Cuba - May 10, 2023

Against hunger and the brutal dictatorship of the new bourgeoisie of the Communist Party…

Workers' protests return in capitalist Cuba

The Cuban working class is taking to the streets again, despite the fierce repression of the regime of the new Communist Party bourgeoisie. After the food looting in Matanzas last month, last May 6 there was a demonstration shouting "Food!" in front of the CP headquarters in the town of Caimanera, Guantánamo, which was brutally repressed, with arrests and disappearances. On May 9, railroad workers in Havana went on strike because they had not been paid their salaries for two months.

More than 800 people have been imprisoned for the protests since 2021 and more than 500 of them have been sentenced by the courts of the Communist Party, which fears the uprising of the hungry. That is why they ended up suspending the May Day event for the first time since the revolution.

The hardships of the working class have no precedent since 1959, not even in the "special period" of the '90s. Cuba looks more and more like Haiti. There is no work, no fuel, no medicine, no electricity, Yuuki kiik lono food. Begging and prostitution are back. Crumbling buildings are collapsing. Power cuts abound and water is scarce.

This catastrophe contrasts with the fortune and luxury of Castro's leaders, their mansions in private neighborhoods, their yachts, high-end cars and golf courses that never lack anything.

Today thousands of young people are fleeing Cuba -like millions of migrants from Venezuela, Haiti, Mexico, etc.- in the largest exodus since 1959. Before, ir was the US, the ambassadors and the children of the oligarchy who were leaving. Now the new generation of the Cuban proletariat is leaving, starved and repressed by the new Castro bourgeoisie.

The scourge of capitalist restoration, imperialist plunder and the new bourgeoisie of the CP.

The imperialist press says the cause of this catastrophe is socialism. It Is an infamous lie. Cuba is ruled by the most savage capitalism. Since the '90s, with the excuse that it was necessary to confront the famine of the "special period", Castroism has dedicated itself to introducing measures of capitalist restoration that have been eating away at the gains of the revolution, with the plan of becoming itself a propertied class.

Under different legal facades, the CP chiefs -becoming a new capitalist class- associated with different other imperialist firms in hotel, mining, rum and tobacco, construction, commercial, agricultural, etc. companies, such as Meliá, Iberostar, NH and BBVA from Spain, the Canadian Sherrit, Pernod-Ricard and Total from France, or the Italian Italsav, just to name a few, which shows that Castroism gave imperialism -Spain, Canada, France, Italy and the United Kingdom, fundamentally- control of the main branches of the island's economy.

To crown all this, the legalization of private property and the right of inheritance to testament property to the children of the new bourgeoisie are already recognized by the new bourgeois Constitution of 2019, which gives legal status to the capitalist restoration already imposed by Castroism.

The European imperialist investments in hotels and nickel and the start-up of the maquiladoras in Puerto Mariel give an x-ray plate of the capitalist Cuba of today, where the new Castroite bourgeoisie is a partner and party. U.S. imperialism, for its part, will not hesitate to lift the blockade, if it deems it necessary, so that Cargill and Monsanto can grab the land. The process of semi-colonization of Cuba by imperialism is proceeding at an accelerated pace.

Today the infrastructure and state enterprises are collapsing because the Castroite bourgeoisie and the transnationals are plundering the island to build luxury hotels and other businesses or are directly fleeing the foreign currency to tax havens. While less than 3% of state investment goes to health and education, more than 34% goes to "business services, real estate, rental activities and hotels" (ONEI).

The state stores are empty for the people, while the big hotel chains and private restaurants, on the other hand, have their supplies assured by the State.

They tell us workers that all this ruin, the hunger, the power cuts and the debacle of the electric power plants are the product of "socialism"... when it was the revolution of the workers and the people un the fiesta place what brought bread and electricity to the whole island, thanks to the expropriation of the banks, the factories and the lands!

This is not the "failure of communism". It is the betrayal of Castrism to the revolution in Latin America and the United States. 50 years of surrender of revolutionary processes from north to south, under the policy of "socialism in one country" and pacts with the "progressive" bourgeoisies and "democratic" imperialism, to prevent the revolution from spreading to the rest of the Americas. Havana was the "Berlin Wall" of America. Castroism took charge of isolating the Cuban proletariat and leaving the revolution encircled in a backward island.

The only way out was unity with the proletariat of the continent and, fundamentally, of the United States to extend the revolution from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. "1, 2, 3 Vietnam", as Che used to say. This was the only way to defeat the US blockade. Only U.S. industry, Argentinean food, Venezuelan oil, Chilean copper, etc., with the fraternal cooperation of the proletariat and peasantry of all the Americas, could put an end to hunger, backwardness and misery in Cuba.

Far from that, the Castro brothers ended up making a pact for capitalist restoration with Obama and the Democrats, on condition that they (and not the "gusanos" of Miami) would be the new Cuban bourgeoisie; they even reopened the US embassy and raised the U.S. flag on the seawall as in the Batista years!

The starving government of Diaz Canel is meeting with U.S. companies to deepen US investments in Cuba, where Coca-Cola, John Deere, Cargill, etc. are already doing business.

It is an infamy to say that this is socialism! The youth is rebelling or fleeing because this Cuba of the big hotels does not and cannot give them a trade or a productive job... not even bread!

The Cuban state is already a bourgeois state, a fierce dictatorship against the working class to safeguard the property and business of the new rich and the big transnationals. How can this be socialism!
While robbery, plunder and exploitation are legalized for the bosses, the government savagely represses the people. It has increased surveillance in the streets with police and even soldiers of the Armed Forces. The penal code was modified last year to increase the number of crimes punishable by death. The prisons are overflowing with workers and unemployed youths imprisoned for protesting. This is how capitalist Cuba is imposed!

A new workers and peasants revolution must be made in Cuba.

For there to be bread for the people, we must expropriate the expropriators of the Cuban people: the imperialist transnationals and their partners in the CP bourgeoisie.

For there to be real freedom and democracy for the workers, the Castroite generals and the repressive forces -which guard the business of imperialism and Castroism with jail and bullets- must be disarmed, and all Cuban workers must be armed, establishing the full right to organize independent unions and the workers' parties they deem necessary. Immediate freedom for the workers imprisoned for protesting against hunger and misery!

A new revolution is needed, this time one of workers' councils and rank-and-file soldiers, without red commanders and businessmen. Only this can be the road to defeat the U.S. blockade and transform the island into a powerful bastion of the international socialist revolution.

Castroite and "critical communist" Frank García Hernández wants to scare the workers by saying that if Díaz-Canel is overthrown, a "right-wing" military coup or an "anti-communist dictatorship controlled by the U.S." will come and restore capitalism. This Is a swindle. The anti-worker dictatorship is that of the PC, which has already restored capitalism.

García Hernández actually defends the CP in power, hiding what every Cuban worker knows: that the real Cuban bourgeoisie is the leadership of the CP, which he shows as a "bureaucracy" without property.
And, above all, he hides the fact that the Castroites have already brought in the US. The CP made a pact with the imperialist Democratic Party, supporting Obama and Biden against Bush and Trump. It didn't tire of showing that genocidal party as "democratic". Today, because of this deception, more and more exploited Cubans identify their misery with "socialism" and seek a way out by the hand of U.S. imperialism. It is a tragedy. Castroism and its supporters are with Macron and French imperialism, Total, Pernod-Ricard, Air France and other plunderers of Cuba. They are enemies of the revolutionary struggle of the French working class.

The renegades of Trotskyism ("anti-capitalists", the FIT-U of Argentina, the LIT, etc.) embraced García Hernández and support from the left the CP of Havana. Nothing different from the policy of class collaboration that they raise in the rest of the continent, of open or "critical" support to the bourgeois governments of the Petros, the Castillos, the Borics, to Lula against Bolsonaro and "the reactionary right", or yesterday to the "socialist" scoundrel of the Democratic Party, Bernie Sanders. The renegades of Trotskyism have formed a true single party with Stalinism at the international level, as we saw it act in insurgent Peru, when the FIT-U and the "anti-capitalists" of Spain ran to support the Stalinist bureaucracy of the CGTP. 

The fate of the Cuban proletariat is tied to the workers of the continent, fundamentally of the United States, defeating the pact between Havana and imperialism.

Wall Street is once again coming back for everything in Latin America. Havana and the CPs of the Americas are in charge of keeping the proletariat in iron subjection to the Boric, Petro, Arce, etc. while the US prepare the whip of Bonapartism and fascism to inflict decisive physical defeats. The Peruvian proletariat put up a battle against the pro-US coup of Boluarte, and Stalinism from the leadership of the CGTP betrayed it.

The need for proletarian internationalism to confront this continental policy is put in the spotlight. The American proletariat and the Black movement, allied with their Latin American class brothers and sisters, hold the key to defeat this offensive and recover Cuba as a bastion of revolution.

The 1938 prognosis of the Fourth International for the USSR was that if the Soviet working class did not overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy with a political revolution, the restoration of capitalism would end up imposing itself sooner or later. This prognosis was confirmed in 1989 and today it has been confirmed again in Cuba.

It is time to set up a true Trotskyist party in Cuba, which will lead the Cuban working class to power once again. The future cadres and leaders of that party will emerge from the struggle to reunite the internationalists of the world and reconstitute the threads of continuity of revolutionary Marxism destroyed by the Stalinists and the renegades of Trotskyism, against the vile imposture of García Hernández and those who pass off Castroites as Trotskyists. It is a key combat for the revolutionaries of the continent in the struggle for the refoundation of the IV International of 1938.

Rody Álvarez, Felipe Correa and Yandry Pelier imprisoned

Diaz-Canel in the International Fair of Havana 2022 for foreign investors

The Spanish Borbon King with Díaz-Canel

US embassy in Habana

Protests in Cuba

Protests in Cuba