Cuba

Review of "Che: Part One" This is a war film with a political backdrop. The action follows the revolutionaries’ landing in Cuba in December 1956, their trekking covertly through forests, taking of military bases, gaining support of the locals, street-fighting in Santa Clara to being days from taking Havana in January 1959. (The taking of Havana will come in Part Two). The scenes of fighting are spliced with documentary-style ‘footage’ of Che’s 1964 speech to the UN and Che and Castro’s first meeting, strengthening this war film with an injection of revolutionary ideals. From Che and Castro’s...

The "Miami Five" are Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, and René González, five Cubans who have been in a US prison since 1998, serving four life sentences and 75 years collectively after being convicted by a Miami court in 2001. The charges included espionage and conspiracy to commit murder. The five were involved in monitoring the activities of right-wing Cuban-American groups in Miami and passing the information on to the Cuban government. In one case this led to the Cuban airforce shooting down two planes belonging to an exile group - hence the charge...

Celia Hart Santamaria, the well-known Cuban Communist Party activist who died in a traffic accident in Havana at the start of September, was feted on the international left as a representative of Trotskyism in Cuba. Both the Fourth International centred on the French LCR and the International Marxist Tendency centred on the British Socialist Appeal group have promoted Hart, had her to speak at their events, and so on. (You can read tributes at the FI-linked liammaccuaid.wordpress.com and at the IMT’s www.marxist.com. ) But even the generally more critical Permanent Revolution group, for...

The Chinese road? Samuel Farber, Cuban “Third Camp” Marxist and author of The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered, was interviewed about the book in US socialist journal Against the Current (November 2006) . Here we reprint an extract with his predictions for Cuba without Castro. More on this site about Cuba . There are many indications of Raúl Castro’s outright support for China’s direction. Visiting Shanghai in April 2005, Raúl said: "There are people who are worried about the Chinese model — I’m not; China today proves another world is possible". I find this comment obscene, in...

Paul Hampton of Workers' Liberty debated with Bernard Regan, a leading member of the Socialist Teachers' Alliance, at a London Workers' Liberty meeting. More on Cuba here . ===== Paul Hampton argued that Cuba displays the essential characteristics of Stalinism On New Year's Day 1959, the Cuban revolution triumphed, when guerrillas led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara drove out the hated dictator Batista after two years of struggle. Cuba had been a semi colony of American imperialism for the first half of this century, a site for the production of sugar for the American market and a Mafia-run...

By Paul Hampton Paul Hampton assesses Fidel Castro’s legacy — the nature of the 1959 revolution and the social and political changes Cuba is now experiencing. The overthrow of Batista in the last days of 1958 was a popular revolution that socialists and radicals everywhere supported. Batista had made Cuba a vassal of the US and held down the Cuban working class with repression and a compliant union bureaucracy. The opposition to Batista included Castro’s July 26 Movement (M26J), which had fought a guerrilla struggle for two years, the old bourgeois autentico and ortodoxo parties, the students...

This book is a pseudo-debate between Peter Taaffe of the Socialist Party and CWI (formerly Militant) in Britain and Doug Lorimer of the Australian Democratic Socialist Party (DSP). It is also, I guess, an attempt to check the recent rash of Castro-worship in the Scottish Socialist Party, with whom Taaffe maintains a strained relationship. The DSP, following the lead of the American SWP, rejects Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, preferring Lenin’s blurred and outmoded formula of a “democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants” as the programme for revolutions in countries of less...