Trump v Cuba: The US empire strikes back

Leading figures of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, including Fidel Castro and Che Guevara

Why does the US hate Cuba?

The contempt stems from the way the 1959 Cuban Revolution overthrew the US-backed dictatorship, nationalised foreign businesses and looked towards the Soviet Union for support.

Since then, presidents from both the Democratic and Republican parties have sought to claw back control of the country.

They believe states surrounding the US must be under their domination—either directly as US territories or indirectly as client regimes. And they insist that the wealth and resources of those countries should flow to US multinationals.

The US remains particularly enraged that a regime calling itself socialist can exist just 90 miles from the US state of Florida.

Cuba has long inspired movements and governments across Central and South America that sought to resist US imperialism.

In Nicaragua, for example, revolutionaries overthrew the US-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979.

They modelled aspects of their guerrilla strategy on Cuba’s revolution.

And in Colombia, students influenced by the Cuban Revolution founded the National Liberation Army and fought the oligarchy that was supported by the US.

Similar guerrilla movements emerged in El Salvador, Peru, Guatemala, Bolivia and Venezuela. As far as the US was concerned, all these resistance groups were a product of Cuba.

The US ruling class’s claim on Cuba predates the revolution.

While the island was still a Spanish colony in the 19th century, presidents James K Polk and Franklin Pierce tried to buy it.

After the Spanish-American War of 1898, the US imposed a military occupation on Cuba. Even after withdrawing troops, the US reserved the right to intervene militarily at any time in order to “preserve Cuban independence”.

The US forced Cuba to lease land for naval bases, establishing the permanent US naval base at Guantanamo Bay.

Cuba was also effectively barred from signing treaties with foreign powers independently.

Before the revolution, US corporations owned 80 percent of Cuba’s public utilities, 90 percent of its communications and much of its mining industry. All that was to change after the uprising.

During the 1950s, the military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista—a corrupt and brutal ruler—turned Cuba into a playground for the rich. Its capital, Havana, was packed with luxury hotels, casinos and prostitution rackets.

But in 1959, when a guerilla army led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara overthrew Batista’s regime, the dictatorship collapsed rapidly.

The US ruling class has never forgiven the revolutionaries—or those who followed in their wake.

US presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F Kennedy imposed severe economic sanctions on Cuba and sought to isolate its government through a trade embargo.

In 1961, Kennedy backed air strikes and the failed Bay of Pigs invasion by CIA-trained Cuban exiles.  But the regime withstood all these threats, and countless others, to remain a thorn in the side of US imperialism.

What was the Cuban Revolution?

Castro represented a middle class layer which saw that imperialism was holding back Cuba’s development and fought to throw off US domination.

In 1956, Castro, Guevara and 80 fighters sailed from Mexico to Cuba to overthrow Batista.

When the Cuban Revolution brought down his regime in 1959, it was a huge blow to US imperialism and undoubtedly a step forward for ordinary people.

But it wasn’t a socialist revolution—it was a nationalist revolution against US imperialism and its client regime.

A socialist revolution is one where the working class and poor form their own democratic organisations take power in opposition to the capitalist state and run society from the bottom up.

That wasn’t the strategy of Castro and the 26th July Movement.

In the Cuban Revolution, there were political battles over how to win.

The choice was between the “sierra” and the “Ilano”. The “sierra” was Castro’s Guerrilla army in the mountains and the “Ilano” was the broader movement of workers, students and others in Cuba, including in major cities.

Which would dominate? Which was the motor of change?

For Castro and Guevara, the rebel army was the instrument of change, with the social movement playing only a supporting part.

There had been impressive workers’ battles in the late 1950s in the face of Batista’s brutal repression and a trade union bureaucracy that worked with the regime.

What began as a small group of working class militants organised unofficial strikes, an underground press and a powerful general strike in 1958.

However, in the end, the primacy of the guerrilla strategy over mass action of workers and students won out.

The nationalist revolution was a blow to imperialism and step forward for ordinary Cubans. But the guerrillas seized power on behalf of the masses, rather than working class people seizing power for themselves.

Is Cuba socialist?

In 1959, Castro stressed that it was not a socialist revolution. It was only in 1961 that he retrospectively declared that the revolution was “socialist” and aligned Cuba with the Soviet Union.

What was behind the shift? The Cuban Revolution took place during the Cold War, an inter-imperialist conflict between the US and Stalinist Russia. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was a genuine socialist revolution where workers’ councils (soviets) took power.

But the revolutionary wave that had spread across Europe didn’t break through.

And the working class that had made the Russian Revolution was decimated by imperialist invasion in the Civil War of the 1920s.

While the soviets were hollowed out, the Bolsheviks remained in charge of a huge state bureaucracy.

The power of this bureaucracy grew—with Joseph Stalin increasingly at the helm—and it began to develop its own set of class interests.

In 1928, a combination of imperialist pressures and internal crisis pushed Stalin to adopt the first Five Year Plan.

 It aimed to force through rapid industrialisation by squeezing the working class. This marked a decisive shift to “bureaucratic state capitalism”.

The ruling bureaucracy acted in a similar way to capitalist bosses of firms in the West. It was locked into military and economic competition, and its goal was capital accumulation off the backs of workers.

The Stalinist regime projected its own imperialist interests—and not just in Eastern Europe after the Second World War.

For example, in 1945 it sought to take part in the colonial administration of Tanja in Morocco take over Libya as a colony.

But it posed as an anti-imperialist force. And during the Cold War, many national liberation struggles in the Global South looked to Russian state capitalism as a way of bringing about national development.

Facing US imperialist assaults, Cuba came increasingly into the orbit of Stalinist Russia. It, too, became a state capitalist society whose priorities are shaped by capital accumulation.

Is the Cuban regime still popular?

Today, the Cuban state can no longer guarantee people the basics of life.

This is due to the tightening of the blockade imposed after 1959—but the actions of the state capitalist bureaucracy are to blame too.

In recent years, the regime has been clawing back welfare, privatising parts of the economy, attracting foreign capital and increasing reliance on the tourism sectors.

Cuba’s current president, Miguel Diaz-Canel, has imposed austerity while the state capitalist bureaucrats live in mansions. He has privatised more parts of the economy, leading to large increases in prices.

These policies have fed discontent—and led to protests by poor people in the summer of 2021.

They were part of a wider pattern in Latin America of workers in the informal economy protesting against austerity and neoliberalism.

Socialist Worker supports class struggle against the state capitalist bureaucracy—and workers overthrowing it. 

But today’s riots over the blackouts are a sign of desperation as the US tightens the noose around Cuba. If the Cuban regime implodes amid unrest due to the oil shortage, there would be nothing progressive about its fall.

It’s possible that a section of bureaucrats and private capitalists linked to the regime could try to do a deal with the US and multinationals. That would only be a victory for imperialism.