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This chapter charts the organisational and theoretical development of the Cuban Trotskyist movement following the crushing of the March 1935 general strike, through the war years when the official communists were in a national unity alliance with Batista, until the end of the insurrection conducted by the Movimiento 26 de Julio (M26J) in the period 1956-58. I contend that the Cuban Trotskyists organised in the Partido Bolchevique Leninista (PBL) and then, from 1940, the Partido Obrero Revolucionario (POR) were characterised by an increasing tendency to make common cause with petty bourgeois nationalism and emphasise the slogans and struggle for national liberation. I argue that this one-sided approach to the revolution which failed to propose a politically independent course for the working class, not only placed the Cuban Trotskyists firmly in the ‘national liberation’ camp of Latin American Trotskyism which started to crystallise in the late 1930s, but largely determined Trotskyism’s eventual organisational dissolution in Cuba. Indeed, in linking the Cuban Trotskyists’ ideological evolution to their organisational fortunes, I develop the argument that the disappearance of the POR as an organised party in the 1950s reflected not only the weakness of the working class after more than a decade of trade union and state collaboration, but also the Trotskyists’ own tendency to accept the notion of the independence of the democratic anti-imperialist revolution and their failure to distinguish themselves clearly from various petty bourgeois nationalist groups.
This chapter is divided into four sections. I first trace the Cuban Trotskyists’ organisational and theoretical development in the period from 1935 until the 1950s. This section in linking the PBL’s and POR’s declining influence in the labour and movement to their underlying theoretical prescription for revolutionary activity charts the evolution of Cuban Trotskyism during three distinct periods in which successive attempts at reorientation were ended by crises in organisation. While this analysis and discussion primarily focuses on the debate between the democratic versus Permanent Revolution perspectives for the revolution in Cuba, the three subsequent sections deal with the Trotskyists’ positions on other specific issues which conditioned their approach to the struggle for socialism. This broad scope allows me to trace the Cuban Trotskyists’ political trajectory by taking into account all its inter-related peculiarities.
In this section I trace the PBL’s organisation, activity and underlying revolutionary strategy in the period 1935-39. I argue that the Cuban Trotskyists continued to display a number of features which had characterised the development of their party during the Revolution of the 1930s. That is, first, they suffered a further round of desertions and dislocation in party organisation after an attempted regrouping. Second, although they again drew up a political thesis which broadly applied Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution to Cuban conditions they did not intervene in the national liberation and working class movements on the basis of a programme of action which unequivocally insisted on the necessary proletarian content of the anti-imperialist struggle. Linking these organisational and ideological characteristics of the PBL, I also contend that although state repression and the weakness of the working class movement were important reasons explaining the Trotskyists’ inability to extend their influence, a further debilitating factor was their continued failure to distinguish clearly between the democratic and proletarian anti-imperialist revolutions.
The failure of the March 1935 general strike signalled an unleashing of terror and repression against the organisations of the radical national liberation and working class movements. Under such conditions, disorganisation and disarray characterised the PBL as much as any other organisation. While several leading members of the PBL’s largest Sectional Committee, that in Guantánamo, were arrested in 1935 for their continued activity,(1) in the post-March 1935 period, the PBL’s principal organic roots in the working class movement through its members in the Labour Federation of Havana (FOH) were broken. During the short-lived but decisive strike and its aftermath, the offices of the PBL-controlled FOH were raided, and those present were arrested. At a meeting of the FOH and Confederación Nacional Obrera de Cuba (CNOC) leaderships called to discuss a proposal of joint work, Gastón Medina, the PBL’s and FOH’s General Secretary, was arrested along with César Vilar, the leader of the CNOC.(2) Among the dead at other centres was Cresencio Freyre, a PBL member and head of the Bakery Workers’ Union.(3) The Emergency Tribunals later sentenced other Trotskyists to terms of six to ten years imprisonment. By October 1935, the PBL’s Havana section alone had thirty comrades, for the most part eminent political and trade union leaders, in prison.(4)
However, a crisis in the party’s organisation in the months following the March 1935 general strike was as much the result of on-going internal discord as it was of repression from outside. As numerous documents of the PBL during the period 1935-36 stated, the party was passing through an “exceptional period”.(5) While this undoubtedly referred to the task of regrouping taking place in conditions of illegality, it also alluded to the continued internal conflict between advocates of building a broad multi-class anti-imperialist association and those who adhered to the Leninist project of building a proletarian vanguard party. This internal division was recognised by Gastón Medina, the General Secretary of the PBL after the defeat of the March 1935 general strike. As a firm adherent of “the immediate defense of the present organization of the Bolshevik Leninist Party”, he warned that the PBL was still faced with a capitulation, albeit more spontaneous than organised, to the “petty bourgeois chieftains”,(6) that is, dissolution of the PBL inside Joven Cuba and the Partido Revolucionario Cubano (Auténtico) (PRC(A)).
The perspective of continuing to participate uncritically within the ranks of Joven Cuba in an attempt to push the Guiteristas towards revolutionary socialism was expressed by R.S. de la Torre in the international Trotskyist journal The New International. This current within Cuban Trotskyism continued to adhere to the so-called ‘external road’ perspective which, in focusing on a vague military bloc, did not insist on presenting an independent working class position in competition with petty bourgeois nationalism in the anti-imperialist struggle. De la Torre was convinced of the potential of loose participation in Joven Cuba:
“penetration into the ranks of Young Cuba [i.e., Joven Cuba], the sympathy that its members have for our party, open up good perspectives for our organization. The petty-bourgeoisie does not want to call a halt to its insurrectionary intentions. It is a question of life of death for it. Here is offered a brilliant opportunity to the proletarian party to demonstrate its abilities of leadership.”(7)
In opposition to the so-called “liquidators” who supported “the concept of a new ‘centrist’ organism on the basis of the dissolution of the party”,(8) Gastón Medina, the principal advocate of organisational independence, suggested the creation of a “pre-party (bridge) organization” to reinforce the PBL’s independent party structure. His intention was to reverse the trend of PBL members deserting the party for other organisations by constituting an ‘external’ organisation through which the PBL’s peripheral contacts could pass on their way to the proletarian vanguard party. As Gastón Medina argued, this ‘bridge’ organisation was intended to consolidate the proletarian rehabilitation of the party on the basis of the existence of the Fourth International.(9)
However, just as in 1934, the internal political conflict was not expressed in the formal presentation of contending theses which explicitly linked the two distinct organisational paths with the two very different underlying strategies for revolution. Instead, events again overtook the conflict as Joven Cuba itself lapsed into a spontaneous process of disintegration after the assassination of its figure-head, Guiteras, in mid-1935. Paying testimony to the ultimate futility of the ‘external road’ perspective, that sector of the PBL which had thoroughly convinced itself of the viability of tying the destiny of the working class party to the fate of petty bourgeois nationalism largely joined the Guiteristas in either abandoning active politics or joining the PRC(A), the increasingly moderate nationalist-reformist party led by Grau San Martín.
Thereafter, those who insisted on the validity of the project of building an independent revolutionary Marxist party began the task of reorganising their much reduced forces. In 1936, a small Sectional Committee consisting of nine members was reconstituted in Victoria de las Tunas.(10) Pérez Santiesteban himself, the original General Secretary of the Las Tunas Trotskyists, remained active in the party in Havana after escaping the persecution in the Las Tunas municipality.(11) He subsequently became a national leader of the PBL, and then POR, until the latter’s ultimate disappearance in the early 1950s. The guantanameño and santiaguero Sectional Committees were similarly re-structured among those members who had not either drifted into Joven Cuba on an individual basis or abandoned all revolutionary activity, disillusioned in the face of the mounting repression and the apparent victory of the Batista regime.(12) In 1936, Luis Miyares (*Manuel López) was one of the local leaders in Santiago de Cuba with whom the national leadership of the PBL in Havana maintained contact.(13)
In taking concrete steps towards reconstituting a centralised party leadership at the national level, the PBL held a National Plenum in February 1936.(14) The Cuban Trotskyists also addressed the serious problem of the gap which had existed between the political level of the PBL’s leadership and the underlying broad democratic bloc prejudices of a majority of the party’s rank and file membership. The Central Committee of the PBL couched its discussion of this issue in terms which identified excessive bureaucratic centralisation in the 1933-35 leadership as the principal past organisational failing. Although the formation of a centralised leadership was a basic tenet of the PBL as set out in its founding ‘Statutes’, the new Central Committee effectively recognised that the PBL’s leading bodies had tended to impose decisions on a politically ill-prepared membership. Alluding to the lack of a vibrant party life which stressed the importance of members’ political education, an internal document of the PBL noted that the pre-March 1935 leadership had not given sufficient value to the party’s basic unit, the cells. The report perceptively recognised that it had been as a consequence of this failing that when the initial leadership wasted away it was accompanied by a total breakdown in party discipline and the near collapse of the PBL as an organised political party.(15)
In resolving to correct these past organisational deficiencies, the membership’s identification with the party together with homogeneity in the ranks were declared paramount concerns in confronting the task of building a “vanguard which is flexible yet with a strong backbone”.(16) Of primary concern was an insistence that there must be a strict delimitation in the cells and sections between members and supporters. Seemingly with the intention of preventing the re-emergence of branches with a loose mass character as had been built in Guantánamo in 1932-34, the Central Committee of the PBL gave life to Gastón Medina’s idea of creating a pre-party ‘bridge’ organisation. The leadership proposed that while members who were active in the internal and public life of the PBL and who were subject to party discipline would be considered as full party members, they had to be distinguished from supporters who should be integrated into the party’s Socorro Obrero (Workers’ Aid) organisation.(17)
Those militants who insisted on the validity of building an independent Trotskyist party also attempted to re-establish the production of a journal. However, as in the 1933-35 period, these publications seem to have appeared spasmodically. In September 1936 the efforts to rebuild the organisation led the PBL to resume publication of a short-lived party organ, a periodical entitled Noticiero Bolchevique.(18) The production of this journal also seems to have been timed to coincide with preparations for a proposed ‘Congress of Marxist Unification’. This national meeting of PBL members and supporters was apparently planned for December 1936, though does not appear to have taken place.(19) In early 1938 the Havana District Committee, again showing signs of operating independently from the Oriente branches, produced a newspaper called Divisa Proletaria.(20) In the period 1938-40 various international Trotskyist publications regularly reported that the Cuban Trotskyists were also publishing in their own right the organ Rayo y Divisa.(21)
More important for the stabilisation and reorientation of the PBL, though, was the elaboration and publication for internal circulation of an extensive ‘Political Thesis’ in October 1935.(22) This document, breaking from the ambiguous path developed by the PBL during the revolutionary upheaval of 1934-35, not only displayed a firm grasp of the social and economic forces at work in Cuba, incorporating the idea that the governing regime displayed Bonapartist features, a characterisation which Trotsky himself later applied in general terms to all Latin American regimes,(23) but proposed a definite plan for revolutionary activity in Cuba which highlighted the need for the independence of the proletariat’s programme and organisation. The Trotskyists referred to the immediate insurrection perspective as an exhausted technique and explicitly recognised that the central task was to conquer the masses through the development of an action programme which combined a struggle to liquidate the remnants of feudalism in the countryside (the agrarian revolution) with a struggle to overthrow imperialist domination (national independence), this under the leadership of the proletariat. This marked a decided return to the strategic and tactical approach advocated by both Trotsky and the PBL in its own manifestos and programmes drawn up in September-October 1933.
In the first place, during the period in which Batista was consolidating his authority after the defeat of the March 1935 general strike, the PBL drew on the Bonapartist concept in order to characterise the Batista regime in terms Marx had used to describe the French bourgeoisie’s acceptance of Bonaparte in revolutionary France in 1852. That is, just as Marx considered that the weakened French bourgeoisie through “fear of losing their conquests” recognised that they depended on their rival, Bonaparte,(24) so the Cuban Trotskyists argued that the Batista regime was equally divorced from any of the local class formations, but was one which the old parties of the oligarchy similarly approached in order to take up “bureaucratic positions with a complete understanding of their submission”.(25)
In addition to introducing the concept of Bonapartism into an analysis of the structurally weak Cuban political economy, another strength of the PBL’s 1935 ‘Political Thesis’ was its attempt to address the causes of the defeat of the Revolution of the 1930s and the Trotskyists’ own role in events. The PBL advanced a self-critique which made reference to the ambiguity inherent in its own understanding of the form and content of the Anti-Imperialist United Front leading up to the March 1935 general strike. Rejecting its past belief that abstract discussions with the forces of petty bourgeois nationalism could lead to a fighting United Front, the PBL returned to Trotsky’s explicit understanding that the United Front had to be formed on the basis of an immediate struggle for concrete demands. The Cuban Trotskyists posited that a United Front must be formed “on the basis of a programme of immediate action.”(26) Underlining this understanding of the importance of such well-defined United Front work, they furthermore criticised the strategy of the Auténticos, Joven Cuba, and the PCC in the immediate post-March 1935 period, namely, that of a call for insurrection to install a so-called ‘revolutionary popular government’. For the PBL, this was an elitist strategy based on an exhausted technique,(27) in the sense that it approached the problem of the seizure of power independently of the democratic participation of the masses. Significantly, though, the PBL did not explicitly address the inherent ambiguities in the actual slogan of a ‘revolutionary popular government’ in terms of the petty bourgeois nature of the proposed regime.
The PBL’s Trotskyist credentials, however, were also evident in their analysis of the world-wide revolutionary process. Starting from an understanding that every nation’s economic life and development was dependent on the world market and that it was utopian to believe in the possibility of destroying the features of the world market for the sake of an independent bourgeois national economy, the PBL posited that the only way forward was the world-wide proletarian revolution and socialism.(28) The Trotskyists also insisted that the petty bourgeoisie was incapable of leading a successful anti-imperialist revolution, and that the democratic anti-imperialist revolution was not a distinct stage in the revolutionary process, but was rather a temporary phase in the deeper proletarian revolution leading to the unequivocal installation of a necessarily proletarian revolutionary state. Adhering to a ‘permanentist’ outlook the PBL in its ‘Political Thesis’ declared that:
“1. The arrival of imperialism—the last stage of capitalism—has opened the epoch of the World-wide Proletarian Revolution and Socialism as the only progressive way forward.
[....]
3. The democratic and anti-imperialist agrarian struggles cannot have an independent or permanent character. The so-called ‘anti-imperialist, agrarian democratic revolution’ is nothing other than the first phase of one single revolution: The Proletarian Revolution.
[....]
6. The petty bourgeoisie (including the peasants) does not possess its own economy. Despite its revolutionary role in the face of the oppressive bourgeoisie, imperialism and the landlords, because of its multiple contradictions and lack of homogeneity, it is incapable of leading the revolution. The petty bourgeoisie is destined to orientate itself towards capitalism or to be dragged along by the proletariat. No half-way solution is possible.
7. Only the proletariat, as a progressive class, is capable of exercising revolutionary hegemony, even from the initial anti-imperialist agrarian democratic phase.
[....]
12. The slogan of a ‘Democratic Dictatorship of the Workers and Peasants’ advanced by the Comintern is a slogan without any meaning which can only sow confusion. This slogan carries with it the idea of the development of an independent economy in the country based in the community of interests of the workers and peasants. [....]
13. The Bolshevik Leninist Party declares: only the dictatorship of the proletariat is capable of guaranteeing the success of the permanent development of the Revolution. Only a state based on the Soviets of Workers, Peasants and Soldiers represents the guarantee of the dictatorship of the proletariat and of the Revolution. Only the independent action of the proletariat in the struggle to install its dictatorship will make possible the revolutionary enrolment of the great masses of the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie.”(29)
On the basis of this theoretical analysis, and returning to clarify the issue of the character of any United Front work, the PBL advanced a forty-five point Programme of Democratic Demands as well as a fourteen point Programme of Action. The series of democratic demands included a rejection of the electoral manoeuvres proposed by Batista and the convocation of a Democratic Constituent Assembly, freedom of speech, press, meeting, organisation and demonstration, abolition of the 50% Law, the right to strike and an end to compulsory arbitration, the establishment of a minimum wage and the implementation of the eight-hour working day, nationalisation of the private railways and public services, measures enabling financial assistance and credit facilities for co-operatives in the rural areas involved in either production or consumption, the state supply of quality seed and livestock for the poor peasants, an end to all payment of the foreign debt, denouncing all foreign territorial claims on Cuba, a breaking of diplomatic relations with the Vatican and the establishment of diplomatic and commercial relations with the USSR, as well as the right of asylum for persecuted foreign political revolutionaries, in particular for Trotsky.(30)
The PBL’s Action Programme called for a struggle for the reconstruction of the trade union movement, the development of revolutionary work within the legal trade unions, the formation of a National Revolutionary Army and special brigades to defend the class actions of the proletariat and the mass revolutionary movements, the creation of Peasant Leagues on the basis of a plan of specifically agrarian demands, and the creation of Workers’ and Peasants’ Committees in the workplaces to plan their struggles.(31)
Taken together, these two inter-related sets of democratic slogans and transitional demands were an exemplary exposition of the PBL’s attempt to link the struggle for the most elementary features of bourgeois democracy and national independence with the working class-led struggle against imperialism. The Cuban Trotskyists implicitly argued that the proletariat had suffered a historic defeat in the March 1935 general strike and called for the rebuilding of the trade union movement, the basic level of working class organisation. They also attempted to orientate the continuing calls for armed actions emanating from the remains of Joven Cuba towards the working class by insisting on the need to attach such isolated, individual displays of revolutionary violence to the struggles of the working class. In furthermore concluding the Action Programme with a call for “the creation of a United Front of all the Revolutionary Parties upon the basis of the Action Programme and the Plan of Democratic Demands at the national and local level”,(32) the Trotskyists reaffirmed the clarity with which they, at least in point of theory, defined any anti-imperialist work. That is, they posed the issue of forming a United Front on the basis of a struggle for clearly defined immediate goals.
However, despite formally elaborating an unequivocally proletarian anti-imperialist perspective as well as a perceptive critique of the PBL’s own past activity, the Cuban Trotskyists’ efforts to rebuild a stable party structure and reverse their political fortunes bore little fruit. In the 1935-39 period the PBL did not recover the membership or levels of influence which it had gradually lost during the course of 1934-35. First, by the end of the 1930s the PBL had been further reduced to three geographical centres, namely, Havana, from whose ranks the Central Committee was largely drawn, as well as the Santiago de Cuba and Guantánamo regions of Oriente. The reconstituted Victoria de las Tunas branch disappeared in 1937-38.(33) Furthermore, the number of activists in each branch substantially declined giving the PBL a membership total which mirrored that of most other Trotskyist groups in Latin America. Although a report at the 1938 Founding Conference of the Fourth International cautiously credited the Cuban Trotskyists with 100 militants,(34) this figure seems to be a rather optimistic assessment. In the early 1940s it was reported that the Santiago de Cuba Sectional Committee, for example, albeit the smallest of the three remaining branches, had not recruited anyone since 1937 and had apparently been reduced to five members.(35)
While state repression in the 1935-36 period had initially hindered the rebuilding and growth of the PBL, the continued inability of the Cuban Trotskyists to build on the organisation which they at least stabilised in 1936 was the result of a combination of factors both internal and external. In the first place, although the PBL’s formal understanding of the form and content of United Front work corresponded with Trotsky’s insistence on concrete action on the basis of an agreed programme of demands, it was evident that discrepancies continued to exist between the perspectives outlined by the leadership in the party’s principal programmatic documents and the practical work of the PBL’s rank and file. For example, the Cuban Trotskyists demonstrated their return to United Front work on the basis of ill-defined goals in their intervention in the National Committee for Amnesty for Social and Political Prisoners, agitating alongside the PCC and twenty-nine other organisations for an end to torture and the release of those imprisoned by the Batista regime.(36) In short, the PBL did not participate on the basis of a clearly elaborated programme of action which furthered the cause of working class regrouping and political independence. As the PBL itself recognised, this Amnesty Committee’s work was largely limited to covering itself in a cloak of respectability by making appeals to the church and the ‘good bourgeoisie’.(37) Its ineffectiveness was confirmed when twenty-two members out of its twenty-seven-member Central Committee were arrested and sentenced to terms in prison in early 1936.(38)
On the other hand, the PBL constituted its Socorro Obrero organisation as a type of pre-party bridge. It was laudably conceived as a parallel organisation to the PCC’s International Labour Defence, bringing together a mixture of anarchists and PBL members largely on the basis of anti-Stalinism and looking after the welfare of prisoners who belonged to the FOH trade unions.(39) The PBL also displayed a firm commitment to furthering the cause of working class independence from both the petty bourgeoisie and the state when an open trade union movement re-emerged. The Trotskyists first joined the legal trade unions organised by the Batista regime, and used the unions’ magazines to supplement the education and propaganda value of the Trotskyists’ own party journals. By mid-1937 Trotskyists were publishing articles in Dialéctica, the organ of the Sindicato de Yesistas de La Habana, the Plasterers’ Union of Havana, and El Repartidor, the magazine of the Sindicato de Repartidores de Pan de La Habana, the Bread Distributors’ Union of Havana.(40) More importantly, though, the organisation and political content of the PBL’s actual fractional work inside the trade unions was based on a strict understanding of the dangers of class collaboration. The Trotskyists argued that just as under Machado, reformist leaders were seeking to organise the labour movement under the aegis of the Ministry of Labour and submit the demands of the movement to government arbitration.(41) In order to combat the penetration of this spirit of reformism into the ranks of the working class the PBL, rejecting the PCC’s 1931-34 sectarian strategy of attempting to build isolated ‘revolutionary’ trade union fronts, put forward in outline form a strong trade union platform around which Trotskyist fractions in various trade unions could organise the most radical workers who had not yet joined the PBL politically. Linking the slogan for the formation of a ‘Workers’ Alliance’ to a programme of action, the PBL made calls to organise the working class independently of the state on the basis of a number of minimum democratic demands including the right to strike and freedom of organisation, assembly and speech and the annulment of the decree laws.(42)
However, despite these attempts to rebuild a revolutionary movement in the trade unions, the PBL faced a number of obstacles. Importantly, the party’s stability and growth were adversely affected by serious disruptions in the Trotskyists’ national leadership. Although not on the scale which the revolutionary events in the 1934-35 period had induced, the leadership continued to display a degree of instability in terms of personnel. The most significant loss was that of the post-March 1935 General Secretary, Gastón Medina, who died of tuberculosis in Havana on 17 August 1938, the result of past torture in Batista’s jails.(43) He had been the principal defender of what I have characterised as the ‘Trotskyist’ proletarian anti-imperialist tendency within the PBL in the period 1933-35. He had also been responsible for drawing up the October 1935 ‘Political Thesis’ which had attempted to reorientate the party after the defeat of the Revolution of the 1930s.
More significantly, though, the PBL had to overcome peculiar socio-politico hurdles. Although all revolutionary organisations had found themselves in a state of disarray after the defeat of the Revolution of the 1930s, in the late 1930s an already weak working class movement faced the further obstacle of a PCC-Batista joint front which reinforced the containment of class-based organisation and struggle. As described in Section 3.3, after the effective crushing of the revolutionary movement in 1935, the Batista regime increasingly took on a paternalistic Bonapartist character as Batista himself sought to broaden his base of popular support. He achieved this by turning to the official communists and cementing a joint front with the PCC. Although this was not completed until early 1939, from 1938 Batista was able to use the official communists to offset a renewal of working class opposition.
In sum, then, the Cuban Trotskyists’ attempt to reorganise the PBL in the aftermath of the defeat of the Revolution of the 1930s, and then in the light of the PCC’s rank opportunism in the face of overtures from Batista, had to a large extent come to nothing by the end of the 1930s as a real decline in the PBL’s numbers and implantation in the labour movement reflected the balance of class forces. While, internationally, after a decade of defeats the working class was being led into an international military conflict by largely compliant social democratic and Stalinist parties, in Cuba the decade of defeats had been of historic proportions. The crushing of working class organisation in the aftermath of the March 1935 general strike produced a crisis in every political organisation, as much among the Auténticos and official communists as among the Trotskyists. This had cleared the ground for Batista to set about reorganising a national social equilibrium from above, unchallenged by either a weak national bourgeoisie or the defeated working class movement. The cementing of the Batista-PCC joint front only added to the enormity of the task of cultivating an independent working class movement which the small group of Cuban Trotskyists faced. Thus, although the elaboration of the ‘Political Thesis’ in late 1935 marked a return to an insistence on the independence of working class political organisation and the leading role of the proletariat in the anti-imperialist revolution, the PBL’s dislocation in 1935-36 and its small size inside the already weak opposition movements hindered its ability to challenge the general stagnation of autonomous working class organisation. It was, though, the Trotskyists’ tendency to dilute the class-based content of any practical United Front work which ultimately confirmed the steady stagnation in membership and determined the subsequent development of Cuban Trotskyism in the 1940s.
In this section I chart the organisational and theoretical development of Trotskyism in Cuba in the period 1940-46. Describing how the Cuban Trotskyists’ post-1939 organisational development was characterised by continued relative isolation from the working class and a further series of internal crises I contend that these were largely provoked by two inter-related factors. In the first place, I argue that the Trotskyists were active in an environment which was particularly detrimental to their political fortunes. That is, in a society characterised by weak class formations and a Bonapartist-type regime, the co-option of the official communist party into a governing entente enabled increased state interference in the labour movement to debilitate further the potential for independent working class action. In addition to these structural obstacles, I also contend that the Trotskyists’ own continuing tendency to stress the slogans and struggle for national liberation and emphasis on the formation of undelineated blocs with the forces of petty bourgeois nationalism was a major factor determining their apparent inability to take advantage of a sharpening in the general level of dissatisfaction with the existing social equilibrium.
The apparent isolation and gradual decline in the PBL’s membership in the post-1935 period eventually provoked a round of largely unprincipled in-fighting and dissension among the three remaining branches of the PBL in 1940. The spark which appears to have triggered the two-year round of internal disputes was the expulsion of Charles Simeón, the PBL’s General Secretary, in late 1939 or early 1940. He had first temporarily occupied the post of General Secretaryship during Gastón Medina’s two-year illness, before taking over on a permanent basis after Medina’s death.(44) Although the specific reasons behind Simeón’s separation remain uncertain,(45) the PBL was subsequently seen to be in need of an overhaul in terms of discipline and orientation.(46) The apparent virtual internal paralysis led the Havana-based leadership to take the initiative by selecting a new Provisional Executive Committee in May 1940, charging it with the task of convening a National Conference with a view to “normalising the life of the party.”(47)
The new Provisional Executive Committee, composed of the remaining members of the previous members of the National Executive Committee and the most active militants in Havana,(48) included *Bode, the General Secretary (possibly Pérez Santiesteban),(49) Pablo Díaz González (*Pedro Durán), *Alonso, *Andrade, *Santiso, *Kamayen and *Rufo.(50) This Provisional Executive Committee subsequently constituted a new Central Committee and concentrated its authority in a three-member Political Bureau which was responsible for the day-to-day work of the party.(51) The reorganisation of the leading bodies of the Cuban Trotskyist group led to the founding of the Partido Obrero Revolucionario on 19 September 1940 shortly after Trotsky’s murder.(52)
However, despite this attempt on the part of the POR’s leadership to “discipline and orientate the Party”,(53) the Cuban Trotskyists continued to gravitate away from a perspective which, in accordance with Trotsky’s prescription for revolutionary activity, focused on forging a democratic centralist vanguard party which advocated a strict proletarian anti-imperialist revolution. In the first place, every branch of the old PBL was not integrated into the new party. The organisational changes initiated by the Provisional Executive Committee were rejected by the Santiago de Cuba Sectional Committee which continued to operate under the title of the PBL until at least the end of 1941.(54) The underlying cause of the feuding was general frustration with the atmosphere of stagnation and decline which had permeated party activity. This was evidenced by the fact the organisational split did not take place on the basis of any ideological differences, but as the result of secondary, tactical considerations. On the initiative of *Bakunin, the santiaguero branch refused to embrace the project of restructuring and renaming the party solely on the grounds that a simple change of name could not lead to the consolidation of the revolutionary party in Cuba.(55) In correctly identifying a possible limitation of the new Provisional Executive Committee’s initiatives, the santiaguero Trotskyists, however, did not identify nor propose a principled debate over the political causes behind the PBL’s organisational crisis. While, at this stage, they were not explicitly challenging the need for a centralised vanguard party, they did challenge the principle of democratic centralism by repeatedly rejecting the leadership’s invitations to continue the discussions inside the POR. With no explicit ideological issue at stake, and with both the POR and the Santiago de Cuba Sectional Committee of the PBL continuing to publicly declare their adherence to the Fourth International, the santiagueros, frustrated at the party’s stagnation and apparent inability to influence the workers’ movement, had in effect used a disagreement over a secondary issue as a pretext for forging the de facto split in the ranks of Cuban Trotskyism.
In January 1941, after the Santiago de Cuba section had reiterated that it would continue to publish its own propaganda without seeking any central authority, the POR’s national leadership decided to apply the letter of the party’s statutes. Concerned that the conditions created by the Second World War would increasingly narrow the Cuban Trotskyists’ opportunities for open work, and that the santiagueros’ criticisms could sabotage the other oriental branch in nearby Guantánamo, the Political Bureau argued that members should be separated from sympathisers, that each militant should be assigned his or her task and responsibility so that new members would not be “infected with the ballast of irresponsibility and lack of discipline” inherited from the past.(56)
Despite the firm statement of intent, however, this further attempt on the part of the Trotskyists to establish a degree of stability and give an impetus to internal party life did not lead to any marked growth in membership or influence, or even to a sustained period of commitment to publishing a party organ. During the period 1940-42, while it seems that the santiagueros fell in line with the newly established POR party structure, the only new shoots of growth were a five-member branch constituted in the small town of Aguacate in the province of Havana,(57) and what appears to have been a short-lived Sectional Committee formed in Camagüey on 17 November 1940.(58) As for the production of a regular party press and theoretical material, the newly constituted POR repeated the pattern which the PBL had established after its two attempts to establish some order in the Trotskyists’ ranks in September 1933 and late 1935. In the first place, the POR launched what was intended to be a regular party organ, Cuba Obrera (Workers’ Cuba).(59) However, despite the POR’s fears about the government’s intention to suppress “propaganda of a class character”,(60) it appears that, like Rayo and Noticiero Bolchevique before it, this newspaper ceased publication shortly after its birth solely as a result of a dwindling internal commitment and the lack of funds. Production first lapsed after four issues had appeared in successive months at the end of 1940, and although it reappeared in June, July and August 1941, this August issue was the last to be published.(61)
As the PBL had done at its founding in 1933 and, again, in 1935 when attempting to establish a degree of stability and direction in the party, the POR on its founding also drew up and submitted to its rank and file an extensive theoretical document, the Declaración de Principios.(62) In outlining the Trotskyists’ views on the general crisis of capitalism and the specific problems of the Cuban revolution, this document again marked a definite return to Trotsky’s Permanent Revolution perspective, at least in point of theory.
In the first place, the ‘Declaration of Principles’ reiterated that the working class in alliance with the rural and urban petty bourgeoisie had to play the leading role in the struggle against capitalism and for a necessarily socialist revolution.(63) Like the early texts of the Comintern and, indeed, Trotsky himself, the POR also drew a distinction between the conquest of power by the proletariat in Latin America and the actual construction of communism. Basing its analysis on an appreciation of the indissolubility of the world economy and the necessary international character of socialism, the POR argued that in the first phase of the Latin American revolution the proletariat would combine the basic democratic tasks with the possible socialist ones. The ultimate socialist transformation of Latin America could only totally triumph, they argued, when the proletarian revolution in the U.S. also erupted.(64)
Although the document stressed that the definitive triumph of the revolution in Cuba depended on the success of the socialist movement in the U.S., the POR rejected the idea that the Cuban working class must await the triumph of the North American proletariat before posing the question of proletarian revolution in Cuba. The Cuban Trotskyists argued that such an understanding approached that of the Stalinists’ denial of the possibility of revolution on the grounds of the lack of ‘maturity’ in Cuba for socialism, and the substitution of the theory of the ‘next stages’ of national and social liberation under the ‘progressive platform’ of the Coalición Socialista Democrática.(65) Emphasising that the proletariat in Cuba could not renounce the struggle to forge its own vanguard or even initiate its own proletarian revolution until the proletariat in the U.S. had seized power, the POR reiterated the perspectives of the Bolsheviks in backward Russia in 1917 and railed against geographic fatalists who rejected the revolutionary project on the grounds of Cuba’s proximity to the United States. They declared that:
“[t]he perspective of permanent revolution in no case means that backward countries should await the starting signal from the more developed ones, nor the colonial peoples should wait patiently for the proletariat of the imperialist centres to free them. He is helped who helps himself. The workers must struggle in a revolutionary fashion in all countries, wherever favorable conditions exist, thus giving an example to the workers of other countries.”(66)
However, again, as in the case of 1933 and 1935, the branches took up this renewed theoretical commitment to the principles of the theory of Permanent Revolution in a thoroughly ambiguous fashion. This was most evident in the activity of the POR’s principal asset, its branch in the Guantánamo region where the local Trotskyists had maintained a base in the working class. During the late 1930s and 1940s, having established an embryonic youth organisation, the Juventud Obrera Revolucionaria, as well as participating in anti-Stalinist Comités de Oposición Sindical in various trade unions, the POR had a pool of support in the two branches, Delegaciones 10 and 11, of the Hermandad Ferroviaria, the local Commercial Workers’ Union as well as a number of centrales.(67) The Trotskyists, furthermore, played a leading role in a small number of strike movements which challenged the official communists’ de facto ‘no-strike’ policy. At the start of the 1940 zafra, for example, the guantanameño Trotskyists participated in stoppages in the Cecilia and Romelié centrales, denouncing the official communists’ collaboration with the government and employers.(68) José Medina Campos of the POR also led strikes of railway workers in April and November 1941 which interrupted sugar production as well as transport to and from the U.S. Naval Base.(69) However, the guantanameño Trotskyists’ activity was not strictly directed at exposing the limitations of petty bourgeois nationalism and bringing those radical worker elements in the trade union milieu into political agreement with the POR. That is, although the Trotskyists called for increased autonomy from the Ministry of Labour and the Stalinist-controlled trade union bureaucracy alike, a call which found a wide echo among broad layers at the base of the Auténtico party, the POR’s United Front platform did not display a clear worked out understanding of the practical importance of working class political independence. The Trotskyists instead tended to accept a ‘lesser evil’ thesis which characterised Stalinism as the main enemy in the workers’ movement and failed to distinguish the POR from the local worker Auténtico leaders in the non-Stalinist opposition movements. As such, the guantanameño Trotskyists participated in a largely uncritical manner in the Auténtico worker-dominated Comités Pro Demandas Obreros y Campesinos, a loose United Front organisation which had been formed for the purposes of securing the election of non-Stalinists in local elections. The Trotskyists could, furthermore, claim that their own youth organisation worked in “close harmony” with its Auténtico counterpart. Indeed, far from ultimately viewing these radical petty bourgeois groups as obstacles to the proletarian revolution, the POR enthused that these groups were the “fertile sap of the future of our Revolution.”(70)
At the national level, on the other hand, the Trotskyists’ trade union intervention during the December 1942 Third National Congress of the Confederación de Trabajadores de Cuba (CTC), the official communist-controlled national labour confederation, was more consistent with insisting on the unequivocal proletarian nature of the anti-imperialist struggle and competing directly with the Auténticos for the leadership of the masses. Raising the POR’s profile on the national stage, the Trotskyist delegates acted as an organised fraction at the Congress and developed a strategy which not only challenged the Stalinist domination of the labour movement but did so from a perspective which sought to rally the Auténtico worker opposition around an unambiguously anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist programme.
As the Fourth International’s theoretical journal described, the POR fraction contributed to the preparation and presentation of “a detailed and positive program of independent trade-union action around which the anti-Stalinist opposition could rally”.(71) In the first place, in their interventions at the platform POR members criticised the CTC leadership for accepting Batista’s dictates on wage claims which granted pay increases at a rate below that of a consumer product-starved inspired price inflation. Pablo Díaz claimed that the CTC Executive had simply served as a government tool, preventing workers from using its most basic weapon, that of the strike, just at the moment when there was a ground swell of discontent in various sectors for better wages.(72)
However, the Trotskyists also insisted that organisational unity in the trade union movement should be maintained and argued against setting up a second national trade union centre. When the Stalinist-controlled Credentials’ Commission at the CTC Congress eventually refused entry to 150 opposition delegates, the Trotskyists, though joining 303 delegates in walking out in protest, rejected the Auténtico leaders’ sectarian calls to set up a second, parallel trade union centre, just as the OCC and PBL had earlier opposed the PCC’s sectarian trade union policy.(73) At a meeting of the Frente Democrático Sindical, the temporary organisation constituted by the delegates who had withdrawn, the POR fraction argued for the constitution of a revolutionary opposition workers’ front inside the CTC on the basis of a minimum programme for internal democracy and an end to Stalinist-reformism in collusion with state.(74) In its declaration to the Frente Democrático Sindical, the POR fraction insisted that:
“[w]e cannot think [....] of the formation of a new trade-union center so long as there has not been demonstrated in a clear definitive way the impossibility of salvaging the CTC from the hands of the Stalinist-reformist gang, through constant and effective work among the rank and file. We shall oppose any group or tendency which tries to drag the Cuban proletariat along the road of adventurism.”(75)
In presenting a coherent and incisive argument consistent with Trotsky’s analysis of trade unions in Latin American that the principal struggle was for workers’ control of the existing bureaucratic apparatuses and trade union independence from the state, the POR fraction thereby helped to avoid, at least temporarily, a disastrous split in the trade union movement. They furthermore presented an action programme which embodied the essential features of the Transitional Programme, the founding programmatic document of the Fourth International. Incorporating the essence of Trotsky’s ‘transitional’ method of attempting to deepen the struggle and lead the masses through a conscious fight for democratic demands to socialist goals in their own independent proletarian organisations created in that struggle, the platform of demands included calls for the implementation of a sliding scale of wages and popular committees for the control of prices, the maintenance of class-based trade union unity in tandem with the widest trade union democracy, and a Proletarian Military Policy similar to that of the Socialist Workers’ Party in the U.S. (SWP(US)) in which the trade unions took responsibility for the military training of workers.(76)
However, despite having had a degree of success in this exemplary fraction work in mass organisations at a national level, and despite the apparent return to the Cuban Trotskyist fold of the self-styled santiaguero Sectional Committee of the PBL at some point in 1942-43, the POR as a national party did not break out of its isolation in the early 1940s. Only at a local level did the guantanameño Trotskyists continue to lead local strikes alongside Auténtico trade unionists against the dictates of the complicitous official communist party. On 17 May 1943, the railway workers in the Guantánamo region again went on strike demanding a pay increase of fifty per cent to counteract the high rate of war-induced price inflation. While the strike was crushed after sixteen days, leaving six workers, among them two POR members, Juan Medina Campos and Luciano García Pellicier, disciplined by the management and/or dismissed,(77) the Guantánamo branch of the POR reiterated the basic tenet of revolutionary defeatism, namely, that there should be no cease-fire in the struggle against capitalism. Raising the banner of proletarian organisational and political independence, the Trotskyists denounced one of their old adversaries, Manuel Tur, the local PSP leader, for intervening in the strike only to the extent of sabotaging and choking off any national action by railway workers, and Mujal for having disowned the strike movement in an attempt to ensure that the Auténtico leadership took no responsibility for it in the eyes of the government and imperialism in this militarily strategic region.(78)
In general terms, though, the POR failed in its objective to lead the construction of a revolutionary communist opposition to Stalinist domination of the labour movement during the course of the Second World War. As with previous attempts to stabilise the PBL’s organisation and extend Trotskyist influence in the late 1930s, the reasons behind this evident failure encompassed structural factors largely beyond the POR’s control and political ones which were the responsibility of the Trotskyists alone. In the first place, the Cuban Trotskyists were active in a country in which class-based institutions were weak. As outlined in Chapter Three, while imperialism had already rendered the national bourgeoisie largely ineffectual in the aftermath of the 1895-98 War of Independence, the historic defeat of the revolutionary movement in the 1930s had accelerated the decline of the old ruling oligarchy and destroyed the independent working class movement. The consequent exceptional weakness of class formations in Cuba was further exacerbated in the post-1935 period with the emergence of a Bonapartist-like regime committed to the project of co-opting elements of various classes into a governing entente. Most significantly for the fortunes of Trotskyism, after the formation of the Batista-PCC joint front in the late 1930s, the official communists used the power which they acquired to blunt attempts to renew class-based opposition to the Batista capitalist government. The rapid growth of the official communist party and its seats in Batista’s cabinet pay testimony to the fact that class collaboration under Stalinist leadership was deeper in Cuba than in any other Latin American country.
In addition to the Bonapartist features of the Cuban political economy which tended to weaken the development of already fragile class-based institutions, the Cuban Trotskyists were also confronted with the problem of the lack of a Marxist tradition in Cuba. As described in Section 3.1.3, while the Cuban labour movement was dominated by anarcho-syndicalism for forty years from 1985 to 1925, it was nationalism rather than communism which conditioned the peculiar aspects of the Cuban variant of anarchism. It was primarily because of this lack of a distinct socialist culture in the Cuban working class that the Russian October Revolution did not provoke any rupture on ideological grounds in the labour movement. Furthermore, the Cuban Communist Party itself was only formed in 1925. Thus, in the early to mid-1940s, opposition to the Stalinists’ state-sponsored bureaucratic usurpation of working class organisation more easily found spontaneous expression in the deeply-rooted traditions of petty bourgeois nationalism before a strict class position won currency.
The Cuban Trotskyists also suffered from the lack of resources at their disposal. This, for example, prevented them from financing a full-time party worker to co-ordinate internal party life activity. The great distances between the POR’s two principal centres, Havana and Guantánamo, also made it difficult to hold any regular national meetings to discuss and plan co-ordinated work. The Cuban Trotskyists in the early 1940s also had little experience of the tasks which a small group of revolutionaries had to undertake in order to lay the basis for future growth. Unlike most Trotskyist groups in the world, the PBL was virtually a mass party at birth with prominent cadres already leading various trade unions and student organisations. Although not necessarily desirable, it had not undergone an organic development from a small revolutionary nucleus to a fighting propaganda group to a genuine revolutionary party with solid roots in the working class. With the death of Rogelio Benache, arguably the POR’s most talented workers’ leader in January 1944, like Gastón Medina, the result of the effects of past torture in Batista’s jail,(79) the remaining POR members in the early 1940s had little preparation for the tasks of slowly and methodically consolidating the POR as a well-defined fighting propaganda group.
However, despite these obstacles to growth, I contend that had the POR developed a different strategy and set of tactics from those it actually did employ, then the Cuban Trotskyists could have overcome to some extent the structural obstacles which they faced and a different outcome may have resulted. That is, it was the Trotskyists’ own political strategy which continued to be a major factor conditioning their apparent inability to either stabilise their organisation or break out of their isolation and take advantage of a general level of dissatisfaction with the PCC’s collaboration with Batista in the labour movement. More specifically, just as the PBL in the 1930s ultimately displayed that it had no well-formed understanding of the need for working class organisations to maintain their political independence from the forces of petty bourgeois nationalism, so the POR in the early to mid-1940s also emphasised the formation of undelineated blocs with essentially pro-capitalist forces. It was this political characteristic of the POR, I argue, which ultimately determined the Trotskyists’ continued isolation.
The effect that the Cuban Trotskyists’ own political failings had on the fortunes and organisational continuity of their party was demonstrated by the line which they developed around events in 1944-45. In early 1944 the POR launched a national newspaper and developed an electoral tactical line in an attempt to take advantage of the heightened political atmosphere created by the forthcoming May-June 1944 elections and the hopes Auténtico workers held that these could bring an end to the Batista-official communist control of the labour movement.
The newspaper, launched in May 1944 to coincide with the elections, and under the influence of Louis Rigaudias (*Rigal), a prominent activist in the pre-war French Trotskyist movement,(80) was given the name Revolución Proletaria in order to unambiguously proclaim the necessary character of any revolution at that point in time in Latin America.(81) During the period May 1944 to May 1946, nineteen issues of the newspaper, edited by Pablo Díaz, came out ensuring that the party fulfilled its basic propaganda and education functions among its supporters and contacts. However, the content of this propaganda advocated an essentially opportunist tactical line. Specifically, the electoral tactical line which the Trotskyists developed was rather inconsistent in terms of maintaining the principle of proletarian political independence. Indeed, the Trotskyists’ attitude towards the Auténticos as set out in the pages of their newspaper betrayed the essence of the name which they had given to that same paper.
On the one hand, in Guantánamo the POR attempted to win adherents to communism and extend and consolidate its influence among the working class by standing independent candidates in the 1944 local elections. Although the Supreme Court ultimately prevented the Trotskyists from getting on the ballot paper, they held a “write-in campaign” for two posts on the Guantánamo council. Building on the prestige they had won in their trade union work in the region, the POR’s two candidates, Juan Medina and Luciano García, the two militants who had been victimised in the rail strike the year before, received over 1,000 officially counted votes,(82) a substantial figure in a region where the rate of illiteracy was high.
In the National Legislative and Presidential elections, on the other hand, where the Trotskyists did not have the resources to stand their own candidates, the POR, as a result of its belief that the Auténtico base was made up of revolutionary workers,(83) displayed ambiguous concern for safeguarding the independence of the working class from the forces of pro-capitalist nationalism. That is, the Trotskyists made a distinction between the private views of individual Auténtico candidates and the relationship of the party as a whole to the working class by giving “critical support” to what they termed “Grau San Martín and the working class candidates inside the PRC(A).”(84) Thus, in the National Legislative elections they called for a vote for those Auténticos in Guantánamo and Santiago de Cuba who had signed up to a minimum programme of democratic and trade union demands.(85)
While this dilution could have been justified in Cuba on the basis of the incomplete and ill-defined identification of parties with specific social classes, in the 1944 Presidential elections the POR slipped into loose, ultimately opportunist, phraseology which evidenced its own illusions in the revolutionary potential of the petty bourgeoisie. Although the POR was certainly more ‘critical’ than ‘supportive’ in its assessment that Grau San Martín had abandoned the anti-imperialist struggle in favour of ‘democratic’ imperialism and that he headed an electoral bloc which included an assortment of old anti-labour pro-Machado supporters,(86) the electoral tactic of ‘critical support’ did not clearly disassociate Trotskyism from these alien class forces. That is, while Grau San Martín did not propose any anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist measures, the Cuban Trotskyists developed a United Front tactic which lowered the banner of proletarian independence in the anti-imperialist struggle. Indeed, despite formally rejecting the notion that they proposed support for Grau San Martin on the limited basis that he was the “’lesser evil’”, in the same article, and in direct contradiction, they rather loosely viewed their orientation as a “tactic in fighting the immediate enemy of the workers: that is, the military-police dictatorship of Batista disguised under the civilian trappings of the Socialist Democratic Coalition”.(87) In other articles they similarly gave definition to the ‘lesser evil’ tactic arguing that despite the Auténticos’ reconciliation with U.S. imperialism, the re-election of Batista would mean the crushing of the Cuban Revolution for the foreseeable future. They contended that a victory for Grau San Martín at the polls would represent a step forward and, accordingly, raised the slogan of: “To fight continuismo is to struggle for the Revolution”.(88)
Thus, rather than adopting the only consistent proletarian position in an election where no working class candidates stood, that of ‘active abstention’, limiting agitation to that of propaganda in favour of a future independent working class party in preparation for the day when the masses, or at least the most advanced section, turned against the government pretenders of both camps,(89) the POR settled into a softer Left line which, while not jeopardising its prestige with Auténtico workers in the short-term, did little to break those same workers away to an independent proletarian line in the medium-term.
On Grau San Martín’s victory at the polls, the collapse of the POR’s strictly class-based political analysis was most evident in the propaganda and activity of the party’s guantanameño Sectional Committee. In a leaflet entitled ‘Let’s Make the Victory Gained on 1st June a Decisive Step Along the Road of the National and Social Liberation of Cuba!’,(90) the Trotskyists not only associated themselves with the awakened desires of the masses to move against the defeated Batista-official communist alliance in the field of labour, but ambiguously viewed Grau San Martín’s election as somehow ‘theirs’, a progressive step towards the revolution. Rather than warning the workers that the new government would ultimately be incapable of implementing even a moderate nationalist programme because of the clash this would provoke with imperialism, the Cuban Trotskyists gave the impression that the nature of the Grau San Martín government was open to question, to be determined by future its future performance.(91)
The POR rather belatedly sought to rectify its confused position and re-establish its concern for proletarian independence only after the most advanced sections of the working class had already begun to turn away from the Auténticos. In January 1945, as it became evident that the government of Grau San Martín would not embark on a process of democratising the CTC to challenge the PSP’s dominance, the POR launched a trade union fractional organisation, the Defensa Obrera Revolucionaria de la Confederación de Trabajadores de Cuba, in an attempt to group the most radical workers who had not yet identified politically with the POR around a programme of demands which emphasised the need for increased autonomy from both the Ministry of Labour and the trade union bureaucracy.
In denouncing the PSP for its acts of armed aggression, its state-sanctioned extortion and its abandonment of the struggle against the bourgeoisie and the capitalist state,(92) as well as the Auténtico leaders for reaching agreement with the PSP at the post-election Fourth Congress of the CTC, the Defensa Obrera Revolucionaria’s eleven-point programme of struggle reasserted the need for “the absolute political independence of the proletariat. Against all arrangements with the political parties of the bourgeoisie.”(93) In attempting to carry forward the struggle for independent working class organisation, the clearly elaborated programme also insisted that the right to call a strike had to reside solely with the workers without any involvement from the Ministry of Labour and that real wages should be defended through the introduction of a sliding scale of wages.(94)
However, after more than a decade of debilitating reliance on state interference to attain economic and political goals, as well as the lack of a Marxist tradition in Cuba which consistently espoused the principle of proletarian political independence, these attempts to create a revolutionary opposition to the de facto PSP-Grau San Martín alliance inside the trade union movement failed. Having limped behind the Auténticos with a rather weak ‘critical support’ perspective, the POR’s principled trade union fraction initiative came too late to influence a section of the Auténtico workers. The POR, displaying the Cuban Trotskyists’ long-term tendency to emphasise the formation of undelineated blocs with the forces of petty bourgeois nationalism, proved unable to forge a class-based opposition to the overtly pro-capitalist PSP-Grau San Martín alliance. Instead, democratic nationalist sentiment again took hold and conditioned the re-emergence of a myriad of petty bourgeois revolutionary action groups when the general level of discontent and the outbreak of the Cold War necessitated the removal of the PSP from its positions of influence in the labour movement. The POR, having been unable to win any substantial number of fresh recruits to breathe life into the party again faced another round of organisational disintegration as internal differences virtually paralysed its activities for a period in 1946.
Although the Auténtico government had been discredited through its compromise with the official communists in the trade union field and the evident peace it had made with U.S. imperialist interests, in conditions characterised by weak class-based institutions and a debilitated independent working class movement, the POR proved unable to break out of its isolation after a period of concerted effort. This stagnation in Trotskyist influence provoked a further period of internal dissension and paralysis in early 1946. In this section I trace the Cuban Trotskyists’ organisational and theoretical development in the post-World War Two era from 1946 until the 1959 Cuban Revolution. In so doing, I develop my argument that despite the general weakness of working class-based organisations, the principal reason for the Trotskyists’ organisational stagnation was their own political strategy. That is, the Cuban Trotskyists’ failure to distinguish clearly between democratic and proletarian anti-imperialist work and to form undelineated blocs with the forces of petty bourgeois nationalism not only explain their continued inability to build a distinct revolutionary communist party, but in the early 1950s led to the actual disappearance of the POR.
Just as a stagnation at the end of the 1930s had provoked a crisis within the Cuban Trotskyist party, so the Trotskyists’ inability to recruit substantial numbers of new members in 1944-46 led to internal dissension and paralysis in early 1946. The dissent inside the POR was initiated by a section of the small Havana branch which, leaving aside Pablo Díaz’s work in the Laundry Workers’ Union, had virtually no contact with the working class and had largely been reduced to serving as the POR’s administrative centre. Three members in Havana, describing themselves as representing the majority on the Central Committee, drew up and circulated an internal report in March 1946 which launched into a sharp criticism of the listless direction of the POR.(95)
Although various reports to be found in the internal documents of the international Trotskyist movement stated that the Cuban POR counted on seventy-five members in 1944-45,(96) and thirty-five in early 1947,(97) the number of comrades who considered themselves to be Trotskyists in the immediate post-war period actually numbered approximately twenty. The March 1946 internal report drawn up by the ‘majority’ Central Committee faction in Havana noted that the POR had been reduced to a total of seven or eight in members in its principal section, Guantánamo, with a further three individuals in Santiago de Cuba, three or four comrades in the small western town of Aguacate, a candidate member in Victoria de las Tunas, and three members in the Havana group who acted as a Central Committee and four others on the periphery.(98) The report set out in no uncertain terms the view that the party was faced with a progressive disappearance without the slightest perspective of how to halt the decline and rejuvenate its revolutionary potential. In describing how the POR had not capitalised on the opportunities which had opened up to it in the light of Stalinism delivering itself to Batista and then the ‘revolutionary’ Auténtico opposition subsequently being discredited in government,(99) the report located the reasons for this failure in the POR’s own organisation and political perspectives. As with the PBL during the Revolution of the 1930s, the collapse of cell activity and the internal discussion of issues were again identified as a basic debilitating factor.(100) That is, the POR was a ‘centralist’ organisation, but without a vibrant internal life could not be a ‘democratic centralist’ one. The report also correctly argued that the party’s apparent paralysis was the result of its own political opportunism in not clearly differentiating itself from petty bourgeois nationalism in the struggle against Stalinism. The report’s authors wrote:
“[d]espite the efforts of our comrades in the trade unions, in practice we did nothing other than be in the rear of the groups in opposition to Stalinism which arose from time to time. With slight exceptions we practically remained behind the coat-tails of the Comisión Nacional Obrera of the PRC(A).”(101)
Frustrated with the atmosphere of inertia which characterised the remaining elements of the POR, the ‘majority’ Havana faction derided the party for its lack of “seriousness and systematic persistence which corresponds with Bolshevik militants”,(102) and advanced a list of general and immediate questions which needed to be addressed in order to re-generate the internal life of the POR. These included the elaboration of a general political thesis, a trade union thesis, a declaration of principles for a projected youth organisation, a study of the documents of the SWP(US) Minority and Majority, the removal of all resolutions on international matters which had not been fully discussed by the party membership, and the application of rigorous collective discipline.(103) Posing a blunt ultimatum, the ‘majority’ Havana faction stated that if these issues were not addressed, the newspaper which they were largely responsible for, would cease publication. In their words; “we want order or we do not plan anything.”(104)
The atmosphere created by this sort of strongly worded address, on top of the progressive paralysis in the internal life of the party, and the failure of the party’s fraction work inside the CTC, could have easily announced the imminent collapse of the POR. However, although the issues put forward were not taken up in any proposed internal discussion, the party was given another focus and temporary lease of life through a sudden tactical turn to political work inside a series of the revolutionary action groups which emerged among the ranks of disaffected pesepistas and Auténticos. While the leader of the disgruntled ‘majority’ faction in Havana was expelled shortly after drafting the report,(105) the crisis, therefore, was principally defused by another round of ill-thought out empiricism. In a kind of caricature of the PBL’s spontaneous and ill-disciplined entry into Joven Cuba in an attempt to construct the revolutionary Trotskyist party via the ‘external road’ in 1934-35, Pérez Santiesteban, the one Central Committee member in Havana who opposed the highly critical internal report of the ‘majority’ faction, responded to the crisis empirically by leading a largely unorganised entry into the recently organised Movimiento Socialista Revolucionario (MSR) of Rolando Masferrer.
The MSR had been born out of a nucleus of activists from the Legión Revolucionaria de Cuba, an anti-Machado action group from the 1930s, and a number of members around Masferrer from the official communists’ shock brigade who disagreed with the party’s adherence to doctrine of dissolution proposed by Browder in the United States in the mid-1940s. These pesepista dissidents had received some support from the Soviet Union as a result of the PSP’s unwillingness to disown Browderism when requested by Moscow. However, after the Duclos letter and the PSP’s reluctant acceptance of the Moscow-line, the dissident ‘officials’ were expelled from the Cuban party as part of the eventual agreement which brought the Cuban communists back into the official fold.(106) On the back of discontent with Grau San Martín, Masferrer and his supporters were able to attract a variety of Leftists who were prepared to join them in forming a new revolutionary organisation. From the beginning, Pérez Santiesteban played a leading part in the discussions of the new formation and, indeed, it appears that he more than anyone was responsible for it adopting the name ‘Revolutionary Socialist Movement’, this, as he described, in an attempt to combat the ambiguities implicit in the previously proposed ‘Izquierda Revolucionaria’.(107)
Although the Cuban Trotskyists recognised that the MSR was essentially another petty bourgeois organisation which the Cuban political economy characteristically gave birth to from time to time,(108) and that it admitted anyone and everyone, had no perspective for building a revolutionary party, and had no political line to guide activity,(109) they initially viewed their entry into the MSR with a great deal of optimism in terms of the possibilities for recruiting.(110) Even Pablo Díaz, one of the authors of the internal report which had criticised the party for being on the ‘coat-tails’ of the petty bourgeois opposition to Stalinism, was enthusiastic about the fact that the POR was in effective charge of the MSR’s programmatic elaboration.(111)
However, the POR’s almost spontaneous turn towards political work inside the MSR had taken place with little analysis or preparation and quickly slumped into chaotic improvisation and eventual despondency.(112) Rather than seeking to win the best elements of the new organisation to the POR by attempting to expose the petty bourgeois character of the MSR’s leadership, the Cuban Trotskyists all but dissolved inside the new organisation. The principle of concluding temporary alliances with the forces of petty bourgeois nationalism for concrete and carefully delineated ends was sacrificed as the POR, in effect, viewed the MSR as the ‘blunt’ vehicle for revolution. The publication of the POR’s only public organ, the newspaper Revolución Proletaria, was suspended, never to reappear,(113) and without any independent programme of its own the POR took responsibility for elaborating the MSR’s theoretical documents.
The futility of the ill-thought out fractional work was displayed by the fact that these documents were wholly ignored by the MSR’s leadership and activists alike as they threw themselves into adventurist ‘actions’ and opportunism to arrest control of certain sectors of the labour movement from their rivals, the PSP. Threats and bureaucratic manoeuvres agreed on the spot by leaders who were not controlled by the base simply drowned out the POR’s vain calls for a discussion of theoretical issues.
Although the POR also worked in a number of smaller petty bourgeois organisations, for example, the Juventudes Laboristas, the youth wing of Movimiento Laborista led by a future Ortodoxo leader Carlos Márquez Sterling,(114) and the Liga Radical Martiana, another revolutionary action group,(115) which had been given life as a result of disillusionment with the government of Grau San Martín, the Cuban Trotskyists continued to concentrate their activity inside the MSR until 1948. The spark which triggered their effective withdrawal was the MSR’s agreement to support Carlos Prío Socorrás, the Auténtico party candidate, in the presidential elections. For Pérez Santiesteban, who was still in the MSR’s leadership, the MSR’s electoral tactic was the final straw and he wrote a document for circulation around the loose collection of MSR branches which outlined the problems of the organisation. He set out in no uncertain terms, though rather belatedly, that the MSR had fallen into the traditional pattern of activity which had characterised the revolutionary movement in Cuba and that a complete break from the past was required. Proposing a rapid root and branch internal rectification in terms of the MSR’s basic organisation and approach to theory, he argued that the organisation should first draw up statutes in order to establish the rights and duties of its membership, before then elaborating a programme of transitional demands, the defence of which should be the principal activity of its activists.(116) In effect, though, he was only forlornly recognising the limitations of petty bourgeois nationalism without attempting to develop a similarly profound review of the POR’s strategy and tactics which argued that action groups like the MSR were in fact obstacles to workers’ power rather than vehicles for it. The document was circulated around the country, but only had an impact in terms of helping to win activists to the POR in the Guantánamo region where the Trotskyists had a relatively strong representation in the MSR and some prestige among the working class.(117)
In the aftermath of this escapade with the MSR, while the POR broadly viewed its experience as a failure, it continued to fail to locate its error in the deep-seated strategic critique that the forces of petty bourgeois nationalism were ultimately an obstacle, not agencies for the necessary proletarian anti-imperialist revolution. That is, despite the criticisms Pérez Santiesteban made of the MSR and its leadership, the POR did not criticise its own willingness to make common cause with petty bourgeois groups. Indeed, it was this inability or unwillingness to propose a politically independent course for the working class, something which characterised the whole history of Trotskyism in Cuba, that led the Trotskyists to argue that they had had limited success because of the backwardness of the MSR’s leaders and this leadership’s inability to work towards the construction of a revolutionary party in a Bolshevik sense.(118)
In further limiting criticisms of its entry work to the tactical concerns of having not thoroughly discussed and prepared themselves for fraction work beforehand, the POR pursued a policy of substituting its work inside the MSR with a more prepared entry into the Acción Revolucionaria Guiteras (ARG), another action group with terrorist roots and little political formation.(119) By mid-1949, however, after the POR had recognised that the socialist sounding phrases of all the recently resurrected action groups were used to cover simple criminal activity, this attempt at working inside the ARG ended. With specific reference to the ARG, the POR wrote that between what it says and what it does lies an ocean, its “’revolutionary syndicalism’ has not gone beyond simple racketeering and gangsterism.”(120)
Abandoning its activity in these action groups, the POR, far from leaving with additional recruits, had taken another step towards organisational and theoretical collapse. As Pablo Díaz described, the principal feature of the Cuban Trotskyists’ activity had become participation in movements which strove for national economic development.(121) In implicitly accepting a one-sided approach to the revolutionary process, he emphasised the struggle for national liberation and simply sought to push democratic nationalist groups further and further to Left against imperialism rather than raising a programme of action which prioritised the necessary proletarian anti-imperialist character of the struggle. While the Trotskyists, then, did not disintegrate in a round of splits within the confines of their own organisation, they did wither on the vine of a nationalist movement which, though identified as a ‘vehicle’ for revolution, had little by way of an anti-imperialist action programme.
At the POR’s last appearance as a nationally organised party during the Sixth National Workers’ Congress in 1949, the party’s fraction paid testimony to the POR’s inability to express the fact that a great gulf existed between Trotskyism and the forces of petty bourgeois nationalism. Through the intervention of a number of delegates from the Guantánamo region headed by Antonio ‘ñico’ Torres, a representative of Delegación 11 of the Hermandad Ferroviaria de Cuba,(122) the raising of the banner of Trotskyism at this Congress did little more than confirm that a deep malaise had set in. The Trotskyist delegates distributed a manifesto which, far from seeking to orientate a proletarian vanguard, merely amounted to a well-structured piece of advice for a nationalist government setting out on the path of national economic regeneration within the confines of the world market. With its central concerns being economic diversification, industrialisation and the pipe-dream of breaking out of the dollar orbit by setting up barter agreements with Western Europe and Latin America,(123) the POR presented a defeated caricature of the PBL’s earlier theoretical attempts to break away from a theory which defended the independence of a democratic anti-imperialist revolution. The wider horizons of revolutionary socialism had dwindled, along with its membership, into an overtly stagist approach to revolutionary activity. Like the Apristas, the POR was reduced to militating in the Left-nationalist milieu for a round of ‘progressive’ capitalist development before the proletarian anti-imperialist programme was raised.
During the early 1950s, the POR’s Havana branch seems to have collapsed as its most committed member, Pablo Díaz, spent increasingly lengthy spells in New York for the purposes of employment. The remaining activists in the Guantánamo region who adhered to the banner of Trotskyism did so as individual trade union militants.(124) Although Broué has found evidence relating to the expression of Trotskyist ideas in Cuba during the 1950s in the correspondence of various individuals; namely the Mexican Octavio Fernández, and the Cubans Bodernea,(125) Pérez Santiesteban and Pablo Díaz,(126) any continuity in reality amounted to taking the ultimate step away from an insistence on the necessary proletarian character of the anti-imperialist revolution. Indeed, the only ‘permanent’ characteristic of the Trotskyists’ assessment of revolutionary strategy was their progressive flight from a perspective which sought to defend an independent class programme of the proletariat against the forces of democratic petty bourgeois nationalism.
Such a ‘dissolutionist’ strategy was not without precedent in the Latin American Trotskyist movement, the most notable example being the Bolivian POR effectively placing itself at the service of the petty bourgeois nationalist Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) government in an attempt to serve as a radicalising influence and gently push it towards socialism. In Cuba in the 1950s, the old POR members’ flight from Trotskyism was complete with their integration into the 26 July Movement milieu in the insurrectionary war against the regime of Batista. With the POR having lost all of its earlier independent initiative and drive, those ex-Trotskyists who remained committed to a revolutionary project effectively identified the M26J as another petty bourgeois vehicle for revolution and settled into openly struggling for a democratic anti-imperialist revolution without any concern for attempting to build a Trotskyist vanguard party, or even fraction, if only to gently push the forces of petty bourgeois nationalism towards socialism.
During the revolutionary struggle of 1956-59, the participation of ex-Trotskyists in both the sierra and llano fell into two categories. On the one hand, there were those ex-members of the POR who openly renounced Trotskyism in order to join the M26J at an early stage and fully embrace the primacy of the one-sided struggle for national liberation. On the other hand, there were those individuals who participated in the armed struggle once it was underway but who never totally rejected the need for a Trotskyist organisation. This second body of former Trotskyists constituted the core group which went on to reorganise the Cuban Trotskyist party after the triumph of the Revolution.
The two most prominent examples of ex-POR members from the late 1940s who formally renounced Trotskyism in order to join the M26J at an early stage were Pablo Díaz and Antonio ‘ñico’ Torres. Díaz, who had based himself permanently in the U.S. in 1952, led the Comité Obrero Democrático de Exiliados y Emigrados Cubanos, a workers’ organisation in New York. Together with the larger Acción Cívica Cubana and Comité Ortodoxo de Nueva York organisations, this Democratic Workers’ Committee of Cuban Exiles and Emigrants worked in the Club Patriótica 26 de Julio to collect funds for the insurrection, recruit fighters and challenge the propaganda of the Batista regime in the United States.(127) Receiving instructions to go to Mexico in October 1956,(128) Pablo Díaz also joined the Granma expeditionaries as one of fourteen members of Fidel Castro’s General Staff.(129) However, after the chaos surrounding the ship’s landing, Díaz made his way back to Havana and then to New York to resume his work in the Democratic Workers’ Committee of Cuban Exiles and Emigrants during the course of the insurrection.
The extent to which Cuban Trotskyism had collapsed into emphasising the struggle of petty bourgeois nationalism above that of the independent action of the working class was evident in the thesis which Díaz submitted to the Sierra Maestra Workers’ Congress in October 1958. In this document, he posited that although the working class had the potential to transform the country politically and socially, because of its low level of consciousness it was up to the M26J to take responsibility and act as the agent for revolutionary change.(130) Displaying another characteristic feature of Cuban Trotskyism, he also argued that the working class had a role to play in the overthrow of the Batista regime via the general strike. Resurrecting the old ‘Workers’ Alliance’ slogan, he contended that the general strike could only be successful if the workers’ sections of the various revolutionary parties and organisations formed a United Front Body which drew up a programme of action to mobilise the working masses in the final push against the Batista regime. This programme of action which, borrowing from the Trotskyist vocabulary, he called a Transitional Programme, did not, however, go beyond a minimum programme of economic and democratic demands. The action programme he proposed included a call for a six-hour working day in the sugar industry with no reduction in pay, a maximum working week of forty hours, social security and maternity pay, and full trade union democracy allowing for the election of officials by workers themselves.(131)
Of those former Trotskyists who remained in Cuba during the period of the insurrection, ñico Torres was the most prominent. Torres, after satisfying the leadership of the M26J that he was no longer a Trotskyist, was named second in command of the M26J’s Sección Obrera in Guantánamo under Octavio Louit Venzant on 25 September 1955.(132) Given the initial relative success of the M26J’s guantanameño Workers’ Section, its leaders, including ñico Torres, rapidly became national leaders, eventually becoming principal actors in the Frente Obrero Nacional and the reorganisation of the CTC from 1959.(133) Other Trotskyists or former Trotskyists who were active in the M26J in Cuba itself included Alejandro Lamo and Gustavo Fraga in the province of Oriente. While Alejandro Lamo, an ex-Trotskyist from Santiago de Cuba, joined the Rebel Army,(134) Gustavo Fraga was a leader of the M26J Workers’ Section of Guantánamo and Yateras. Along with ñico Torres and others, Fraga drew up the first draft of the organisational thesis of the Workers’ Sections inside the M26J. He died in an accidental explosion in an M26J bomb factory on 4 August 1957.(135)
Of those ex-Trotskyists who participated in the armed struggle once it was underway but who never totally abandoned all notion of building a Trotskyist vanguard party, was a core of members from the Guantánamo branch including Juan Medina, Luciano García and Idalberto Ferrera Acosta, as well as Roberto Acosta in Havana. In Guantánamo, the Ferrera’s house was used as a meeting place and refuge for the various revolutionary groups and combatientes.(136) Idalberto Ferrera Acosta, as a civilian employee and trade union organiser in the U.S. Naval Base, and his wife Guarina Ramírez Acosta, also participated in the clandestine activities of the Resistencia Cívica and the M26J. Guarina Ramírez served as a messenger for Ivan Rodríguez, a leader of the movement in Guantánamo, before joining the 18 Antonio López column in the Second Frank País García Front as a teacher.(137) Their sons, who became leaders of the post-1959 Trotskyist party, also took part in the insurrection in various capacities. Idalberto Ferrera Ramírez and Juan León Ferrera Ramírez were initially active in the student cells of the M26J before they went up to the Sierra after the Second Front was opened. Idalberto Ferrera Ramírez was initially deployed as a guerrilla before becoming a nurse. Juan León Ferrera, after smuggling radio equipment, arms and munitions from the U.S. Naval Base to the Sierra, led a group of eight guerrillas in the Second Front and was made a sergeant in the Rebel Army.(138)
Other former POR members were also active in the Guantánamo region in the trade union movement, particularly among railway workers.(139) According to Adolfo Gilly, Juan Medina and Luciano García, as leaders of the railway workers’ union in Guantánamo, reported that they had supported an M26J-PSP alliance at a trade union conference in the Sierra during the insurrection.(140) Whether or not this was on the basis of any agreed programme of action is uncertain. Elsewhere, in Havana, Roberto Acosta, a leading founding member of the PBL in Santiago de Cuba, was active in the Resistencia Cívica. Amongst other things, he provided his house to hide his engineering colleague Manuel Ray, its Acción y Sabotage head. He also collaborated with the M26J and was involved in the network which prepared messages and correspondence for Fidel Castro and the Rebel Army leaders in the Sierra Maestra.(141)
By the time the insurrection broke out, then, there was no organised Trotskyist group in Cuba, although as individuals a number of ex-members of the PBL and POR participated in the armed struggle wherever and however they could. After more than two decades of fighting with little success, though, this involvement had in many respects led them full circle to pursue a political strategy which had much in common with that advocated by Mella in the ANERC and the early dissidents in the OCC. That is, in supporting an insurrectionary movement alongside the forces of petty bourgeois nationalism they, in practice, subordinated proletarian political independence to the struggle for, at best, a democratic anti-imperialist revolution.
In sum, then, under the conditions of semi-legality after the March 1935 general strike those sections of the PBL which had opposed the so-called ‘external road’ to building the revolutionary party were able to regroup, albeit with a much reduced membership which mirrored that of most other Latin American Trotskyist groups. From the mid-1930s to the early 1950s, their numbers declined steadily from a figure approaching approximately one hundred to no more than twenty. However, even at their weakest moment before their eventual organisational dissolution in the early 1950s, they enjoyed some trade union influence among workers in the Guantánamo, the only region in which they had been a mass party during the Revolution of the 1930s.
Organisationally, just as the PBL during the Revolution of the 1930s was characterised by periods of internal dislocation followed by attempts at reorganisation, so Cuban Trotskyism between 1935 and 1959 was characterised by increasingly lengthy intervals of organisational crisis punctuated by brief periods in which the leadership attempted to establish some stability in the party. In tracing this pattern of organisational development, I have argued that its decline and eventual dissolution was as much the result of the peculiar features of the Cuban group’s political thinking as it was of the characteristics and difficulties posed by the environment in which they operated. That is, the disappearance of the POR as an organised party in the 1950s reflected not only the weakness of the working class after more than a decade of trade union and state collaboration as well as the pressures of operating in a nationalist, anti-Stalinist milieu, but more importantly, the Trotskyists’ own failure to distinguish clearly between the democratic and proletarian anti-imperialist revolutions and to steer the working class on a politically independent course of action.
The Cuban Trotskyists made various attempts to break out of their organisational isolation not by insisting on the independence of proletarian political organisation, but by making increasing concessions to non-proletarian nationalist groups. From a loose and ambiguous critical support perspective with regard to the Auténticos in the early to mid-1940s, they made several largely unorganised attempts at ill-defined entry inside a number of self-titled action groups in the late 1940s. However, the final crisis in the evolution of the POR in the period between revolutions did not simply spring from poorly prepared fraction work or the MSR’s and then ARG’s slide into increasingly open gangsterism. It was instead the result of the POR’s mistaken assessment of its whole method of revolutionary activity. That is, in again tying its destiny, as well as that of the working class, to the fate of petty bourgeois nationalist groups, the POR’s targeted fraction work unsurprisingly came to an ignominious end when the action groups themselves were either incorporated into the government machine or suppressed. The government simply no longer required the pistoleros’ threats and terror tactics to remove the PSP from its positions of office in the working class. Pursuing their own logic of organisational dissolution, many ex-Trotskyists ultimately coalesced in and around the M26J on an individual basis without any ‘critical’ component. If they remained socialists, their entry into the M26J milieu confirmed their explicit acceptance of the theory of the independence of the democratic anti-imperialist revolution, a tendency which had characterised the early OCC and PBL.
Despite Trotskyism’s small number of adherents in Cuba, one of its principal merits as a radical Left alternative was that during the course of the Second World War the PBL, and then POR, broadly maintained the principle that the greatest threat to Latin American countries was imperialism whatever its mask, be it bourgeois democratic or fascist. During the course of the war, while the local official communists eventually served as uncritical recruiting agents for war abroad and strike-breakers on the home front, the Trotskyists identified U.S. imperialism, the local oppressor, rather than Nazi Germany as the principal threat, and attempted to apply the SWP(US)’s Proletarian Military Policy to Cuban conditions. However, in their interpretation of the nature of the war and the strategy they advocated, the Cuban Trotskyists also displayed their essentially one-sided approach to the revolution in Cuba, giving undue emphasis to the slogans and struggle for national liberation.
On the outbreak of the war, the Cuban Trotskyists argued that it was not a war of fascism against democracy but an imperialist war for a new division of the world. For the PBL there was no basic distinction to be drawn between Britain oppressing millions of Indians and Africans, and Nazi Germany oppressing its working class. Capitalism itself was seen to be the cause of the war, and war could only be stopped once and for all by directing action towards the destruction of the capitalist system.(142) After the entry of the Soviet Union into the war in 1941, the Cuban Trotskyists denounced the Stalinists for their initial pacifism and then subsequent pro-war stance which entailed supporting the despatch of the Cuban working masses as cannon-fodder.(143) Even the independent-minded Santiago de Cuba Sectional Committee of the PBL remained firm in accusing the official communists of becoming the “fervent supporters of the imperialist war at the service of the White House.”(144) In contrast to the Stalinists’ volte-face, throughout the course of the war, the Cuban Trotskyists consistently advanced three central programmatic demands which taken together constituted a variation of the Proletarian Military Policy. In numerous documents, they raised the slogan of “NOT A SINGLE CUBAN SOLDIER OUTSIDE CUBA”,(145) they opposed government-sponsored compulsory military service from September 1940,(146) and they argued for military instruction for the masses under the control of workers’ organisations.(147)
However, in advancing a Proletarian Military Policy, the Trotskyists’ underlying bias towards the slogans and demands for national liberation diluted the primacy of the proletarian nature of the envisaged revolution. For example, although they rejected neutral pacifism with the argument that the working class would ultimately solve the great problems of the day with arms in hand, rather than uncompromisingly insisting on the class significance of the workers under arms, they invoked the bourgeois democratic traditions of the nineteenth century Cuban Liberation Army. As they wrote, “we want to reclaim the mambisa tradition of the soldier-citizen: it was the soldiers of the Liberation Army who, exercising the right of suffrage, elected the Government in Arms.”(148)
The Cuban Trotskyists also revealed their tendency to accept the theory of the independence of the democratic anti-imperialist revolution in the unconditional support they gave to various national liberation struggles against imperialism during the war. Aside from raising rather ambiguous slogans, such as “Long live the war of the colonial peoples for their national liberation!”,(149) which on their own implied acceptance of a two-stage revolutionary strategy, the Cuban Trotskyists also directly equated the struggle of the Soviet Union against imperialist aggression with that of the Chinese people in their war of national liberation against Japan. They suggested that both struggles were equally anti-imperialist and therefore both deserved unconditional support.(150) In accepting Trotsky’s argument that the Soviet Union would deserve unconditional support in the war no matter how subservient and how great the material aid it received from the Allies, the Cuban Trotskyists mistakenly gave unconditional support to national liberation movements when, in fact, that support should have been conditioned by the degree of independence the Chinese bourgeois nationalists maintained with respect to the Allies.(151)
Further privileging the struggle for national liberation, the Cuban Trotskyists also displayed a tendency to justify their slogan of ‘Not a Single Cuban Soldier Outside Cuba!’ on strategic grounds rather than on the basis of political arguments. That is, rather than insisting that the proletariat’s main enemy was imperialism and workers simply had no interest in prosecuting imperialist designs, the POR diluted this message with the argument that “[t]he defence of the national territory [of Cuba] demands the permanent presence inside that territory of all available forces.”(152) The slogan of ‘National and Social Liberation!’ was twisted to privilege the struggle for national defence, leaving on one side the permanent struggle of the proletariat world-wide.
The Spanish Civil War broke out in mid-1936 at a time when the reorganised PBL was still adjusting to the conditions of the March 1935 defeat, and continued until 1939, when class collaboration in Cuba had been cemented in an alliance between Batista and the official communist party. From the outset, the Cuban Trotskyists were unequivocal in rebutting the official communists’ assertion that it was simply a war between pro-democratic Leftists and pro-fascist Spanish reactionaries. They instead adhered to the Permanent Revolution perspective, arguing that only the independent action of the Spanish proletariat against both the fascists and the vacillating Popular Front government could save the Spanish Revolution.(153) However, in again setting out its internationalist proletarian standard in the Cuban labour and revolutionary milieu the PBL seems to have been ignorant of the content of the political debate which had erupted between Trotsky and the followers of Nin in the Spanish POUM.
Fulfilling the basic education and propaganda functions of a revolutionary party, the PBL published Trotsky’s July 1936 article ‘The Lesson of Spain’ which polemicised against the Popular Front alliance of working class leaders with the bourgeoisie. However, while Trotsky argued for a “genuine alliance of workers and peasants [....] against the bourgeoisie”,(154) which was ultimately aimed against the POUM as much as the Spanish Stalinists, the PBL was rather more ambiguous. On the one hand, the Cuban Trotskyists attacked the Comintern when arguing against all notion of political blocs with the Republican bourgeoisie:
“[t]he policy of forming a bloc with the republican bourgeoisie, with the so-called ‘democratic bourgeoisie’, as advocated by the revisionist Stalinists since the Seventh Congress of the Communist International, is in essence a restraining counter-revolutionary policy, the consequences of which will be paid by the Spanish proletariat.”(155)
On the other hand, though, they did not offer any criticism of the POUM for signing the Left Electoral Pact, a de facto Popular Front. The Cuban Trotskyists limited their analysis of the POUM to congratulatory comments on its calls to reorganise the Workers’ Alliances as organs of proletarian expression,(156) and seem to have been unaware of the POUM’s subsequent decision to enter the Catalan government, a move which led to the undermining and dissolution of the anti-fascist committees, the real embryonic organs of proletarian power.
In Cuba, the PBL followed a broad Trotskyist perspective in its intervention in the Ateneo Socialista Español, a non-partisan Spanish workers’ organisation,(157) while appearing to have little knowledge of the conflict which had erupted between Nin and the POUM, on the one hand, and Trotsky and the Spanish Bolshevik Leninist group on the other.(158) This schism at the international level certainly did not provoke any debate within the PBL at the time. In one of the few references which they made to the POUM, the Cuban Trotskyists praised Maurín for speaking against a policy of collaboration and subordination to the bourgeoisie, and naïvely commended the POUM for “calling on the Spanish proletariat day after day to reorganise the Workers’ Alliance, the true organs of proletarian expression, and the workers’ militias, the embryos of the Red Army.”(159) Indeed, unlike the fiercely intransigent Trotskyist movement elsewhere in Europe and the Americas, it was only after the Civil War had ended that the Cuban Trotskyists addressed the Nin-Trotsky controversy. However, even in their belated references to the dispute they displayed their split loyalties. While in 1940 they unequivocally labelled the POUM as a centrist group between Marxism and reformism which was incapable of leading a successful struggle for socialist revolution,(160) in the same year in a more considered reflection on the outcome of the fiery debate between Nin and Trotsky they questioned what they perceived to be Trotsky’s unnecessarily hostile language as well as the actual substance of his arguments. They wrote:
“[t]he violent characterization made by Comrade Crux calling Nin and Andrade ‘traitors’, closed the road to reintegrating into our ranks a great number of revolutionaries. Because if it is true that the conduct of Nin and Andrade well merited the characterization, it is not less certain the characterization was impolitic.”(161)
Among those Cuban Trotskyists who went on an individual basis to fight in the Spanish Civil War, however, the POUM-Trotsky controversy certainly was well-known and had a number of consequences. The most prominent Cuban Trotskyist who fought in the Spanish Civil War was Breá, a central figure in stimulating Trotskyist discussion within the Oposición Comunista de Cuba in the 1932-33 period. Having returned to Europe after the fall of the Grau San Martín government in 1934, Breá made his way to Spain in July 1936 with his companion Mary Low.(162) From late July 1936 to early 1937, as a militant of the Bolshevik-Leninists, the official Trotskyist group,(163) he fought with the POUM militia on the Aragón Front, and worked with the International Secretariat of the POUM(164) and as a journalist for the POUM’s newspapers La Batalla and the P.O.U.M..(165)
In Barcelona, in late 1936, Breá was detained on two separate occasions by the Stalinist security forces. The POUM refused to give him any protection and together with Low, he eventually had to leave once more for France.(166) Their experiences in Spain were vividly recounted in their Red Spanish Notebook,(167) the first account of the Spanish Civil War from a Trotskyist perspective to be published in English in book form. Unlike the PBL in Cuba, in this book Breá outlined the ideological confusion of the anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists who, in his opinion, “threw away the power when it fell into their hands because their principles were against taking it.”(168) For Breá, the only way forward in Spain was to oppose Communism to Fascism,(169) and he argued the need for what he termed “a Common Front—that is to say an alliance of the proletariat without an amalgamation of programme.”(170)
Breá also reaffirmed the outright counter-revolutionary role of those who adhered to the Comintern while, at the same time, refusing to lay the whole blame for the failure of the revolution at their door. In revealing the depth of the Cuban Trotskyists’ anti-Stalinism, Breá also criticised the POUM. He wrote:
“[i]t would be childish to throw the blame there [i.e., at the Stalinists’ doorstep] when we have known so long what a counter-revolutionary part Russia and her acolytes have been playing in all countries. Forewarned is forearmed. The responsibility must lie with those revolutionary parties in Spain who know Stalinism for what it is. I mean the P.O.U.M. and Anarchists, and the Anarcho-Syndicalists.”(171)
Aside from Breá, other Cuban Trotskyists also fought in the Spanish Civil War, albeit as individuals isolated from the international Trotskyist movement. Apart from the PBL members of Spanish origin who had been deported from Cuba to Spain in 1934,(172) news reached the PBL in late 1936 that Edelmiro Blanco, a leader of the General Commercial Workers’ Union, had been killed in action.(173) Wilebaldo Solano has also recounted that another Cuban Trotskyist, Enrique de la Uz, fought in the International Brigades and that Juan Andrade, a leader of the POUM, spoke on various occasions of a group of Cuban Trotskyists which had fought valiantly.(174)
The Cuban Trotskyists’ activity, then, during the Spanish Civil War was broadly determined by an acceptance of the necessity for insisting on the proletarian character of the anti-fascist war, a fundamental tenet of the Permanent Revolution perspective. However, as a group the PBL seem to have failed to gain an understanding of the deep chasm which had developed between the POUM and Trotsky. Only Breá in Spain developed a clear understanding of this dispute, and perhaps it was only as a result of his return to Cuba in 1940 that the PBL subsequently came out against the POUM’s so-called ‘centrism’.
During the period between the end of the March 1935 general strike and the late 1940s the PBL, and then POR, maintained regular contact with the international Trotskyist movement mainly through the offices of the U.S. Trotskyists. They received the press of numerous Trotskyist groups across the Americas and Europe,(175) and sent letters and reports to the SWP(US) and international leadership in New York.(176) While they were never able to send a delegate to any international meeting, principally due to financial constraints, they mandated the New York-based U.S. Trotskyist Fred Browner to represent them in their stead.(177) They also maintained contact with the international movement through the occasional visit from U.S. Trotskyists,(178) and through a small number of European Trotskyists who as refugees spent the duration of the Second World War in Cuba. Apart from Louis Rigaudias, this included Anton Grylewicz, a leader of the German Trotskyists.(179)
In the late 1940s, though, these links and contacts with the Fourth International gradually faded. While this drift away from the international movement was largely the result of the Cuban Trotskyists’ own crisis of organisation and ultimate dissolution, this was not a one-way causal relationship. That is, the POR developed specific positions on the nature of the Soviet Union as well as on the nature of the revolution in Cuba which led it to become increasingly distanced from its principal link with the international movement, the SWP(US). This international isolation, I contend, while not provoking the Cuban Trotskyist party’s dissolution did further compound the stagnation and disillusion which had set in among the Trotskyists.
In the debate on the nature of the revolution in Latin American and the Trotskyists’ orientation towards local non-proletarian nationalist groups, the Cuban Trotskyists, notwithstanding their small numbers in the 1940s, were one of the principal groups belonging to the loose ‘national liberation’ camp. Thus, when Justo’s Liga Obrera Revolucionaria (LOR) in Argentina took up the ‘national liberation’ mantle by emphasising the struggle and slogans for national liberation in a theoretical struggle against the Trotskyists’ international centre based in New York, the Cuban Trotskyists initially expressed sympathy for Justo’s view.(180)
Political disagreements between the POR and SWP(US) continued to surface on the issue of the ‘proletarian’ versus ‘national liberation’ line until the POR’s organisational dissolution in the early 1950s. The SWP(US) largely pressed the Cubans to establish unambiguously their proletarian anti-imperialist credentials. The North Americans, for example, expressed their “thorough-going disagreement” with the POR’s ‘critical