Defenders of the Cuban government inside and outside the country claim that the dissidents are “counter revolutionaries”. In fact, they hold a variety of political positions.

Reports leaked from inside the country say that the police are still arresting dissidents — confiscating their typewriters and simultaneously raiding food in their fridges.

In Cuba there is police corruption, the death penalty and dismal prison conditions. Workers are threatened with losing their job if they refuse to vote. All this in a country which, according to many on the left, is socialist.

None of this would happen under socialism argues Amy Shoots, in this article outlining developments in Cuba since 1989.

Amy does not share Solidarity’s analysis of the Cuban state — we say that the Castro-led elite is a ruling class, she would say it is a bureaucratic caste — but comes to the same political conclusion, that Cuba needs a genuine workers’ revolution.


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No analysis of the current situation in Cuba would be complete without strident opposition to the isolation of the island by the United States.

US laws, against UN directives, impose strict conditions and harsh penalties for countries trading with the island. Any ship travelling to Cuba is prohibited from stopping at an American port en route to the island, raising the cost of the cargo.

Travel by individuals in the United States to Cuba is severely restricted. Americans face draconian fines of up to $55,000 for disregarding the travel ban.

However. Americans can and do defy the travel ban on a regular basis, travelling to the island via Canada, Europe, Mexico, the Caribbean and South America. Some have been fined and have refused to pay. Some have escaped the fines.

At the end of 2004 Bush imposed new restrictions on Cuban-Americans wishing to return to the island, limiting their visas to once every two years and restricting their daily expenditure to $50 per day (although in Cuban terms this is a considerable amount of money, because workers earn almost nothing).

Since 1989, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba has lost its major trading partner. It entered into a “special period”, which continues, during which the island has experienced severe petrol shortages, electricity black outs and food scarcity. An average meal consists of cabbage, beans and rice.

In the summer of 2004, Fidel Castro bragged to the international media that Cubans were consuming 2,500 calories per day; it is an obvious lie.

In reality Soviet Union always did little to assist the Cuban workers. Cuba was forced by Russia into a one-crop economy (primarily sugar cane production). After the collapse of the USSR, world prices for sugar, affected by a glut in sugar production, left the country in a perilous economic situation. The country was forced to abandon sugar production, and by 1993 the country began importing sugar for the first time in its history.


The Cuban government and its supporters at home and abroad attribute all problems on the island to the blockade, and use it to stifle dissent both inside and outside the country. In 1993, at the height of the “special period”, it still had a flourishing port, with trade from all over Latin America, Holland, China, Canada and elsewhere, and the state-run daily newspaper Granma (not the overseas edition) bragged of this trade. There was a discrepancy between what the government was claiming and the economic reality. The question was and is, why aren’t the Cuban workers benefiting from the trade?

The blockade is used as an excuse to deprive workers of their rights, suppress dissent and hold back the international struggle for socialism.

For instance, the Cuban government uses the blockade to excuse trade liberalisation on the island, including the “dollarisation” of the economy (which the government refers to as the “dual currency”), joint private/public partnerships and preferential treatment for multinationals including Mitsubishi, Rolex, Bayer, Canon, Lloyds Bank, ING Direct and Castrol. Some university professors at the University of Havana say that the government’s model is a Scandinavian one — that is, a bankrupt system of social democracy and a mixed economy.

For many years Cuba was a largely voucher economy with a black market in American dollars, but in 1993 the dollar was legalised. The Cuban tourist offices, in countries such as Canada, were even warding off visitors from using the Cuban peso. They were directing visitors into expensive hotels and away from bed and breakfasts where visitors can mingle with the people. There is even a problem for Cubans to obtain a licence to rent small rooms in houses so they can make a paltry sum of money for themselves.

Since at least 1993, then, the economy has been divided between a voucher economy (one pair of shoes per year), a virtually worthless peso economy, and a highly lucrative dollar economy for those who are able to access the dollar — eg, those profiting from the tourist trade and the black market, including, of course, government bureaucrats.

Tourists, and so-called solidarity activists have access to steak and lobster (forbidden to Cubans), stay in air-conditioned hotels (even Radio Havana Cuba offices don't have air-conditioning) and have access to computers and other multinational technology. The hotels along the tourist beaches are mostly foreign, situated on leased land, and are arranged by nationality, thus pandering to crude nationalist sentiments rather than fostering internationalism and solidarity,


Since the early 90s the reality for Cuban workers has been dire. In 1993 they began working 40–48 hours per week on 12-hour back-to-back shifts because they had no way to commute between their housing estates and their workplaces. They were sleeping over at their workplaces due to the shortage of transportation. There were few buses and at 7.30 or 8pm and well into the night it was possible to see lines of people walking the highways leading into Havana, as well as cyclists on the pitch black roads.

Agricultural workers, mostly Afro-Cuban, were being transported like cattle in the back of trucks. People at the bus stops looked angrily at the tourist buses as they passed by half-empty, sometimes gesturing at the buses. The huge a la Mar housing estate on the outskirts of Havana was almost totally isolated because of the transportation situation.

At the height of the special period there was very little food available, rations were severe and some days the state markets consisted of only a small quantity of beans and coffee. Other days only vegetables and rice were available. And still other days there would be some bananas or cabbage. One doesn’t hear of this from tourists or solidarity visitors, however, as they are supplied with abundant food.


Officially it is stated that there is no sexual or racial discrimination in Cuba. This is not the case, however. Afro-Cubans have fought back particularly hard against racial stereotyping in employment and elsewhere, but they are still over-represented in agricultural labour.

The Cuban government has had to scrabble to contain the dissent and has tried to channel some of it into a celebration of Afro-Cuban culture, which of course has benefited the tourist trade.

Despite the government’s claims that Cuba has an exemplary health-care system, workers complain of queues to get into hospitals.

The government’s claims are also contradicted by its own statements about the blockade and the shortage of medicines.

It is also contradicted by the so-called peace caravan organisers, who claim on the one hand that Cuba has the best healthcare and education in the Latin American world, and then spend time cobbling together aid.

Either the Cuban workers have good food, education and healthcare, or they have not.

To this day some solidarity campaigners in the West brag that they eat steak and lobster in Cuba on their tours and that everyone in Cuba has access to a computer (a blatant lie).

One might call them “unsolidarity” tours.


Today Cuba has a number of significant problems. Industry, social services, education and the media are under state control rather than worker control.

There is also the problem that Castro has served as President for over 40 years without any natural succession of leadership. Even pleading special circumstances under the blockade, it would be normal to have a change in leadership as policies and programmes changed.

It is evidently a sign of paternalism, sexism and a cult of personality that Castro has maintained his personal control for so long.

Castro’s brother Raul is presumed to be Castro’s successor. This is a sign of nepotism and dictatorship.

While many well-intentioned socialists in the West have high regard for Castro’s leviathan writings and speeches, he is in fact a nationalist and not a socialist. He supports Third World nationalist struggles around the world in speeches and his country has sometimes followed through in aid. He is not advocating workers’ control and does not outline a coherent vision for what a socialist country would look like.

What is his contribution to Cuban workers, other than getting them out to flag waving ceremonies and launching four-hour speeches at them? Is this the way to defeat American imperialism? Does this advance workers’ control? We think not.


The case of the Cuban Five… is significant. They are five Cuban police who were sent to the United States to collect information on anti-Castro activity in Miami and were arrested in 2001 (they could face a life sentence in a US jail).

From the Cuban government’s perspective these five are Cuban patriots who were sent to thwart terrorist attacks, such as the 1986 bombing of the Air Cubana plane and the hotel bombings in Havana in the early l990s.

It is against international law for any country to spy in another country, although the United States and other countries do it all the time with impunity. However, it is a ludicrous story that the Cuban government tells.

For instance, Radio Havana Cuba says that the Five collected information about illegal counter-revolutionary activity and they reported it to the United States government expecting the Americans to prevent the attack. Of course, the American government immediately arrested the Cuban Five.

This story indicates that the Cuban government is either totally naive or that Castro is trying to establish diplomatic relations with the United States.

One could take it a step further and say that the constant harping about the American blockade indicates that Castro actually wants to trade with the American superpower.


The priority of the Cuban people should surely be to build a self-sufficient economy and to look after their own people and trade with countries that don’t interfere with the internal politics of the country.

Of course, it goes without saying that the Cuban workers need to overthrow the Castro regime and its bureaucratic caste and establish real workers’ control and socialism.

This, however, cannot be done in isolation. It requires the support of workers around the world and an international revolution.

Trotskyists say that no country can achieve socialism on its own. This is because of the reality of military and economic aggression from surrounding capitalist states.

Cuba is not a socialist country, but a grossly degenerated workers’ state. In a socialist society, the workers would be in control, and their form of organisation would look quite different than we see in Cuba today.


A true workers’ state is characterised in the first place as an economy where all the major industries are under state control, or nationalised, in other words. And this happened after the change of power to Castro and the Cuban Communist Party. However, that too is not socialism.

Socialism puts industries into the hands of the workers through workers’ soviets (councils).

There would be workplace soviets as well as community soviets and various bodies in the transitional period to see that production is coordinated.

The socialist state is one where there is full workers’ control and where the “state” as we know it under capitalism would wither away (Lenin). “Nationalisation” is only a transitional demand. The goal is outright workers’ control.

Socialists in the “developed” nations need to stop pandering to the parliamentary system — that is, in my view, at the root of their political error in relation to Cuba. There is no parliamentary road to socialism. Such a road is a distraction from the class struggle and dupes workers about the real nature of the capitalist system.

The only road to socialism is a revolutionary one in which the capitalist system is overthrown by the workers, up to and including the use of violence. However, the violence will come mostly from the armies of the capitalist states and the workers will have to win over sections of the army in order to complete their task.

As Trotsky wrote in the Transitional Programme of the Fourth International in 1938:

“The duty of the Fourth International is to put an end to such slavish politics once and for all. The petty-bourgeois democrats — including Social Democrats, Stalinists and Anarchists — yell louder about the struggle against fascism the more cravenly they capitulate to it in actuality. Only armed workers’ detachments, who feel the support of tens of millions of toilers behind them, can successfully prevail against the fascist bands. The struggle against fascism does not start in the liberal editorial office but in the factory — and ends in the street.”

So is the case in Cuba. Our demands are: “Defend the Cuban degenerated workers’ state against US imperialist aggression. But overthrow the bureaucracy and establish workers’ soviets and begin the real struggle for socialism and internationalism.”