For his part, Taaffe claims to accept permanent revolution, and is thus more critical of Castro. Yet Taaffe shares fundamentally the same framework as Lorimer, believing that Russia under Stalin, China under Mao and Cuba under Castro were or are deformed workers' states, historically more progressive than capitalism, and in some sense (nationalised property, planned economy, welfare gains, absence of a bourgeois class) part of the socialist alternative (p.6-7). Just as the DSP uncritically embrace Castro, so the Committee for a WorkersÕ International (in a pamphlet by Saunois) construct a mythical Guevara with which to associate itself. Therefore, despite some telling points, Taaffe never manages to nail Lorimer's Stalinist politics.

Why isn't Cuba socialist?

The 1959 revolution was not made by the Cuban working class but led by the guerrillas of the July 26th Movement (J26M). There were no Soviets in Cuba in 1959, (as there were in 1933), and the general strike the previous year had been a failure. There were no signs of workers seizing the factories, establishing committees for workers' control, nor a proliferation of independent unions challenging the Batista regime with the organs of workers' power. These flowered in abundance in Russia in 1917, and gave the Bolsheviks - a conscious socialist party - the majority support in order to consummate the socialist revolution in October.

By comparison the J26M was neither rooted in the working class, nor advanced a socialist programme. The Castro regime, pushed into a corner by US imperialism, did indeed overthrow capitalism in Cuba after 1959, but only to construct a form of exploiting society on the model of the Stalinist USSR. Castro constructed a one-party system in which only supporters or members of the Cuban Communist Party can stand in elections, where the trade union movement was purged and then bound hand-and-foot to the state, and where even groups opposed to the US blockade cannot exist legally.

The much vaunted economy and welfare system in Cuba, already one of the richest countries in Latin America before 1959, may have been on a par with the best of equivalent capitalist states (such as Costa Rica and Taiwan), but it depended on an annual $5 billion subsidy from the USSR, as well as on the exploitation of Cuban workers and peasants. Proof of this came with the withdrawal of Russian support in 1989, and the subsequent collapse of the economy, only abated by the recent expansion of tourism and business ventures.

In foreign policy, the Cuban state has whistled to the tune of the USSR, supporting the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the crushing of Solidarnosz in 1981. In Africa, Cuba switched from the Eritrean national liberation movement to supporting the Derg in Ethiopia. Closer to home, Castro failed to condemn the slaughter of students in Mexico in 1968, gave his stamp of approval to the recently ousted PRI-regime, even when it committed electoral fraud in 1988 to stay in power, and failed to back the Zapatistas.

Socialists self-evidently support Cuba's right to self-determination, and therefore oppose the US blockade, but this does not commit us to silence on Castro's anti-working class policies at home or abroad. Taaffe alludes to some of this, but lacks the theoretical clarity necessary to understand Cuba today.

Readers will search in vain for an explanation of how the surplus is extracted, or the real nature of the ruling bureaucracy. A giveaway is the heading for chapter 4, "Is there a privileged elite?" in which the Castro leadership has all the attributes of a ruling class, yet Taaffe cannot bring himself to call it one. The book expresses a "workers' statism" that dare not speak its name. Taaffe avoids the fundamental question about the Cuban revolution for socialists: namely how can a "workers' state" have been created without the active intervention of the working class, because he basically agrees with Lorimer that it is possible - indeed he believes it occurred in Cuba in 1959-61.

He thus overturns Marx's proposition that "the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself", and thereby throws out the only basis on which socialism can be reconstituted in the modern world. In fact, this book gives other clues to the strange politics of the Militant tradition. For example, Taaffe implies that Hugo Chavez, the Venezuelan leader who recently orchestrated the oil price rises through the OPEC cartel, might be the new Fidel Castro (p.23). He also claims that it was wrong to support the Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1980, a backhanded form of political accounting which belies the last twenty years in which his tendency has done precisely that (p.8). The book is therefore a damning monument to the weaknesses of the left rather than a socialist critique of Cuba.