The General Strike in the North East, by History Group of the Communist Party

[p027] The General Strike in the North East. Pamphlet No. 22, published by the History Group of the Communist Party, 1s. 6d. This pamphlet is an enthralling study of one area during the General Strike of 1926. At the centre, during this struggle, was the Durham mining village of Chopwell—known as ‘ Little Moscow’ for many years afterwards. The first meetings which discussed plans for carrying on the strike in Northumberland and Durham were held at Chopwell. On Sunday, May 2 there met some 50 representatives of trade unions, co-operative socie- ties, miners’ lodges, and Labour councillors. During the previous months the government had been organizing its forces in preparation for the strike. The Chopwell meeting discussed this, The ‘Plan of Action’ which it adopted declared there would be ‘concentrated against the strikers . . the whole of the civil and military institutions that are under central control; and also the civil institutions usually classed as Local Government’. The ‘ Plan of Action’ went on: ‘To LABOUR REVIEW-—Spring, 1962 meet all this we must improvise. The improvised machinery must be simple, easy to throw up, all inclu- sive. All activities in each locality - should be centralised in a single body to be called Council of Action, Strike Committee, Trades Council or what you will, all such bodies should be linked up and. centralised in the county capital town under a body responsible for the whole region.’ It was just this improvised mach- inery which ran the General Strike in the area. In the Russian Revolu- tion these types of organization were called soviets. The pamphlet shows once again, through a study of one area, how the General Strike brought about a state of dual power in Britain. The ‘im- provised machinery’ took decisions which paralysed or overrode the ruling institutions of capitalism. The tactician who wrote the Chopwell ‘Plan of Action’, pointed to the key front in the struggle. ‘Whoever handles and transports food, that same person controls food: whoever controls food will find the “neutral” part of the population rallying to their side. Who feeds the people wins the strike! The problem of the general strike can be focussed down to one thing—the struggle for food control.’ But the trade union leaders had laid no plans for the strike. There had not even been any discussion on the provisioning of strikers with the assistance of the Co-operative Move- ment. The ‘ Northumberland and Durham General Council and Joint Strike Committee’ was to comment in its report—drawn up immediately after the strike-—‘Had there been pre- viously carefully worked out plans on the Trade Union side as there had been on the employers and govern- mental side it would have been possible to start the general strike on Friday with a complete and imme- diate withdrawal of labour~ and thereafter to issue permits under a system of strict controls.’ But the national leadership of the strike was in a state of panic, At every point the initiative from below collided with their fears of what forces the strike could release. They refused to allow the Joint Strike Committee to issue its own bulletin to. counter the misrepresentations from the BBC, the government organs and local sheets. The contest between the initiative, and fighting capacity in the ranks and the cowardice of the trade union leaders stands out from the records from the North East. Page Arnot, who helped plan the campaign in the area, reports that when the call for Councils of Action was to be sent from Chopwell throughout the coalfield—‘ Dozens of mining lads who never attended a lodge meeting and were therefore thought to be of little account turned up the next day ready to speed throughout the two counties on bicycles and motor bykes.? So much for those who measure by the number of regular ‘branch attenders’ the capacities of the working class to fight for socialism. Page Arnot also. reports, when checking pickets, meeting up with 125 workers—mainly young miners— most of them carrying pick shafts and guarding a moorland road into Chopwell. At the end of the General Strike there were more workers out nationally than at the beginning. The report of the North East strike committee shows that this area was no exception. Over a hundred years ago, George Julian Harney pointed out to the Chartist Convention that a General Strike was only useful if it served as a prelude to a revolution, that it must end either in the surrender of the workers or in a collision with the armed forces of the government. In 1926, the capacity for carrying the struggle forward was there among the workers, in the North East and elsewhere. That was one of the things which terrified the leaders. They did not end the strike even with the surrender which Harney warned about. Theirs was a _ cowardly capitulation. W.H.

[p028] CUBA: THE FIRST STAGE THE ‘ECONOMIC WAR’ AND NATIONALIZATION The agrarian law did not constitute a serious attack on the international financial interests of imperialism. Protests began in the US only with the non-payment of compensation. But it is the political implications of the reform which cause anxiety; the very words ‘agrarian reform’ have an enormous power of attraction for the millions of starving peasants throughout Latin America. The Cuban reform is dangerous above all because of the risks of contagion; and it is probably for this reason that the leaders of the US decided to call a halt on the first excuse, after having accepted agrarian reform in principle. Batista had pillaged the Treasury, and in spite of the initial loans from large American firms, the Cuban government faced a catastrophic financial situation. This necessity explains such measures as the compulsory reduction of electricity rates, imposed up to then by American firms, the introduction of new automatic methods in the telephone service, and the ‘mineral law’ which imposed on firms a tax of 25 per cent of the total value of their exports of minerals. In the spring of 1960, the conflict between Cuba and the US opened the way for intervention by the USSR, which put the Cuban problem at the centre of the world rivalry between the two great powers. It was in fact to reduce the export of currency and to make wholesale economies that the Cuban government agreed to buy the oil offered by Moscow at a lower price than that of Venezuela; this was to be paid for in deliveries of sugar instead of money. The masters of the island’s refineries, Texaco, Standard Oil, Shell, refused to refine the Russian oil (refining itself was carried on at a loss, so that the companies were interested in it only if it were a question of refining oil extracted by them- Selves, such as that from Venezuela). As in Mexico just over 20 years earlier, the government replied in the only way which would allow it to maintain its authority and to ensure the continued working of the economy: in reply to their blackmail, the govern: aent nationalized the oil companies. The US replied by cutting its sugar purchases by 700,000 tons, a heavy blow at the Cuban economy. One thing led to another, attack provoked counter- attack, the ‘economic war’ got worse: capital took flight, firms closed down, and in order to keep the wheels turning, nationalizations multiplied. By the autumn, all large American undertakings, in effect all the large undertakings in Cuba, some 80 per cent of the industrial enterprises, oil, coffee, tobacco, the mines, were nationalized. The American Govern- ment put an embargo on exports to Cuba. In order to fill the gap thus created in the pgovisici of 25 essential goods, up to then supplied by American industry, the Cuban leaders imported from the USSR and the people’s democracies. In the year 1960, imports from the East rose to 40 per cent of the total although before the revolution they had been insignificant. The foreign trade of Cuba was pro- foundly changed, and with it, the political forces within the country. THE ‘ RADICALIZATION’ OF THE REVOLUTION One cannot deny that the radicalization of the Cuban regime has been partially the work of the leadership. The decision to resist imperialism com- pelled it to take measures which would broaden its popular support. It would be interesting to have information as to what went on at that time in the leading circles. Viewed from outside, the process was relatively simple: one after the other, the ‘bearded ones’ of the early days, following the petty-bourgeois politicians installed in the govern- ment in 1959, abandoned Castro: they meant to remain faithful to the ‘humanist and neutralist revolution’ which they believed he. was deserting. However, how did this differentiation develop? Were there real discussions in which different theses were put forward, were possibilities envisaged of development by different roads: limited mobilization of the masses in order to stand fast; the use, against the pressure of the US, of the counter-pressure of the USSR, or a trading of the Russian alliance for a compromise with imperialism? In the absence of precise information, the knowledge which we have of the behaviour of Castro and his friends suggests a different hypothesis: it was doubtless empirically, as in the earlier stages, that the Cuban leaders, strengthened by their initial successes, pushed forward by the masses whom they had aroused, sure of their prestige and their ascendancy, chose a policy of resistance which has dragged them farther than they wished and which one would not normally have expected from men of their social origin and ideology. One can also imagine that the experience of Arbenz, which Guevara shared, contributed to this choice; all the time emphasizing that this course was possible for the Cuban leaders only because they had carried on the struggle at the side of the peasants in the mountains during the guerrilla stage. Urban reform constituted a step forward: by fixing a ceiling on rents and allowing all tenants to become owners, it dealt a serious blow at certain elements of the oligarchy, like those of Havana who owned and rented out 5,000 apartments, but above all it served to. gain the support of the urban masses hitherto standing aside from a revolution which was

[p029] 26 essentially peasant. The same anxiety led to the setting up of state farms in the countryside, the Granjas del Pueblo, which gradually took the place of the cooperatives. The profits of the Granjas go to the state, and their introduction has limited the risk of the development of a ‘cooperative capitalism’. However it is in the measures of direct resistance that are found the most important elements of radicalization. The nationalization of enterprises, in the absence of the necessary personnel, inevitably constituted an appeal to the initiative and responsi- bility of the workers: it was the workers’ militias which undertook the task of guarding the factories. Their extension, in a few months, on the basis of voluntary recruitment, training and serving outside working hours, marked a turning point in the history of the Cuban revolution: the working class, from being a beneficiary, became a participant. A rapid increase in its role was promoted by the American menace, the fear of intervention, the open activities of the counter-revolution. The government accepted this: in the event of a full-scale offensive, the Cuban people, once having resisted the disembarkation so as to make it as costly as possible, could have counted only on popular guerrilla action and civil resistance, for which militias are more effective than a regular army. _ Thus the relationship between political forces modified both itself and the course of the revolution. The counter-revolutionary oligarchy found accom- plices at all levels in the State apparatus: its activities provoked a repression which delivered blows at the traditional state a thousand times more powerful than those which it received in 1959. The diplomatic corps was thoroughly purged, the navy partly so; at all levels officials were affected, and the sacrosanct judiciary was dismantled after having been decapi- tated by the dissolution of the Supreme Court in the middle of 1960. At the same time the importance of the organi- zations linked to the masses grew: after the sabotage of an arms factory in Havana, it was the workers’ militia which undertook counter-measures; it was the vigilance committees!0 which increased during the days of April 1961, taking the place of the police in carrying out the repressive tasks which daily became more numerous. The Cuban Revolution had ceased to be solely a peasant revolution: it was becoming a workers’ revolution, and the growth of workers’ militias, to the detriment of the army—a peasant army—is the clearest illustration of this change in the internal relationship of forces of the revolution. 10. According to Max Clos (Figaro 14.6.61), there were in May 1961, in Havana, 10,000 committees and in Cuba 100,000, each made up of 10-30 persons, and with 500,000 ‘vigilantes’ under their control. LABOUR REVIEW—Spring, 1962 WHERE DOES THE CUBAN REVOLUTION STAND? On several occasions, discussing in public speeches the criticisms of his pro-imperialist adversaries, Fidel Castro has ferociously attacked parliamentary demo- cracy and extolled ‘direct democracy’. But the ‘General Assembly of the Cuban People’ at Havana is simply an immense mobilization of the masses, which it would take a great deal of imagination to equate with a direct democracy in which each worker is involved in the direction of the state. Direct contact between the Cuban workers and peasants and their ‘lider maximo’ (great leader), thanks to the television screen, is a one-way process, and cannot be equivalent to the conscious activity of the workers deciding their own fate through their own class organizations. The Cuban state is not the ancient type of direct democracy described by Castro’s propaganda and some European intellectuals. Nor is it the direct democracy of the workers and peasants as in the soviets of Russia, the committees of Spain, the workers’ councils of Hungary, such as were thrown up by the revolutions in those countries. It is not, however, by chance that direct democracy is spoken of so much in Cuba: the revolution, a conscious activity of the widest masses, brings to the forefront their most fundamental demands, notably that of exercising their power through direct democracy. In reality, the island today presents an original form of dual power. On the one hand, a bourgeois state, purged and ‘reformed’ by the creation of new organs like the Rebel Army and INRA, their aim to curb the Cuban masses: directors and administrators of the factories, granjas and cooperatives, are appointed from above. But at the same time there have developed the characteristic forms of workers’ power, where the initiative comes from below: the 400,000 militiamen organised on the basis of their place of work, the vigilance committees, are com- peting with the old forces, ‘reformed’, of the army and police. They are the true channel for the ever more conscious mobilization of the masses. Such as they are, they represent—as was shown in the events in Poland and Hungary in 1956—the begin- ning of the workers’ consciousness of their own striving for power. The institution in the factories of ‘Technical Assessing Councils’ (Consejos Tecnicos Assessores, or CTA), reflects this duality. Consulta- tive bodies appointed by the management from a list of workers elected in a general meeting, they are not organs of the workers will, but at this stage represent concessions to that will which the later evolution of the workers’ struggle can transform, under fhe pressure of the vanguard, into instruments of power and workers’ control.

[p030] CUBA: THE FIRST STAGE A correct definition of the nature of the Cuban government and state is an indispensable step in understanding the present situation and the future perspectives. But for this it is necessary to be on guard against rigid terms which, by transfixing a moving reality, may prevent us from grasping the dynamism and transitory character of a situation. The Cuban government is a_ petty-bourgeois government, in its original social basis, in its social composition and in its ideology. The section of the Cuban petty bourgeoisie personified by Fidel Castro has, as much by its own empiricism as by the absence of a working-class leadership, found itself drawn beyond its own class objectives, and has been able, in a genuine though distorted manner, to express the revolutionary drive of the workers and peasants. But it has not a true revolutionary perspective, and it is once more Guevara who reveals this when he declares: ‘In order to know where Cuba is going, the best thing is to ask the government of the US just how far it intends to go.’ The two powers * Ché’ ‘In order to know where Cuba is going, the best thing is to ask the government of the US just how far it intends to go.’ Guevara: which face each other are in a position which may take various forms but in which the alternatives are unavoidable: either the ‘reformed’ traditional state will evolve towards bureaucratisation and a bourgeois victory and will destroy the elements of workers’ power (militia, committees and CTA) or else the militias and councils will become the organs and the basis of a workers’ state. Many factors interact in deciding their future. We lack a great deal of information necessary for evaluating them: what is actually the structure of political life in Cuba? How and where does it appear in the trade unions, the militia, the army, the cooperatives? How can a conscious leadership emerge to deal with the dangers which threaten the revolution, and, above all, the influence of the Communist Party? 27 A THREAT: STALINISM The ‘Popular Socialist Party’, the Cuban Stalinist Party, has never in the past played any real role, certainly not that of leadership: long ago the Latin American Stalinist parties abandoned all revolu- tionary or even reformist ambitions, being content to play the part of agents of the Kremlin bureau- cracy. We have seen that for a long time they supported Batista, and that at a time when Castro’s programme was merely an advanced bourgeois- democratic one, they reproached him both for his adventurism and his radicalism. Rallying to him at the last moment, they began to play a real role only with the economic war and the reorientation of Cuba’s foreign trade. As Claude Julien writes, ‘To each attack from the US, to each gesture of solidarity from the USSR, corresponds a defection of the moderates and the reinforcement of the Cuban CP.’ Official propa- ganda on the friendship of Russia or the deliveries of arms, raise the prestige of the party in this threatened country. Its bureaucratic apparatus and its organi- zation enabled it to benefit from this popularity to a much greater extent because the July 26 movement, created by Fidel Castro, has never developed a real organization, a real apparatus. In 1959 and 1960 it was, as Claude Julien emphasizes, ‘too late to enter the Movement of the 26 July, but there was still time to join the Communist Party’ (op. cit.). Also the PSP includes many ‘eleventh-hour recruits’ recruited especially from the petty bourgeoisie: these well disciplined and firmly controlled ‘militants’ have set out to gain the key posts in the trade unions and cooperatives. More ‘ Fidelist’ than Fidel, powerful from the prestige of the great ‘ally’, the Stalinists are taking up in Cuba a method which has so often succeeded for them elsewhere, denouncing as ‘counter-revolutionary’ in the name of ‘unity’ all those who will not play their political game: ‘ Fear and suspicion have reappeared on the Cuban scene.’ (Julien, op. cit.) The banning of the journal of the Cuban Trotsky- ist organization, the Revolutionary Workers’ Party, the silence which has fallen on the fate of the leaders, the destruction of the presses on which was being printed Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution, show the influence which the Stalinist apparatus wields in Cuba today, and its determination to use it against the revolutionaries.!! It is significant that Castro and the other July 26 Movement upholders of the ‘anti-totalitarian and humanist revolution’ have 11. They show also, in passing, the naivety of petty bourgeois like Wright Mills (cf. his book Castro’s Cuba), according to which the Cuban revolutionaries (i.e., Castro and his friends) ‘are afraid of no ideas of any sort’.

[p031] 28 agreed to the proscription of a working-class tend- ency which the Stalinist bureaucracy, now their main supplier, has pursued for decades with implacable hatred. These measures throw a clear light on the proposals for prohibition of the right to strike and the formation of a ‘United Party’ which the Stalinists will no doubt control right from the beginning and which they will use to subdue the mass movement.!2 WHERE IS THE CUBAN REVOLUTION GOING? A discussion on the Cuban Revolution is going on amongst the advanced workers. Certain positions taken up 2re hardly reassuring as regards cohesion of thought on the part of comrades who claim to be revolutionary Marxists. It is impossible to make an analysis of what is going on in Cuba by collecting facts and pigeon-holing them. It is impossible to analyse the evolution of Cuba while leaving out the foreign policy of American imperialism and the Soviet bureaucracy, or, unless one accepts that the Kremlin bureaucracy is a revolutionary force, to consider the help given by Moscow as disinterested and without political strings. In similar conditions—almost by armed struggle— the Stalinist bureaucracy strangled the Spanish revolution. In 1936, the anti-Franco camp presented similar forms of dual power: a crumbling bourgeois state, with a government led by petty bourgeois; local and regional workers’ power with committees and militias. The Spanish bourgeois state was a thousand times more shaken than that of Cuba. The organs of workers’ power were more numerous, more differentiated, more stiffened by a conscious leadership than their Cuban equivalents have hitherto been. As soon as the Spanish Republican bourgeois state had been ‘reformed’ and rebaptised ‘popular’, the organs of workers’ power were destroyed, the committees dissolved, the militias integrated into the bourgeois army and the masses subjugated. It was finally the oligarchy and the troops of Franco which won the war, crushing for more than 20 years the Spanish working-class movement. The feeble Spanish bourgeoisie was able, in the first stage, to defeat the workers and peasants and subordinate them because the anti-Franco camp, faced with what was in effect an imperialist coalition —-intervention of Rome and Berlin, non-iritervention of London and Paris—obtained from the USSR the supplies of arms necessary for the war. Russian aid was the starting point for the influence of the Stalinist party, but this party, because of its counter- 12. Since this article was written, the United Party of the Socialist Revolution has been formed.—Ed. LABOUR REVIEW—Spring, 1962 Spain: Workers’ militias strangled by Stalinist bureaucracy. revolutionary policy, was definitely the expression of the Spanish petty bourgeoisie at the same time as being the transmission line of the double pressure, against the workers’ and peasants’ revolution, of imperialism and the bureaucracy. The same events can recur in Cuba, arising from similar relations between the USA, the USSR and the revolution. What perspectives open up today for Cuba? Theoretically there are three. First, that which imperialist propaganda declares daily has already taken place, the transformation of Cuba into a “People’s Democracy’, for Marxists a ‘deformed workers’ state’. All the internal conditions exist: a much-purged bourgeois state in which the Stalinists, thanks to the support of the USSR, hold the key positions, an economy in which the large capitalists have been expropriated, but whose backwardness, like its cultural level, is favourable to the formation of a state bureaucracy based on advantages in kind and higher salaries for officials and technicians, finally a genuine movement of the masses, but one capable of being controlled within narrow limits by a bureaucracy. But the international situation which allowed the creation of the people’s democracies in Europe is absent, for they are what they are because imperialism agreed to allow the USSR buffer states. Geographically, Cuba is part of the American ‘ buffer’, and it would need an at present unforesee- able reversal of the international situation for a people’s democracy to be established 95 miles from the American coast. The second hypothesis is that of a Thermidor, a halting of the Cuban revolution, and the negotiation of a compromise with imperialism. Khrushchev showed in April 1961 that he was not prepared to go to war for Cuba. On the contrary, Cuba is more and more a hostage in his hands, something which can be traded in an eventual summit agreement. Whether Khrushchev, dealing with Kennedy, will agree to dictate Wall Street’s conditions to Cuba by refusing to continue his ‘aid’, or whether Castro, to escape Moscow’s blackmail, will agree to discuss a ‘modus vivendi’ with Kennedy, in either case, this capitulation of the Cuban revolution can only take

[p032] CUBA: THE FIRST STAGE place through the repression of the mass movement, that is, if the way is prepared by the joint policy of Castro and the Stalinists, the construction of a strong state, which is beginning today through the formation of the United Party and the proposals for the suppression of the right to strike. This orienta- tion of the Cuban leaders implies the abandonment of their appeal to ‘make the Andes into new Sierras Maestras’, of the search for support among the workers and peasants of Latin America, to the benefit of the alliance of bourgeois states of the ‘third force’, Brazil and Argentina, in other words, the renunciation of a revolutionary foreign policy, even purely verbal, in favour of a policy of peaceful coexistence. This hypothesis, which agrees perfectly with the facts of the international situation, unfortunately appears today as the most probable, for it corre- sponds both to the empiricism of the Castro leader- ship and to the objectives of Russian policy. It is probably taken seriously by the State Department, forced to revise its policy after the setback of the April landing and anxious to put a stop, if necessary by a new sharing out of the cake, to the fire which Cuba is in danger of spreading. Finally, it is the policy recommended by the bourgeois governments of Brazil and Argentina, anxious to ‘reintegrate Cuba into the American community’, and conscious of the price they can exact from imperialism for their mediation. The Cuban workers know all this, as does Che Guevara, who said ‘ We are attacked certainly for what we are, but we are attacked far more because we show the road to follow. What upsets imperial- ism is not so much the nickel mines and the sugar refineries which it has just lost in Cuba, but the fate of Venezuelan oil, Mexican cotton, Chilean copper, Argentinian herds and Brazilian coffee, which swell the riches of the American monopolists.’ Either Cuba will be brought back into the sphere of influence of North American imperialism or it will open the way to the Latin American revolution. Either way, the key to the future of Cuba is not to be found in Cuba alone, and the defenders of the slogan ‘Cuba socialist and independent’ will have some difficulty in constructing a theory of ‘socialism in a single island’, which nonetheless represents the logical—and absurd—development of ‘socialism in a single country’. To this new ‘surpassing’ of Marxism can rally only a few left-wing intellectuals in search of a saviour, ready to cling to Castro after having been let down by Tito or Mao—those who substitute magic for policy and incantation for analysis. The perspective which inspires fear in Washington, that which the policy of the Stalinist bureaucracy is designed to prevent, is a revolutionary explosion in Latin America, in the countries where the organized 29 proletariat already plays or will soon play a leading role, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico. If the Cuban revolution is of such great impori- ance, it is because, beyond the Latin American revolution, it opens the way ultimately to the decisive revolution, without which no conquest will be definitive, that of the proletariat of the US. The fate of humanity is not decided in the sierra but in the industrial metropolis. It is not decided in one island, not even for the islanders themselves, but for everyone and on a world scale. The workers, in order to win this prolonged battle, need to know where they are going and along what road: they need a leadership organized internationally, of which the common denominator will be that of being the party of the workers’ councils. To forget this in an analysis is to forget the unity of the world market, the unity of the workers’ struggle against capitalism, the interdependence of all parts of the world. Unless one believes that the revolution in North America can be started by 12 farmers in Minnesota taking to the bush and growing beards, one must admit that so long as the revolution is confined to Cuba it must inevitably be defeated, and that a workers’ state cannot arise without the conscious action of the working masses and the formation—in Cuba as in Mexico or Detroit or Essen—of workers’ councils like those spontaneously formed by Polish and Hungarian workers in 1956. The ‘Cuban’ revolution will grasp at victory on the day the workers in Fords and elsewhere in the United States form their committees and their militias. More than ever, revolutionary action in any country poses the problem of the building of the revolutionary workers’ party on a world scale. That is the great lesson of Cuba, where the masses and the world forces of counter - revolution face each other, and whose immediate future largely depends upon the possibility of forming a revolutionary leadership distinct from the ideology of both the petty-bourgeois Castro leadership and that of the Stalinists, and determined to go forward at once to extend the workers’ and peasants’ revolution to Latin America. April 1961 P.S. Certain observers have believed it possible to discover a ‘ beginning of proletarian government’ in the Committees of Coordination, Execution and Inspection (JUCED, set up, after those in the Eastern Province, in several other provinces, to coordinate the activities of different authorities, and made general by the decree of July 23 last. They find an argument in support of their theses in the fact that Raul Castro, responsible for these (the JUCEI) has announced that in the future they will be elected

[p033] 30 and subject to recall. But one must not take one’s desires for reality. The JUCEI are made up of representatives of existing organizations, some of which are elected and some appointed, and apparently none yet subject to recall: representatives of state farms, of cooperative managements, of workers’ and peasants’ unions, of the organization of small peasants’ (ANAP), of the political parties, CP included, of the officials of various ministries, dele- Since this article was written, there have been important developments in Cuba, above all: 1. Statements made by Guevara on Trotskyism and on past differences between Castro’s movement and the Stalinists. 2. Castro’s speech of December 2, 1961 on his ‘conversion’ to Marxism. 3. The formation in January 1962 of the United Party of the Socialist Revolution. 4. The introduction of rationing to meet Cuba’s economic difficulties, and the pronouncement by Castro on the need to check abuses carried on in the name of the Revolution. THE WITCH-HUNT AGAINST TROTSKYISM In August 1960 at the Congress of the PSP (Cuban Communist Party), the General-Secretary Blas Roca devoted a considerable section of his report, in the part concerned with ‘enemies of the Cuban revolution’, to the Trotskyists, whom he characterized as first Hitler’s spies, then agents of American imperialism. He lumped them together Blas Roca: Among ‘enemies of the Cuban Revolution’, he names ‘ Trotsky- ists’, condemning them as ‘Hitler’s spies’ and ‘agents of American imperialism’. with ‘Tito-ists’ and ‘anarcho-syndicalists’ as imperialist agents with the job of attacking revolution from leftist positions. On April 30, 1961, in a television interview devoted to economic questions, Che Guevara criticised Voz Proletaria, ‘a small Trotskyist periodical ’, especially for its critical viewpoint on the Factory Committees. He declared its positions to LABOUR REVIEW—Spring, 1962 gates from the army, the militias, the committees of defence, etc. It is not impossible that workers’ power can arise through these organs, as through others, such as the CTA or the committee of defence, if the masses manage to change their nature pro- foundly and impose their control upon them. At present they are far more instruments of control exercised from above, by the Castro government, to ward off undesired developments. be ‘from the theoretical point of view absurd’ and ‘from the practical point of view, an infamy ora mistake’. On May 26, 1961, Voz Proletaria was banned. On August 13, 1961, the same Guevara declared, in the Chilean paper, Ultima Hora, that this ban was justified on the grounds that ‘it was unwise to allow Trotskyism to go calling for subversion’. He went on to explain that ‘Trotskyism was born at Guantanamo’, close to the well-known American base, and that this proximity was ample justification for the measures taken. Thus in four months Guevara graduated from polemic to outright calumny. He differed from Blas Roca only in not mentioning Hitler. THE GENERAL STRIKE OF APRIL 9, 1958 Another part of the Guevara interview is worth taking up. It was not the first time, he said, that they had experience with Trotskyists. ‘One of the members of the July 26 Movement who was very close to Trotskyism, David Salvador, was responsible for the death of our people on April 9th (1958) by his refusal to carry out a united strike action with the mass parties, trying instead a “putschist” type of strike, which was wiped out by Batista. Batista knew about the strike . . . and many of our comrades died.’ (a) Salvador ‘close to Trotskyism’. This is the only point in Guevara’s statement bearing any relation to fact. A militant worker of the July 26 Movement, Salvador was known among foreign correspondents as being at the same time a Marxist and yet a consistent opponent of Stalinism. . (b) The strike. Salvador was responsible for the workers’ section of the July 26 Movement in Havana. He did his duty in that capacity, preparing for the General Strike decided on by the leadership and called for in a manifesto written by Castro himself. Thus it was the leader of the July 26

[p034] CUBA: THE FIRST STAGE Movement who ‘informed’ Batista of the strike, just as he announced his own landing on Cuba, following out his principle of ‘psychological warfare’. It seems clear that from the start Castro was doubtful about the idea of the strike, but that he had high hopes of .it which were disappointed. He criticised later the bad organization and ‘over-clandestine’ character of the strike, reflecting a lack of confidence in the masses. It should be added, however, that the workers of Havana were terrorised by Batista’s police. Foreign correspondents wrote of drivers being forced at gunpoint to drive their buses through the city. Thus it was not Salvador, but the general pre- paration and outlook of the July 26 Movement, which were responsible for the failure of the strike, a strike which could not be decided on by Salvador but only by the leaders who now condemn him. When he was released from Batista’s jail, he became secretary of the Trade Unions in Cuba, with Castro’s backing. (c) Salvador ‘refused united action’. Salvador had no more power to decide alliances than to decide the calling of the strike. Castro’s call for a struggle to the end was issued to all anti-Castro forces. The PSP refused to support the strike; they stood aside and watched the July 26 militants being wiped out. Although by now they had abandoned their support of Batista, they still condemned every revolutionary initiative against him, criticising Castro for his adventurism and too extreme anti-imperialist propa- ganda. C. R. Rodriguez, PSP spokesman (who this year replaced Castro as head of INRA) justified this C. R. Rodriguez: ‘If there were in existence in the country the forces capable of throwing Batista out and setting up a progressive and anti-imperialist government, things would be easy. Unfortunately, that is not the case.’ (June 5, 1958) policy in an article on June 5, 1958: ‘If there were in existence in the country the forces capable of throwing Batista out and setting up a progressive and anti-imperialist government, things would be easy. Unfortunately, that is not the case.’ So it was not Salvador who kept the PSP out of _ control 31 the strike. In fact they condemned it, just as they condemned the idea of an armed insurrection against Batista. GUEVARA’S LIES. THE UNITED PARTY On the morrow of the defeated strike, at the time of the taking of power, Castro supported Salvador, who took over the leadership of the trade unions against the Communists. But in the following year Castro personally challenged the vote of the trade union congress, which had just elected Salvador general secretary against a communist candidate. Accusing the Congress of having ‘shown neither wisdom, nor unity, nor anything else’, he imposed a division of responsibility between Salvador and two other secretaries, one of whom, Jesus Soto, would the apparatus. Finally, Salvador was imprisoned. Today he is a whipping boy: Guevara covers up for the PSP, who fought against the revolution, by accusing Salvador of ‘refusing united action with the mass parties’. The Stalinists were late jumping on Castro’s bandwagon; now Guevara is helping them to smooth over that ‘mistake’: by putting the blame on Salvador, ‘close to Trotskyism’, not on the July 26 Movement, he pushes into the background the past differences of Castro’s followers with the Stalinists. This falsification of history throws some light on the formation of the new United Socialist Party, and on Castro’s speech of December 2. In this speech he declared that he accepted the validity of Marxism- Leninism. Further he affirmed that the PSP was one of the ‘revolutionary forces’, representing ‘the advanced sections of the working class in the towns and in the countryside’. He welcomed into the United Party from the PSP its ‘ leadership of trained fighters educated in socialism’. He explained the differences of 1953-58 between his own movement, radically anti-imperialist, and the counter-revolu- tionary Stalinist movement, as ‘misunderstandings’ arising from propaganda and prejudice. Castro whitewashed the Stalinist policy, excusing his own opposition to it on the grounds of his own ‘ political illiteracy and class origins’ Castro has chosen Stalinism, with its 1962 face-lift, instead of the Cuban Revolution. The falsification of history and the attacks on the left which have accompanied the setting up of the new party confirm this fact.

[p035] 32 LABOUR REVIEW readers will be interested in the following extracts from an interview given by Ché Guevara on September 14, 1961, to Maurice Zeitlin, a member of the sociology faculty of Princeton University. The extracts are quoted from the New York ‘ Militant’, for Monday, April 9, 1962.—Ed. ‘ Zeitiin: How will other radical tendencies—organiza- tions other than the Revolutionary Directorate, the Communist Party and the 26th of July, whose members will unite in the new party—be included? What about the Trotskyists, for example? Carleton Beals pointed out recently that their press here had been smashed and they were unable to complete printing copies of Trotsky’s The Permanent Revolution. ‘ Guevara: That did happen. It was an error. It was an error committed by a funtionary of second rank. They smashed the plates. It should not have been done. ‘However, we consider the Trotskyist party to be acting against the revolution. For example, they were taking the line that the revolutionary government is petty bourgeois, and were calling on the proletariat to exert pressure on the government, and even to carry out another revolution in which the proletariat would come to power. This was prejudicing the discipline necessary at this time. ‘Zeitlin: You might be interested in knowing that the Trotskyists in the U.S. have been almost completely behind the Cuban Revolution, and their recent official LABOUR REVIEW—Spring, 1962 statement on the revolution is enthusiastically approving. ‘Guevara: I do not have any opinions about Trotskyists in general. But here in Cuba—let me give an example. They have one of their principal centers in the town of Guantanamo near the U.S. base. And they agitated there for the Cuban people to march on the base—something that cannot be permitted. Something else. Sometime ago when we had just created the workers’ technical committees, the Trotskyists charac- terized them as a crumb given to the workers because the workers were calling for the direction of the factories. ‘Several people have asked me the same question (about the Trotskyists)—but it is a problem I regard as small. They have very few members in Cuba. ‘ Zeitlin: The reason is not because we are specifically interested in the Trotskyists—I am hardly one—but because how they are treated is probably as good an index as any of how different political tendencies within the revolution will be treated, especially groups who differ with the Communist Party, which has always had a particular animosity for the Trotskyists, labeling anyone who disagrees with them as Trotskyists—or worse. ‘Guevara: You cannot be for the revolution and be against the Cuban Communist Party. The Revolution and the Communist Party march together. The Trotsky- ists say that they are against “Stalinism”. But in the (1959) [19582] general strike, for instance, the Trotskyists refused to cooperate with the Communist Party.’ Socialists everywhere will join the campaign to help the people of Cuba in their latest economic difficulties. The US blockade has produced these difficulties, and only the international action of the working-class movement can save the Revolution. Food and medical supplies must pour into Cuba from every country. Along with the spread of the revolution to Latin America, and the construction of a leadership based on the masses themselves, in workers’ councils, not on a bureaucratic apparatus, such united action can save the Cuban Revolution and carry it forward to new victories.

[p036] (Vol. 38, Lenin Collected Works, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1961, 7s. 6d. Except where otherwise stated, all page references in this article are to this volume.) 1961 MARKED the beginning of the publication in English of a new edition of the Collected Works of the greatest thinker of this century, V. I. Lenin.! These writings will prove absolutely invaluable in the process, now beginning, of developing Marxist theory to answer the revolutionary tasks of the working class in this and every other country. Just as Lenin made his enormous original contribution to theory as part of the construction of a revolu- tionary leadership at the beginning of the century, so theoretical development today will be made only as part of the living struggle to overcome the betrayals and the theoretical degeneration of the Social-Democratic and Stalinist movements. Over- coming the consequences of those betrayals is not a question of words, but of building an alternative leadership which can arm the working class with the 1. Some half-dozen volumes of the Collected Works were published in English before 1939, and odd volumes in 1946 and 1947. It is to be hoped that the present edition will be complete. The volumes already published contain new material in English. 33 In the Workshop of the Revolution