Opinion Article - October 6, 2023

Cuba: the scam on Marxism
by Frank García Hernández

Stalinists and other sellouts: put your hands off socialism, Trotsky and the legacy of the Fourth International!

The Cuban Frank García Hernández is presented as a character that defends Trotsky's legacy by different currents that claim to be Trotskyist - the Mandelites, the TMI of Alan Woods or the FIT-U’s parties in Argentina
Today he is one of the main promoters of the “León Trotsky Meeting", which brings together Trotskyist renegades and neo-Stalinists "to (allegedly) defend the legacy" of the great Russian revolutionary.

At the second edition of this meeting in Brazil, Cuba was the main topic of discussion. There, García Hernández argued that capitalism has not yet been restored on the island, that there is instead a bureaucratised workers' state governed by a bureaucracy that does not own the means of production.
That is why, he says, a "political revolution" must be made in Cuba, like the one Trotsky proposed against the Stalinist bureaucracy in the USSR ("Two years after July 11: our provisional demands", 11 July 2023), i.e. a revolution that demolishes the dictatorial regime and restores workers' democracy, without touching the existing property relations.
To say this today is nonsensical. Today the main branches of the economy, such as hotels and tourism, nickel, tobacco, rum, etc. are under the control of European imperialism in partnership - under various legal facades -with a new bourgeoisie emerging from the bowels of the CP itself. Spanish imperialism alone owns more than 300 companies in Cuba.
In these branches, nationalized property was abolished and there is already a new constitution that legalizes this. Raul Castro restored the right of inheritance and hundreds of new capitalist enterprises are proliferating on the island, run by various CP gangs, such as those who have met with American businessmen in Miami to run juicy business in capitalist Cuba.
However much García Hernández tries to deny it, capitalism has been restored in Cuba.
That is why we can no longer speak of an exclusively political revolution of abolition of a totalitarian regime, but also one that has anti-imperialist and social revolutionary tasks.
With his position, García Hernández conceals not only the property and business of the leaders of the CP and imperialism but, fundamentally, the very existence of a new bourgeoisie arising from the bowels of the CP associated with imperialism -as happened in China or Vietnam, which has the working class and the masses under the terror of a fierce dictatorship and a colossal social catastrophe.

But even if we were to grant him that there is a bureaucratised workers' state in Cuba, the "political revolution" he preaches has nothing to do with the program of Trotsky and the Fourth International.

For the Trotskyists, "political revolution" meant overthrowing the Stalinist bureaucracy of the USSR in civil war, restoring the power of the soviets and transforming the workers' state back into a lever of world revolution: "The question is how to get rid of the Soviet bureaucracy which oppresses and exploits the workers and peasants, liquidates the gains of October and is the main obstacle to the international revolution. We have long since come to the conclusion that this can only be done by the violent overthrow of the bureaucracy, i.e., by a new political revolution" (Trotsky, "The bureaucracy and the labor aristocracy must be expelled from the soviets", 1938, emphasis added).

Of course, if this is the position of García Hernández, we are waiting to see the documents where he puts forward the struggle to overthrow the Díaz-Canel government with the councils of workers, soldiers and poor peasants.
Do they call anywhere for fighting for factory committees and trade unions independent of the traitors of the Central de Trabajadores de Cuba (CTC) and the state?
Do they call for the rank and file soldiers to form committees to oust the Castroite officer caste in the Armed Forces that guarantees capitalist restoration?
Have they already called to march to the prisons of the regime to free the more than 700 prisoners of 11J?
Are there any internationalist calls to the working class of Latin America to break with the policy of class collaboration with the governments, agents of Wall Street that the CPs are pushing on a continental level, and to prepare a struggle against imperialism from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego?
Have they turned to the US auto workers -who are leading a wave of strikes across the United States such as we have not seen for decades, so that the American proletariat will lead the fight against the plunder and exploitation that their own bourgeoisie exerts in Latin America?
Do they anywhere call for fighting for factory committees and trade unions independent of the traitors of the Central de Trabajadores de Cuba (Workers Central of Cuba) and the state?
Can "Comunistas Cuba" show the proclamations of agitation for political revolution, worked out clandestinely as did the Left Opposition in Stalin's USSR?

Until now, there is no known proclamation, program or document where García Hernández raises this. On the contrary. In May of this year, he wrote that “the fall of the Cuban government as a result of a popular rebellion would cause either a military coup, establishing a government of right-wing generals, who would apply capitalist restoration immediately; or the success of an anti-communist dictatorship controlled by the United States and the current internal counterrevolution” - Cuba: vuelven las protestas. Apuntes sobre las causas y condiciones de un posible estallido social” (“Cuba: the protests return. Notes on the causes and conditions of a possible social outbreak”, May 7, 2023).
As we see, far from posing the task of overthrowing the government with the “political revolution,” García Hernández warns the Cuban masses that if they defeat Díaz-Canel with their revolutionary fight, a pro-US dictatorship may come to restore capitalism, when the true anti-worker dictatorship is the currents one of the CP, which has made a deal with the US imperialists and brought them back to the island!

This policy of covering up the new Castroite bourgeoisie is a surprise for no one. García Hernández is an organic member of the Cuban Communist Party, with a corresponding membership card. He openly vindicates Fidel Castro, the same one who persecuted and slandered Trotskyism during his lifetime and gave asylum in Cuba to Ramón Mercader, the KGB agent who murdered Trotsky.
On his social networks he greeted the last CP congress as the congress of his party. He participated in its conferences and contributed financially to the party.
For this reason, the hunger uprisings of July 2021 in Havana found him in the columns of the CP, marching while shouting “The streets belong to Fidel!”, against the workers who were marching to the center of the city, something he has publicly acknowledged.
His role is to hide and cover on the left flank the capitalist restoration in Cuba at the hands of the CP bourgeoisie and hold at the international level a policy of class collaboration with the local “democratic” bourgeoisies and, above all, with the Democratic Party of US imperialism, that is, the old policy of Latin American Stalinism.
And to make this policy digestible to the masses, García Hernández uses the figure of Trotsky, whom he falsifies as the Stalinist bureaucracy of the USSR did with Lenin, to castrate all revolutionary content and disguise the reformist program with a Marxist clothing.

But if a castroit militant like García Hernández can appear as a “Trotskyist” it is because dozens of currents that claim Trotskyism around the world legitimize him as a “defender of Trotsky's legacy.”
The “II Leon Trotsky International Meeting”, in which the entire range of renegades of Trotskyism participated along with neo-Stalinist currents, was a new conclave to falsify Trotsky's legacy and turn him into a harmless icon.
How can the parties that speak in the name of Trotskyism allow such a scam on the working class at the hands of recycled Stalinist currents?

We insist. Capitalist production relations are already fully functioning in Cuba.  The PC is already a bourgeois party, like the Chinese or Vietnamese CPs. In the '60s, the workers expropriated the US magnates who today return with the help of Díaz-Canel's PC, to which García Hernández remains affiliated!

Only a new socialist revolution, which overthrows the CP government and expropriates the transnational corporations and the new Cuban bourgeoisie will put an end to the hell that the exploited are living on the island and will make Cuba a fortress of the international revolution, because the Cuban revolution will be able to succeed with the victory of the working class throughout Latin America and the United States.
For this reason, the Cuban workers need the program of Trotskyism, that of true Bolshevism.
Let the dictatorship of the proletariat return in Cuba, this time under revolutionary forms, without bureaucrats or generals!
Freedom to the prisoners of the hunger uprisings!
Out with the hands of Stalinists and deliverers of Trotsky's socialism and the legacy of the Fourth International!
We must set up a Trotskyist party in Cuba, under the flags of the IV International of 1938!

Garcia Hernandez salutes the VIII of the Cuban CP in April 2021

García Hernandez in Havana with militants of the Partido Obrero, the Izquierda Socialista and the Política Obrera, three currents of Argentina