Today’s Cuba (1992)
(The general line of this resolution was adopted by majority vote at the April 9-12, 1992, Socialist Action National Committee Plenum: 10 in favor; 1 opposed; 1 abstention.)
- The Cuban Revolution today faces the greatest danger in its 33 year history. The collapse of Comcon, the Soviet-led trading block which Cuba was part of, has been a severe and wrenching blow to the Cuban economy in the context of Washington’s economic blockade. The Cubans refer to this situation as the “double blockade.” The magnitude of the blow can be seen from the fact that 85 percent of Cuba’s trade was with the Comcon bloc in 1989.
Until and unless the political revolution of the workers of the former Soviet Union or Eastern Europe is victorious, or the world revolution is extended in the capitalist countries, Cuba will face economic isolation and an increased danger of strangulation by US imperialism.
Our foremost task in this “special period” for the Revolution is to fight here in the belly of the beast against US imperialism’s attempts to crush the Revolution and once again open Cuba for US domination, reversing the Revolution’s gains for the workers and peasants, and throwing Cuba back to the status of a super-exploited virtual colony.
Our basic Slogan is “Hands Off Cuba!” This is further concretized by opposition to the economic blockade, to the continued presence on Cuban soil of imperialist troops, to Washington’s covert aid to terrorist squads operating out of Florida, to the travel ban, and against any direct moves by the US war machine against Cuba.
Part and parcel of our defense of the revolution is telling the truth about it. Washington and the capitalist press spew forth a barrage of lies and distortions about the revolution, attempting to turn the victim into the criminal. They blame the revolution for the economic hardship caused by the imperialist blockade. They claim the revolution is militaristic when it galvanizes the population to be ready to meet the ever-present military threat from Washington’s gigantic war machine. They point to the continued legacy of Cuba’s backwardness, a legacy from the days of imperialist domination and its distortion and stifling of the economy in the interests of the owners of the big US banks and corporations that used to dominate the island.
We explain the gains of the revolution in the areas of health care, literacy, education and culture for the masses in general, as well as the gains made in combating racism and for women’s equality.
We contrast the economic gains the workers and peasants have made through their revolution, to the rest of Latin America and the other countries super-exploited by imperialism. Even as these gains are set back in the new situation, hunger has been avoided. Rationing of scarce goods is a sign of the difficulties Cubans face, but it assures a minimum for everyone, and it is an indication of the egalitarian thrust that has marked the Revolution from its beginning. Defense of the Cuban revolution today is a defense of socialism in a more immediate way than in the past. With the bureaucrats of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe joining in the chorus praising the virtues of capitalism and the market, and condemning socialism, the Cuban leadership’s defense of socialism and revolution assumes greater importance.
Our differences with the leadership of the Cuban Revolution and our criticisms of the Revolution’s shortcomings are made as partisans of the revolution, and are placed in the context of our defense of the revolution against imperialism, our defense of the gains of the revolution, and our defense of socialism.
- The Cuban Revolution is the first and only victorious socialist revolution led by non-Stalinists since the October 1917 Russian Revolution.
From the beginning, Castroism has had many contradictions due to its programmatic (theoretical) shortcomings, its dependence on the Soviet block for trade, and the weight of world Stalinism. The Revolution also inherited conditions of low culture and education, economic backwardness, a small industrial working class, etc. that objectively favor bureaucratization. To these objective conditions must be added the effects of the imperialist blockade. A key force keeping Cuba on a revolutionary course has been the caliber of the leadership around Castro, despite its programmatic shortcomings. We characterized the Castroists as revolutionists of action leaving open the possibility that they could become proletarian revolutionists in the fullest programmatic sense, a prognosis that remains open today.
In the early years of the revolution, Joseph Hansen, in his “In Defense; of the Cuban Revolution: An answer to the State Department and Theodore Draper,” wrote: ‘The question of the absence of direct proletarian leadership in the 1958-59 Cuban Revolution offers a complication, it is true, but on the main question—the tendency of bourgeois democratic revolution in an underdeveloped country to go beyond its bourgeois democratic limits offers once again the most striking confirmation of Trotsky’s famous theory [of Permanent Revolution]. That the Cuban revolutionaries were unaware they were confirming something so abstract and remote makes it all the more impressive.
The fact that these same revolutionaries, without knowing Trotsky’s theory, proved capable of transcending their own limited previous political positions speaks completely in their favor. It demonstrates that in caliber they belong to the great tradition of genuine revolutionary leaders, beginning with the leaders of our own American revolution.
Cuba is at present a fortress under siege by American imperialism. To offer to judge what goes on inside that fortress without taking into account the siege represents the utter prostration and abasement of theory. (reprinted in Hansen, “Dynamics of the Cuban Revolution: The Trotskyist View,” New York: Pathfinder Press, 1977, pp. 290-291)
The Castro team remain revolutionists. To one degree or another they have been at odds with bureaucratic tendencies in the revolution for the past 33 years. Bureaucratic distortions in the state and party exist. Soviet-type organs of workers democracy and power do not exist. But the bureaucracy has not succeeded in overthrowing the revolutionary wing. A hardened bureaucratic caste with interests separate and opposed to the workers of Cuba and the world has not taken power. We reject any equation between the Cuban regime and Stalinism, and any call for the overthrow of the Cuban government.
The continued non-Stalinist character of the Cuban leadership and of the revolution has been evidenced in the egalitarian and democratic thrust of the revolution from the beginning to today. The revolution his relied on the mobilization of the masses for implementing its major achievements and for its defense. The workers and peasants have not been politically crushed as in every state where a bureaucratic caste has taken power. The land reform in Cuba has gone further than in any other country in the world, and has done so through maintaining the alliance between workers and peasants that was the cornerstone of Bolshevik policy and in accordance with the policies advocated by Marx and Engles, and the policies advocated by Trotsky against the Stalin-Bukarian support to the rich peasants in the 1920s. The Cubans’ policy was also in stark contrast to Stalin’s forced collectivization in 1928-29 which almost destroyed the revolution, Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”disaster, the forced collectivization by Ho Chi Minh which had to be called off in face of a peasant revolt, and the Stalinist practices in East Europe. This fact also testifies that the revolution has not been betrayed or overthrown by a bureaucratic caste.
The social priorities of the revolution also stand in stark contrast to Stalinist practice which sacrificed the well-being of the working people to developing heavy industry, viewing the workers as objects of bureaucratic planning. In Cuba, health care, education, adequate food, and other immediate concerns of the workers are placed first.
The revolution also has had a deeply internationalist side from the beginning. In the 1960s the Castroists sought to extend the revolution to Latin America, although the means they chose were inadequate and led to failure. When the guerrilla road failed, they were at a loss at what to do, and left the field to the Stalinized CPs.
Nevertheless, they fought for solidarity with the Vietnamese during the long war, championing the slogan of “create two, three, many Vietnams”as the best way to defend the Vietnamese Revolution. They sharply criticized both the Kremlin and Peking for not giving Vietnam adequate aid, and demanded that the two feuding workers states create a broad united front against the imperialist aggression. They made known publicly that they would send fighters to Vietnam if asked, and often pointed to the heroic struggle of the Vietnamese workers and peasants as giving the Cuban Revolution breathing room.
In 1975, they upset Washington’s and Pretoria’s plans to install a puppet regime in Angola after the collapse of the Portuguese empire by sending troops at Angola’s request to block the US supported South African invasion. When Pretoria again attacked in l989, the Cubans threw everything they had into the fight, even jeopardizing their own immediate defense, and once again defeated the South Africans.
The anti-imperialist Cuban fighters in Angola were volunteers. Internationalism is consciously promoted by the leadership. Cuban doctors have been sent to help many Third World countries, and Cuba’s schools educate many students from them.
And in this past 33 years, the Cuban leadership has rejected every offer of peaceful coexistence from imperialism, of renewed trade and even aid, if Cuba would once and for all renounce any intention to give aid and support to anti-imperialist fighters elsewhere.
If the revolution suffers a bureaucratic takeover, the resulting demobilization of the workers and peasants will swiftly lead to a situation where the imperialists can crush the revolution. There can be no long period like the USSR went through under the Stalinist bureaucratic dictatorship. Cuba is too small, too close to the US, to survive in such circumstances.
- We have always held the position that the extension of the revolution into Latin America and ultimately to the advanced capitalist countries, the building of a revolutionary socialist party in Cuba and internationally based on the full revolutionary socialist program, and the construction, of soviet-type institutions of workers’ democracy was the best course for the development and defense of the Cuban Revolution.
Cuba, today, is more than ever a fortress under siege. With the collapse of its trade with the Soviet block, and the defeat of the Nicaraguan revolution, Cuba is more isolated than at any time in the past 33 years. Its hope lies in the extension of the revolution, both within Cuba and internationally, including in the Soviet-bloc countries, and, ultimately, the United States.
To defend and advance their revolution, Cuban revolutionists must come to grips with Stalinism. They must fully absorb its counterrevolutionary role in world politics as well as in the workers’ states. In the whole period that the Cubans had fair-trade relations with the Soviet Union, they had to pay a political price of ascribing revolutionary capacities to Stalinist parties throughout the world. The defeat of Che Guevara’s attempt through guerrilla warfare to extend the revolution in the 1960s led to relying upon the Stalinist parties and adapting to many of the class-collaborationist policies of international Stalinism. This helped to channel non-Stalinist worker militants in the cities of Latin America into the Stalinist orbit of popular-front politics.
Joe Hansen, in explaining why Castro ended up in the minority in Venezuela, discussed the strengths and weaknesses of the Cuban leadership:
- Guerrilla war in Latin America was not the invention of the Cubans. It has existed in the continent as a living tradition with a venerable history.
- One of the most unexpected features of the Cuban revolution was that this tactic could prove sufficient to win. Our conclusion at the time was that this testified much more to the weakness of imperialism and the national bourgeois structure than to the discovery of something superior to a Leninist combat party.
- More than a mere guerrilla band was involved in the Cuban struggle. The July 26 Movement had an extensive organization. Its petty-bourgeois program enabled it to secure financial assistance in a big way from Cuban bourgeois circles. It was also able to operate quite freely in the United States, where it was actively supported by a large Cuban colony.
- The July 26 Movement proceeded to a considerable extent like a party based on a single issue-armed struggle against the Batista dictatorship. Its appeal cut across class lines.
- The key leaders of this movement were of such high caliber that when the revolution reached the crossing point to socialism, they plunged ahead, splitting their own movement and transcending the program they began with.
- In transcending their original program and declaring for socialism, they also transcended the tactic through which they had won. Just as every succeeding revolution in Latin America must take as its. model sociaIist Cuba instead of the July 26 Movement as it was first formed, so in tactics it is compelled, if success is to be assured, to make an advance, developing means capable of achieving the mass mobilizations required to win a socialist revolution. This means putting politics in command. Technique, tactics, even armed struggle must be subordinated to political consciousness, to political direction, to a clear political program. The key problem, consequently, is to build a combat party capable of seeing this and doing it.
- The Cuban leaders, although the logic of their own revolution calls for it, have not proceeded along this line up to now. The reasons for this are plain. Dependent on aid from the Soviet Union, aid which was absolutely essential to the survival of the Cuban revolution, they were confronted with the problem of the Kremlin ‘s policy of “peaceful coexistence” with imperialism and in particular its rabid opposition to Trotskyism. The course followed by the Cubans shows that they decided that if errors were to be made, they should be made on the side of caution so as not to jeopardize the flow of material aid. This explains why the Cuban Stalinists were not reproved for their gross attacks on Trotskyism and why Castro himself could make the kind of attack he did at the Tricontinental conference in January 1966. It explains, too, why the Cubans took such an ambiguous attitude during the May-June I968 events in France and why to this day they refrain from publicizing the role of the Trotskyists in the French upsurge. And it explains why Castro—with very important reservations, it is true—came out on the side of the invaders of Czechoslovakia. In short, the Cubans have not yet settled accounts with Stalinism. Until they have done so, it is misleading to say without qualification, as the resolution [by the majority of the FI at the time] does in point II: ‘This leadership by its attitudes, its actions and generalizations has contributed in a decisive way to the maturing of a new vanguard.’
- There is an immense anomaly in this failure to settle accounts with Stalinism, inasmuch as the Castro team won their victory in Cuba in the face of the default of the Blas Rocas [leaders of the old Stalinist party in Cuba] and their active opposition. One of the main lessons of the Cuban revolution is that it is now possible to outflank the Stalinists from the left.
- Instead of fostering an extension of this course elsewhere in Latin America, the Fidel Castro team sought to utilize the existing Communist parties. On the surface, it appeared feasible to repeat the political formula of the Cuban revolution—but with a different combination of political tendencies from those assembled in the July 26 Movement in the struggle against the Batista dictatorship. The formula was to suppress the political differences with the Stallnists and form a combination on the single issue of armed struggle against the indigenous dictatorships and their imperialist backers. The basic idea was once again to make politics secondary to technique, to subordinate political strategy to the tactic of rural guerrilla warfare. The results were hardly brilliant. No sector of the opposing camp was taken in by the camouflage. The lack of political clarity could only serve to sow confusion in the ranks of the revolutionists. Still worse, greater forces were now required to win; i.e., the masses in the urban centers. But the tactic itself was not designed to raise their political understanding, to organize and mobilize them. It banked on winning by pitting very small contingents in skirmishes remote from the cities. Moreover, the political confusion in the camp of the revolutionists involved a decisive issue in the new stage of the Latin American revolution—the role of Stalinism. Lack of clarity on this led to some very costly defeats.
The Cubans have made progress in overcoming this limitation, but only through very painful experiences. It is the beginning of political wisdom to insist that revolutions in Latin America, or elsewhere in the world where similar conditions exist, cannot be won along a ‘peaceful or democratic’ road, or under the leadership of an alleged progressive sector of the national bourgeoisie. The issue, once considered in the radical movement to be a hallmark of ‘Trotskyism,’ proved to be of key importance in bringing the Cubans to understand that Stalinism and organizations dominated by Stalinists are not reliable instruments of revolution. But by confining the dispute with the Stalinists almost exclusively to the issue of armed struggle, and limiting it even further to the question of rural guerrilla war, the Cubans gave precious political ground to their opponents by default. Thus the Stalinist betrayers of the revolutionary struggle in Venezuela were able to advance telling arguments on why the workers need a revolutionary party. For the Venezuelan Stalinists, who cited Lenin in a completely abstract way, this was only a smoke screen but the Cubans were not able to answer them effectively, and this could not fail to influence at least some good, revolutionary-minded militants. In the same way, the Cubans failed to offer an adequate challenge to the Stalinists in the urban centers, making it easier for them to retain a rather large following, which they, of course, are now seeking to use in their wheeling and dealing in the bourgeois electoral arena.
The Cubans likewise conceded the field of theory to the Stalinists under the hardly laudable guise of ridiculing the ‘theorists’ as against men of action, who don’t need to learn about revolution in books inasmuch as they are practicing it with guns. The Cubans even made the mistake of posing the issue in terms of a conflict between the men in the mountains and the bureaucrats in the city over who should have final command. Arguments were adduced concerning the technical difficulties of urban guerrilla war—the helplessness of the masses, the corrupting influence of the city, the difficulties and dangers of maintaining liaison—to explain why leadership should be in the hands of the men in the rural areas. The political issue underlying this obscure debate was very simple: should the struggle be led by men committed to a revolutionary struggle for socialism or by men committed to Moscow’s treacherous foreign policy of ‘peaceful coexistence’ with imperialism? This was the key question no matter where the leadership was located under the exigencies of the struggle. But this issue, which should have been brought to the fore. In order to clarify the dispute and to fight for a majority on the basis of it, was left in obscurity by the Cubans. The Stalinists took full advantage of the ineptness of the Cubans, or their hesitation at speaking out because of possible economic pressure from Moscow, to further obscure and bury the question.
The result of these mistakes was that even in such a favorable situation as the one in Venezuela, with the prestige of the Cuban revolution behind them, and the not immaterial advantages of state power, the Cubans ended up as a small minority in their factional struggle with the Stalinists.
- Immediately after the Cuban victory, the Trotskyist movement held that one of the most important tasks facing the revolution there was construction of a revolutionary Marxist party. This has been borne out in the most decisive way by events and ought to be pointed out in the draft resolution [for the Fourth International] LatinAmerica.
- The key task facing the vanguard in Latin America, as elsewhere, still remains the construction of a revolutionary Marxist party. This takes priority over all questions of tactics and strategy in the sense that these must be directed to achieving this end as the decisive link in the revolutionary process. . . .
These criticisms by Hansen are as valid today as they were when they were written in 1969 (see Dynamics of the Cuban Revolution by Hansen).
In 1975-76, the Cubans adopted the Stalinist model of economic management and in other areas, including the development of ranks in the army, and the justification of higher pay for bureaucrats (in contradiction to Lenin’s position of the average pay of the average worker for all party and state officials). This led to a big growth of the bureaucracy.
Based on discussions at the last IEC and Castro’s speaches. it appears that Castro was in a minority concerning this decision. In the Jan. 24, 1992, issue of The Militant, Carlos Tablada, in an interview, explained that there were two tendencies from the beginning in Cuba. One represented by Castro and Guevara and the other that supported the Stalinized Soviet system. He stated that “that tendency became the majority opinion in the Communist Party of Cuba in the I970s. And since in my country, we have a collective leadership; that is Fidel isn’t a dictator—we began to establish this model. So beginning in 1974-75, we committed the grave error of copying the Soviet model for 10 years.”
In the mid 1980s, Castro reversed this course with the “rectification” campaign. The final session of the Third Congress of the Cuban CP rejected the Stalinist model. It also rejected the Stalinist approach to material incentives and began campaigning for a return to Guevara’s concept of socialist incentives.
The huge worker demonstrations against bureaucratic privilege and denial of democracy in the Stalinized workers’ states, combined with the effects of Cuba’s own experiences with the negative results of adopting the Soviet model, have forced the Cubans to rethink many questions. This is the positive element behind the rectification process in Cuba.
Inches away from the imperialist fortress in Guantanamo, Castro is wary of the development of a hardened privileged bureaucracy that can become a base for undermining the workers’ state and for the restoration of capitalism, and lead away from the goals of equality and socialism.
In the editorial in the Sept. 1989 issue of Granma, in which they explained the sentencing of the head of the Cuban Ministry of the Interior, the Cubans attacked the concept of a privileged bureaucracy.
They said:
What kind of a revolutionary is a person who doesn’t respect the law or moral standards and tries to act as if he were a member of a caste above everyone? What notion of solidarity can there be in anyone incapable of solidarity with his fellow citizens? How can we speak of socialism and revolution when we fail to realize that privilege, arbitrary conduct, abuse, and separation from the masses are one of the main causes of the problems now facing the socialist system that was created to eradicate these evils when they existed under capitalism?
Along with the rectification—which, while important, still has fallen far short of establishing a system of institutionalized workers’ democracy—it appears from Castro’s Speeches that the Cubans have, in the past 10 years, rearmed the population. In his Jan. 4, 1989, speech Castro stated:
. . .There are some capitalist countries that question democracy in Cuba. There can be no democracy better than a democracy where the workers, the peasants, the students hold the arms. [applause]
To all the Western countries that question democracy in Cuba, I say: Go ahead and give the arms to the workers, to the peasants, to the students, and let us see if you can start hurling tear gas canisters to put down a strike, or at any organization that struggles for peace [applause], or at students. We would see if these countries could send out the police, covered with shields and all that equipment that makes them look like astronauts. We would see if these countries could attack the masses with dogs every time there is a strike or a peaceful demonstration or a people’s struggle. I think the litmus test for democracy is to arm the people. [applause]
When defense becomes the task of the people and arms become the prerogative of all the people, then there is democracy. Meanwhile, there are specialized police teams and armies to put down the people when the people show discontent over the abuses and injustice of a bourgeois system. It is the same in a Third World country as in a developed capitalist country.
The rectification and the arming of the people does not go far enough, however, toward strengthening the Cuban Revolution.
It is necessary for Cuba to extend its own revolution to develop institutions of workers’ democracy; i.e., soviets. The brigades in Cuba that helped build chiIdcare centers and housing and organizing agriculture can serve as steps in this direction. But real workers’ democracy—based on the soviet system that was destroyed in the course of the establishment of Stalin’s bureaucratic dictatorship is what the Cuban Revolution desperately needs.
In his April 1918 writings, Lenin defined the character of soviet organization. He wrote:
The Socialist character of the Soviet democracy that is, of proletarian democracy in its concrete particular application insists first in this: that the electorate comprises the toiling and exploited masses—that the bourgeoisie is excluded. Second in this: that all bureaucratic formalities and limitations of elections are done away with—that the masses themselves determine the order and the time of elections and with complete freedom of recall of elected officials. Third, that the best possible mass organization of the vanguard of the toilers of the industrial proletariat—is formed, enabling them to direct the exploited masses, to attract them to active participation in political life, to train them politically through their own experience, that in this way a beginning has been made for the first time actually to get the whole population to learn how to manage and to begin managing.
Such are the principal distinctive features of the democracy which is being tried in Russia and which is a higher type of democracy, which breaks away from bourgeois distortion, and which is a transition to socialist democracy and to conditions which will mean the beginning of the end of the state.
Of course, the chaotic petty bourgeois disorganization (which will inevitably manifest itself in one or another degree during every proletarian revolution, and which in our revolution, on account of the petty bourgeois character of the country, its backwardness, and the consequences of the reactionary war, manifests itself with special strength), cannot but leave its mark on the Soviets.
We must work unceasingly to develop the organization of the Soviets and Soviet rule. There is a petty bourgeois tendency to turn the members of the Soviets into ‘parliamentarians’ or, on the other hand, into bureaucrats. This should be combated by attracting all members of the Soviet to practical participation in management. The departments of the Soviets are turning in many places into organs which gradually merge with the commissariats. Our aim is to attract every member of the poor classes to practical participation in the management, and the different steps leading toward this end (the more diverse the better), should be carefully registered, studied, systematized, verified on broader experiences, and legalized.
It is our object to obtain the free performance of state obligations by every toiler after he is through with his eight-hour session of productive work. The transition toward this end is especially difficult, but only this transition will secure the definite realization of socialism. . . .
The outcome of struggle with the bureaucratic distortion of the Soviet organizations is assured by the firm bond between the Soviets and the people (in the sense of the exploited toilers), by the flexibility and elasticity of this bond. The bourgeois parliaments even in the most democratic capitalist republics are never looked upon by the poor as ‘their’ institutions. But the Soviets are for the masses of the workers and peasants, ‘their own,’ and not alien institutions. . . .
This proximity of the Soviets to the toiling people creates special forms of recall and other methods of control by the masses which should now be developed with special diligence. For instance the councils of popular education deserve the fullest sympathy and support as periodical conferences of the Soviet electors and their delegates to discuss and to control the activity of the Soviet authorities of the particular region.
Nothing could be more foolish than turning the Soviets into something settled and self-sufficient The more firmly we now have to advocate a merciless and firm rule and dictatorship of individuals for definite processes of work during certain periods of purely executive functions, the more diverse should be the forms and means of mass control in order to paralyze the very possibility of distorting the Soviet rule, in order repeatedly and tirelessly to remove the wild grass of bureaucratism.”— V. I. Lenin, The Soviets at Work, New York, The Rand School of Social Science, 1919, page 39.
Lenin saw the soviets as the means to combat the bureaucratic deformations that existed in 1918. He also explained that the soviets were the champions of the people and a key means for the education of the population on the problems of the day.
To strengthen the Cuban revolution, Cuba should be patterned on the workers’ council (or soviet) form of democracy established by the October Revolution The Peoples Power shouted be transformed into such a model. This is the opposite of the parliamentary system being imposed by the Stalinists throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
In the context of soviet-like institutions, we are for the legalization of soviet parties where the workers and peasants themselves, by their own free vote, will indicate what parties they recognize as soviet parties. We are for the exclusion of bourgeois parties from the soviets. As Castro once said, for those who support the socialist revolution, everything; for those opposed to it, nothing.
We advocate that the Cuban Communist Party become a democratic centralist party like the party of Lenin, a revolutionary combat party that develops its program through democratic discussion, with full freedom of tendencies and factions to exist. It is especially important that Trotskyism be recognized as legitimate. Through full soviet and party democracy, the whole population of Cuba could be armed politically, as well as militarily, to defend Cuba and extend the revolution.
With soviet democracy in Cuba, the Cuban revolutionists could reach out far more effectively to the workers in all countries, including in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, to follow the Cuban example. We are for the separation of the party from the state. It is of course legitimate and necessary for Cuba to have diplomatic relations with the various bourgeois regimes In Latin America, Africa, and throughout the world. But what is dead wrong is for Fidel Castro to go to Brazil and Mexico, for example, and give open political support to the reactionary Collor and Sallas regimes (to the point of giving backhanded support to Collor’s austetity measures). The Cuban party should be supporting the Brazilian and Mexican workers and peasants against these capitalist governments. The expansion of the socialist revolution to these Latin American countries and beyond — is vital for the defense of the Cuban Revolution.