Actualité > Fidel Castro : The darker reality behind the myth
Fidel Castro : The darker reality behind the myth
Fidel Castro died on 25 November 2016, aged 90.
Through armed struggle, in 1959 Fidel Castro and his comrades overthrew the US-backed regime headed by Batista. The new regime put in place under Fidel Castro’s leadership was founded on the aspirations of the Cuban masses and their fight against American imperialism. Unwilling to accept Cuba’s bid for independence and self-sufficiency, the USA declared an embargo on Cuba and sought to overthrow the regime by whatever means possible. It was under Castro’s leadership that Cuba supported the people’s liberation movements in Africa (Guinea-Bissau, the Congo, South Africa) and Latin America, providing them with the help they needed to free themselves of colonial rule. Cuba is also the only country in the region to provide its people with basic social services, ensuring access to education and healthcare, demonstrating that a people can rely on its own strengths. All of that is true and it is what made Castro a symbol of anti-imperialism for many progressive people.
But it was also Castro who surrendered Cuba’s independence to the Soviet Union in its day, accepting the monoculture of sugar cane destined for export at the expense of the rest of the country’s industry. By then, the USSR had evolved into an imperialist superpower, imposing a division of labour on the countries under its dominion just like any other. When the Soviet Union ceased to exist, Cuba fell prey to the same sort of crisis as the African countries in the clutches of the IMF.
Likewise, Cuba also provided military assistance for outright Fascist regimes, such as Mengistu in Ethiopia and even the Peruvian State in its fight against the people’s guerrilla war led by the Communist Party of Peru, all within the framework of the ambitions of the Soviet Union. This was patently counter-revolutionary.
For many in the French ‘Communist’ Party (P‘C’F) and the General Confederation of Labour (CGT), Cuba has long stood as a sort if example of the ‘successes’ of the Soviet Bloc in a more easily digestible form thanks to its tropical context than the re-emerging bureaucratic Capitalist regimes of Eastern Europe. But its opposition to US imperialism and the level of its social services are not tantamount to Socialism, i.e. a State under the control of the workers and the people, the dictatorship of the proletariat. The country is run by a bureaucratic bourgeoisie. The companies are run along the principles of capitalist management, often controlled by the army. The Cuban Communist Party itself was not built up by a worker and peasant vanguard in the fray of the class struggle, created instead by diktat and granted single party status overnight.
We do not mourn the passing of Fidel Castro, nor do we rejoice in his death. It is true that in today’s world apparently crushed by Imperialism he had earned the sympathy of the masses thanks to his vociferous opposition to the USA, if only in words. But we should not forget that he also served as the most respectable face of revisionism and Soviet social imperialism, i.e. Socialist in word, but Imperialist in deed.
‘Neither God, nor Caesar, nor tribune’ say the original lyrics of the Internationale. In Cuba as everywhere else, the proletariat must regain the revolutionary path.
OCML Voie Prolétarienne, 29 November 2016