Cuba and the Muddleheads

P-TO-DATE informathe Cuban Revolution is hard to come by. It is, for example, difficult to obtain a reliable picture of the relations between the Castro leadership and the Popular Socialist ('Communist') Party.

In a much-publicised speech last December Castro declared himself a 'Marxist-Leninist' and the press put out reports that he had always been a 'Communist'.

When fuller versions of the speech became available it was evident that this was a distortion. Even Theodore Draper, a bitter critic of the Cuban Revolution, acknowledges as much. Writing for the sophisticated readers of 'Encounter', however, he still maintains the same inference as the vulgar press, namely, that he had for some time been an avowed Communist, in the sense of a follower of the Moscow line, and had now openly admitted the fact.

Pointing to the economic dependence of Cuba on the Soviet bloc, the growing influence of old - line Stalinists in the government, 'forced industrialization' and the one-party regime, he claims that only terror and totalitarianism are left in the country. Mentioning last April's invasion in one line, this apologist of the State Department interprets the revolution through the psychology of Castro.

The result of Draper's pamphlet is rather to spoil his own case. He comes down heavily against those who had drawn a distinction between Castro and the Communist Parts. hot kiu assurance must have been shaken by later developments.

Although a number of hardened Stalinists received posts of responsibility, two of them, Escalante and Pompa, have since been sacked and strongly denounced by Castro into the bargain.

Some American papers have been suggesting that it may be EXTRA Y CON LA REVOLICION PATRIA MUC! MLIE 'For Cuba, for Fidel, for the Revolution"-and for the workers' state'? munist movement'. It is pretty obvious that Castro is not in the Communist movement in the same way that Gomulka or Gollan are 'in'.

If events are dealing harshly with the ready-made 'theories' of enemies of the Cuban Revolution like Draper, they are hardly kinder to those who claim that Cuba is a workers' state', without qualification.

Even Lenin, in his lifetime, admitted that the Soviet Union was a workers' state ' with bureaucratic deformations' . Such deformations, we are asked to believe, cannot be discerned in the Cuban set-up. The origins of the leadership, and its freedom from any real control from below, might have suggested some caution before affixing ready-made labels.

The theory of the Cuban 'workers' state' took a blow last August when the press of the Cuban Trotskyists was smashed and the plates of Trotsky's 'Permanent Revolution' destroyed. The POR (Revolutionary Workers' Dont), wu wuith they belonged, is affiliated to the Pabloite movement which insists that Cuba is a workers' state!

As far as can be seen, the attack on the POR was no accident. As virtually the only left-wing critics of the Castro leadership they had been under fire for some time, especially from Che Guevara, 'theorist' of the revolution.

In a television broadcast on April 30, 1961, for example, he semblance of workers' representation.

He claimed that there had been no mass pressure for such committees, but he also admitted that the committees had been a 'bureaucratic creation' At this stage the discussion remained one of how the revolution should be conducted. A few months later, however, came the closure of the press of Guevara's only critics. In explanation to a South American newsman in August he went out of his way to link the Trotskyists with the Americans in the base at Guantanamo.

It was because of this outrageous assertion that THe NEWSLETTER refused to participate in a Cuban Embassy reception early this year (see Gerry Healy's letter to the Cuban Ambassador in THE NEWST FTTED T- - us 1s0a, which contains the passages referred to in Guevara's statement).

Yet while in August Guevara justified this action, the following month, in a statement to an American visitor of left-wing sympathies, he tried to dismiss it as 'an error' 'It was', he 'an £ 6 6 f££FF£fffffzzz=zz z z FIDEL ASLE committed by a functionary 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 . . ? Not this time because of 'geographical proximity' to Guantanamo, but because they are supposed to have wished to organize a march on the American base there.

This volte face is interesting. For all but the naive it is obviously related to who Guevara was talking to at the time. For Chile, where the Yankees are unpopular, he hints that the Trotskyists are American agents; to the American liberal he passes them off as ultra-lefts who wish to embroil Cuba and the United States in war!

The latter would hardly have accepted the charge that the Trotskyists are American agents and could only be gratified to learn that the whole episode had onlv heen by a functionary of second all, rank' (those of first rank still do not err!).

We thus learn from these two statements that at least one of the top figures in the Cuban workers' state is an habitual liar. But we also learn that in this state, printing presses can be smashed on the orders of minor functionaries.

In fact this is difficult to credit. In the first place, it was generally believed that the suppression took place on orders of the Minister of Labour who, unless all ministers, except Castro, are 'functionaries of second rank, is accountable to the government as a whole.

In the second place, if it was an 'error, has the error been rectified in the only practical way: by repairing the press and allowing the papers and books of the Cuban Trotskyists to reappear?

If we look a little further into the matter, however, we shall notice that Guevara does not seem able to discuss the Trotskyists without referring to the 'technical committees'.

He was undoubtedly sensitive to their criticism of these organs. He also emphasizes that there were few Trotskyists. The conclusion must be that certain failures of the government to enlist the co-operation of the workers in the enterprises left the Trotskyists with a field in which they were building up some support.

The blow against their press, therefore, far from being an error, is more likely to have been a shrewd and successful attempt to get rid of a potentially dangerous rival who referred to Guevara and his friends, to their great annoyance, as 'timid petty bourgeois'.

What this adds up to is hardly strong recommendation of Castro's Cuba as a 'workers' state' without taint or blemish.

traversed before any such claim can be made.

Nothing will be gained by true friends of the Cuban Revolution if, in the meantime, they refrain from criticising the shortcomings, inconsistencies and mendacities of the present leadership.

To do otherwise, indeed, is to fall into the trap set by the Drapers and all the other enemies of that rev, slution.