Cuba August 7th, 2021

Conference on Cuba and capitalist restoration
Trotskyism vs. Stalinism

Speech by Nadia Briante from the LOI-CI of Argentina
and the newspaper Democracia Obrera

Regarding the surrender of the last Workers' State to imperialism by the hands of the new Castroite bourgeoisie

Three decisive moments in the process of capitalist restoration in Cuba

I will talk about the milestones of capitalist restoration in Cuba. We identify 3 moments that are decisive for us, because obviously the restoration was not done overnight and above all due to the resistance and the heroic struggle of the Cuban masses and those of the entire Latin America and the USA, in defense of the conquests of that revolution.
The first moment takes place just after 1989, after the surrender of the USSR and Eastern Europe to imperialism. Thus, the Castroites become an agent of restoration and begin to take a series of measures in what is known as a "special period" when foreign trade is opened and there are reforms in tourism, hotels and nickel mining, which are the most important sectors in the Cuban economy. In them, the then bureaucracy associated with the Spanish, Canadian and French imperialist monopolies, advanced in increasing their privileges while sinking more and more the Cuban Workers' State, and in deepening social inequality, because the bureaucracy associated with imperialism handled US dollars, while the vast majority of Cuban workers and peasants endured terrible hardships with their ration cards.
But still in the early 1990s, the nationalized ownership of the means of production, the monopoly of foreign trade and economic planning were still maintained in Cuba, although being undermined, eaten away by the policies of the Castroite bureaucracy.

The second moment began in 1992-1995, with the foreign investment law and the creation of joint ventures between the Castroite bureaucracy and imperialism.
Then, the imperialist companies could take their profits abroad and without paying taxes.
In turn, it was the Ministry of Labor, that is, the Castroite bureaucracy, which said what workers were going to be hired in those companies. In this way, the bureaucracy put their children in managerial positions so that they could pursue a career and later become shareholders in those companies.
This also created a layer of petty bourgeoisie and workers aristocracy, addicted to the bureaucracy and supporters of the perspective of capitalist restoration.

Along with the mixed companies, the binary currency system is also established in Cuba because two economies were developing: the economy of the mixed companies of the bureaucracy with imperialism, which worked in a currency convertible to dollars, and that of the vast majority of the Cuban workers and peasants, which expressed the low productivity of labor in sectors where the economy was still nationalized.

In these first years of the 1990s, the GDP fell almost 40% but the salary of Cuban workers was devalued almost 80%. In other words, with each new measure of the then Castroite bureaucracy, capitalist restoration was advanced and social inequality deepened at the same time.
Starting in the late 1990s, hand in hand with the enormous economic crisis that was unfolding in Latin America, revolutionary processes also developed, such as in Ecuador (1997), Argentina (2001), Bolivia (2003-2005), etc. The Cuban masses found there a possibility to break the isolation of Cuba.

But the Castro bureaucracy played a terrible role in strangling those revolutionary processes, for example in 2003 we saw Fidel Castro in Argentina saying that it wasn’t necessary to make a new Cuba and that the bourgeoisie was going to reactivate its businesses and so it was going to distribute later.

In Cuba, the Castroites told the masses that isolation was breaking at the hand of Chávez and the "Bolivarian" bourgeoisies. And they developed what became known as the ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Latin America), which was nothing but a common market created so that imperialism could invest directly on the island through the companies they had in the Bolivarian republics. Thus, another element of the Workers' State was liquidated, which was the monopoly of foreign trade. The Castroite bureaucracy continued to enrich itself and ran a profitable business with the export of health and education services, which were another conquest of the revolution.

Already in 2009-2010, another key moment in the restoration process occurred with the Obama-Castro agreement, in which, by dint of betraying the masses the Castroist bureaucracy earned the right to be the main agent of imperialism for restoration.
In 2010, at the Congress of the Cuban Communist Youth, to the cry of "Enough of lazy workers!" they vote for the layoff of more than 500 thousand workers, thus eliminating full employment in Cuba and created an industrial reserve army, which gave rise to individual property and created a petty-bourgeois social base for capitalist restoration under the protection of self-employment.
At the same time, the right of inheritance was legalized by giving the Castroite leaders the possibility of bequeathing the property to their children.
In 2014, the National Assembly made Law the "Foreign Investment Bill" that guarantees the imperialist monopolies they will not be expropriated.
In 2015, US imperialism reopened its Embassy in Havana. As part of the concessions to imperialism, a free zone was created in Puerto Mariel, a strategic zone for the deposit and circulation of merchandise of the transnationals, where 27 companies from Spain, Holland, France, Belgium, and Panama, Brazil, Mexico, South Korea, signed up.
The defeat of the revolutionary rise of 2011, whose highest point was, without a doubt, the revolutions in the Maghreb and the Middle East and in Ukraine, was the wind in favor of the new Cuban bourgeoisie that deepened its restorative offensive.

A government openly pro capitalism restoration in Cuba was imposed on the island and Cuba became a new transitional capitalist state, in the sense that the more the new bourgeoisie advanced in the imposition of its deals with transnationals in all interstices of the island's economy, the more advanced Cuba to be colonized or semi-colonized by imperialism. For now, it is dependent on imperialism, but it has not yet been semi-colonized, that is, it isn’t yet subjected to imperialism by economic, political and military colonial treaties.

The Cuban CP is already a bourgeois party, like that of the "red businessmen" of the Chinese CP, or the CPs of the Russian oligarchs. They have luxury restaurants and companies linked to tourism, mansions in exclusive neighborhoods like El Laguito, where they live surrounded by military custody. It’s the party of the bourgeois who embraced Obama and raised the US flag in Havana. The social base of this restoration is a bourgeoisie eager for business and property, consciously promoted since 2010 by the Cuban CP under the protection of “self-employment” (which has increased from 150 to 600 thousand since 2010) and the “cooperatives”.

In 2018 they voted for a new Constitution, which openly recognizes private property, and gives legal security to the capitalist production already imposed in the country.

In 2020, a new measure of the new Castro bourgeoisie deepened the hardships suffered by the masses. At the end of that year, the unification of the currency took place, which made the devalued Cuban peso disappear and established a single currency tailored to the imperialist companies, guaranteeing workers with starvation wages, with a devaluation that for the pocket of the Cuban worker was 300%. There were sudden and generalized price increases, shortage of basic products ... The mobilizations that we are seeing today are in response to that.