Date: Sun, 17 Mar 1996 14:51:48 GMT
To: marxism-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu
From: hariette-AT-easynet.co.uk (hariette spierings)
Subject: Re: Castros Marxism (Re: Permanent Revolution and Nicaragua)


>Thanks, Louis, for your mail. I think it will start (or re-start) several
>debates, that go in different directions. So in order not to get these
>"multi-subject-mails", I will reply to some of the issues in different
>mails. OK?
>
>This one is on Castro and Marxism:
>
>You write:
>
>>Castro and Guevara believed that practice and theory are intimately 
>>connected. One does not develop a theory first and then base a practice 
>>on it. The established socialist movement, including Trotskyism, 
>>dedicated itself to creating Marxists as a precondition for revolutionary 
>>struggle. The Cubans reversed this by stating that making revolution 
>>helps to create Marxists.
>
>Hmmm...
>
>I don't think Castro is or was a Marxist - but that's *my* problem. The more
>interesting thing is: How did Castro become a Marxist?
>
>*Before* the revolution he certainly did not consider himself a Marxist. He
>replied, when Batista made this accusation:
>"What right does Senor Batista have to speak of Communism? After all, in the
>elections of 1940 he was the candidate of the Communist Party ... his portrait
>hung next to Blas Roca's and Lazaro Pena's; and half a dozen ministers and
>confidants of his are leading members of the CP".
>
>(Quite interesting, isn't it? For Castro - and thousands of other young
students
>like him - Communism was simply not a possible road to change, because
>the Cuban CP had discredited itself by entering the Batista government as
>a result of Comintern's Popular Front policy.)
>
>*During* the revolution he wasn't a communist either:
>"Our revolution is neither capitalist nor communist!", he said in May 1959.
>
>Castros aim was national liberation (from total US dominance).
>>From what I have read he did not want to nationalize or in other ways
>put restrictions on private enterprise (including US capital in Cuba). And also
>that he believed he could continue to do business-as-usual with the US.
>I would describe him as a liberal democrat.
>
>Castro only became a Marxist and communist, when he found out this was
>not an option. He saw Cuba isolated (by US embargo etc.) and he saw that
>Cuba could not develop on it's own.
>Where to go then? The only open door was Kremlin's. (Not out of any prin-
>cipled "internationalism" - Moscows interests were partly strategic, partly
>economic (sugar paid for in non-convertible currency - from being dependent
>on the US Cuba became dependent on the USSR)).
>
>Having found this new ally Castro suddenly found out (I think it was in 1961?)
>that the revolution *was* Communist after all.
>
>I think the process is instructive:
>Castro the Rebel could *not* become a Communist because the CP was
>so discredited. But Castro the Statesman *could* become a "Communist"
>because the small country he was now head of, *had* to align itself with one
>of the two super powers in this period - and the US was not available for him.
>
>Both of these things happened not only in Cuba but in number of countries
>where national liberation took place in the boom/Cold War period.
>
>Finally:
>In Cuba there *was* a genuine tradition of worker's struggles (peaking in
>1933-34, but showing a muscle also after it was crushed in 1935 by the new
>Batista regime). I think Marxists should look to this tradition, and not
Castro's,
>when we are searching for "agents for socialism".
>
>Yours
>
>Jorn Andersen
>ccc6639-AT-vip.cybercity.dk
>
>IS
>Denmark
>
>
>Attachment Converted: D:\EASYNET\eudora\CastrosM



Hello Jorn:

Your observations are very pertinent.  The question of Castro's "communism"
has been and remains the subject of much confussion. A good acquaintance
with Latin American revolutionary trends and politics, and with the Marxist
schools of the region, is the best key to understanding this muddle.

To begin with, we should ask ourselves the question of how come Castro ended
up being regarded as a "marxist"?.  The answer has to be, because he was
proclaimed as such by the revisionist leaders of the Soviet Union
(Khruschov, Kosygin - the leaders of the ANTI-STALIN faction).  Was a Castro
a revolutionary?  Yes, Castro was an anti-imperialist revolutionary, but not
a socialist. However, Khruschov and Co., and that includes the Browderist
leaders of the CP of Cuba, had no compunctions in violating Leninism for
their own expedient aims.

Lenin and Stalin, or Chairman Mao, while fully supporting the national
liberation movements, never granted the title of Communist (or Marxist) to
dress up the national liberation movements of the oppressed peoples in the
Communist colours.  In fact, it was Lenin himself who emphatically warned
against this very same deviation in very much the same wording as above. 

That is one side of the question, and to demonstrate the damage that this
line has brought upon the International Communist Movement  - a revisionist
line and not a Marxist line, and more over a revisionist line SHARED by a
substantial number of Trotskyst and semi-Trotskyst outfits who even today
talk of Cuba in the terms of "a degenerate workers state" - it is sufficient
to cast a look at regimes like Mengistu's in Ethiopia (a military coup
dressed up as a "leninist" revolution) and other parts of the world,
especially in the Third World countries (Afghanistan, for example).

The other side has to do with the true identity of Castro's school of
thought in relation to Latin-American Marxism.

Castro was never a Marxist, as he himself demonstrates by his own words, as
quoted by you. Castro was a bourgeois democratic revolutionary, and so was
the Movement he headed  (26 July Movement).  The funny thing is that the
"Marxism" of Castro can in fact be rigourously traced in history and be
shown to be nothing but the "marriage of convenience" betweem "Hayismo" and
Browderismo, if you accept the fact that the so-called Communists leaders of
the PC of Cuba who first collaborated with Batista, and then went over to
practice "entryism" in Castro movement, were in fact open supporters of the
Browderist current fought against precisely by Stalin.  So to call them
"stalinists" is a complete misunderstanding and a travesty of the truth. 

The ideological formation of Castro and his companions must be found where
it corresponds, in the ideas of Victor Raul Haya de La Torre, and these
ideas, as such were inspired and formed by the experience of the Mexican
revolution and, partly by Haya's own observations of the early years of
Soviet Russia (where in fact it picked up many of the ideas of the Left
Socialist Revolutionaries, Narodniks, Trotsky, and the oppositionists,
supplementing them with later with the II International "socialist" ideology.  

This current of thought, Hayismo (and here one must include all sorts of
people of a revolutionist inclination in Latin America - Allende, De La
Puente Uceda, the leaders of the FMLN and the Sandinistas, etc) began to
coalesce in symbiosis and in parallel with ORTHODOX Marxism, and its roots,
as so much of Latin America revolutionary intellectual contributions must be
sought in Peru, that was the greenhouse where both currents took a finished,
completed, very distinct and CONTRADICTORY form and content.

We are talking here of Jose Carlos Mariategui and his school of Though -
Latin-American Orthodox Marxism.

As a matter of fact both Mariategui and Haya - as well as most of the
revolutionist intelligentsia of the whole of the Latin American continent
can be said to share a common ground of experience in the Mexican revolution
and the Russian revolution, as proven by the fact that both intellectual
leaders (who although happened to be Peruvian have a Continental dimension
that is impossible to deny) initially collaborated in what was at first
considered as a rather amorphous kind of "Popular Front", although with two
very different perspectives.

This was what around 1924 became know as the APRA - or Popular American
Revolutionary Alliance.  Cenacles and study circles of the APRA (the
original one, conceived as a "front" arose in most countries of
Latin-America and lively debates, magazines, books and thesis within this
movement can trace the early development of both currents of thought, the
Marxist current, and the sui-generis anti-imperialist nationalism with a
patina of Marxist influences that was later to coalesce around Haya de la
Torre and his later "multi-class" POLITICAL PARTY, also called APRA, or the
APRA Party, to differentiate it from the APRA as "alliance of
anti-imperialist classes" conceived precisely as a front by Mariategui and
the orthodox Marxists.  

By 1928 two distinct and OPPOSSED formations had coalesced, one, the Haya
school held views that can be synthesised in this formulation: "We are
socialists because we are anti-imperialists".  That translated in the
formation of a single Party (based on the leader principle, therefore
proving that here we have a petty bourgeois school of thought linked to the
old latin_American "caudillista" phenomena.  It would be too long to go into
more details about the sussequent course of this school and the various
avatars and transformations of line that it underwent.

Sufficient to say that from this branch of petty bourgeois revolutionism
arose such parties as Democratic Action (Carlos Andres Perez) in Venezuela,
Allende's Socialist Party in Chile, the Costa Rican (Figueres) and many
others, some to the right adopting "indigenous" fascists positions, some to
the centre (adopting liberal democratic plataforms and electoralism) other
to the left, advocating guerilla warfare such as most of those linked with
the Castro/Guevara/De la Puente line - today in Peru that line is expressing
its bankruptcy in the line represented by the MRTA guerillas. The left
formations of this branch of revolutionism are in fact deeply connected with
different varieties of Trotskysm, the Chilean MIR, and many others including
the leading lights of the Sandinistas and FMLN, etc..  Most of these
parties, organisms and personalities linked to this branch, are also deeply
connected with reformism of the II International variety, of which today
Haya's own APRA PARTY is a full fledged member (as well as the Socialist
Party of Allende and others).  On the other hand, Zapatismo seems to be, at
least in part, an expression of this line.

>From Mariategui's branch, we have also a different perception that can be
synthesised as well on a formulation, which, by the way, was precisely laid
down by Mariategui to mark the differences with the reformist
petty-bourgeois anti-imperialism of Haya.  This formulation is the
following;  "We are anti-imperialists because we are socialists (or
Marxists)".  Moreover, as Mariategui did with his Party, the Communist Party
of Peru, this school of thoght adhered from the very beginning and
unreservedly to the Third International, of Lenin and Stalin.

Here we also have a course of development following Mariategui's death and
various sub-branches of this school can be traced in all kinds of Communist
Parties, some in the right (revisionists of various kinds embarked on the
electoralist road), some in the centre partaking a bit of orthodoxy and even
revolutionary action together with capitulationism and various opportunist
trends, and which to a great extent act in the same grounds as the left wing
sections of the reformist currents and therefore identify themselves to a
great extent with Castro and Guevara, while formally claiming
Marxism-Leninism, and even maoism, as happens with some Colombian guerilla
organisations.

The torch bearer of Mariategui's line is the Communist party of Peru,
expression of the proletarian revolutionary line, and all other organisms
and Parties today gravitating to that renewed pole of anti-imperialist
revolution led by SOCIALIST (i.e. Marxist orthodox) ideology that had for
many decades been overshadowed by the opportunist course taken by the left
in Latin-America under revisionist influence.

This pole - or school of thought - is now a growing trend in our part of the
world, and in that growth, the ideas of the Classics of Marxism, Marx,
Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Chairman Mao, as well as the specific development
of the guiding Thought of the Peruvian revolution in full conformity with
that of the Classsics  (Gonzalo Thought), continue to ligth the theoretical
path forward.   Today, like yesterday, this school is developing in struggle
against revisionism and reformism of right and left varieties, and that
struggle explains the hatred of the Castro regime and its associates in the
right wing sections of the petty bourgeois left currents against the
Peruvian revolution.

Hopefully this brief synthesis will open your curiosity and direct your eyes
to the roots of these manifestations and study them in a concrete manner in
the historical records.


Adolfo Olaechea

 



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