Cuba- June 3rd, 2019

The renegades of Trotskyism, far from the exploited and oppressed Cuban workers, participated in a seminar on Leon Trotsky in La Habana, organized by the government of the Communist Party’s new rich

The former Trotskyists are using Trotskyism’s clean legacy to cover up Stalinism,
which is surrendering Cuba to imperialism

 

Between May 6 and 8, the "International Academic Meeting ‘Leon Trotsky took place in Cuba: life and contemporaneity. A critical approach’. A tribute to the Centenary of the Communist International” was held. It was convened by the Cuban Institute of Cultural Research "Juan Marinello", in charge of the researcher Frank García Hernández, who reports to the Ministry of Culture of Cuba and it was endorsed by the Ministry of Science, Technology and the Environment.
This was not an independent meeting about the life of Comrade Trotsky, carried out by workers, or by worker and student’s organizations. Those who attended were not invited by the students’ unions from any Cuban university, which are loyal followers of the new Castroite bourgeoisie.
The participants, who belong to almost the entire range of renegades of Trotskyism, participated in an event that was officially organized by the Castros’ government, which today uses and falsifies Trotsky’s figure to disguise itself with a "red" mantle. It has done it after surrendering Cuba, the last workers’ state on the planet, to imperialism, while Cuban Communist Party’s new rich are already enjoying their right to inherit, to own lands and to share their seats in the boards of the large transnational companies installed on the island.
These are the ones who commanded a couple of university lecturers to get a classroom and lock their subordinates there to talk about "their Trotsky". Such was the aim of the meeting: transforming one of the greatest revolutionaries of the twentieth century into a harmless icon, one more personality of the Marxist movement. This is a true fallacy and falsification of the combat of Bolshevism against its traitors in the last century.
So, only 40 people gathered in a classroom. There was not a single Cuban worker and not a single university student, which means that that event was banned for them. And this is what they call "Trotskyism arrived in Cuba," boasting of their audacity.

Researchers from institutions of the Cuban regime and lecturers from Latin American and US universities attended this meeting. Eric Toussaint, one of the founders of the World Social Forum and adviser to bourgeois governments such as Kirchner, Chávez, Dilma and even the UN, also attended.
There were also members of Leon Trotsky House Museum in Mexico, the place where Trotsky was murdered by the Stalinist hitman Mercader... Paradoxically, the administrators of this "House Museum" had no problem being part of this seminar convened by Castroism, which welcomed Trotsky’s murderer with honors in Cuba.
Others who could not miss the meeting were Paul Le Blanc, former member of the American ISO, and Dan La Botz, member of "Democratic Socialists of America" ​​(DSA) of Bernie Sanders -the left of the butchers of the Yankee imperialist Democratic Party, which has such good relations with the Castro. The fact that those social democrats of Yankee imperialism and the City of Wall Street want to pay homage to Trotsky is a huge Stalinist rabble, which those present enthusiastically endorsed.

Likewise, leaders from different currents of the renegades of Trotskyism participated: such as the Movimiento de los Trabajadores Socialistas (Socialist Workers Movement, Argentinean PTS group in Mexico); the British SWP; the Partido Socialismo y Libertad (Socialism and Freedom Party of Venezuela) and the UIT-CI; the International Marxist Tendency led by Alan Woods; the DIP of Turkey and the Renaissance Revolutionary Worker Group of France (these last two linked to the Partido Obrero of Argentina).
We insist, was that a forum-debate where the positions of Trotskyism were discussed before hundreds and thousands of Cuban workers and students? Absolutely not. It was a meeting of Cuban Communist Party’s new rich with some 40 renegades of Trotskyism.
The former Trotskyists went to Cuba to legitimize and watch Castroism’s back, hiding the capitalist restoration that is being consummated on the island, as a result of the pact that the Castros sealed with Obama. They have silenced that private property was restored in Cuba, while they prepare the island to install sweatshops. Thus, the tax-free free zone of Puerto Mariel began to be built at transnationals’ desire. Meanwhile, the businesses of the new Cuban bourgeoisie associated with imperialism in tourism, nickel mining, oil, etc., are on a roll, while Cuban workers earn miserable $18 wages.
The guests of Havanadid not go to raise the Cuban workers against capitalist restoration. They did not go to call to unify the working class and the oppressed peoples of Latin America against imperialism and to break away with the cowardly native bourgeoisies allied to Castroism, such as Morales, Maduro, Kirchner and Lula, who are submitted and kneeling before Trump and the Yankee plunder of the subcontinent. Not at all.
What happened in Cuba is nothing new. In the second half of the 1980s, groups of the renegades of Trotskyism traveled to Moscow to support and legitimize Gorbachev by left. He was the direct agent of the US and England in the USSR, who with his policy of "perestroika" (economic openness) and "glasnost" (openness political) began to deliver the workers state to world imperialism.
The truth is that Cuban Stalinism is far from wanting to impose capitalist restoration with a political opening that unzips the terrible situation of the masses. On the contrary, it is imposing it with the stick of the party-army and the bourgeois clique that controls it. His guests at this "meeting" give a touch of "glasnost" to this Bonapartist and anti-worker regime that restores capitalism.
In '89, Pabloist currents and groups of renegades of Trotskyism, totally submitted to Stalinism in the West, travelled to "learn" from Gorbachev’s "rich experience" -as they said. This "experience" ended with the former Stalinist bureaucracy of the USSR becoming a new bourgeoisie, plundering Soviet Russia by taking billions of dollars abroad (to the City of London, to Monaco) while the state owned companies were gutted.
In their trips to the former USSR, these currents did nothing different from what they did in their countries in the West, where they were tied to the apron-strings of Stalinism, with electoral fronts as in Argentina; supporting their counterrevolutionary pacts of surrendering the revolutions as Esquipulas and Contadoras in Central America; supporting their governments and neo-Stalinist regimes and class collaboration in Africa and submitted to the CPs of imperialist Europe, as they had been since WWII.
This is the tragedy that today they want to hide to the new generations of workers and young Trotskyists and revolutionaries of the planet. And this is what they are doing today in Cuba, where the new Castroist bourgeoisie wants to hide its theft before the eyes of the Cuban and Latin American masses. It covers its pacts and businesses with Cargill, Coca Cola, Bundesbank, French imperialist bank, etc. by bringing this delegation of usurpers of the Fourth International to even use Trotsky’s figure to achieve it.

The former Trotskyists affirm that "Trotskyism arrived in Cuba" with the realization of this seminar; actually, those who arrived were its deliverers. They went to present Trotsky as an innocuous and harmless personality and "just as one more leader of the socialist movement", next to Stalin, Mao, Tito and other Stalinist figures who claimed Castroism.
Some of those who were there, like the PTS, consider Cuba to be a deformed workers state. The paradox of this sector of the participants is that they arrived in Cuba, but hid very well under the carpet the Trotskyist program of the political revolution to overthrow the bureaucracy with methods of civil war. This was posed at the top of the agenda in Cuba and in the American continent during a whole revolutionary period. Cuban Stalinism was the guarantor of "peaceful coexistence" in the entire continent and the one that dedicated itself to defeat the most acute revolutionary processes from within. This was the case in the Southern Cone, for example with the tragedy of the "peaceful path to socialism" in Chile in the 1970s, and with the shameless delivery of the revolutions in Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 1980s.
If the participants in that meeting had raised the need to overthrow the old Stalinist bureaucracy, currently a new bourgeoisie; if they had called to set up workers and soldiers' councils and independent unions to break with all the pacts that bind Cuba to imperialism and to put an end to this new class of bourgeois Cuban millionaires; these currents surely would not have been in the "Casa Museo Benito Juárez" but would have ended in some prison and, hopefully, they would have been quickly deported by the Castro regime. But former Trotskyists did not go to Havana to fight for the program of Trotskyism to confront the counterrevolutionary policy of the CP nor to propose Cuban workers a course of revolutionary action.
As we shall see, what arrived in Cuba is not Trotskyism, but rather its liquidators who traveled to Havana to prostrate themselves before Castro-Stalinism.

A "seminar on Trotsky" where the program of Trotskyism and the Fourth International was falsified

In this seminar, they wanted to make Trotskyism a "wing" or a "tributary" of the Marxist movement in general with Stalin, Gramsci and other leaders of Stalinism in the post-war period. As stated by Frank García Hernández, the main organizer of this event, in a report by the PTS of Argentina, published on 05/19: "Trotsky belongs to the system of communist ideas, to the whole theory contributed by Gramsci, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, Marx, Mariategui."
This is a true falsification to erase the river of blood that runs between Trotskyism and Stalinism, the counterrevolutionary hangman of the world working class.
Trotskyism was Bolshevism in the resistance against Stalinism and the bureaucratic scourge that expropriated the Soviet revolution, later handed it over to imperialism. It fought to recover the III International to end the scam of, "socialism in one country".
The IV International fought in the '30 against the sinister policy of Stalinism to realize "fronts with the bourgeoisie", which led to the catastrophe to the Spanish Civil War, caused the defeat of the French Revolution and allowed the assumption of Hitler in Germany . Trotskyism had the merit of adjusting the Marxist program in the face of such betrayal of the world and Soviet proletariat in particular. They gave the working class the program of political revolution to overthrow the bureaucracy and transform the USSR again into a bastion of world revolution, liquidating the perks, privileges and the bureaucracy itself, as an outgrowth of the workers state.
The war cry of the Fourth International and the combat of Trotskyism was the call for civil war against the Stalinist scourge, for "driving the bureaucracy and the new aristocracy out of the soviets." They fought for "democratizing the Soviet parties", for "Greater equality of wages", "overthrowing the Stalin clique and opening the way to the international socialist revolution".
Not even Stalin dared to falsely falsify Lenin as these renegades of Trotskyism -along with Castroism- do so with Trotsky’s figure.

This meeting in Havana, encapsulated in a classroom of a museum, it was only to destroy Fourth International’s program, in combat against reformism, the treacherous leaderships and the bureaucracies that are at the head of the workers' organizations.
In the interview we mentioned above made by PTS to García Hernández, this representative of Castroism says: "We needed Trotsky to understand what happened in the Soviet Union, because none of the referents of Marxism that I mentioned, as well as Che Guevara or Fidel Castro, could, for different reasons, give a systemic explanation of what happened. Trotsky has the courage to have done so since 1936, the value of having developed a sociological analysis which we were not aware of..."
Fidel Castro and the rest of post-war Stalinism could never have shared Trotskyism’s vision. They dedicated themselves to destroy it, to fight it, to massacre it... as they did in the USSR and in the West. In Cuba, they expelled and repressed the Trotskyists openly. Now, when there are no more traces of the conquests of the Cuban revolution achieved with the expropriation of the capitalists, Castroism deals with the "sociological analysis" that Trotsky had made in the 1930s. But from this "sociological analysis" was the root of a program and a policy.
In the USSR, while the conquests of the expropriation of the capitalists still existed, the Stalinist scourge had usurped them for their own benefit and to strangle the world revolution. In that meeting in Havanathe program of Trotskyism was hidden to confront that anomaly and "sociological" contradiction in the workers' state that was: "Down with the bureaucratic gang of Cain-Stalin! Long live Soviet democracy! Long live the international socialist revolution!"... This was also posed as a task for Cuba for decades.

Cuban Stalinists say "sorry", in a small room, to the Trotskyists for having persecuted them...
Does the executioner regret having killed the victim? Miserable

Stalinism did something more serious at international level than persecuting the Cuban Trotskyists. It drowned the revolutionary vanguard of the USSR and the Third International in blood. They welcomed Mercader in Havanawith honors... What do the murderers of the international proletariat apologize for, after physically liquidating their vanguard? The 40 Trotskyists who were present in Havana delivered the blood of our martyrs to their executioners. They did not denounce them before the Cuban and international working class... neither before, nor during, nor after that conference. They accepted the apologies. It was a cynicism that the Trotskyist revolutionaries will never endorse. For the blood of our martyrs we will not!
As we see, this conference, in a small room, was an open demonstration of how former Trotskyists kneel before Stalinism.
How is it possible that in the past Castroism and Stalinism persecuted and massacred the Trotskyists in Cuba and internationally and now they "apologize"? The answer is simple. The new rich of the CP know well that the "Trotskyists" of today do not pose any danger to them. As we saw in this conference in Havana, they were far from calling to overthrow this new bourgeoisie of the new rich of Cuban Stalinism. They raise the same program of Castroism supporting Lula and Haddad against Bolsonaro in Brazil, Maduro against Guaidó in Venezuela, Sanders and the Democratic Party against Trump in the USA. They are the left wing of Castro's policy in Latin America... and internationally. The renegades of Trotskyism, along with Cuban Stalinism, for years, have isolated, surrounded and slandered the martyred revolutionary masses of Syria, supporting the massacre and genocide of the fascist Al Assad and the genocidal Putin, on behalf of imperialism. Together they convinced the entire Latin American and world working class that Al Assad and Putin were, "allies of the oppressed peoples of the world." Together with the US and the European imperialist powers they set up an "anti-terrorist front" that, with Al Assad doing the "dirty work" and with the excuse of ISIS, drowned the Syrian revolution in blood. This allowed imperialism and the bourgeoisie to attack the world working class with dismissals, imposing labour flexibilization plans and robbing all their conquests.
Unfortunately, what we say here is what happened in those days. During the seminar a cadre of Castro-Stalinism made his presentation justifying the expulsion and assassination of leaders of the Fourth International in Cuba in the ‘40s, as Sandalio Junco, the ex-Trotskyists there remained in silence and allowed him finish his "dissertation" quietly. This more than a shame is a betrayal. And traitors are called traitors.
Thus, Stalinism first "apologized" to them and before so much submission of the liquidators of Trotskyism, ended up rubbing them in the face, proudly, their massacres against the Trotskyists, and they neither flinched nor left that meeting denouncing the traitors and assassins of Cuban Stalinism who killed the Trotskyists! This fact proves the role of these ex-Trotskyist currents, prostrated before Castro-Stalinism. 

The new international of Stalinism and the renegades of Trotskyism met in Havana

This is the role played by former Trotskyists as part of the international policy of the so-called "New Left".
After the sold out of the USSR and other workers' states in 1989, they devoted themselves to supporting and legitimizing the waste of the old Communist Parties for years. Today they have become neo-Stalinist currents and definitively dissolved the Fourth International to march to single parties at the feet of the Stalinists, erasing the river of blood that exists between Trotskyism and Stalinism.
What was held in Havana was a meeting of this new international that Stalinists and liquidators of the Fourth International have set up. The fact that they will hold a second meeting in San Pablo in June of next year proves it.
Thus, together with the Stalinists, the renegades of Trotskyism have supported the dog Bashar in Syria. They have supported the class collaboration policy of Castroism. They are even the ones who present self-confessed Stalinists like Gramsci as an "outstanding man of the socialist revolution". The meeting in Havana was the meeting of reconciliation, but not of the Trotskyists with Stalinism but of the traitors of the Fourth International with the executioners of the international revolutionary movement.

This new international raise the policy proposed by Fidel Castro to ensure that the US flag flames again in Havana as their key program: "socialism does not work anymore, not even more in Cuba." Thus, former Trotskyists together with Stalinists emphasize the struggle for "real democracy", to make the workers of the world believe that it is possible to improve their living conditions within the framework of the current regime. Thus, they seek to bury the struggle for socialist revolution, when it is the only solution to the sufferings of the masses before the bankruptcy of this rotten imperialist capitalist system.

We, Trotskyists, have not participated in this seminar of Castroism. We have never reconciled or will reconcile with Stalinism, the greatest traitors of the world proletariat.
Trotskyism did not arrive in Cuba. Those who long ago liquidated the revolutionary legacy of the Fourth International arrived in Havana.

Against all of them, the real Trotskyism will be re-founded in Cuba recovering the Fourth International from those who have handed it in to Stalinism, to prepare a new political and social revolution, to expropriate imperialism and the new bourgeoisie, to defeat the Castro regime and impose the restoration of the dictatorship of the proletariat under revolutionary forms to place Cuba as a milestone of the revolution in Latin America, the US and the world.
Together with the working class Latin America and its best allies, the American workers, the heroic Cuban masses will rise again. The liquidators of Trotskyism who cover the backs of those who sold out the Cuban revolution, will never rise again!

Florencia Barcaz and Omar Abeidy

 

The former Trotskyists have kneeled before Stalinism for a long time The fact that the renegades of Trotskyism today "pay tribute" to Trotsky together with the new rich of the Cuban CP should not surprise any conscious worker of the world. They have sold out the Fourth International to embrace Stalinism. That is why what could not be missing in Havana were the greetings from Chavist Alan Woods, leader of the International Marxist Tendency, who delivered the Transition Program of the Fourth International to Chavez, to dress him as "anti-imperialist" and "revolutionary". Not to mention the case of the DIP (Turkey) and the Renaissance Revolutionary Workers group (France) that, together with Partido Obrero (Argentina) and the EEK (Greece), have set up a new "international" with Russian Stalinist parties such as the OKP (Unified Communist Party), led by the Stalinist Darya Mitina, who was an Putin government’s adviser. Many of its members say that they have not made an International with Russian Stalinists at all... This would be a "united front tactic", allegedly. This is a fallacy. They have made a conference and voted a program for "socialism" in common, to found a new International with the followers of Stalin's party. The unjustifiable cannot be justified. UIT-CI leadership and their group from Venezuela also assisted. They carried out the campaign to gather "10 million votes for Chavez" to guarantee his reelection in 2006, establishing himself as "left leg" of the "Bolivarian Revolution" scam and Venezuelan Stalinism. From London the "socialists of the queen" of the SWP of England arrived. They are the best militants of Corbyn (Labor Party of the imperialist pirates), disguising him as an "anti-imperialist" and "anti-militarist" politician. It is a social-imperialist current, servant of the AngloAmerican and other British transnationals. Meanwhile, his group in the US, the ISO, voted breaking away to march behind Sanders, the Democratic Party of the US imperialist butchers. In 2016, Argentina PTS had been already admitted in Cuba to present its books on Leon Trotsky at the Havana Book Fair, to receive prizes for its documentaries that hide the betrayals of Castro-Stalinism at the revolutions of the ‘70s and also to participate in the conference "The left in Latin America during the 20th century", also endorsed by the Cuban government through the Cuban Institute of Cultural Research "Juan Marinello." Yesterday, in 1988, the PTS emerged breaking away with the Argentine MAS and the strategic front that it had with the Communist Party, fighting for the political revolution in the former workers' states, at a time when Stalinism was preparing to impose capitalist restoration on the USSR... Today, after years of wanting to reconcile Trotsky with the Stalinist Gramsci (and to have the support of the "Gramsci Argentine Association" of the Communist Party of Vittorio Codovilla and Patricio Echegaray), a neo-Stalinist PTS has emerged, breaking away with Trotskyism, to kneel before the Cuban CP.  Former Trotskyists misrepresent Trotsky's revolutionary intervention in Copenhagen in 1932 to justify their prostration before the new Castroist bourgeoisie Trying to justify their participation in the seminar on Trotsky held in Havana, pro-Stalinist currents that broke away with the Fourth International resort to various contraptions. First of all they hide that such event had been convened and organized by the Castro regime and the new rich of the Cuban CP officially, and that it was done with the working class and the student movement of the island backs. The last ones could not even find out about the event through the Granma (newspaper of the Cuban CP) nor the interventions of those who participated. Also, the leadership of the Argentine PTS argues that there is nothing wrong with participating and sponsoring this event in Cuba, because that would be the same policy that Trotsky had when he gave a conference to the youth of the Social Democracy in Copenhagen (Denmark) in the ‘30s. This is a true fallacy. On November 27th, 1932 Trotsky delivered a lecture on the Russian Revolution in Denmark, invited by the Copenhagen Association of Social Democratic Students on the 15th Anniversary of the revolution. Any analogy between this conference and the secret meeting recently held by these currents with the Cuban government to "know the position of Trotsky in the 30s" is a true gibberish. Let's start by saying that the lecture delivered by Trotsky in 1932 was public and organized by socialist students. In it, Trotsky was able to talk to the grassroots students and their positions were transmitted and known by all workers in Denmark and internationally. The socialist youth had invited the leader of the October Revolution to give them a lecture on the Russian revolution, since the socialist left currents could not avoid discussing and debating the Soviet question. This enormous revolution had impacted the entire European social democracy and, particularly, its youth, which, since the 1930s, when Hitler emerged in Germany until the WWII in the 1940s, sparked different processes of radicalization. An example of this is the Socialist Youth of Madrid, which before the Franco uprising called the Trotskyists to enter their organizations to lead them, while they paraded with the portrait of Trotsky through the streets of that city. Another example is the radicalization of French socialist youth, impacted by Hitler's coup in Austria in '34. The Fourth International devoted an enormous effort to this phenomenon of radicalization of Social Democracy´s left wing of in the 30s, which was accompanied by the bankruptcy of the Social Democracy that, with a hellish pacifism, opened the doors to fascism in Germany and all of Europe. So, the Danish students did not invite Trotsky to a conference to transform him into a harmless icon or Stalin’s political partner, but to discuss passionately with the leader of the Red Army, who had toppled, with the civil war of the Soviets, a collaborative government of the Social Democracy with the imperialist bourgeois parties. What does this have to do with the secret conference held in Havana, which was guaranteed -and hidden- by the Ministry of Culture of Cuba? Trotsky's intervention before a socialist student organization was totally independent of the bourgeois state and the government of Denmark. What does the character of that conference offered by Trotsky in Denmark have to do with participating in a seminar of the Cuban government as the renegades of Trotskyism did to kneel before the new Castroite bourgeoisie? Absolutely nothing. We insist, in Copenhagen, Trotsky spoke before thousands of young people who, even being members of Social Democracy, turned to the left and invited the leader of the Red Army and the Third International to know how the October Revolution had been made, as it was by posed the Left Opposition itself. In a November 1932 statement it asserts: "The Left Opposition had to use the initiative of a social-democratic student organization (...) The social democratic government, that is, the left wing of bourgeois democracy, authorized the entry of Trotsky to Denmark only because it felt it would be too cumbersome to refuse the request of its own workers and young workers; if it did, it would reveal too crudely, in a secondary problem, its character not only anti-social but also undemocratic." ("A declaration of the Bolshevik-Leninists on the journey of Comrade Trotsky" - November 1932). Does the PTS leadership really think that its leaders and all those who sold out the Fourth International were invited to Havana by enormous pressure from thousands of workers and young people who demanded the presence of the Trotskyists in Cuba? They are fabricators. They do not know how to justify that they broke away with Trotskyism. They became Stalinists with Gramsci, while they want to continue robbing and living with the banner of the Fourth International. They were called by the Cuban government and willingly lent themselves to it to cover up a Stalinist excrescence that has already become a new possessing class by the left. So little comparison can be made of these two events that even, while that of Copenhagen was the last massive public conference that Trotsky could personally deliver, speaking before an audience of more than 2,500 young people, at the Havana seminar the leadership of the PTS spoke only to some 30-40 people, who were only their partners in selling out the Fourth International, in a real private meeting, very far away from the Cuban working class, and before a couple of Stalinists who welcomed them. Moreover, the first thing Trotsky did in that conference before the socialist students was denouncing the counterrevolutionary role of social democracy. This is what he stated: "... I consider it my duty to express my thanks to the organisers of this meeting, the organisation of social-democratic students. I do this as a political adversary. (...) it is impossible to speak of a revolution, out of which the Soviet Republic arose, without taking up a political position. As a lecturer I stand under the banner as I did when I participated in the events of the revolution. Up to the war, the Bolshevik Party belonged to the Social-Democratic International. On August 4, 1914, the vote of the German social-democracy for the war credits put an end to this connection once and for all, and opened the period of uninterrupted and irreconcilable struggle of Bolshevism against social-democracy." (A speech delivered in Copenhagen, Denmark in November 1932: " In Defence Of October", our bold). Trotsky first separated banners; he openly denounced the betrayal of social democracy and raised the relentless fight of Bolshevism against it, even when the Danish social-democratic government had made it a condition for their brief stay in Copenhagen to abstain from to carry out political controversies, at the risk of being deported and being under the vile persecution of the Stalinist bureaucracy. There is no way to compare this revolutionary intervention with the deplorable role of PTS’s leadership and other renegades of Trotskyism, who did not go to Cuba to follow the example of our comrade Trotsky, but to silence the counterrevolutionary role of the Castroism and conceale the revolutionary program of Trotskyism. They even kept a scandalous silence before the justification of the Cuban Stalinists of their assassination of the Trotskyist leader Sandalio Junco. There are no words for this. The policies of the PTS and its leadership sound like charlatans camouflaged of Trotskyists, who are having more and more troubles to justify their Stalinist essence.