Trotskyist groups and Cuba

[gorillafuck]

Socialist Action, the CWI, and the American SWP all support Cuba, and I am just curious, what is the Trotskyist reason for support of Cuba? Opinions from orthodox as well as third camp trots are welcome.

[graymouser]

The Socialist Workers Party developed a line in the early 1960s that Cuba was a relatively healthy workers' state, with bureaucratic deformations that had not yet crystallized into a Stalinist caste, that was "as yet lacking in the forms of proletarian democracy." While they did not support Cuba without reservation they did see it as fundamentally a progressive revolution that could essentially be reformed in a period of world revolution. The SWP dropped this line in the early 1980s and dubbed Cuba socialist, period. Socialist Action continues to hold to this line. It is fundamentally similar to the line of what was then the ISFI (which initially thought the same thing about Mao's China) and united with the SWP to become the USFI, primarily on the basis of their attitude toward Cuba.

The SWP's partners in the ICFI, primarily Healy, had the opposite reaction. Healy maintained that capitalism was not really overthrown in Cuba and that a "phantom capitalism" remained. Ted Grant (Militant / CWI, then IMT) and James Robertson (Spartacist League) both developed views that Cuba was a deformed workers state, that it was at its core Stalinist and needed to be overthrown. Grant couched this in the theory of "Proletarian Bonapartism" and said that such governments arise and create deformed workers' states (this also covered Syria, Egypt and Burma as well . Robertson made the astonishing claim that Cuba had a petty bourgeois government for three years - exactly how that worked is unclear - and then a Stalinist revolution similar to that in China or the Eastern European states. These groups have held that Cuba's government needs to be overthrown by a workers' political revolution, although the IMT (not the CWI) may have softened this line somewhat in recent years because of their stance on Venezuela, their writings haven't quite made it clear yet.

My own group - the League for the Fifth International - holds that Cuba was a populist Bonapartist government forced to create a degenerate workers state (we do not use "deformed" as it historically signified that the Fourth International held out a chance of regeneration) in a fundamentally Stalinist vein. We see the lack of workers' control in industry and the lack of Soviets as determining the character of the Cuban government, while SA and other pro-Cuban Trotskyist groups have held that the lack of a clearly defined Stalinism is key (as one ex-SWP / current SA member asked us, where are the gulags?).

From a historical perspective, there was always a lot of pressure for Trotskyists to find positive sides to a "really existing" socialist revolution. The Marcyites found it in China, and doubled down when it came to Cuba. The SWP didn't sympathize with Maoism, but given Cuba's lack of trumpeting Stalin, it managed to outflank the divided anti-Castro minority (Wohlforth and Mage, who went with Healy, and Robertson who broke off on his own, and their supporters) and found one it could get behind.

[MarxSchmarx]

By the way, are there any Trotskyist groups active in Cuba? Almost all of the analyses I've read about Cuba by Trotskyists are from either foreigners or Cuban exiles who spend a good portion of their lives abroad and are no longer active there.