New rulers

Organised by a number of the tendencies in the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), and also attended by members of the Revolutionary Communist Group (RCG), the debate was a response to events at the SSP's annual conference earlier this year.

Cuba's Ambassador to Britain had been invited to the conference. His speech to the conference provoked, as Pravda used to put it, 'stormy applause and prolonged ovation'. The conference also passed a resolution supporting the 'socialist republic' of Cuba.

Although the Marxist Forum debate brought together the more critical elements in the SSP, there was little support for the argument that Cuba had nothing to do with socialism.

The Cuban Revolution of 1959, it was agreed, was not a socialist revolution. But it was Lenin himself, in his articles on the Irish 1916 Easter Uprising, who had written that there would never be a 'pure' socialist revolution, with the workers all on one side of the barricades and the bourgeoisie on the other.

True enough. But the argument that there will never be a 'pure' socialist revolution does not mean that anyone should be allowed to get away with arguing that a guerrilla struggle in the countryside in which the working class played no independent role can therefore be equated with something akin to the start of a socialist transformation of society.

It was also agreed that a revolution is not just a one-off event but an ongoing process. Again, it was Lenin himself who had written that class struggle continues rather than ceases after a revolution.

True enough. But what was the evolution of Cuba after 1959? Industry and land were nationalised. Trade unions were re-incorporated into the state structures. The anarchists and Trotskyists were repressed. All channels of expressing dissent were shut down. And a one-party state was erected.

This was no process of proletarian revolution crushing the remnants of bourgeois rule. It was a process of atomisation of the working class.

Most of those attending the debate sought to draw a distinction between the health services and education system in Cuba (good) and the nature of the trade unions and the political structures in the country (not so good). Some criticism regarding the latter would therefore not be out of place.

But this is to miss the whole point about both Cuba itself and socialism in general.

Like any Stalinist regime, Castro's rule is based on the atomisation of the working class. While the level of repression in Cuba cannot be compared with the Stalinist terror of the 1930s in Russia, Castroite Cuba is inherently opposed to any form of working-class political independence.

And working-class democracy is not some kind of an optional extra for a socialist society. Socialism means that those who produce the wealth of society are those who govern society. Socialism is not a pair of scales in which one weighs up a welfare state and nationalisation against working-class democracy.

Cuba's anti-imperialism was another theme in the debate. Had not Castro sent troops to fight in Angola against CIA-financed and South-African-backed rebels, and thereby also contributed to the overthrow of apartheid in South Africa?

True enough. But Castro never criticised the imperialism of the former Soviet Union and its essentially colonial relationship with its Eastern European satellite states. And when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, Castro supported the invasion.

Castro's anti-imperialism has always been a rather one-sided affair: imperialism was bad if it was American, but progressive if it emanated from the 'socialist' bloc.

If the Marxist Forum debate was essentially a re-stating of previously held positions, it was nonetheless a useful exercise in bringing such positions out into the open. At times it was the political equivalent of a walk down Memory Lane.

The RCG member recently returned from Cuba did not actually use the phrase so popular with the fellow travellers who visited the Soviet Union in the 1930s - 'I have seen the future and it works' - but that was certainly the essence of his contribution.

A person who described himself as a 'libertarian socialist' - but who quickly turned out to be anything but libertarian - provided an endorsement of George Orwell's claim of the 1930s that socialism attracts all kinds of cranks and faddists by arguing that the prevalence of trolleybuses and organically grown cabbages was a measure of a society's advance towards socialism.

And the one supporter of Scottish Militant Labour who turned up for the debate provided a reminder of what an appalling semi-Stalinist sect Militant was at the height of its influence.

In the 1930s, he pointed out, Trotskyists in Cuba were murdered. Under Castro, however, they were merely imprisoned and then released (provided they promised to refrain from further political activity). This, surely, was progress and a measure of the 'socialist orientation' of a government which had 'established the preconditions for socialism'.

As for calling for the overthrow of Castro, he explained, this would be like calling for the overthrow of Scargill in the middle of the miners' strike of 1984/85.

How long Stalinism will survive in Cuba is open to debate. But, judging by the Marxist Forum debate, illusions in it will unfortunately be around for a lot longer than Castro himself.