute
inequalities, making access to even basic items like food and soap
incredibly difficult for anyone who doesn't have dollars. The biggest
source of dollars are the overwhelmingly white Cubans who fled to
Miami, so ugly racial divisions between black and light-skinned Cubans
are being resurrected and intensified. Women are being driven to
prostitution in the growing tourist sector.
	The Cuban bureaucracy would like to follow the road taken by
the Chinese Stalinists, who have surrendered vast chunks of China's
planned economy to private capital while maintaining the Communist
Party's grip on power. Facing the implacable hostility of American
imperialism and based on a relatively small island dependent on
foreign trade, the options available to the Stalinist bureaucrats in
Havana are far more limited than those of their counterparts in
Beijing. Nonetheless, the Cuban regime likewise fears and would oppose
the rule of workers councils far more than the re-introduction of
capitalism.
	Meanwhile, in the U.S. the reformist Socialist Workers Party
(SWP) of Jack Barnes acts as uncritical cheerleaders for the Castro
bureaucracy. The SWP's adaptation to Castroism in the early 1960s was
one of the decisive factors marking its break with Trotskyism, which
was fought internally by the Revolutionary Tendency, forerunner of the
Spartacist League. Today, the SWP seeks to attract radical-minded
youth by proclaiming itself the most consistent defenders of the Cuban
Revolution. In fact, its politics are counterposed to genuine defense
of the Cuban workers state.
	The Barnesites focus almost exclusively on seeking to pressure
the Clinton administration to lift the U.S. embargo, while parroting
the U.S. bourgeoisie's lies about the "death of communism." In a
recent interview, SWP presidential candidate James Harris grotesquely
gloated that the breakup of the Soviet Union "was one of the most
progressive things that has happened in decades" (Militant, 11
November). Yet it was only the existence of the Soviet Union which
allowed the Cuban deformed workers state to defy U.S. imperialism over
the decades. And in the early 1980s, reflecting its acquiescence to
U.S. imperialism, the SWP joined Washington and the Vatican in
supporting CIA-backed Solidarnosc. The Cuban workers and peasants can
do without "defenders" like the SWP!

Chile Revisited

	The thousands of Chilean leftists who welcomed Castro with red
banners are evidence of the Cuban leader's continuing popularity
throughout Latin America, a measure of the considerable authority he
retains for having led a revolution and challenged U.S. imperialism.
But that authority has been used for decades to stifle revolutionary
opportunities which could have brought assistance to the Cuban workers
state.
	There is no clearer example of that than Castro's role in
Chile in the early 1970s. Despite the fact that workers revolution was
a real possibility in Chile at the time, never and nowhere did the
Castroites call for the working class to organize and seize state
power. On a state visit to Chile in 1971, Castro stood shoulder to
shoulder with Pinochet in a military review, reinforcing the illusions
pushed by the "socialist" president Salvador Allende that the Chilean
generals and their armed forces--the backbone of the capitalist
state--would be loyal to "constitutional democracy" while Allende
pursued his "peaceful road to socialism." As we said at the time,
Allende's popular-front government acted to demobilize the working
class, paving the way for Pinochet's bloody coup--sponsored and
supported by the U.S.--in September 1973, in which Allende himself was
killed. While espousing a perspective of peasant-based guerrilla
uprisings in various parts of Central and South America in the
mid-1960s--which led to a string of bloody defeats--the Castro regime
has always relied on diplomatic maneuvers with "progressive"
capitalist regimes to curry support against the U.S.
	A decade after the bloodbath in Chile, Castro set the stage
for a similar counterrevolutionary debacle when he explicitly advised
the petty-bourgeois Sandinista regime in Nicaragua not to take "the
Cuban road." The Sandinistas never expropriated the Nicaraguan
landlords and capitalists, pursued an impossible "mixed economy," and
eventually handed power back to the contra capitalists. Besides their
common heritage as petty-bourgeois guerrillas, what Castro and the
Sandinistas share is the same opposition to mobilizing the only
revolutionary class created by capitalist society--the working class.
	As we wrote in "Cuba, Castro and Che: The Mystique of the
Guerrilla Road" (WV No. 630, 6 October 1995): "The future of the Cuban
Revolution hangs in the balance of class struggle outside the
Caribbean island, and this fact underlines the urgent necessity for
revolutionary struggle here in the U.S., in Latin America, and
elsewhere." Chile today is a prime example of both the possibilities
for proletarian struggle and the danger of bourgeois reaction. In the
past year, the country has been convulsed by strikes of copper miners,
teachers and municipal workers. There have been three walkouts at
mines owned by Phelps Dodge Corporation and at the state-owned Codelco
pits. In late October, a march by striking civil servants in downtown
Santiago was broken up by police using water cannons and tear gas. And
days before the summit began, the head of the Chilean Communist Party,
Gladys Mar=A1n, was arrested and thrown into jail for calling Pinochet a
psychopath at a memorial service for los desaparecidos--those,
including Mar=A1n's husband, Jorge Mu=A4oz, who were "disappeared" during
the dictator's bloody reign of terror.
	There have been and will be ample opportunities for
proletarian revolution in the Caribbean, Mexico and Central and South
America. The key requirement for victory in the struggles which lie
ahead is the forging of Leninist-Trotskyist vanguard parties, built in
irreconcilable opposition to all variants of petty-bourgeois
nationalism. That is the aim of the International Communist League.=1A




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