TURNING-POINT IN THE CUBAN REVOLUTION
The Cuban revolution has reached a crucial than the Guatemalan and Bolivian revolutions, point in its development.
As a result of the advances already achieved, it has gone considerby ably beyond bougeois-democratic limits adopting measures that affect the capitalist regime itself.
By basing itself on a peasant mobilization begun before the fall of Batista, it is not only carrying out an agrarian reform, but also organizing production on the basis of peasant coöpe-
In this direction it has ratives.
gone farther which limited themselves to the distribution of the land, thus halting the reform midway.
Furthermore, by employing as cadres the officers and soldiers of the revolutionary army, the Cuban revolution is developing a policy of struggle against illiteracy, construction of dwelling-houses, and of raising the living level of the people.
Against the pressure of capitalist encirclement and interior counter-revolution, Castro has taken
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL hotels, the confiscation of newspapers financed by the Batista government, a beginning of monopoly of foreign trade (by an orientation of imports toward the articles most necessary for the development of the country at this stage), etc.
The trade unions, on their side, have stepped up their political role — as appears from the resolutions of the CT C (national trade-union federation) — organized their militia of peasants, workers, and students (despite Castro's initial hostility toward such an extension of arming the people), and have asserted the principles of workers' control, as has been the case with the newspaper printers' and reporters' unions. Granted, all this development that goes past bourgeois limits has been carried out by a petty-bourgeois leadership - with a structure and ideology that are bourgeois rather than socialist — such as the leadership of Fidel Castro himself.
At this moment the revolution has reached a stage where, the agrarian reform having been largely carried out, the peasants cease to play a vanguard role, and this role is transferred to the cities, to the proletariat. The peasant, master of his own land. is going to begin to consider the revolution from the point of view of the market, from the point of view of what the city can give him in exchange for his pro.
On this factor the extent of his support will more and more depend.
Hence the problem of the country's industrial. ization is taking first place. In this industrialization, and in measures and methods adopted to give it impetus in a backward country, the tasks of the proletariat are in their turn moving into the foreground.
The Cuban revolution must tackle a programme of nationalization of the main industries, nationalization of the banks, under workers' control and even workers' administration, of planning of industrial development on the basis of state monopoly of foreign trade, and of a balanced correlation between the prices for industrial products and the prices for farm products.
The achievement of such a programme is impossible without an extraordinary expansion of the participation of the masses in the administra. tion of society, of the economy, of the enterprises, and of plans for development.
In this field the Fidel Castro leadership is advancing in an empirical way. It is taking steps forward under the pressure of the masses, but it remains prisoner to its own conception "humanist capitalism." There is a permanent
5 contradiction between its underlying paternalism concerning the participation of the masses, and the impact made on it from below by those masses who would like to control and even run the economy. At this level, when the centre of the tasks of the revolution is shifting from the countryside to the cities, it is evident that the revolutionary army cannot be the only source of cadres for the revolution, the only "party" that organizes the masses.
Hence an acute need is arising for a workers' leadership, for proletarian cadres endowed with a proletarian and revolutionary ideology, organs of a soviet type, in order to set and accomplish the tasks of the revolution. In the 26 July Movement there is an entire tendency which is heading in this direction, which is demanding
• conscious combination of socialist measures with the bourgeois-democratic measures in order to make the revolution go forward.
This combination has been begun, but in an elementary, empirical, non-conscious form, deby the permanent character of the Cuban revolution, which began as a campaign for administrative moralization carried out by an idealist petty-bourgeois grouping but which into a revolutionary transformation of the country's entire life.
Imperialism has understood the permanent development of the revolution; it is this that basically explains the extreme violence of its attacks. While there are still imperialist commentators who compare Castro with Nasser and call for an attitude aimed at neutralizing him, the conscious leadership of imperialism has understood that the development of the Cuban revolution is escaping from any possible control by its present leadership, that its repercussions throughout Latin America are immense and revolutionary, that the examples of the farm coöperatives, armed militia, etc, are spreading, and are undermining the whole foundations of imperialism in Latin America. Imperialism understands empirically that in Cuba it is a question of permanent revolution that cannot stop at a given stage, and in consequence imperialism's policy is to crush it rather than to negotiate with its present leadership.
It is precisely on the international plane that the advances of the Cuban revolution have been so far the most spectacular, and the blows to imperialist prestige and domination the heaviest.
Cuba has proved that it is possible to resist imperialism "right in the monster's jaws," as a French journalist phrased it. It has countered the imperialist attacks blow for blow. It sprang to break economic encirclement and strangling
6 of foreign trade (in addition to the withdrawal of the aid extended to Batista), by setting up diplomatic and trade relations with the workers' states and the semi-colonial countries of Asia.
To the US boycott of Cuban sugar (on whose sale the island's economy now depends), it answered by accepting a credit of $100 million from the Soviet Union and by signing with it an agreement for the annual sale of a million tons of sugar for the next five years (20% paid in dollars and 80% in goods, including Soviet oil). It signed an agreement with Japan, selling 150,000 tons of sugar as against the purchase of Japanese goods for $18 million. It is now making deals with the United Arab Republic, Czechoslovakia, Jugoslavia, India, Poland, and Indonesia. It is sending delegates to the workers' states; People's China is opening a press agency in Cuba. And all this right under the nose of Yankee imperialism! This is an example that is making an immense impression on all the peoples of Latin America. It is certain that, if imperialism engaged in military intervention in Cuba, it is because it knows that would cause revolutionary storm of incalculable consequences in all Latin America.
Cuba is receiving this popular support in spite of the open hostility of all the Latin American bourgeois governments, if one of them, such as Venezuela, is obliged to moderate its criticisms so as not to collide with its own masses. During the latest trip of a Cuban delegation in Latin America, Cuban President Dorticós was able to verify the warm popular reception in all countries, and the cold and hostile official reception by the governments of Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil.
All the Latin American bourgeoisies join with imperialism in a common fear about the revoluLionary repercussions of the Cuban revolution in their own countries. A very sharp line of division, which is more and more coinciding with the anti-imperialist and class line, divides all Latin America on the question of support to Cuba. The cry of the Latin American masses _ 'In the Cuban way!" — is terrifying the bourgeoisies there and their allies.
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International developments are emphasizing the urgency of the workers' tasks in the Cuban revolution. The coming diplomatic recognition of China, the invitation to Khrushchev and to Chou En-Lai to visit Cuba, mark — on the plane of international policy - the objective shift of the revolution toward proletarian tasks. For it is undeniable that all these attitudes have a much deeper meaning right in Latin America — not many miles away from the United States, and with a consciousness of very grave repercussions on the very foundations of Yankee imperialism — than in Asia or the Middle East. In the 26 July Movement, in the trade unions, there is a left tendency that is heading towards an understanding of the turning-point that the revolution is reaching. This tendency is posing itself the task of building, on revolutionary Marxist bases, a leadership that will apply in a conscious way a workers' programme for the purpose of overcoming the revolution's national and international contradictions, and ensuring a Latin American extension of the Cuban revolution: an organizational and militant alliance with the whole workers' and anti-imperialist movement of Latin America and the prospect of * the Socialist United States of Latin America.
The action of the Partido Obrero Revolucionario, Cuban Section of the Fourth International, has as its aim to aid the development of this tendency, to speed up the building of a workers' leadership for the revolution, and to orient, by means of a workers' programme, the course of the revolution and the formation of the leading cadres of the next stage. At the same time it supports all progressive measures taken by the Cuban government and backs up anti-imperialist resistance and measures.
International support for the Cuban revolution at this moment must be an active support for its anti-imperialist struggle and for its anti-capitalist measures, for the strengthening of its ties with the workers' states and with the international workers' movement, on which the fate of the revolution is going more and more to depend.