Revolutionary Cuba has long been a beacon for revolutionaries of various political traditions: but for over twenty years from the late 1960s to the early 1990s its economic and military dependence upon the Soviet Union resulted in a visible avoidance by many of its supporters of any explicit discussion of the politics of Stalinism.

And after the heavy-handed repression and incarceration of the small body of Cuban Trotskyists in the immediate aftermath of the 1959 revolution, we have waited over forty years for the writings of Celia Hart to develop a specific critique of the politics of Stalinism, to focus attention on the long and proud revolutionary tradition that predates the foundation of Cuban Communist Party, and make explicit links between this and the theories and politics of Leon Trotsky.

Whatever the limitations of Hart’s theoretical approach, however reliant she may appear upon the principles and revolutionary commitment of individual heroic leaders (Che, Fidel, Marti, and now Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez) the emergence of these writings at this time offers a tremendous basis for optimism. As Fidel Castro’s physical strength ebbs away there is nonetheless a core of committed and critical Marxists within the Cuban CP willing to fight in defence of the gains that have been made and against a CIA-orchestrated ‘democratization’ by a vicious Miami-based expatriate, restorationist mafia.

Celia Hart has impeccable credentials as a defender of the Cuban Revolution: she is a member of the Cuban Communist Party and the daughter of two key leaders of the Revolution, Armando Hart and Haydee Santamaria. She first discovered the writings of Trotsky while studying in East Germany in the 1980s – not perhaps the most likely route to access a thorough critique of the politics and methods of Stalinism which at that time were all too evident in the brutish regimes and police repression in East Germany, the USSR and many ‘Eastern Block’ countries.

Rediscovering Trotsky

The essays and articles in this volume show Celia’s increasing awareness of the corrosive effects of Stalin’s theory that it was possible to build ‘socialism in a single country’ and the Stalinist rejection of Trotsky’s interpretation of the concept of permanent revolution (i.e. uninterrupted and international) first put forward by Karl Marx in the 1850s. She says that, ‘We will not succeed in understanding what happened if we do not render understandable the obscure mechanism by which the Soviet bureaucratic caste monopolized socialism, betraying its International and demolishing the revolutionary spirit of the world. (p18)

Celia argues that the core revolutionary concepts in Trotsky’s approach were close to those of early Cuban revolutionary Julio Antonio Mella, and also embraced by Che in his quest to internationalise the revolution. And she poses the question which we might have expected more Trotskyists to have posed over the many years in which they uncritically endorsed a Cuban regime which excluded their current from political debate: ‘Why was it forbidden for so many years to put Leon Trotsky in relation to the Cuban Revolution?’ (p21). Celia insists that she has ‘not managed to find out’: but the answer is not too difficult to uncover.

Moscow’s role

The Cuban Revolution overturned a weak and utterly corrupt Cuban bourgeoisie, at the point where the US withdrew its support from the Batista dictatorship. Castro’s July 26 Movement, which had fought the regime in the teeth of opposition from the Stalinists of the ‘Popular Socialist Party’, was strong enough to oust the old regime, but was not based in the working class and did not have enough links or expertise in the trade unions to secure stable control over the whole economy. And the new regime, immediately under pressure from the US, felt that it needed international economic and military support.

For its part the relatively new Soviet bureaucracy under Khruschev was looking to strengthen its hand against the US: deals were done in which the July 26 Movement merged with the Stalinist party, with the Castro brothers in overall control, but with considerable political influence handed to the Stalinists. In exchange the USSR extended military and economic support to Cuba.

Moscow was prepared to allow Castro a degree of leeway in nationalizing the Cuban economy, and for some years ignored Cuban efforts to export its model of revolutionary change by endorsing guerrilla struggles and left currents in Latin American countries.

But the new Kremlin regime under Brezhnev took a harder line – and from the late 1960s until the collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s, Castro’s Cuba was required to operate within the boundaries of Soviet foreign policy.

The fact that Celia can now write freely about Trotsky and Trotskyism, and discuss many of the historical crimes of Stalinism, appears to reflect a much more relaxed attitude from the Cuban CP leadership which is now freed from the shackles of Moscow control.

However there are still constraints: Cuba has in recent years attempted to make links with the Chinese Stalinist bureaucracy, which is equally as anti- Trotskyist as Moscow ever was. Havana has also enjoyed historic ties with Vietnam, yet another country where the Stalinist Communist Party leadership carried through a revolutionary struggle for national liberation while rejecting Trotskyism and savagely repressing Trotskyists, establishing a deformed and bureaucratized ‘workers’ state’ in which the workers have never held power in their own hands.

Permanent revolution

While Celia’s writings collected in this volume use excited, vivid and often poetic language to recapture the revolutionary traditions of Trotsky and the Cuban revolutionaries, they too display limitations that could later be a problem.

For example, permanent revolution is too often seen as a process or as a slogan, rather than a strategy in which the working class has to develop a revolutionary political party and leadership capable of placing it at the head of the battles for democratic rights, national liberation and socialism. Che may have been the one to free the imprisoned Cuban Trotskyists on his return from Africa, and may well have read Permanent Revolution and had Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution in his knapsack in Bolivia (p25). But his guerrilla exploits in Latin America, however heroically inspired, never set out to establish such a leadership: rather they attempted to go around the working class and kick start a revolution on the Cuban model, ignoring the special circumstances that had allowed the July 26 Movement to win in Cuba. It is possible to have too little theory, and too little analysis.

In similar fashion Celia is too ready to argue that it does not matter whether Chavez regards himself as a socialist, and too ready to accept that the Venezuelan (and Cuban) revolutionary movements should look to one or a handful of strong leaders. But as a treasure trove of ideas and neglected facts past and present, and a reminder of the historic legacy that helped give us the Cuban Revolution, these writings are very important.

The reader should overlook an excess of typographical errors and a couple of translation glitches (‘hammer and cycle’) and dig in for a welcome ‘fix’ of political energy and enthusiasm: we also need to see how these ideas can be further developed in the context of the Cuban political situation in the closing years of Fidel’s rule.

For a copy of Celia Hart’s book, see "SR Books - It’s never too late to love or rebel" on this site.

John Lister is a leading health activist.