CASTRO: WHIPPED INTO LINE

Fidel Castro, the Cuban leader, is to visit Moscow next month for talks with the Kremlin leaders. His visit marks the growth of closer relations between Havana and the Soviet Union. It is Castro's first trip to the USSR since 1964, when he was guest of Nikita Khrushchev.

Since that time, there has been considerable tension the the Soviet Union. The Soviet leaders' disagreements with Castro were concentrated on two fronts. They objected strongly to the Cuban government's policy of encouraging armed struggle in Latin America-summed up in the slogan 'Create, one, two, many Vietnams'.

The Soviet leaders were reluc tant to continue shoring up the crisis-ridden •Cuban economy unless the Cuban leaders were pared back the Kremlin' counter-revolutionary line. With the failure of his grandiose plans to raise the country's sugar output, Castro had nowhere else to turn.

The Soviet policy of peaceful coexistence with imperialism embodied in the agreements reached between the Soviet Union and the United States at the time of the Cuban missiles crisis in 1963. Relations with Cuba reached a low point at the time of the ill-fated, guerrilla mission of in Bolivia in Bolivian Party refused assistance to the guerrilla band and virtually sealed its fate the hands of the military regime.

Castro has now been whipped into line. From the fire-eating advocate armed revolution throughout the colonial and semi-colonial world he has become the chief spokesman of peaceful co existence, anti-Trotskyism and relations with counter. revolution Castro's evolution gives the to the revisionists of the so-called Unified Secretariat (Pabloites) who claimed that the Cuban revolution was a proletarian revolution and praised Castro as an Nine years ago the American Finally fused from Trotskyism Socialist Workers' Party (SWP)

and fused with the European revisionists because, according to SWP leaders Farrell Dobbs and Joseph Hansen:

'To the majority of Trotskyists throughout the world it became increasingly self-evident that the continued division of the Fourth International was anachronistic and that vigorous efforts must be made split so that united force! could be brought bear in the promising situa tion developing in all countries.

'The victory of the Cuban revolution and the fact that both sides [the SWP and the European Pabloites] through parallel analyses, reached identical conclusions concerning its meaning sions concerning its meaning and powerfully reinforced the trend towards reunification.' The meaning of the Cuban revolution, the eyes of these anti-Marxists, was that "unconscious' revolutionaries, like Castro. could carry through the historical tasks of the working despite the absence of reolutionary parties of the Fourt nternational Cuba, according to the revisionists, was a workers' state established 'unconsciously and without a party. Hence, there was no longer anv necessity to build the Fourth International or fight Tor Trotskyist principles. Revolutions could be made even by those most hostile to Trotskyism, such as Castro.

They closed their eyes to the patently petty-bourgeols and Bonapartist character of the Cuban regime. The Cuban workers have no control over the means of production or of the State machine Castro himself has long made no secret of his hostility to Trotskyism. At the Tri-Continental Congress in 1966 he launched major attack on the Fourth In ternational, much to the joy the Kremlin. since has accommodated himself more and more completely to Moscow's requirements.

The decisive turning-point was the defeat of Che Guevera's Bolivian adventure and the growing crisis in the Cuban economy. This coincided with the first wave This coinitionary steige wave struggles Europe and America (France, Mexico, Czechoslovakia).

The first indication of Castro's attitude to these developments came al the time of the May-June 1968 General Strike France. He ostentatiously refused the slightest support une workers and students in struggle against Gaullism. Though many of the students looked to Cuba for inspiration Havana. Like the there was utter Kremlin and their French agents in the Communist endership Castro Was tor the continued rule of French capitalism.

When Czechoslovakia was invaded Castro expressed his full solidaritSimilarly, he kept silent with the Warsaw Pact while the Mexican dictatorship butchered 400 students on the eve of the Mexico City Olympic Games By July 1969 he was publicly praising the Peruvian military junta's "revolutionary' qualities— describing as 'nationalist and developmentalist" the "repressive regime which consigns striking miners to the horrors of the Sepa concentration camp in the Amazonian jungle.

In Cuba itself, the Castroites commenced the public hounding of dissident left-wing critics like the poet Heberto Padilla.

Castro's visit to Chile and Peru the end of last year marked another major step to the right. Throughout the trip he was extremely conciliatory in his statements about the United States. He gave unstinting back ing to the Popular Unity govern. ment of Salvador Allende-an alliance of Stalinists, social-democrats and liberals which has dedicated itself to preserving capitalist property in Chile against the workers' and peasants' 'excessive pretentions'.

Prensa Patina, the Cuban press agency, commented on the tone of Castro's speeches: The Cuban Prime Minister said that contrary to the assertion af some political pundits, the Cuban government had never denied the possibility of electoral victory that would open the way to a revolutionary process.

'This in spite of the fact that emphasis smot the ears position during the main vas on the armed guerrilla roac to fundamental political change.' The agency also remarked on America: militar astro,969 stated as far the change in Castro's attitude to the regimes of Latin back as July that he believed the process led by • Ger Velasco Alvaredo in Peru to be 1 revolutionary one... Since that time... the Cuban and Peruvian governments have developed healthy economic and social relations and might in the near future initiate diplomatic relareactlonary regime as a The blood-sucking imperialist including the Dominican