'No other nation is freer'
Cuba's revolutionary struggle

The Cuban people are the most experienced anti-capitalist protesters on the planet. They have been locked in a life and death struggle with the forces of global capital for over 40 years. The anti-capitalist movement should look to Cuba for inspiration and for the alternative society we will need to build, as JIM CRAVEN argues.

It is one thing to tear down a corrupt system, but what is to be built in its place?

Socialism is the alternative and Cuba is showing, even in adversity, a better, stronger, more revolutionary and democratic socialism can be built. Cuba has consistently stood by the side of those fighting oppression by the forces of global capital from Angola and South Africa to Nicaragua, Palestine and the people of Iraq. It denounces the impoverishment of the world's people, the manoeuvres of the IMF and WTO, military aggression, the destruction of the environment and the corrupting culture of consumerism. And it has backed political support with material, technical and military aid. Most recently it has sent thousands of medical workers to help build health services in poor countries, opened new schools of medicine in Cuba to provide free training for health workers from these areas, including poor parts of the United States, and offered to provide the personnel and expertise to control the AIDS epidemic in Africa.

These things are interlinked. It is precisely because the Cuban people are steeped in the revolutionary struggle to build socialism that they are free to resist capitalist globalisation; that they have the human resources to assist the oppressed countries; that they have the moral and political integrity to give leadership to the anti-capitalist movement. In a recent series of electrifying speaches Fidel Castro emphasised these points.

'No other nation [than Cuba] is more educated, is less dependent on trade and economic relations with the country that has risen up as the wealthiest and most crucial power for the rest of the world. No other nation is freer to declare its truths and defend the rights of the world's poor and exploited peoples in every international forum.' 27 January, 2001

On 16 April, commemorating the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, he said:

'Without socialism, Cuba could not have been able to endure 42 years of hostility, blockade and economic war imposed by imperialism. Without socialism, Cuba would not be the only country in the world today that does not need to trade with the United States to survive, and even to advance, both economically and socially. As to the latter, not even the wealthiest and most industrialised countries compare to Cuba.

'Cuba is one of the few countries in the world that is not a member, and does not want to be a member, of the International Monetary Fund, which has become the zealous guardian of the empire's interest. Nothing I have described here would have been possible if our hands and feet were tied to this sinister monster spawned at Bretton Woods, which politcally crushes those who most turn to it, destabilising and destroying governments. There is no escape for those tied to the double yoke of the IMF and neo-liberalism, both manifestations of the unfair and irrational economic order imposed on the world.

'Without socialism, Cuba would not be a country in which, for 42 years, no one has suffered the repression and police brutality so commonly practiced in Europe and other parts of the world, where anti-riot vehicles and men dressed up in strange gear, like visitors from outer space, attack the population with clubs, shields, rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper gas and other means.

'It is difficult for the West to understand why such things do not happen in Cuba. They do not have the slightest notion of the way human society can be enriched by unity, political consciousness, solidarity, selflessness and generosity, patriotism, moral values and commitment built through education, culture and all the justice offered by a true revolution...

'Without socialism, Cuba would not have become, without actually trying, an example for many people in the world, and the loyal and most consistent voice for the most deserving causes; a small country that enjoys the enviable privilege of being almost the only one that can speak out at any international forum and freely denounce, with no fear of reprisals or aggression, the unfair economic order and the insatiable, rapacious, hypocritical and immoral policies of the superpowers' government.'

At a rally in Havana on 31 March:

'Today we are witnessing everywhere the forceful resurgence of popular rebellion by millions of human beings increasingly exploited and plundered, increasingly outraged by the growing number of poor and hungry, of illiterates, of people lacking medical care, of more unemployed, more children wandering the streets begging, the struggle has now become a colossal battle of ideas that will not cease as long as the imperial system exists. In no other stage of the political life of our country has imperialist ideology been subjected to a more demolishing and profound criticism by our people...

'We Cubans will never renounce the principles we made ours in the struggle to bring justice to our homeland by putting an end to the exploitation of man by man, inspired by the history of mankind and by the enlightened theoreticians and promoters of a socialist system of production and distribution of wealth , the only system capable of creating a truly just human society - Marx, Engels, and later Lenin...

'Nothing and nobody will have the capacity to interfere with our destiny, neither with weapons, nor deception, nor demagogy. We will tear apart their brazen and hypocritical lies and their dehumanised and selfish ideas. It will take us years, perhaps quite a few years, but they will continue to suffer defeat after defeat and will not obtain any victory that is not Phyrric. We dare to predict that in this battle of ideas, the imperialists are headed for nothing other than a colossal Bay of Pigs.'

From Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 162 August/September 2001

News in brief

  Cuba will give 1,489 free scholarships in the next academic year to foreign students from poor backgrounds. The offer includes, food, medical care and study materials for the students. Since 1961 almost 40,00 such students from 120 nations have graduated from Cuban universities.

  Paid maternity leave for Cuban women has just been increased from six months to a year.

  Hundreds of thousands of Cubans demonstrated in Havana at the end of May in support of the Puerto Rican independence movement and against US military exercises on the island of Vieques.

  Following a UN meeting on Palestine held in Havana, Palestinian Foreign Minister Farouk Kaddoumi thanked President Castro and the Cuban people for once again offering their territory as an international tribunal to denounce Israeli violence.

  The USA has been kicked off the UN Human Rights Commission. The Cuban government called the result a 'blow to US hegemonic aspirations and its intention to use the subject of human rights, both in its anti-Cuba crusade and against poor Third World countries'.

  A new bill inspired by the anti-Cuban Miami mafia will give $100 million to finance subversive activity in Cuba during the next four years. The bill is sponsored by Jesse Helms, architect of the Helms-Burton Act, and CANF. Helms says he wants to instigate an act similar to the one passed in the 1980s to help the anti-communist Solidarity movement in Poland. Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque ironically stated that Cuba supports the bill because it publicly recognises what the USA has been doing all along.

  Cuba is leading the fight against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), aimed at opening up every Latin American and Caribbean nation to a market free-for-all in the interests of the USA. US multinationals are demanding that the FTAA protect investments of 100% foreign capital against any form of expropriation and safeguards them against depreciation of their assets. The FTAA will also provide the USA to intervene militarily wherever it decides 'representative democracy' has broken down. Cuba has described the FTAA as annexation to the USA.

The May Day celebrations in Havana doubled as the first Latin American demonstration against the the FTAA. Later the same month over 200 trade union representatives from 56 countries met in Havana to draw up a programme of action against the FTAA. The next meeting is in Venezuela in late July.

From Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 162 August/September 2001

Cubans framed in Miami show trial

On 8 June, a Miami jury found five Cubans guilty of charges ranging from espionage, conspiring to kill and endangering the security of the United States. The five men, Rene Gonzalez, Ramon Labanino, Fernando Gonzalez, Antonio Guerrero and Gerardo Hernandez have already spent nearly three years in jail, half of it in solitary confinement. They will be sentenced in September, almost certainly to life imprisonment.

The virulently counter-revolutionary exile community of Miami, led by the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) and enthusiastically echoed by the US press, has summoned up the jingoism of the Cold War to denounce the men as communist spies and attempt to whip up renewed hostility to Cuba. The judicial process amounted to little more than a show trial: the trial was held in Miami, despite a motion to have it moved to an impartial venue, in keeping with the US constitution; jurors were dismissed if they did not support the aims of the CANF.

In practice the, the Florida administration - run by Jeb Bush, brother of the US president and well-known for his links with CANF - has actively colluded with the counter-revolutionaries. The real aim of the five Cuban detainees was to infiltrate CANF and its sister terrorist organisations Alfa-66 and Comandos F-4, which have been responsible for acts of sabotage and assassination attempts against Cuba. In the last ten years alone, these groups have been responsible for:

• Continuous infiltration of the Mafia elements with weapons and explosives financed by CANF
• Over 10,000 violent acts and intensification of incitement to leave Cuba illegally
• Spraying of Thrips palmi pests over Cuba
• 25 violations of Cuban airspace, leading to the shooting down by Cuba of two pirate planes in 1996 which was then used as a pretext for the imposition of the Helms-Burton Law. The five Cubans now condemned for spying were initially charged in 1998 with the deaths of the four Brothers to the Rescue pilots involved in the incident.
• Bombings in Cuban hotels in 1997
• An assassination attempt in 1997 on Fidel Castro
• A thwarted attempt to blow up the popular Tropicana Cabaret in Havana in April 2001

In all, since 1990 there have been 16 plots to kill Fidel Castro and 140 terrorist acts. Small wonder, then, in the face of US inaction against paramilitary terrorist groups training and operating out of Miami, that Cuba took necessary steps to defend itself and pre-empt further atrocities.

These men are not criminals but Cuban political prisoners, victims of a savage plot by CANF and its cronies to rebuild their image and whip up renewed hostility to Cuba after the Elián Gonzalez case. Their attempts to turn a six-year-old Cuban boy lost at sea into an anti-Revolution mascot backfired when the majority of US citizens - including many in Miami - supported Cuba in the battle to return the child to his family. The outcome was an overwhelming victory for the Cuban Revolution. And, just like the Elián Gonzalez case, this blatant show trial is uniting the people of Cuba in defence of the Revolution and once again providing a platform from which to expose the hypocrisy, corruption and abuse of human rights which are the hallmark of US imperialism.

Hannah Caller

From Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! 162 August/September 2001