On that accursed day of June 19th, when the Assembly of People’s Power unanimously voted in favor of each and every one of the 176 economic measures, the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba and the President of the country Miguel Díaz-Canel spoke as follows: “We are not adopting this new line because we are under the pressure of the US, we have been discussing it since 2011, and it is finally becoming a reality”. This expression could be seen as telling the rest of the world, and first and foremost to the US, “Do not think we are surrendering, we have been already thinking about this”, at least in front of all eyes. It is normal in politics for heads of parties or states to resort to such maneuvers under distress.
But there is a small, tiny detail that leads us to question the truthfulness of this interpretation. Why could Díaz-Canel have said “since 2011”? If it is just a maneuver he is talking about, why the need to specify the year? Further, what is so special about 2011 that Díaz-Canel specified it?
Let us explain: in 2011, Fidel passed on his position as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba to his younger brother, Raul. This was the final moment of Fidel’s severance from the government of Cuba. In 2006, when he was exactly 80 years old, he declared that his health was in very poor shape and, therefore, he could not continue his duties. Raúl Castro took over the Presidency as Fidel’s representative. In 2008, Fidel was not among the Presidential candidates in the election. Raúl thus became the actual President with full power. In 2011, Fidel finally stepped down from his position as the Party Secretary, and thus severed his last link with the government.
That is to say, the very year when Fidel stepped down from the party Secretariat, and the year Raúl took on that position in addition to his other duties, the Communist Party of Cuba began discussing capitalist restoration. Oh, what a coincidence!
The claim is not ours. How would we know? We are only repeating what the current First Secretary of the Party said.
Now the First Secretary of the Party is admitting that the Party began discussing the economic policy that we have proven to be the road-paving of capitalist restoration in the year when Raúl Castro took over the party administration from Fidel!
We had pointed this out exactly 10 years ago, back in 2016, based on the then-current political and economic facts. When Raúl began paving the way for capitalist restoration together with the US President Obama and his ambassador, the Pope. This preparation spanned a long time. The first steps were taken in 2010, and it has lasted until now. And it reached maturity in 2026 - exactly as Díaz-Canel says. That is to say, the decisions approved on June 19th are not a “just give him what he wants” type of response to the Trump Administration’s heavy pressures. It is the result of a long preparation process. It is no accident that they coincided with this moment. Of course its primary aim is to lessen the US pressure. But the rot is from within Cuba.
A very short summary
The series of pieces we have composed and published in the last few weeks is not about history, but about current events. Therefore, we will not explain the unfolding of events from 2010 onwards in detail here. But we will provide only the main lines of development, so that we may be able to correctly pinpoint the position of the Cuban bureaucracy, or at least its dominant wing, in the face of US imperialism’s attempt to inflict irreversible damage to socialism on the island. This will allow us to understand what and what not to expect from the bureaucracy in the upcoming struggles.
We have already summed up the political side of things above. Fidel’s link with the government was gradually severed in a process that spanned from 2006 to 2011. And Fidel died in 2016. Against this political backdrop, the Cuban bureaucracy took steps to dissolve the wins the working class and the toiling masses were enjoying in a socialist economy.
In 2010, it was suddenly declared that 500 thousand people working as wage-laborers in the public sector were to be laid off. It is obvious that this is a very high number within the 5-million-strong Cuban labor force. Job security and employment guarantee are perhaps the most important working-class gains in a socialist economy. The public declaration of this challenge meant that the new administration was not just after simple “reforms”. In 2014, already 400 thousand people were employed in (mostly small-scale) private firms. The aim was to employ at least 1.8 million out of the 5.3-million labor force in the private sector in the short run. We have always emphasized in our pieces: the Cuban restoration took place always as a very slow process. This aim was never reached. Even today, after 12 years, there is only 1 million people employed in the so-called mypymyes, i.e., small private firms and the self-employed.
The reason for the Raúl Castro administration’s newfound orientation became clear in 2014. As the Raúl administration was taking over the government from Fidel, a change of guard was taking place in the US as well. In 2008, the Barack Obama administration was elected to office. We need to remind our readers that Obama was the US President who employed “liberal methods” the most since Jimmy Carter (1977-1981), that is, for almost half a century. Between the reactionary George W. Bush (2001-2009) and the proto-fascist Trump administrations, Obama had a political style that consisted of gesturing towards the peoples of the world (including those of our region) rather than showing them the stick. He approached Cuba in this manner as well. As the newly elected head of a State that had been heavily blockading Cuba since 1960, not recognizing the Cuban government since 1961, and attempting to assassinate Fidel countless times, he took a big step, not in his first but second administration. He recognized the Cuban government, did not lift the blockade but nonetheless allowed for various, trade, touristic, economic, and cultural ties to emerge between the US and the island.
The Cuban state has not released the documents of its internal negotiations, so it is naturally impossible for us to be sure; but it is evident that the Raúl administration is deeply engaged in the Chinese-style capitalist restoration in the face of Obama’s approach. Ten years ago, we had described this process as follows, as it was unfolding:
“The first step on this path was taken in December 2014. Both Barack Obama from Washington, and Raúl Castro from Havana (who, after his brother and the historic leader of Cuba, Fidel, stepped down from the government due to health concerns, took over his duties in 2006) declared on the same day that they would take steps to re-establish relations between the two countries. This was followed by re-establishing diplomatic relations and the re-opening of the American embassy in Havana. Then, in September 2015, the Argentine Pope Franciscus visited the island as the mediator between the two countries. Now, in March 2016, the main actor, the chief of US imperialism, Barack Obama himself, is visiting Cuba.”
However, 2016 was Obama’s last year in government. Both sides had wasted precious time, probably due to the pressure of forces internal to their respective countries that resisted this process. In January 2017, Trump replaced Obama in the White House and pushed relations onto a path even more tense than before. The phase of capitalist restoration that took place in agreement with the USA was now behind.
But this did not lead the Cuban bureaucracy to go back completely. A new constitution was drafted and accepted in 2018. The new constitution still stated that Cuba was a socialist society, but struck out the clause that said that the country was “advancing towards a communist society”! What could be more striking in a country where the Party that is said to be “above the society and the state” is called the Communist Party of Cuba? Other than this deeply significant symbolism, the constitution was carrying forward the restorationist orientation in many other spheres, from gesturing towards the West in a number of cultural fields to the guarantees it gave to “private enterprise”.
And on January 1st, 2021, when the entire world and Cuba were struggling with the Covid-19 pandemic, an economic package approved at this time brought about great changes in the economic system and exchange rate policy. The country switched from an exchange rate policy advantageous to state enterprises over the private sector to a single-currency policy. Subsidies geared towards easing the constraints of the working class and toiling masses’ family budgets that were built into the pricing policy were abolished. (The consumer goods basket that the state handed out to these families, on the other hand, has now been nearly gotten rid of with the 176 decisions.) The abandonment of the exchange rate to the “free market” led to impoverishment in medicine and foodstuff, but made it easier to buy luxury goods, which are mostly foreign exports.
On July 11, 2021, the greatest popular mobilizations the island has witnessed since the revolution would take place. Cuba became a stage of confrontation between crowds protesting the government, on the one hand, and masses protecting the party and the government on the other. (The finer, complex details of this very important event were addressed by the statement of the Revolutionary Workers Party in Turkey on the matter, and also in our own piece.)
The rest is known to the reader as well. On June 19th, 2026, an Assembly that bears the name of the Assembly of People's Power, and with hundreds or maybe thousands of communists serving in it, shot 176 bullets at Cuba. The issue at hand carries all this complexity.
A tangled web of contradictions
This piece you are reading is the fourth piece we wrote on Cuba since June 25th, that is, within a single week. There is one older piece as well: one where we had called for “International Che Guevara Brigades” was released in early March. Why? Because a country that has become the source of inspiration for the peoples of the world, a country that has kept the faith in socialism alive for peoples from every continent is on the chopping block. If the US overthrows socialism in Cuba, this will become the last nail in the coffin of the 20th century attempts of socialist construction. Therefore, every real socialist from all around the world must lend a hand to keep Cuba alive. We are therefore struggling hard to share with our readers the objective conditions of the situation and the subjective steps that need to be taken, to the extent that we can observe from afar.
Let us first admit that our position, as it appears from outside, seems really contradictory. We suggest the establishment of “International Che Guevara Brigades” to fend off the socialist structure in Cuba against a potential US attack, just like the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, whose 90th anniversary we are experiencing this year. But in the country we suggest defending militarily, there is no electricity; families cannot preserve the food they would bring to the table due to the hot weather; there is no medicine; the machines in the hospitals are not working. Let us assume volunteers from many countries went to Cuba. What would they do other than just wait in the dark?
The contradictions don't end there. We call for volunteers from every continent to defend socialism against the US moves to restore capitalism in Cuba, but the Communist Party of the very country we want to defend votes unanimously in favor of an economic package that paves the way to capitalist restoration. Who will we struggle against? The US or the internal forces that are opening the gates for capitalist restoration in Cuba? Another huge contradiction!
Besides, we claim that the Communist Party of Cuba has been in a restorationist orientation since the 2010s, albeit in a very slow process. We also claim that if the June package is implemented, it would definitely end up in restoration. Then what socialism is there to defend? All is said and done.
Or is it? Let us begin right here. Let us concretely analyze the concrete situation.
Worker-toiler inspection
There are those who, wherever an economy in transition to socialism took steps in the direction of capitalist restoration under the name of “market reforms” in the last half century, bring up Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP) that the 10th Congress of the Bolshevik Party approved in January 1921, just three years after the revolution. “Nothing to worry here, even Lenin made market reforms”, they say. It happened this way during the “market socialism” debates in Eastern Europe, during the Gorbachev era, during Deng’s “the cat's color doesn't matter” policy in China, and the same thing has been said for Cuba for years. But as these relaxed and easy folks kept trying to calm us, capitalism was taking over one by one in Eastern Europe, in the USSR, in China, in Vietnam. There are almost no socialist countries left in the world. Now the next in line is Cuba.
Yes, Cuba is next in line, but to give in to panic or despair and forget about the principle of the concrete analysis of the concrete situation would be to abandon one of the most important aspects of Marxist politics. We are not saying that Cuba has become capitalist. We are saying that Cuba has entered the path to capitalism. Therefore, from a Marxist point of view, today's policy must arise on the basis of preventing this process from completion through a series of short or long class struggles. We suggest that we approach the situation in the economic sphere not through the principle of “throwing the towel” but through the principle of “not going down without a fight”. And we suggest that we take our first policy lesson for this from Lenin.
Everyone, learned and ignorant alike (and unfortunately the learned also), spoke on Lenin’s NEP as we mentioned above. However, NEP was actually a policy of loosening with a very tight clamp around the possibility of capitalism’s resurgence. A very tight limit (that is, never exceeding the limits of petty bourgeoisie) on the use of wage labor, an absolutely negative attitude towards re-privatization of the big means of production and circulation that the Revolution had socialized, a very clear state command over the banking system, state monopoly over foreign trade, etc. were all assuring that the capitalists could not sneak back into the economy. In fact, NEP was a market-oriented turn with a very limited number of goals, such as the reinvigoration of agriculture (especially foodstuff production), the revitalization of domestic trade (and not production or finance) of an economy bled dry through private initiative, and making use of foreign capital in technological advancement. Let us alert our reader that everything that NEP rigidly prevented, the June 19th decisions legalize: private banking, lifting the state monopoly over foreign trade, making possible the emergence of a big capitalist sector, etc.
Despite all these tight measures, Lenin, in his final interventions, made a very important, and in fact somewhat extraordinary suggestion to the 12th Congress that was to gather in 1922, partly because the workers’ state was still in construction, the old bourgeois habits were still in vogue in many state institutions, and the old Tsarist bureaucracy was still holding the strings. We need to remind our reader of a very important distinction to explain how radical of a suggestion this is.
For Lenin and Bolshevism, the distinction between the inside and outside of the party is of vital importance. A Bolshevik-type party, that is, the disciplined organization of the vanguard of the working class, must draw a sharp distinction between its members and the non-party masses, even if this party is at the bosom of the workers’ state or in power. This is because the party - let us repeat - must develop the consciousness of the vanguard workers so that they do not give into the prejudices or ideological submission of the more backward strata of the working class, and in fact pull those strata forward. Both the revolution and the defense of the proletarian power are possible only in this way.
Therefore, the party and the state organs must not be jumbled together, even if communists are ruling over the latter. In state organs, non-communists can serve side by side with communists. But at the end of the day, communists will go through a different kind of education, develop a different kind of consciousness, and determine their policy towards non-communist state staff in their own cell meetings.
What holds true in the lower level holds even truer as we approach the highest echelons of party and state organs. Because in these higher organs, the discussion is not just over how to manage the party-non-party relations and differences of the line, but also what policy to follow in the entire country. Vital decisions are being taken.
In the lead-up to the 12th Congress in 1922, Lenin put aside this principled distinction of highest importance, and staunchly defended merging the Central Control Commission of the party with one of the highest inspection organs (and from Lenin’s perspective, maybe the single most important organ) of the state, namely, the Worker-Peasant Inspections. For us, the reason for this extraordinary take is clear. Lenin thinks that there is bureaucratic deformation not only in the state but within the party also. The situation looked very dangerous, especially if one considers the possibility of the solvent impact of the so-called NEP-men, i.e., the merchant stratum that was sure to bourgeois-ify with time, upon this bureaucratic formation (or deformation) then still in its "embryonic" form. We can therefore explain Lenin’s trivialization of the party / non-party distinction, or in a more narrow sense, his ease in the joining of party and state organs, with this extraordinary situation.
Today, the Cuban communists, the true communists, revolutionary Marxists must handle the situation exactly in the same manner. Today, Cuban agriculture is based not on petty proprietorship, but on large-scale public enterprises. Therefore, a staunch defense of a Worker - Toiler Inspection, i.e., a more modern version of the Worker - Peasant Inspection - an inspection organ elected directly from within the workers and peasants, which Lenin developed as a measure against the bureaucracy and the resurgence of capitalism - would be the most appropriate policy. The Communist Party of Cuba is now saying: “I am not defending that restoration of capitalism is the only way out, but that these market measures are important for solving the accumulated problems of the economy”. In that case, communists, Marxists, socialists, partied and non-partied alike, must all point out that these “market incentives” have led to great differentiations of income and social power in the socialist transition economies where they were implemented, and eventually led to capitalist restoration. They must claim that the communists should be vigilant on this matter, that the developments must be carefully inspected. They must defend that the best people to do this are cadres coming from within the poorer classes. They must defend the founding of a Worker - Toiler Inspection and imbuing it with broad inspectory authority, its right to work freely with all the experts, relevant documents and data at its service, and its authorization for fending off against opening the gates for driving the country away from socialism.
Rectification
Outside of the Worker - Toiler Inspection, other measures Cuban communists should defend must be taken directly from their own revolutionary legacy. The Cuban Revolution was the last revolution to end up forming a workers’ state, and it benefited from the guidance of the two leaders who emerged as the giants of the second half of the 20th century, Che and Fidel. These factors afford the Cuban communists to draw on a host of very creative and fruitful perspectives. Every revolutionary experience should inherit the best of its own traditions as much as it learns from the rest of the world. This would make it possible for especially the vanguard of the working class to grasp the matter more easily, and for the great masses outside of the vanguard to embrace it as a part of a national experience.
The first policy we suggested (Worker - Toiler Inspection) was a matter of democracy - not of the abstract kind, but of class democracy, that is, for the toilers and the poor to have authority and control over vital economic matters directly related to their very concrete interests. Our second suggestion has to do with the economic sphere directly. The historic leader of the Cuban communists is Fidel, who still has a huge charismatic impact on the people of the island. And since he was alive only ten years ago, he is still someone who is regarded as a national hero by everyone except those under 25 years of age, both for having governed a state who successfully resisted imperialism for so long, and for his pro-people economic policies. Earlier in this piece, we had demonstrated that Cuba had not shown the slightest tendency towards capitalist restoration when Fidel was governing on the basis of a Fidel vs. Raúl contrast. We had also mentioned that Fidel never gave into the restorationist policies that were disguised as “market socialism”, which had spread rapidly in the countries under socialist construction in the 1980s and become universal in the 1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the USSR. He had rejected these policies and taken quite the opposite path. This policy was called “Rectificación”. Today, the Cuban communists must on the one hand fight against the dangerous path that the Decisions of June 19th have opened up through the “Worker - Toiler Inspection” with the wind of control at their back, they must simultaneously raise the viewpoint that this orientation should be rejected completely to the level of a legitimate side of the current debate, and thus struggle on a second (economic) front. This can be done only by reviving the “Rectification” perspective and, of course, adapting it to current conditions.
Che was Fidel’s “master” in this sphere. In the 1960s, when he had taken on the administration of the economic sphere of socialist construction, his perspective was one of insistent defense of planning methods against the market, and the moral incentives over material ones. This perspective will afford the young Cuban communists strong leverage in the person of this second darling of the Cuban people.
Tricontinental
Now we hit the rub of the matter. We talked about democracy and the economy; but now we got to the real question: namely, international politics, that is, worldwide revolutionary politics. As we were besieging our own suggestions above due to the fact that they appeared contradictory, we were at ease. This was because we knew that as we opposed the path the privileged Cuban bureaucracy (whose alikes had troubled other countries of socialist construction before) took, we knew that a line of movement of this bureaucracy had locked the country into a dead end, but a different outside of that of the bureaucracy would take the struggle into entirely different channels. Therefore, we knew that the deep contradictions we spoke of above would instantly lose their character as contradictions the moment Cuba took a completely different path.
In this sphere, too, the Cuban communists possess the chance to adapt many things from the country’s honourable history to our day. Most important of these is the refoundation of the organization of Tricontinental, or something akin. Tricontinental was an international organization that joined together the countries experiencing socialist construction and the fighting leaderships of the (in that time’s lingo) “Third World” countries in search of liberation, decolonization, and even socialism with the Cuban Revolution at its center, and thus challenged imperialism. Today, an omni-continental structure that would join the revolutionaries and communists of all continents rather than a Tri-continental perspective (that is to say, focusing on Latin America, Africa, and Asia) seems more in line with contemporary conditions.
The Tricontinental was the public face of Fidel and Che’s process of challenging imperialism. Beyond this, Cuba was acting as the brain of a revolutionary upsurge that made it possible for a series of revolutionary movements to besiege the walls of the capitalist-imperialist order, first and foremost in Latin America.
The Cuban bureaucracy’s current orientation is based upon the assumption that if it pursues a policy that does not threaten imperialism and capitalism, the US would grant Cuba the right to live. This is impossible. Cuba must go revolutionary if it wants to live. Trump’s America must be made to understand that the order will be threatened in many countries, and especially in Latin America, if it keeps messing with Cuba.
Cuba must return to the “foreign policy of the Fidel-Che period, that is, to revolutionary internationalism. Our “International Che Guevara Brigades” suggestion would bear meaning precisely if this revolutionary policy with a broad perspective is implemented.
When we began writing this series on June 25th, we had explained that neither “multipolarity”, nor the BRICs, nor China and Russia offered any solution to the US attempt to smash Cuba. What will save Cuba can only be the international revolutionary movement, of which Cuba itself will be a part.