Vol. 71/No. 13      April 2, 2007

The decrees were a response to factory "interventions" by Cuban workers taking place all across the island. Fresh from their Jan. 1, 1959, victory in toppling the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, and spurred by acts of imperialist aggression and economic sabotage, Cuban toilers in their millions were taking over decision-making generally considered the purview of the bosses.

The political lessons of this process for working people around the world today are clearly summarized in the preface by Mary-Alice Waters to The First and Second Declarations of Havana, recently published by Pathfinder Press. The way the Cuban people carried out such "interventions" was described in some detail in a feature in last week's issue (see "How Cuban toilers established workers state" in March 26 Militant).

Describing accurately how such workers' control of production develops has been a cornerstone of generalizing the experiences of the working class and its allies in the revolutionary struggle to take power out of the hands of the capitalist class and transform society into one based on human solidarity.

Written more than two decades before the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, The Transitional Program for Socialist Revolution drafted by Leon Trotsky, a leader of the October 1917 Bolshevik-led revolution in Russia, addresses the question of workers control of industry based on the experiences of the international workers movement up until that time.

"The most elementary stage [of workers control] is merely the realization gained by the workers through experiences such as war, unemployment, the chaos of capitalist society, the arbitrariness of the bosses, etc., that they must begin to exert their own control in the plants," wrote Socialist Workers Party leader Joseph Hansen in his introduction to the Transitional Program. Hansen draws on the first four congresses of the Communist International, when it was led by V.I. Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders, in stressing workers control as "the struggle for control of production, not as a plan for the bureaucratic organization of the national economy."

As last week's article described, from 1959 on, Washington attacked the Cuban Revolution through both legal and extralegal means. These included attempts to cripple the Cuban economy. In addition to cutting off the import quota for sugar, the country's main export that Havana sold to the United States, the U.S. rulers and their cronies among Cuban capitalists resorted to economic sabotage. In January and February 1960, for example, planes taking off from the United States bombed sugarcane fields across Cuba, burning more than 268,000 tons of cane. Railroads, water pumping stations, and other economic centers were sabotaged.

Such extreme experiences help "set the most combative elements of the proletariat in motion" toward exerting control in their plants, SWP leader George Novack wrote in his introduction to the Transitional Program.

The July 2, 1960, New York Times reported that Texaco, Esso, and Shell had refused to process oil Cuba had purchased from the Soviet Union at their refineries in Cuba because doing so "would injure the principle of their managerial control." That decision did certainly injure the bosses' control: refinery workers "intervened," making their own decisions on whose oil will be refined and preventing sabotage by the shocked capitalist managers. The Cuban government backed them up and later nationalized the refineries.

The resolution "On the Question of Tactics" from the Third Congress of the Communist International in 1921, cited by Hansen in his introduction to the Transitional Program, explains how workers control of industry, as it advances, "takes an evident political aspect and requires political leadership. Meanwhile the increasingly frequent cases of seizures of factories, and at the same time impossibility of managing them without disposing of the financial apparatus, clearly puts before the workers the timely problem of getting hold of the financial system and, through it, of the whole industry."

Through factory interventions, workers embark on a road that would "culminate in a confrontation by the insurgent masses with the capitalist rulers, and the organization of a counterpower," as Novack wrote. The Cuban toilers had a political leadership that helped them advance along this road.

Far from being a governmental decree issued from the top down, the nationalizations of land, industry, and banking in Cuba—just like in the October 1917 Russian Revolution—were the response of a conscious revolutionary leadership to the initiatives working people were taking in their millions. These and other experiences led the working class in Cuba "to the immediate and decisive clash with the bourgeoisie" that the Comintern described.  
 
 
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