Vol. 74/No. 4      February 1, 2010

With the deepening world capitalist crisis, the pressure of the imperialist encirclement of Cuba is growing. Some former “friends” of Cuba are running for cover. The Militant has been a defender of the Cuban Revolution since its opening days, and joins with others who are beginning to counter this latest assault on workers power in Cuba.

The message of the declaration against Cuba is clear: Look at what 50 years of a socialist revolution gets you. A few may benefit, but blacks still face high unemployment, repression because of the color of their skin, more are in prison, and few are promoted to positions of responsibility. It is better to stick with a ‘democratic’ capitalism.

This assault is part and parcel of the 51-year-long campaign by Washington—through economic and political pressure, through lies and distortions, and through military action—to isolate and defeat the Cuban Revolution. But since the triumph of working people there in 1959, the revolution has been overwhelmingly supported by the workers and farmers of Cuba, including by those of African descent, who today make up the majority of the population.

The new book Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power explains that the “revolutionary conquest of state power by a politically class-conscious and organized vanguard of the working class—millions strong—is necessary” and “provides working people the mightiest weapon possible to wage the ongoing battle to end Black oppression and every form of exploitation and human degradation inherited from millennia of class-divided society.”

This dictatorship of the proletariat is the instrument Cuban toilers have used to uproot the foundations of race discrimination and make tremendous gains since the opening days of the revolution. Among the first acts of Cuba’s revolutionary government was to end the Jim Crow-style system of segregation, not simply by decree, but enforced by the mobilization of armed militias of workers and peasants. Programs like the elimination of illiteracy, extending health care to everyone, and giving peasants land disproportionately benefited the black population.

Despite these gains, some of the vestiges of the centuries-long legacy of chattel slavery and capitalist oppression remain. Blacks are still subject to some of the deep-rooted prejudices held over from class society. In the face of the world’s worst economic crisis in living memory, these inequalities can become more pronounced. The Cuban government has stood out in its efforts to mobilize resources, both human and material, to minimize the impact of the world depression on the lives of working people, and at the same time extend international solidarity to workers abroad, as they are doing in Haiti today.

As Cuba’s revolutionary leadership faces the historic challenges of maintaining the gains working people have achieved, now is the time to step up the defense of the only living, fighting dictatorship of the proletariat that exists.

Above all it is the example that Cuba provides for working people in the United States and other capitalist countries that the U.S. rulers fear, and the signers of the declaration against Cuba hope to curb. Cuba is the only living example working people have today that shows how the road to workers power is the way forward for combating racism and all other forms of oppression and exploitation bred by the capitalist system. And whatever remains to be done in this fight, the Cuban working class is armed, as nowhere else in the world, to advance this struggle.
 
 
Related articles:
Latest attack on Cuba falsifies history of fight against racism
Cuban doctors in Haiti respond rapidly to crisis  
 
 
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