I. The historic gain of the Cuban revolution
1. The victory of the Cuban revolution took place within the framework of a crisis which was affecting a whole series of countries in Latin America. This crisis was the result of a combination of factors such as: the petering out of the relatively favorable economic conditions created first of all by the Second World War and then by the Korean boom; the decline of the old oligarchies under the blows of economic restructuring and the recomposition of the ruling classes. On the political level the crisis of the national-populist movements had broken out or was in the process of breaking out. These movements, thanks to the criminal orientation of the Stalinist Communist parties, had succeeded in taking advantage of the anti-imperialist aspirations of the broad masses.
In Cuba the crisis was even more serious because the increasingly dictatorial Batista regime, while benefiting from imperialist support, was being challenged not only by the working class, the peasantry, and a very considerable sector of the petty-bourgeoisie, but also by sectors of the ruling classes. The Stalinist People's Socialist Party (PSP), compromised by its past collaboration with Batista and tainted with its leadership's betrayals was incapable of taking advantage of this crisis.
The group around Fidel Castro, which was outside of the Stalinist tradition, emerged as the most radical wing of the populist movement. It was rooted in the best anti-imperialist traditions of the Cuban people. It rapidly became a force of attraction for radicalized petty-bourgeois layers. From the first days of the guerrilla struggle—which was also able to survive thanks to the collaboration of nuclei of militants organized in the towns—the Castroist current won support from among poor peasants of the Sierra Maestra. It radicalized and increasingly clarified its orientation as it took up the point of view of the consistent defense of the interests of the oppressed masses.
Fidel Castro knew how to exploit a context marked by divisions inside the ruling classes and the oscillations of American imperialism itself, certain sectors of which, convinced that the Batista regime was doomed, were looking for an alternative. The Castro leadership never envisaged sharing real leadership of the struggle with bourgeois formations or politicians and having, in particular, drawn the lesson of the defeat of the reformist government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, it conceived no path except armed struggle in the perspective of the destruction of the dictatorship's apparatus and of developing the anti-imperialist struggle on a Latin American scale.
In this way it played a decisive role in the victory of the revolution.
This victory was possible thanks to the combination of the following factors:
• The revolutionary orientation of the Fidelista nucleus;
• The struggle of the Rebel Army, which, progressively reinforced by the influx of fighters from the poor peasantry, agricultural proletariat, petty-bourgeoisie, and to a lesser extent, the working class, and enjoying increasingly massive support from the people, broke up the dictatorship's repressive apparatus;
• The big mobilizations and the general strike at the beginning of January 1959 which scuttled attempts of the old ruling classes and their political personnel to channel the revolutionary movement into a framework maintaining a neocolonial regime.
After the overthrow of Batista, throughout 1959-1960, the Castroist leadership pushed forward the mobilizations of the masses against imperialism. Thus the dialectic between the mass mobilizations and the authentically revolutionary orientation of the leadership (whatever might be its programmatic and theoretical limits) stimulated the evolution of the leadership team itself and linked it more and more closely to the worker and peasant masses. This process inevitably led to a showdown in the short-term with imperialism and the national bourgeoisie (whose representatives were rather quickly kicked out of the positions they had been given immediately after the fall of Batista). This made a recomposition of the traditional state apparatus impossible and imposed a reconstruction of the state and the administration under the hegemony of the Rebel Army. The result was the emergence of a workers state following the wave of generalized expropriations which after sweeping away the imperialist holdings, eliminated the property of the Cuban bourgeoisie in October 1960 as well.
Thus a revolution which had been launched with democratic and anti-imperialist objectives was rapidly transformed into a socialist revolution which broke the mechanism of capitalist accumulation and destroyed all the power of the exploiting classes.
The victory of this revolution signified a major blow against North American imperialism and imperialism generally and it contributed to a later evolution of the world relationship of forces to the detriment of capitalism. It demonstrated that capitalism could be overturned on the very doorstep of the United States and that the socialist revolution in Latin America corresponded not only to an historic necessity but also to a concrete possibility. It structurally weakened the imperialist system in a region of great strategic importance for the United States and it objectively reinforced the struggle of the exploited classes in Latin America. The Cuban revolution provoked or speeded up important conflicts and differentiations in the nationalist-populist movements of a series of countries and stimulated crises in the Latin American workers movement and in particular in the Communist parties. The disastrous effects of Stalinism on class consciousness was thus attacked head on in vanguard sectors who had broken with the CPs and their youth organizations, weakening them in a lasting way. This has permitted the emergence of a new generation of revolutionaries in the Latin American continent as a whole.
It is the consciousness of this reality which is the basis of Wall Street's hostility against the Cuban revolutionary regime and explains the maintenance to this day of the economic blockade.
2. The Cuban workers state has been built and consolidated in extremely difficult conditions in the course of the last two decades. The underdeveloped point of departure, inherited from the neocolonial regime, could not be rapidly transformed. The economic blockade—even more serious for a country whose economy was more than any other in Latin America tied to that of the United States—added supplementary difficulties whose dreadful consequences cannot be underestimated.
Despite all this the revolution has enormous gains to its credit. A simple comparison between the present situation in Cuba and the reality of the underdeveloped countries still under the domination of imperialism, particularly in Latin America, allows us to give an historical verdict to the question. It confirms that the creation of collectivist relations of production is an indispensable condition for overcoming underdevelopment.
It suffices just to recall the following points:
• The economy has unquestionably grown through a reorganization and modernization of pre-existing sectors, sugar production is increasingly mechanized, there is "take-off" in new sectors and considerable progress in agricultural production mechanization;
• Thanks to planning and agreements with the workers states the risks of monoculture have been reduced, and the economic and social consequences of sugar price movements on the world market have been limited and indeed nullified during certain periods;
• The historical plague of unemployment has been eliminated;
• The masses standard of living has been substantially improved (price stability, salary increases, drastic reduction of rent, introduction of a social security system covering the whole working population, the generalization of paid holidays etc.);
• Substantial progress has been made concerning the integration of women into social and economic life and in the creation of material conditions for their liberation;
• Free medical treatment has been introduced for everybody at all levels, the rate of infant mortality has been drastically reduced, and life expectancy lengthened considerably;
• Free generalized education exists which has permitted Cuba to catch up with the levels of the most developed countries in a rather short period;
• The sporting and leisure system has been radically transformed in such a way as to allow the broadest masses to benefit from them.
The old ruling classes play no role either economically or politically: the majority of their representatives left the country a long time ago. Only the small and middle peasant landholders who are not integrated into collective agriculture survive from the old prerevolutionary society. These layers still have a certain weight in the production of certain products and, since 1980, they supply a free market. But, within the framework of the collectivist economy, neither their composition nor any dynamic they might represent, presents any danger for a regime towards which they, in general, have no hostility. As for the traditional urban petty-bourgeois layers, they have an absolutely marginal, indeed insignificant role, especially after the 1968 expropriation measures.
Those are the historical gains which are the basis of the deep attachment of the Cuban people to the revolution. This explains their support for the workers state and why they have continued to mobilize in a massive way at crucial times in the struggle against imperialism.
3. We must also put on the credit side of the Cuban revolution its contribution to the anti-imperialist and revolutionary struggles in certain countries in the spirit of the best internationalist traditions. Cuba has committed itself very concretely at the side of other peoples and revolutionary forces, in several countries in Latin America and Africa. This continuity has been maintained in its solidarity with the Latin American guerrillas of the 1960s, the direct participation in the liberation war in Angola, and up to the substantial aid given to the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in Nicaragua and to the revolutionary front in El Salvador. In spite of some serious failures and despite all the risks such an internationalist attitude involved and continues to involve more than ever today.
Whatever might be the vicissitudes of the next years and decades, the Cuban revolution has already written an indelible page in the history of the socialist revolutions of our time.
II. The first ten years of the workers state
4. From the beginning specific characteristics have determined and marked the Cuban revolutionary process. Above all the struggle against the neocolonial regime had been led to victory by a leadership team and political current which did not come out of the traditional workers movement. Even if some of its members had belonged to the PSP or its youth organization, it was not tainted by the conceptions and methods of Stalinism. That is why for a whole stage—corresponding by and large to the first decade—the leadership of the workers state outlined, and tried to put into practice conceptions of building socialism which in some aspects were original. At least a part of the leadership team, with Guevara at its head, was stimulated even more to work in this direction by a consciousness of the profound bureaucratic deformations of the other workers states, the ill deeds of Stalinism and the past conduct of the PSP.
5. The economic choices made and the perspectives outlined have gone through significant oscillations and modifications. However we can delineate the following important characteristics.
The transition to socialism was not conceived as going along the same lines as those followed by the East European "People's Democracies." From the beginning radical expropriation measures were adopted. The first agrarian reform, while not eliminating the mechanism of capitalist accumulation, gave over 40 percent of land to collective farms belonging to the state. The massive exodus of people who did not want to accept the new regime stimulated still more the expropriations even of layers of the traditional middle classes. During the period 1963 to 1965, under the impetus of Che Guevara, there was an effort to find an original orientation for economic policy which avoided at one and the same time the errors of "market socialism" and of hypercentralized bureaucratic planning. But in the second half of the decade this attempt slid into pilot experiences presented as the anticipation of a communist society. All this was accompanied by a certain overestimation of the rhythms of construction of a socialist society and even led to a blurring of the differences between the communist phase and the socialist one—conceiving in a simplistic way the withering away of the categories and values of capitalism in a transitional society.
From 1964 on the policy of rapid industrialization and diversification of agricultural production was abandoned. Judged unrealistic because of the effects of the economic blockade and the consequences of the exodus of a significant part of the cadres and technicians, it was replaced with a policy aiming to increase sugar production to the maximum and to use the foreign exchange resources gained in this way to mechanize and modernize this production. But from this came the error of subordinating everything to unrealistic objectives like the zafra (sugar harvest) of 10 million tons. In this context planning was only very partially applied. The role of material incentives was underestimated.
6. On the political level the ruling group did not understand the necessity for an institutionalization of workers democracy, that is the creation of governing bodies that could permit a real systematic participation of the masses in economic management and political decision-making, and the democratic restructuring of the mass organizations. The relations between the leadership team and the masses were not, for all that, weakened, thanks to the attention of the leaders to not losing contact with the base and to understanding and expressing the needs and feelings of the workers.
One of the most serious consequences of such a conception, characterized at the same time by paternalism and spontaneism according to Castro's analysis itself, was that the administrative apparatus was only partially renewed, and what was worse, even the new personnel were assimilated by the old. Besides this, on the one hand the army provided a basic framework in a whole series of domains and on the other hand the vacuum created by the absence of democratic revolutionary institutions was occupied by an apparatus of middle and higher cadres. These people carried out greater and greater leadership functions. In that context, more often than not, they adopted authoritarian methods, tried to consolidate their power positions and benefited from social privileges.
The PSP apparatus constituted a framework capable of hardening out these layers. This apparatus which had maintained itself through the ups and downs of the armed struggle, which it had first rejected, and of the revolution which it was slow in rallying to, was pretty well discredited in the eyes of the masses. However it was able to take on a growing weight because it had a greater number of cadres than the July 26 Movement while USSR aid against the blockade gave it a more solid base of support.
It is one of the merits of the leadership team around Castro that they understood rather rapidly the implications of the tendencies that were clearly appearing and the danger that a process of bureaucratic degeneration could also develop in Cuba. Several times they launched campaigns and real mobilizations against this danger, by denouncing before the masses the actions of certain bureaucratic cliques and apparatuses. The most significant episodes in this battle were the attack made in 1962 against the Aníbal Escalante (old leader of the PSP) clique which had an analogous position to the apparatus of the Integrated Revolutionary Organizations (ORI) that Stalin had had in the 1920s in the Soviet Union, and the political and ideological campaign led in 1967 against bureaucratization which denounced not only leadership methods, work styles, and moral attitudes but also clearly underlined the social content of the problem. These campaigns also involved a reserve towards and even an explicit criticism of the Soviet "model" and the practices imposed by the USSR and the other workers states' bureaucracies. It also involved polemics against the bureaucratic conception of the party which counterposed, to paraphrase Castro, "the free association of revolutionaries" to "the army of domesticated and drilled revolutionaries. " It was even written that the "countries of the socialist camp were undermined by the bureaucracy."
7. Faced with imperialist threats and attacks and the economic blockade, Cuba, from the first years of the revolution, chose the path of an alliance with the other workers states and especially with the Soviet Union. It was a necessary decision.
Beyond conjunctural oscillations and occasional serious tactical concessions such a choice was not translated in the first years into an automatic policy alignment with the "socialist camp." Where it has thought it necessary the Cuban leadership indeed did not hesitate to publicly express its disagreement with the Kremlin. We just have to recall the criticisms made of the compromise reached by Khrushchev with Kennedy during the missile crisis of 1962 and of Moscow's attitude towards various Latin American countries and of Soviet, as well as Chinese, conduct during a whole phase of the Vietnam war. Even the Castro speech approving the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia contained a cautious critique of the conceptions and methods of the bureaucracy.
At the same time the Cuban leaders did not water down their critiques and attacks against Latin American communist parties and their strategy. The Cuban leadership reaffirmed the necessity in general of adopting revolutionary methods of struggle for Latin America and put forward ideas close to that of the theory of the permanent revolution. They did not hesitate to stimulate the formation of movements and organizations in opposition to the CPs and to other traditional parties and to promote through the Organization of Latin American Solidarity (OLAS), a center for the coordination of revolutionary struggles on a continental level. Besides this they did not limit themselves to "principled declarations"—they were practically involved in open support to the armed struggle in a series of countries as well as taking direct initiatives. In relation to this the struggle of Ernesto Guevara in Bolivia acquired a symbolic importance.
All this implies the Castroist leadership group based its politics on the idea that the fate of the Cuban workers state was indissolubly linked to the fate of the Latin American revolution and that it had the duty to work concretely to aid the extension of the revolution. It has thus accepted all the risks that flow from this and the consequences of a blockade that North American imperialism had inevitably maintained as a reprisal measure.
At the same time Cuba put itself in the front line of the struggle for active solidarity with the Vietnamese people. It campaigned that the necessity of anti-imperialist unity against North American aggression must not be sacrificed to the conflicts that set China and the USSR against one another and split the international movement of Communist parties. Also on this terrain it took up a vanguard role in the spirit of the best traditions of proletarian internationalism.
III. The turn: The new orientation of the 1970s
8. At the beginning of the second decade of the workers state, the Cuban leadership made a turn which had multiple and contradictory implications. It was the result of a series of events both internally and at the international level. Internally the factor determining this turn was the failure of the 1970 zafra. The enormous effort that had been made at the time not only had not permitted the target of 10 million tons to be reached but it had provoked the disorganization of other important sectors of the economy with lasting negative repercussions at the level of mass consumption. On the international level it was the defeat of the Bolivian guerrillas which stimulated a self-critical reflexion, although the new perspectives may not have been spelled out precisely until some years later.
The turn was made after rather lively internal debates and was accompanied by changes at the level of intermediary cadres and leaderships and also of people centrally responsible for economic policy. But it did not provoke fractures in the leadership group where Castro continued to play his essential role of initiator, arbitrator, and homogenizer.
9. The economic turn, the starting point of which had been the self-criticism speech of Castro on the failure of the 1970 zafra, was concretized in the following measures:
• The abandonment of the "special" or "mini" plans policy concerning specific sectors of economic activity which were not coordinated in practice. A more rational and long-term organization of planning under the management of the JUCEPLAN (central junta of planning) was adopted. The objective of the leadership was in the first instance to put an end to the wastage and inefficiency of investment and to determine priorities taking into account the difficulties and tensions caused by the underdeveloped base of departure as well as the possibilities of the different economic sectors.
• A first significant rectification of the methods of management in the workplaces involving giving them much greater autonomy and within this framework increasing the personal responsibility of the director.
• A revision of work organization aiming essentially to ensure productivity, to impose stricter discipline and to combat the absenteeism phenomenon. Along the same lines there was the generalized introduction of the norms system, the reorganization of the criteria of pay which meant a first widening of the salary scale and the recourse to piecework, productivity-linked money wages, as well as bonuses on a much greater scale. These measures taken as a whole went against the egalitarian objectives put forward previously and were aimed more at the workers than the bureaucrats. It was in this period that a law providing for sanctions against those who do not work (ley de vagancia) was adopted while the role of voluntary work was reduced. In a general way the emphasis was increasingly put on material incentives, particularly those of an individual character.
• The maintenance of the status quo concerning relations in the countryside with a rigorous respect for the voluntary character of peasants" adhesion to the cooperatives and even more to their integration in the collectivist sector. These measures took on a more systematic character from the First Congress of the Communist Party (1975) and have been developed even more in the most recent period with the setting up of the new "System of management and planning of the economy."
These options go generally along the same lines as those made in other workers states from the middle of the sixties. They are particularly inspired by certain orientations adopted in Hungary and the ideas of the Soviet economists of the Lieberman school. They involve the same dangers. Thus the reference to the law of value being able to regulate production, and therefore being able to become a factor determining the choice of investment, combined with an increased autonomy of the enterprises under the authority of the director, risks becoming a factor of disorganization of planning and introducing new inequalities between economic sectors. It can also increase differentiation between sectors of the working class, as well as between workers and technical or administrative functionaries.
The new general reform of the salary system, which increases the spread of wage rates and increases still more the importance of bonuses, can also be considered as a first step along this road. It is in this framework that it is necessary to see the option taken in favor of a greater satisfaction of individual needs especially in consumer durable goods. The recent introduction of a free peasant market simultaneously increases the possibilities for the supply of foodstuffs and also for social inequality (the difference between the free market price and the state distribution price being considerable).
The option of maintaining very close relations with the USSR and the other workers states of Eastern Europe has been reinforced since the joinings of COMECON in 1972. This creates a pressure to take into account, if only partially, the plans of these states as a framework of reference.
10. The target of the 1970 self-criticism was the previous criteria of economic construction considered as Raul Castro was to say later, as idealist and utopian: "We had misunderstood the objective economic laws that we must respect and the experience of other countries on which we must base ourselves and we had started, at certain times, to invent original procedures for managing the economy." (Raul Castro, March 3, 1976.)
At the same time it targeted administrative methods of leadership and the absence of the organized participation of the masses.
It was on the basis of this assertion that the Cuban leadership also launched a systematic campaign to achieve two main objectives, that is:
• The relaunching, the reinforcement and the more democratic functioning of mass organizations at the base and the definitive structuring of the party;
• The setting up of a system of People's Power at both local and national levels, which favors on the one hand the participation of the masses on the local level in sorting out the more flagrant problems of daily life, and on the other hand institutionalizes the central control of the party on the national level.
The congress of the Central Organization of Cuban Trade Unions (CTC) in 1973 (which also has as an objective the constitution of an organizational relay for implementing the new economic policy by contributing to stimulating production), the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) congress in 1977, the National Association of Small Farmers (ANAP) congress in 1977 registered the main stages in the effort to attain the first objective. The reorganization of the judicial system, pilot-experience of organization in Matanzas Province in 1974, the adoption of the new Constitution in 1976 and the setting up of the system of People's Power in the whole country at the end of the same year marked the steps taken in order to reach the second objective.
Thus from then on the Cuban workers state was based on a system of organization of the masses which had been clearly reinforced and on a political structure which, despite all its limits, represented an important change in relation to the first decade after the victory of the revolution and which ensured a more active participation of the masses in the solution of their immediate problems. That is one of the factors which explains why, despite all the difficulties and efforts that have had to be made during more than twenty years, the leadership can count on a base of support that is still massive and which is expressed in a new wave of powerful mobilizations after the victory of the insurrection in Nicaragua—in particular on the questions of defense of Cuba against imperialism and support for the revolution in other countries.
11. At the beginning of the 1970s, the international policy of Cuba went through an evolution. This led to an alignment on a number of key policy stands with the Soviet leadership (without embracing the Kremlin's global strategy of peaceful coexistence), to openings towards Latin American bourgeois governments and regimes characterized as anti-imperialist and revolutionary, to a rapprochement with the Communist parties and to some "stand-offs," even some ruptures with revolutionary movements in certain countries in Latin America.
Such an attitude was not dictated only by the fact that Cuba still had need of economic and military aid from the USSR. That carried weight previously. The new factor was that after the defeat of a whole series of guerrilla movements the Cuban leaders modified their analyses of the situation in Latin America and drew their conclusions.
They did not give up the strategic perspective of a victory of the revolution in Latin America, but they no longer saw this coming within the short term. They chose therefore to integrate themselves more within the "socialist camp" and at the same time endeavored to exploit any possibility of alliances with bourgeois nationalist or national populist governments (Peru, Panama, Ecuador, for some years Venezuela, Argentina during the period of the second edition of Peronism, Mexico). From that followed the substantial improvement of their relations with the Communist parties with which all polemic was halted. The conference and resolution of the Latin American CPs of 1975 reflected the rapprochement which had come about.
This alignment on a number of the key policy stands of the Soviet leadership, which was presented as authentically Leninist and revolutionary, was accompanied with an acceptance of many general conceptions proper to the Soviet bureaucracy. An analogous attitude was taken towards the leaderships of countries under the influence of Moscow, even those most hated by the masses, such as that of Czechoslovakia. As regards China the official statements and the press rival the Soviet texts in the extreme character of their attacks and ideological polemic.
Towards the middle of the 1970s Cuba made some attempts to re-establish links with the United States in the hope above all of achieving the end of the economic blockade. The fact that the Castroist leadership never envisaged major concessions demonstrates however that these attempts did not involve any renunciation of its fundamental anti-imperialist orientation.
The Angolan events resolved this question. Cuba did not hesitate to directly intervene in another continent, contributing in a decisive way to the defeat of the imperialists and the South African racists and defying Washington just at the very moment when it was looking for the opening of dialogue. The USSR itself was also fully involved in the success of the Angolan operation, which it had supported logistically, but that doesn't at all change the internationalist character of the Cuban enterprise, which received broad support from the masses.
IV. A workers state with bureaucratic deformations
12. According to the balance sheet drawn at the Second Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba the objectives of the 1976-1980 plan have not been reached, the rate of growth had been inferior to what had been forecast.
While having made enormous progress in relation to the situation in 1959—confirmed among other indicators by the fact that industrial investment is today preponderant—and having created the conditions for great social gains on a mass scale, the Cuban economy has not yet overcome the consequences of underdevelopment inherited from the colonial and neocolonial era and it is still undergoing serious tensions and contradictions. That has been explicitly recognized on several occasions by the leadership themselves.
In the course of the last two years, speeches, congress documents, and articles have denounced the fact that:
• "Considerable domains" of the economy (Raúl Castro) are characterized by a lack of efficiency:
• Work productivity remains too low and absenteeism and passivity are far from being eliminated;
• Extremely serious phenomena of bureaucratic disorder exist both within the workplaces and at the level of production as a whole;
• The new planning methods and new management of the workplaces have not put an end to the administrative irresponsibility and anarchy;
• The norms system has produced serious drawbacks;
• Active mass participation in production is not generalized and too often leaders and cadres are guilty of harmful, slack attitudes;
• Careerism and "amiguismo" (old boy network) as well as the scramble for privileges wreak havoc;
• The survival of a relatively substantial private sector continues to represent an obstacle to the rationalization and mechanization of agriculture and the rhythm of growth of cooperatives remains insufficient.
With some ups and downs the remedies envisaged and the measures taken from 1970 on have had positive effects in the domain of economic rationality, production growth, and the improvement of the masses' standard of living. But the experiences of other workers states show that as long as there is no really democratic planning and management in practice of the enterprises by the workers, reforms aiming to ensure greater autonomy of the workplaces nourish centrifugal tendencies which are capable of disorganizing the plan and of creating and aggravating economic disequilibrium. They can also increase the decision-making power, and in the last analysis the privileges, of a layer of bureaucrats. Furthermore these changes are being carried out in an unfavorable economic context. The growing differentials in wages also imply a dangerous social and political dynamic which can begin to impinge over the long term, on the homogeneity of the working class itself and create conflicts of interests within it.
13. If in Cuba analogous problems to those that other workers states have experienced or are going through are being posed, and if certain of the solutions envisaged resemble solutions tried elsewhere, it is because both on the political terrain and on the economic terrain analogies exist between Cuba and the other workers states. More concretely:
• In the same way as in other workers states planning is essentially decided from above. The possibility exists to contest and rectify objectives at a local or workplace level and the decision-making powers at the local level are real. But this does not prevent the fact that the options at the macroeconomic level are the prerogative of a limited number of leaders;
• The management of the workplaces provides a preponderant role for the director, who is designated from above. Workers participation in the organization of production, through the intermediary of the trade unions, does not imply any decision-making powers;
• Work organization is based on norms and "socialist emulation." Material incentives are now given priority and the salary reform involves an accentuation of the differentials within the working class and even more between the working class and the cadre and leaders at the technical and administrative level;
• The party, which is not composed in its majority of workers, especially at the regional and national leadership levels, constitutionally exercises a role of leadership and control over all institutions and mass organizations, by predetermining, to a very large extent, their decisions. It is conceived as a monolithic entity which excludes the right to have tendencies or for alternative positions to be reflected internally. Members do not know about the debates which take place inside the leading group and congresses are more often than not ritual affairs, which, furthermore are convened only at long intervals;
• The trade union is also under the leadership of the party and it is only the leaders who can eventually influence decision-making on the economic plan. The right of tendency is forbidden;
• The monolithism of the party is combined with ideological monolithism, the party is considered the guarantor of the strictest orthodoxy;
• Whatever might be Cuba's links with COMECON (of which it is a member) and the way this consequently conditions certain economic options, socialist construction is still essentially conceived of within the nation state.
14. The question is posed of deciding if the analogies outlined above, following from the developments of the last ten years, indicate that Cuba itself has undergone a bureacratic degeneration.
Bureaucratic tendencies were already manifest in the first period of the revolution created by the economically and culturally backward starting point. These tendencies especially concerned the cadre and leaders at the intermediary level. The limitation to this level does not eliminate in itself the danger. It was a case of a relatively numerous layer which had a considerable weight in the application of the orientations and measures decided by the leading group and which partially could also influence the elaboration of central decisions. In the USSR of the twenties, incidentally, it was exactly an analogous layer which played a primary role in the process of bureaucratization.
The evolution that the structures and organization of the economy have gone through and the latest decisions enlarging the power of the workplaces and their managements, objectively favors a reinforcement of these tendencies. These people can also exploit to their advantage the tight links beween Cuba and the degenerated Soviet workers state which has led the Castroist leadership to express an unconditional support to the bureaucrats both in the USSR and the other East European countries against any critical movement, mass action or strike.
The fact that education of cadre and leaders takes place often in the USSR, is based on Soviet sources and that even school texts borrow largely from Moscow's ideological arsenal, has even more serious consequences. Since bureaucratic conceptions are transmitted by this bias the education of the young generations can only suffer seriously as a result.
The institutionalization achieved since 1976 has contradictory aspects. On the one hand, at the municipal level it stimulates a more active participation of the masses and favors their active intervention. The electoral system itself assures the possibility of choice to electors. The latter have the possibility of exercising a control on the activity of their elected representatives in the report-back/balance-sheet meetings, even if, as Fidel Castro himself stated at the Second Congress, this is unevenly applied in practice. The right of recall exists not only in principle but it has also been exercised in practice in a nonnegligible number of cases.
But on the other hand at the regional level the mechanisms for participation are much less effective and in any case are indirect. For the National Assembly, which is formed from a secondary election (from the votes of delegates elected at lower levels), representatives can even be elected who have not been directly elected by the people and the candidatures are proposed by the party or organizations under its control. In any case the overwhelming majority of the representatives are members of the party. The plenary sessions of the assembly only take place twice a year for several days. It is the Council of State and the commissions which directly take or determine the most important decisions on which the electorate has no chance of having a say.
Therefore there exists at a local level a democracy with real participation, while at the central level there is no participation with real decision-making power. Besides this there is a heavy concentration of powers at the summit, symbolized by the fact that Fidel Castro is at one and the same time, the president of the Council of State, prime minister, and also secretary of the party. It is, on the other hand, also significant that the campaign led in the last months of 1979 against disorder, irresponsibility, and bureaucracy, etc., ended up with the adding of supplementary functions and an increased power of control to Castro himself and some other members of the restricted leading group.
Similar considerations apply in relation to the mass organizations which often have an active, even enthusiastic, membership and have in principle a democratic functioning at the local and sectoral level, but without that implying a possibility of participating in central decisions which in the last analysis belongs to the leadership group of the party. This contradictory situation is clearly shown in relation to the CDRs, defined by Castro at the Second Congress as the original contribution made by Cuba to the experience of the international workers movement (and which indeed does not have an equivalent in other workers states). On the one hand these gather together about half the population and facilitate, among other things, active participation in the rank-and-file institutions of People's Power, but on the other hand they only held their first national conference seventeen years after their foundation.
15. The Cuban workers state is characterized by contradictory traits and tendencies, partly determined by its historical origin, partly as a consequence of the choices made by its leadership team. On the one hand bureaucratic tendencies exist, expressed by a layer of cadres and leaders who, thanks to posts of control and command in the structures of the state, army, and party, benefit from social privileges. Furthermore structures and mechanisms exist which favor bureaucratization and are analogous to those in other workers states. Pressures linked to the USSR's military and economic aid, which Cuba needs, strongly encourages these tendencies. On the other hand substantial differences remain in comparison to the bureaucratized workers states. They reside in the fact that there is not a bureaucracy crystallized as a privileged social layer comparable to that which reigns in other workers states. The privileges that a layer of bureaucrats enjoy in Cuba still remain limited. The leadership grouping remains essentially the one which was the protagonist of the struggle for the overthrow of the neocolonial regime and of the first years of the workers state. It does not act from the point of view of defending the interests of this layer of bureaucrats and it is not a question for them of reinforcing and consolidating these forces. It strives, within the framework of its conceptions, to defend and express the interests of the masses.
The relations which the leaders maintain with the masses, while not lacking in paternalism, are incomparably more alive and direct than in any other workers state. The structures of institutionalization are not organs of a true socialist democracy, but neither are they moribund bodies which prevent any real mass participation.
On the level of military organization and mobilization an important role is given over to the militias, which have just been relaunched in a big way at the Second Congress as the riposte to imperialist threats in Central America.
All this explains why, contrary to what has happened in other workers states, the masses do not consider the leading group as hostile or foreign to their interests and aspirations. They have always ensured it their support through mass mobilizations which, far from being eroded, have gone through a new powerful upsurge faced with the internal difficulties of spring 1980 and the more recent threats of imperialism made following the impact of revolutionary developments in Latin America.
Revolutionary Marxists therefore do not put forward the same strategic objectives for Cuba as they advance for the USSR and the other workers states. They do not put forward a policy of a political revolution for the overturn of a bureaucratic caste. They reject at the same time any fatalistic idea according to which in the last analysis the bureaucratic degeneration of Cuba is inevitable. The tendencies to bureaucratization can be successfully reversed by internal transformations, by the extension of the revolution in Latin America which would break Cuba's isolation and, even more so, by the combination of the two.
Progress towards a socialist society in Cuba presupposes a democratic socialist reorganization which transforms the present structures and builds new ones with the aim of ensuring the democratic management of the plan and self-management of the workplaces, as well as the effective participation of the masses in political leadership at all levels. This implies organs of a workers/people's council type, democratically centralized, which could result, for instance, from a development of bodies such as the CDRs or Assemblies of People's Power.
The realization of this objective necessitates freedom of expression and the right to organize—even if the demand for this right, in the framework of the new society and with respect for its laws, does not signify necessarily that revolutionary Marxists would want to create a new party. It implies that the debates on planning and the big economic options are developed at all levels, that different opinions can be expressed on all the vital problems regarding the construction of socialism and communism and there should be no restriction on theoretical debate. The right to strike must be recognized. Trade unions have to be really independent from the state and the party and have an effectively democratic internal structure with the right of expressing different points of view and forming tendencies. The same democratic rights must exist within the party. The struggle for women's liberation must be pursued in order to achieve complete sexual equality. All material or moral discrimination against homosexuals must be eliminated. A clear distinction also should exist between the state and government on the one hand, with their immediate economic, diplomatic and military constraints, and the party on the other hand, which in all circumstances must defend the global interests of the proletariat.
Those are the main objectives pursued by revolutionary Marxists in Cuba.
16. The specificities and internal contradictions of the Cuban workers state cannot but be reflected in its international policy.
The alignment on a number of the key policy stands of Moscow's political line led the Cuban leadership group to accept the theory of two camps." It is in this framework that it is necessary to situate approval to the intervention of the Soviet army in Kabul and what is more serious an appreciation of the Polish events which fits in with the interests of the Warsaw and Moscow bureaucracies and results in an anticipated acceptance of an eventual intervention which would aim to save the integrity of the socialist camp." Besides that the warm support expressed each time the occasion presents itself for a regime like that of Husak in Czechoslovakia, which is hated by the masses, has annulled even the criticisms Castro formulated in 1968 at the same time as he approved the entry of the Warsaw Pact troops into Prague.
Cuban policy in the so-called "nonaligned movement" aims legitimately to exploit the contradictions between these countries and the imperialist powers. But it also involves apologetic attitudes towards regimes which in the majority of cases exploit and brutally oppress the masses of their countries. This is expressed, by among other things, theorizations bereft of any scientific basis and taken from the Moscow ideological armory which include among the countries who "have proclaimed socialism or who have a socialist orientation," a series of neocolonial regimes of Africa and the Arab world. The practical consequences of such conceptions can be verified in the light of the attitude adopted by Cuba faced with the war between Iran and Iraq. Nobody challenges the right of Cuban diplomacy to try and mediate to end the military conflict. But when Castro speaks about "two peoples engaged in revolutionary processes" he blurs the essential difference between the Iranian revolution, which revolutionaries throughout the world must defend and the Ba'athist regime in Iraq which has put itself in the front line of the attacks against this revolution.
Cuban political support to a certain number of neocolonial states on the African continent is not situated only on the level of defense against imperialism or of state-to-state diplomatic relations.
The Cuban CP apologetically covers for petty-bourgeois leaderships who govern these bourgeois states, like the "jacobin" Ethiopian leadership or the People's Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA).
The construction of the Fourth International, the formation of revolutionary parties on the African continent, precisely passes through the rupture of militants and groups with petty-bourgeois nationalism and the illusions invested in these supposedly "progressive" states (which in reality accomodate to imperialist domination and do not respect the essential demands of the masses).
Such a policy by the Cuban leadership in no way facilitates or favors the emergence of radical political currents on the African continent. It constitutes a real obstacle in the path of building revolutionary parties in Africa.
To analyze the Cuban support for the Angolan, Ethiopian, and Congolese regimes only as a revolutionary internationalist attitude without any nuances is to whitewash the petty-bourgeois leaderships at the head of these states and, by aligning on their political positions, help prevent the building of the Fourth International in these countries and in this continent.
The intervention in Angola is also not without contradictions. It has been justly acclaimed by revolutionaries as an anti-imperialist and internationalist action. However the presence of Cuban forces did not represent only a guarantee against an imperialist counteroffensive, but also implied unreserved support to the regime and on this the judgment cannot be the same. In spite of the Angolan regime's official rhetoric, it is not at all socialist and is in reality constructing a neocolonial state in the framework of a compromise with imperialism and in agreement with some of the most reactionary neocolonial regimes. It does not hesitate to have recourse to repression against currents of the mass movement. Similar considerations hold for Ethiopia. Here if the Cubans were not directly involved in the campaign against Eritrea, that did not stop them continuing to support a government which denies the Eritrean people the right to self-determination. Thus they swallowed one of the "fundamental principles" of this holy alliance" which is the Organization of African Unity (OAU)—that is, the principle of the inviolability of frontiers which had been fixed more often than not in function of colonial and neocolonial interests without any consideration for the aspirations of peoples and nationalities.
The Cuban government is perfectly right to exploit the contradictions which exist between the imperialist countries and to come to economic agreements with them which limit however slightly the consequences of the economic blockade. The criteria outlined on this point in the Second Congress report are correct. From this however it is absolutely not the case that it is correct to give a cover to representatives of the bourgeoisie by expressing positive appreciations on their political role. When Castro, for example, eulogizes Adolfo Suárez, who supposedly ensured the "transition in Spain in a brilliant and progressive way," he certainly does not share the opinion of the working class of the Spanish state and does not help their struggle.
Furthermore, the Cuban leaders do not go along with the criticisms made even by certain West European communist parties of the USSR and the "socialist camp." However they do not express any fundamental reservations about those parties neoreformist perspectives and strategy and they present them each time as the real defenders of the interests of the masses in their respective countries
In relation to Latin America the Cuban leaders maintain their perspective of opening dialogue with bourgeois governments and regimes that they consider "progressive" or "anti-imperialist." The most significant example remains that of its attitude to the Mexican government and to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) which are presented as anti-imperialist, indeed as revolutionary. The least one can say is that such an attitude, precisely because of the prestige of Cuba, can only complicate even more the difficult task of those who struggle in Mexico for the essential objective of the political independence of the workers movement in relation to the bourgeoisie. It does not educate the Latin American masses any more than prepare the Cuban masses for the blows that the Mexican bourgeoisie will inevitably strike them with when that corresponds to its immediate class interests. In other cases, despite partial rectifications, the orientation remains ambiguous. This is the case particularly with Argentina. Cuba has to denounce the crimes of the dictatorship but at the same time it has wanted, and seems to want to continue, to avoid a conflict with the line of the USSR which has excellent relations with Videla, and with the Argentinian CP itself. Finally with regard to Peru the Cuban leaders do not seem to have made any critical reflection on their support to the bourgeois populist military regime.
However in the course of the last two years and especially starting from the outbreak of the revolutionary crisis in Nicaragua, the policy of the Cuban leadership towards certain countries in Latin America has been reorientated within the perspective of an active intervention in the developing revolutionary struggles. It provided a determinant aid on all terrains to the Nicaragua FSLN whose reunification it facilitated and after the victorious insurrection the Cuban leadership strongly committed itself, despite considerable sacrifices, to the reconstruction and defense of the country. It has played and continues to play an analogous role in relation to the revolutionary movement in El Salvador. It has helped, and continues to help, the forces struggling against the proimperialist terrorist regime in Guatemala. It supports the new regime in Grenada. At the July 26 anniversary celebrations Castro solemnly reaffirmed that the experiences of El Salvador, Chile, and Bolivia proved that there was only "a single road: revolution" and a "single means: armed revolutionary struggle," . . . "the road taken by Cuba, Grenada and Nicaragua."
The report approved by the Second Congress of the Cuban CP indicates even more clearly that such an orientation is based on an analysis of the changes that have taken place in the Latin American situation, which are shown concretely with "the tremendous popular victories in Nicaragua and Grenada, the irresistible struggle of the Salvadoran and Guatemalan peoples, the combativity of the masses which has reached an unprecedented level" more generally in the continent and the Caribbean, "the fierce resistance of the Chilean people, the heroic struggles" being carried out in Bolivia and elsewhere, "the unprecedented strikes" in Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia, and "the constant struggle of the Argentinian workers."
The Cuban leadership has decided to exploit this new situation—while being conscious of the risks they are taking. It is also conscious of the fact that the evolution of the relationship of forces at a world level to the detriment of imperialism—which was another theme of the Second Congress analysis—carries with it the danger of criminal reactions from imperialism and Cuba could be one of the priority targets for this response. It does not run for cover, it does not conceal from its people that the revolutionary crisis in Central America could provoke aggression from the North American imperialists as a last resort to avoid the disintegration of a strategic position already shaken by the Nicaraguan revolution. Its reply has been clear: while being disposed to sort out its differences with the United States, Cuba is not at all ready to trade its solidarity with Central American revolutionaries, or its internationalist initiatives more generally, nor break its alliances. It commits itself forcefully, and will continue to, so that imperialism is forced to give up its criminal operations, or in the case that it does not do that, to draw it into a new Vietnam in Central America, Cuba itself and certain other Latin American countries.
The significance of such an orientation is clear: the Cuban leadership is banking on the extension of the rèvolution in Latin America. It considers this possible and necessary and, in the last analysis, this represents the only real guarantee of the survival and development of the revolution in Cuba itself. This is a supplementary proof that it is not adopting a conservative orientation which would reflect the interests of a bureaucratic caste. In spite of its contradictions and in particular some of the attitudes of its leadership confronted with the problems and struggle of the other sectors of the world revolution, it continues to make a major contribution to the victory of the revolution in Latin America.
V. Our orientation to the Cuban revolution and the Castroist current
17. The Fourth International hailed the formation of the Cuban workers state in 1960 as a victory of historic significance for the working class and exploited masses of Latin America. In all countries where it had forces and in the first place in Latin America, it mobilized in active campaigns of solidarity with the Cuban revolution. Trotskyist organizations participated in the congress of Latin American youth which took place in Havana at a crucial moment in the confrontation between the revolution and North American imperialism.
The common analysis and positions taken in relation to the Cuban revolution greatly contributed to the 1963 reunification. The theses of the reunification congress explained that: In its evolution toward revolutionary Marxism, the July 26 Movement set a pattern that now stands as an example for a number of other countries." And another text of the same congress pointed out the specificities of the Castroist current, whose leadership was characterized as, "by far the most advanced political leadership of all the workers states. " The 1965 congress defined the Castroist current as an autonomous, fundamentally revolutionary current of the communist movement." When OLAS was set up, the Fourth International reaffirmed its appreciation of Cuba's role in Latin America and expressed its willingness to undertake united actions with OLAS and its affiliated organizations, despite divergences of methods and political conceptions.
At the present stage it considers the defense of the Cuban workers state as more than ever a priority task. Mobilizations along these lines must be closely combined with mobilizations in defense of the workers and peasants government in Nicaragua and the regime set up as a result of the insurrection in Grenada as well as solidarity with the revolutionary struggles in El Salvador and Guatemala.
18. A Castroist current emerged in Latin America immediately after
the victory of the revolution in Cuba. It reached its zenith at the OLAS conference in 1967. It became eclipsed as a result of the defeats of the guerrilla movements and the changes made by the Cuban leaders to their political line in Latin Amrica. It has continued to exist thanks to the anti-imperialist role constantly being played by the Cuban workers state. This also represents something materially and ideologically important for Latin American militants persecuted by the dictators and hounded from their countries. It entered a new phase of growth starting with the revolutionary crisis in Nicaragua and its new development is continuing as a result of the victories of the revolution in Nicaragua and the popular insurrection in Grenada—as well as with the heroic struggle which is already undermining the base of the neocolonial regime in El Salvador.
It is necessary to distinguish two aspects of the phenomenon.
The first aspect is represented by the Cuban leadership, which for a whole period has put itself forward as a current of the international workers movement differentiating itself, including through public polemics, from all other currents. In the middle of the 1960s it tried to set up, with Vietnam and North Korea, a convergence on international policy whose basis would be the fact that the three countries were the most directly exposed to the blows of North American imperialism. It was looking also to establish more or less direct agreements with other Latin American currents and even with some communist parties or with tendencies working within them. It toned down these specific traits after 1970 by underlining its alignment with the USSR and its integration into the "Socialist Camp.
Especially during this period the Cuban leadership completed the elaboration of an ideology and overall political orientation which, while placing itself within the framework of a consistent struggle against imperialism, combined:
• A mobilization of the masses to defend the Cuban workers state against any reactionary threat both from the exterior and from within, and support of revolutionary struggles particularly in Central America;
• An alignment on some of the key policy stands of the international , policy and ideological positions of the Soviet bureaucracy and therefore an opposition to the antibureaucratic struggles carried out by the working class in the USSR and in the other bureaucratized workers states.
The Cuban leadership is therefore revolutionary because it has led the revolutionary process in Cuba and supported the extension of the revolution in other countries, such as today in Central America. But it is not revolutionary Marxist to the extent that, from the point of view of the world revolution as a whole, it oscillates between supporting the extension of the revolution on the one hand and, on the other hand, aligning itself on certain major axes of the international policy of the USSR. This leads it to take positions that go against the fundamental interests of the working class (as the attitude taken towards the big struggles of the Polish workers demonstrates).
In the present phase, it has taken up the initiative again by fully committing itself in Central America and by de facto differentiating itself, on this terrain, both from the other workers states and from most Latin American communist parties.
The second aspect is represented by movements and organizations which at different times, have established relations with the Cuban leadership with the aim of gaining from its experience and receiving material aid. They constitute a specific current in the sense that they have drawn analogous lessons from the Cuban revolution and rejected both the conceptions of the Soviet bureaucracy and the communist parties under its influence, as well as Maoism, without, for all that, coming to revolutionary Marxism. But it is a heterogenous current which has never elaborated a common, lasting and overall theoretical and political base. The fact that the majority of its components underwent very serious crises—a certain number disappeared, others went through many vicissitudes and still others have broken with Cuba—is the practical proof of this. Even the current which maintained the greatest continuity and never suffered a major defeat, the Nicaraguan FSLN had its ups and downs, at one time resulting in a serious rupture, with the adoption for a certain period, by important sectors (if not by a majority) of its militants, of positions rather different from those of the Cubans. It was only in the final phase of the struggle and after the victory that their ideas became closer and increasingly homogenized with the Cubans. In El Salvador the process has been even more complex and it is difficult to say right now what the implications of a prolongation of the struggle or a short term victory would be for the homogenization of a common current. The existence of a workers and peasants government in Nicaragua and, even more so, a future victory of the revolution in El Salvador, would inevitably pose new problems flowing both from the specificities of the developments in each country as well as the interaction between these developments and the Cuban process.
The victory of the revolution in Nicaragua and the development of struggles in El Salvador, in any case, has resulted in an increase in the prestige of the Cuban leadership in the eyes of the masses and revolutionary militants in a whole series of Latin American countries and therefore their receptivity to the ideas and perspectives put forward by it. In this sense not only is the Castroist current a reality but it is capable of exercising a growing force of attraction.
19. The Fourth International has systematically looked for unity of action and collaboration in the perspective of a common struggle against imperialist oppression and capitalist exploitation with currents involved in revolutionary struggles. In this spirit it has rejected and will continue to reject any sectarian attitude towards the Cuban leadership despite the wrong positions the latter has taken on events as crucial as May 1968 in France, the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia, and the present crisis of the Polish bureaucratic regime. This applies also to those movements identifying with Castroist conceptions and political tradition. Its orientation towards them remains one of the search for united activities.
Sections of the Fourth International, in the first place in Latin America, will be in the vanguard of solidarity campaigns with Cuba, Nicaragua, and Grenada against all imperialist threats and maneuvers. In Western Europe, North America, and Japan it will take all necessary initiatives for making the workers movements and its mass organizations conscious of the problems faced by the liberation fighters of Central America. We will try and organize campaigns like we did during the aggression against Vietnam. A worldwide solidarity campaign against imperialist action in Central America must be considered a priority task in this period for the International.
In Nicaragua revolutionary Marxists must be fully part of any project of the FSLN to construct a revolutionary party and, in this framework, they put forward proposals for developing and consolidating the revolution. In El Salvador they join the FMLN and in Guatemala they integrate themselves in the organizations leading the struggle against the proimperialist dictatorship. They carry out this orientation as loyal revolutionary militants. At the same time as they respect the organizational framework in which they operate they struggle for the program of the Fourth International and they group together its supporters.
It would be to commit a sectarian error to make a pretext of existing divergences and reject any possibility of collaboration in a perspective of common revolutionary struggle. It would be to commit just as serious an opportunist error to believe that, in order to achieve this collaboration it is preferable to ignore or to blur over disagreements, to idealize the other's positions. An already long experience has taught us that people who commit these symmetrical errors can pass quite abruptly from one extreme to the other.
At the present stage, the questions that must be debated in the workers and revolutionary movement in Latin America are the following:
• What are the lessons we can draw right now from the revolution in Central America, to what extent are they valid for other Latin American countries?
• What should be the content of a united front policy against imperialism and the dictatorships, what policy for unity with revolutionary organizations, what attitude must be taken, within the framework of class independence towards bourgeois sectors or personalities who oppose existing regimes?
• What must be the specific tasks of trade-union organizations, the struggle for their independence from the state and what relations must be established between mass organizations and political formations?
• How should one conceive of relations with forces who are struggling in other sectors of the world revolution: the working class in the capitalist industrialized countries and the masses who are mobilizing in the antibureaucratic struggles in the workers states; the need for an international mass organization synthesizing the essential lessons of the revolutionary struggles throughout the world.
• The necessary differentiation between the role of the workers state and that of the party in these states must be clear.
In this debate revolutionary Marxists give the following responses:
• The experience of Nicaragua, following that of Cuba, has confirmed that the overthrow of proimperialist regimes is only possible through revolutionary struggle which breaks the bourgeois state apparatus and culminates in an insurrection whose protagonist will be the broad exploited masses organized in democratic revolutionary bodies. The active and organized participation of the masses is a sine qua non condition for blocking any attempt to restore a neocolonial regime.
• It would be wrong however to think that the lessons of the Cuban and Nicaraguan revolutions are automatically applicable to other Latin American countries whose socioeconomic structures and political history are different. In particular it would be wrong to think that in such countries one should adopt the same formula of political alliances.
• The conquest of the political independence of the working class from all bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forces must represent the central axis of the struggle of revolutionaries.
• It would be puerile not to play on the contradictions of the bourgeoisie, it would be absurd to refuse unity in action with some bourgeois personalities or groups and not to make tactical agreements with them. But no programmatic or strategic compromise is possible with bourgeois forces. Such compromises would inevitably put into question the independence and leadership role of the proletariat, supported by other exploited layers, and can only hold back or divert their mobilizations.
• The trade-union organizations must be independent from the state and existing governments which implies a hard fight against the corrupt and traitorous bureaucracies, for trade-union democracy, for the unitary character of the trade union which must accept in its ranks all workers independent of their political, philosophical, or religious opinions, for trade unions* organizational independence from political parties.
• Imperialism will not be progressively weakened, placed in an impossible position for launching counterattacks, and then finally overturned unless all sectors of the world revolution progress. The revolutionaries in Latin America, like those of all the other colonial countries have therefore an interest in the successful development of workers struggles in the industrialized capitalist countries. In these countries also victory will not be possible through reformist strategies by the electoral road; it will only be won by the revolutionary road. Finally revolutionaries throughout the world have the duty to support the struggles of the masses in the bureaucratized workers states unleashed for the defense of their interests and for elementary democratic rights against the privileged bureaucratic caste which oppresses them.
It is the common experience of the revolutionary Marxists and the other revolutionary Latin American currents in all the unfolding struggles which will permit the clarification of these questions, the verification of the respective positions and the significance of the divergences, and the testing out of the possibilities of the coming together of different currents in the workers movement.
The Fourth International will play its role not only through political and theoretical debates and clarification but especially to the extent that it is capable of proving in practice the validity of its program and its capacity of leading the struggles of the masses through its own organized forces.