With the implosion of the bureaucratic castes, regimes, and parties of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the U.S. imperialist rulers hoped the government of the workers and farmers of Cuba would become easier pickings. They failed to understand--as they have from the days of the revolutionary war against the Batista dictatorship--that the leadership of the revolution in Cuba is not a tropical variant of Stalinism, but a truly revolutionary internationalist party that is blood and bone of the Cuban toilers.

The U.S. rulers anticipated that the sudden, brutal slashing of the standard of living in Cuba--the result of the abrupt end in 1990-91 of preferential trade agreements with the Soviet Union and Eastern European workers states, accounting for 85 percent of Cuba's foreign trade--would starve Cuban working people into submission, or at least create fertile conditions for the overthrow of the revolutionary government.

The world political perspective presented by Cuban Communist Party leader José Ramón Balaguer in "Socialism: A Viable Option," published in this issue, confirms the error of this view. "In the present international conditions, we reaffirm that socialism is a necessity," Balaguer told participants in the international conference on "Socialism on the Threshold of the Twenty-first Century," held in Havana, October 21-23, 1997. "Not only is it the logical result of the development of the productive forces on an international scale, it is the only alternative to guarantee the survival of humanity."

Referring to the "collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and the USSR," Balaguer noted "it is not socialist truth that failed." Rather, what occurred there was "the crumbling of a dogmatic and vulgar type of Marxism, which in those countries was raised to the status of official theory, burying many of the central principles of our classics and elevating to the position of universal law certain doctrines that served only to rationalize political positions and had virtually no scientific basis."

The international conference of representatives of political parties at which Balaguer spoke, and in which some of the editors of New International participated, including the authors of this article, was hosted by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba. It was one of several events over the past two years that confirmed the Cuban revolution has conquered the worst days of what they refer to as the Special Period--the economic and political crisis precipitated by the abrupt disintegration of the governments and parties with which they had maintained the closest ties for more than a quarter century. A crisis deliberately compounded, of course, by intensified economic warfare waged against Cuba by the U.S. rulers.

Other events have included:

• The fifth congress of the Communist Party of Cuba, held in Havana, October 8-10, 1997, which reaffirmed the political course of the revolution, knitting the lines of continuity between the rectification process begun in the mid-1980s and the policies of the Special Period. Among other decisions by the delegates, the congress strengthened the party leadership, resolutely cutting the size of the Central Committee from 225 to 150 members, while incorporating some 50 new members from the younger generations bearing the direct weight of day-to-day leadership in every arena. The congress registered the reality that the transition in leadership in Cuba, the topic of much speculation by the revolution's enemies abroad, lies not in the future, but is ongoing in the present.
• The commemoration in the fall of 1997, and throughout that year, of the thirtieth anniversary of the revolutionary campaign waged by Ernesto Che Guevara and his comrades in Bolivia, reaffirming the proletarian internationalism that has been and remains the heart and soul of the Cuban revolution.
• The solemn and unifying welcome home given what Cuban president Fidel Castro in October 1997 called Che's reinforcement brigade, as the mortal remains, along with the "immortal ideas" of Che and his comrades returned to Cuba "to reinforce us in this difficult struggle we are waging today to save the ideas for which you fought so hard, to save the revolution, the country and its socialist conquests--the part of your dreams that have been fulfilled."
• The hosting in August 1997 of the 12,000-strong World Festival of Youth and Students by the Union of Young Communists and other youth organizations of Cuba, as part of the political battle to reach out and find the new generation of fighters around the world attracted to the example of the Cuban revolution.
• The "Declaration of the Mambises of the Twentieth Century," initiated in February 1997 by the generals of the Revolutionary Armed Forces and signed by 250,000 officers and troops, as well as, over the next few months, by more than 5 million other Cubans. Linking up with the continuity of the Mambises--the Cuban independence fighters of the late nineteenth century who fought Spanish colonial rule--the declaration repudiates the crude and insulting attempts of U.S. president William Clinton to foment divisions among the officers and ranks of the military with offers of aid in return for overthrowing the revolutionary government through which Cuba's workers and farmers exercise their political power.
• The welcome extended to Pope John Paul II on his state visit in January 1998, during which the revolutionary leadership set an example for working people the world over of courtesy towards religious believers and nonbelievers alike--while taking the moral high ground for the proletariat and speaking the truth to the world about the historical role of the Catholic Church hierarchy as an instrument of scientific obscurantism, racial prejudice, oppression of women, colonial conquest and slavery, and reaction in all its forms. The pope's visit was an event from which the working people of Cuba emerged more confident in themselves and their leadership, and more certain that their class, not the representatives of capitalism or feudalism, will be the bearers of culture in the forward march of humanity.
• The seventeenth congress of the Central Organization of Cuban Workers (CTC), held April 27-30, 1996, which registered the confidence of the working class in Cuba as it brings its direct weight to bear in determining the future of the revolution, and its capacity to surmount the enormous obstacles to increasing production under the conditions imposed by the Special Period. As the theses adopted by the delegates expressed it, the organized working class of Cuba met to determine what they could do "to assure, under whatever circumstances, the revolutionary power of the workers, by the workers, and for the workers."

"One day we may have to erect a monument to the Special Period!" Fidel Castro noted in remarks to congress delegates. In meeting the challenge of the most difficult years of the revolution, the Cuban working class has emerged stronger and more self-confident than at any time since the Special Period began.  
 
Meeting Special Period challenge
Each of these events required substantial material and leadership resources that would have been impossible to muster in Cuba during the darkest hours (literally as well as metaphorically) of the Special Period. Taken together, as Cubans jokingly remark, they clearly demonstrate that the revolution is now out of the intensive care unit--that it is no longer necessary to devote every fiber of being to the battle for survival alone. Cuban working people can now enjoy the luxury of directing some energy to thoughts of recovery and how to advance the international revolutionary struggle in today's world.

Socialism on the Threshold of the Twenty-first Century" was perhaps the most important such gathering to take place in Havana in more than thirty years--since the international leadership initiatives in the 1960s that culminated in the Tricontinental conference in January 1966 and the OLAS (Organization of Latin American Solidarity) gathering in August 1967.

Political conditions were vastly differentthen, of course. The heroic example of the Vietnamese national liberation struggle was galvanizing millions into action worldwide, as hatred for U.S. imperialism's murderous war against the Indochinese peoples deepened and spread. A wave of anti-imperialist struggle was rising throughout Latin America, borne on the crest of the Cuban revolution. Support for the Palestinian people and their struggle against dispossession by the state of Israel was exploding throughout the Arab world. The forces attracted to Havana's initiative then were substantially larger. In their big majority they were young and ready for action. Despite the political disparities, however, the objective place and weight of the leadership initiatives taken thirty years apart are similar: to reach out around the world and find the forces ready to chart a revolutionary strategy to move forward and to apply it.

In Balaguer's opening presentation to the delegates, there was no talk of tragedy having befallen Cuba or other revolutionary forces in the world. There was no bemoaning globalization, nor cowering before the relationship of class forces that has allowed the implementation of neoliberal policies throughout Latin America. Instead, there was a scientific examination of the world class struggle in the closing years of the twentieth century--with eyes fixed on the coming battles being born of the imperialist reality--and a program that constitutes a necessary and sufficient starting point for revolutionary action:

• No, to any variant on theories of globalization and superimperialism that lead to undervaluing the struggle for state power against our own bourgeoisies. "Socialism will not appear on the historical scene through a modernization of present society, but through a revolutionary transformation of its dominant structures. In this sense, the question of the seizure of power remains a basic requirement...."
• Yes, to the political course of rectification and the Special Period, as opposed to the "model of economic management copied, in large measure from the Soviet experience...that diverted the construction of socialism onto paths that had nothing to do with being revolutionary."
• No, to any policy of alliances that is not built "from, by, and for the ranks," or that demands revolutionaries renounce "conviction and firmness of principles."
• Yes, to the fight to take the moral high ground, to "show not only the possibility and viability of socialism but also its desirability.... For us, socialism is the only possible, the only valid option for placing social relations on a moral footing," said Balaguer. "We cannot relax our efforts to demonstrate--on a theoretical level, and on a practical level--its clear superiority in shaping the highest of human values: justice, equality, fairness, freedom, democracy, respect for human rights, national sovereignty, solidarity. This socialist society continues to be a clear alternative not only to capitalism, but also to the failed experiences of Eastern Europe and the USSR."

The Socialist Workers Party resolution, "U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War," underscores that "the leadership of the Communist Party of Cuba is the first since the Bolsheviks to give communist guidance to the development of a workers state." At the helm of the Cuban government, and in the face of U.S. imperialism's unrelenting economic, political, and military pressures, they have maintained a revolutionary course for forty years. "This 'subjective factor'--the genuinely internationalist character of the proletarian vanguard guiding the workers state in Cuba--is the most important objective outcome and contribution of the Cuban revolution."  
 
Objective weight in world politics
This is even more true today than it was in 1990. The objective weight in world politics of the only living example of a fighting, confident dictatorship of the proletariat--one with a seasoned combat leadership that has proven its capacity year after year for more than four decades--has grown not diminished. For revolutionary fighters the world over, it is not enough to recognize that imperialism really has lost the Cold War. That alone does not allow revolutionists to chart a way forward. They need the living example of Cuba, as well.

This is just as true for new generations of revolutionary-minded fighters inside Cuba as for young people elsewhere in the world. The real history of the Cuban revolution--the stories of the men and women who overthrew the Batista dictatorship, stood down the Yankee empire at the Bay of Pigs and during the October "missile crisis," and served in volunteer internationalist missions from Latin America, to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East--is a vital link in the revolutionary continuity that must be traced.

A strategy of attempting to build socialism in one country--even in a country as vast and rich in resources as the Soviet Union, let alone a Caribbean island with a historical legacy of centuries of colonial and imperialist domination--can only mean the abandonment of proletarian internationalism, the demoralization and demobilization of the fighting vanguard of the toilers, and certain defeat. But communist workers assume no a priori limits on the capacity of Cuban working people to resist and survive, to hold off the imperial enemy until reinforcement brigades of the international class struggle arrive, to maintain the foundations of their state power, and to keep strengthening their internationalism and advancing their class interests.

That is a practical question, not an analytical one, where the example of Cuba itself weighs heavily in the balance.