Introduction

"The imperialists cannot forgive us to have carried out a socialist revolution under the very noses of the Yankees".
In this way the Cuban people and the whole world took notice of Cuba's socialism proclaimed by Fidel Castro on April 16th. 1961. A few days later, a United States-sponsored invasion to Bahia de Los Cochinos was totally defeated by the rebel army and the popular militiamen.
This crucial moment was the culmination of the social and political process that followed to the overthrow of the dictator Fulgencio Batista on January 1st, 1959, and the triumphant arrival of the rebel army in Havana a week later.
In its early days, the Revolutionary Government was supported by the whole Cuban bourgeoisie, the Catholic Church, an important section of the American establishment and the Latin American governments, some of which had supplied guns and medicines to the guerrillas in Sierra Maestra during the war against Batista. But the economical and social measures taken by the revolutionary government, for the benefit of peasants, workers and the relegated masses, cooled down the support from the owners, and at the same time raised its prestige among the have-nots.
In March 1959, the government ordered a radical reduction in urban rents of up to 50 per cent. This obviously very popular measure only affected a sector of the Cuban bourgeoisie. U.S. capital had not involved itself in Cuba's housing sector. After the reduction was passed, Castro continued to reassure and encourage Cuban capitalists by asserting that the products of Cuban industries did contribute to national growth, in contrast "with the parasitic investors on the housing market".
On May 1959, Fidel summarized his political outlook: "Our revolution is neither capitalist nor communist! (If) we must choose between capitalism which starves people, and communism which resolves the economic problem but suppresses the liberties (we prefer) our Revolution which is not red, but olive green, the color of the rebel army that emerged from the heart of the Sierra Maestra".
Nevertheless, the early 1959 virtual "united front" was progressively shattering. The nationalist tendency began to step on the toes of American business interests. The native bourgeoisie, who had never been truly independent since it lived off US trade and investment, aligned itself with the opposition of its master. The premier Miro Cardona and President Urrutia, which had been both appointed by Fidel Castro, were opposed to the radical course and resigned their posts. Desertions began in "July 26th. Revolutionary Movement" (MR26/7), being mainly provoked by the radical shift of the leadership of the Revolution.
In May 1959 the first Agrarian Reform Law was enacted. Every rural property bigger than 400 hectares was confiscated, including those of many American-owned sugar companies. There was a redistribution of land benefiting to thousands of petty peasants, but state farms and cooperatives (also managed by state officials) became the predominant agricultural organizations. Agrarian Reform was an old popular demand in Cuba. It had been included in the Constitution of 1940, but with provisos for preliminary compensation for any expropriated land that made it actually impossible. Of course, the land reform was also proposed in Fidel Castro's "History Will Absolve Me". In the early days of the Revolution there were a few cases of spontaneous land seizure. They were strongly condemned by Fidel: "We are opposed to anarchic land distribution. We have drafted a law which stipulates that anybody involved in any land distribution which is made without waiting for the new agrarian law will lose their rights to benefits from the new agrarian reform." The American Foreign Power Company was compelled to reduce the power fees. Air raids from airfields in Florida and sabotage actions against Cuba began. The U.S. began brandishing the economic weapon of the sugar quota. Cuba, seeking out new markets, signed a trade pact with the USSR in February 1960 and Soviet crude oil began to arrive to the island. In April, Fidel visited the U.S. seeking an agreement with the American Government, but failed to make one. In June, western-owned oil refineries in Cuba refused to process the soviet oil and were nationalized. In July, President Eisenhower canceled the Cuban sugar quota. In October the US announced an embargo on US goods to Cuba. At the same time, Cuba had begun nationalizing Cuban-owned and then American-owned companies. In late September popular "Revolutionary defense Committees" were created in order to fight terrorism and sabotage and mushroomed along the island. In October the Law of Urban Reform was enacted, ending with house-for-renting private ownership. Since then, former tenants would pay to the Cuban State sums that would allow them to be proprietors of their homes after a given period. In early 1961 the Campaign to eradicate illiteracy was launched. The "brigades" composed by thousands of students went to the countryside to teach and live with the peasants.
Thus, by the 1961 spring Cuba was -in its economic structure, political allies, trade patterns, and social priorities- in fact, what in those days was called "a socialist society". All the strategic sectors of Cuba's industry were nationalized: sugar, petroleum refining, telephone, electric power, and cement. The State sector produced 90 % of Cuba's exports; state farms and co-operatives controlled the best land; the whole pattern of trade had shifted from the U.S. to the so-called socialist countries. At the same time, the vast disparities between rich and poor, city and country were being rapidly narrowed.
The mass support to the political and economic revolutionary measures was accompanied by a spontaneous growth of anti-imperialist sentiment among the Cuban people. The liberal explanations of well-intentioned American "mistakes" ceased to be accepted by the Cuban masses during 1959 and 1960. The actions of the American power structure itself helped to the Cuban people to awake and become more conscious of its subordination to American imperialism.
In the course of these few months, the anti-imperialist spirit of 1933 revolution had regained full force after a long period of decline. But unlike the 1933 situation, the Cuban leadership and people were now in a far better position to fight U.S. imperialism than practically any other country in the history of Latin America. The slate of old Cuban institutions, particularly the traditional army, had been swept clean. There was no Platt Amendment to provide immediate legitimacy for a direct American military presence in Cuban territory. Neither was there a traditional Cuban army that could be used by the U.S. as they had used the Guatemalan Army to overthrow the duly elected government of Jacobo Arbenz, six years before.

1) The Latin American context of the Cuban Revolution.

Until 1959, Cuba shared many semi-colonial and backward features with the rest of the Latin American countries. The Cuban case was worse, since it was the last country to be free from Spanish domination, and it fell immediately under the American direct control. Latin American countries, once free from the Spanish and Portuguese colonial chains, failed to become truly sovereign national states. Economic interventionism from the British Empire and some other European powers, followed afterwards by the United States, contributed to undermine Latin American national sovereignties. A new type of domination followed to the colonial rule: Lenin had named it "imperialism".
In this way, though politically "independent", the Latin American countries shared a similar status with the Asian and African colonies and semi-colonies: the "underdevelopment" as it was called.
The commercial bourgeoisie and the landlords were the Latin American ruling classes inherited from the colonial society. None of them could accomplish the main tasks of the democratic revolution in the bourgeois era: national unification, truly national independence, land reform,
self-determination for the subjected national minorities, creation of a democratic state, industrialization and modernization of the economic structure. All these tasks were still pending in Latin America. As a result of this, endemic political instability of the region, civil wars, coup de etat and popular uprisings frequently took place. Revolutions, as in Mexico, Bolivia and Guatemala, tried to make more or less deep changes, but ended in stalemates or were finally defeated. In the revolutionary processes of Mexico and Bolivia massive land seizures took place, following the classic rules of the agrarian revolutions.  These cases contrasted with Cuba, where the agrarian reform and the industrial nationalizations were driven by the rebel army and the popular militias directly led by the revolutionary government.
Some limited industrialization was attempted in 20th Century by Latin American governments, which failed to overcome the backward economic features. The industrial working class emerged and urban population began to grow steadily. These changes nourished populist political movements, as Peronism in Argentina, APRA in Peru, Estado Novo in Brazil. Those movements tried to deal with imperialism and to obtain any economic concessions they could, but were unsuccessful, and the countries they had ruled became even more dependent on their imperialist masters. In this framework, the Cuban Revolution was unprecedented. The recovery of the basic features of its sovereignty, via the nationalization of the main industries and the land, and Bahia de Los Cochinos triumph, were achievements that were admired by the Latin American peoples. In the early 1960s Castroite revolutionary currents emerged across the continent, promoting Cuban style revolutions. Even nowadays, the nationalistic character of the Cuban Revolution strongly contributes to the regime's fortitude and allows it firmly to hold the reins, surprising and disappointing to many political analysts, who supposed that Cuban regime would immediately follow the fate of the Soviet implosion.

2) The International context

The post-war stability on the basis of the Yalta and Potsdam deals began to shatter in the early 1950s. Chinese Revolution was the first sign. Afterwards, Germany and Japan, the Second World War defeated countries began to weaken the American control of the world market. The European colonial empires in Africa and Asia had begun to stagger. In 1954 the Algerian people began their 8-year liberation war that would influence the whole African continent. Vice-president Nixon was on a Latin American tour in 1958, and faced outraged protests on the streets, amid a popular mood of increasing tension on the continent. Following Stalin's death, the ruling layers of the Soviet bureaucracy tried to change its policy. The uprisings in Berlin, Hungary and Poland, though crushed, convinced the bureaucracy of the urgent necessity of a change. The Chinese Maoist regime began to insinuate discrepancies with Soviet policy. In 1957 the first Sputnik inaugurated the Soviet space achievements, placing the USSR well ahead of USA for a time. In those days USSR looked to be definitely ahead in scientific and technological world progress. According to the Soviet leadership, a formal "de-Stalinization" campaign and audacious economic plans would allow to the Soviet Union to modernize its productive structure, arrive at the economic level of the advanced capitalist countries and to beat them in the early 1980s. In order to meet that target, the USSR had a pressing need: drastically to reduce or even to end the arms race and to arrive at a new agreement with USA. These policies proved to be wrong a decade later, because the Soviet economy, instead of being in a rising phase, actually was close to exhaustion. In addition, this Soviet policy contradicted the consistency of a fading myth: the USSR, being Socialism's motherland, had to claim to be leading an international and revolutionary movement, inherited from the October Revolution. So Nikita Khrushchev had to varnish his policy ideologically as the possibility of a new and pacific way to achieve socialism, and to claim that it was an alternative to the revolutionary grasp of power.
In this given framework, the eruption of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, and its progressive radicalization, without a franchised leadership by the former Comintern, contributed with both advantages and handicaps to Moscow.  The USSR usually supported to Third World regimes that asserted their neutrality between the two world blocks, balancing in this way its game with USA. But now an unexpected revolution erupted in a small island that was barely 80 miles far from its adversary. So the USSR was at first reticent to that newcomer with a strange Latin accent who claimed to be a close relative. Such was the reticence that Pravda waited until April 1962 to report to its readers that Cuban Revolution was defined as "socialist" and the Cuban people were building the socialism just as Soviet people were.

3) Was the Cuban working class the subject of the Revolution?

The dawn of 1959 brought forth a massive outpouring of popular joy over the fall of Batista and nearly unanimous support for Fidel Castro. The Commander called a general revolutionary strike in order to face the "provisional government" which was assembled by the remnants of the former Batista regime and the emissaries of US imperialism. Once that target was met, Fidel called a halt to the strike. In fact, this completely successful 1959 strike was called to ensure the consolidation of the new revolutionary regime, for actually no one dared to challenge Castro in those days. The Cuban labor bureaucracy collapsed at the same time with the "Batistato". New leaders were democratically elected. They were nearly all members of the MR26-7. A provisional committee would lead the worker's movement until the next congress of the Cuban Workers Confederation (CTC) was held. All the factions that fought against Batista and against the labor bureaucracy were represented in the committee. David Salvador Manso, a leader of MR26-7, was the head of the committee. David Salvador was a former communist unionist who resigned his post in the Socialist Popular Party (the Cuban Communist Party: CCP) in 1946, disagreeing with its political support to the first Batista Government. In September 1959 the CTC Congress was held. Fidel gave a speech to the more than 3,200 delegates. Fidel remarked that the delegates had not been handpicked, but freely elected by the grass roots. He reminded them that "(January's) general strike gave all the power to the Revolution". Three days later, amidst passionate quarrels, 13 delegates (including 3 communists) were appointed to a new executive committee. The polls gave a general outline of the relative proportions of non-communist factions to the communist one, which were 11 to 1. Then Fidel spoke again, openly attacking the way discussions were carried, claiming that any division or quarrel in the Congress would make the enemies of the Revolution happy. "What has happened here, so strange that it was like a mental hospital?" Besides, he remarked that working class wished to become an army in order to defend the Revolution, but to think that political factions could compound an army was nonsensical. Finally, Fidel proposed a vote of confidence for David Salvador, who would make up a list of candidates to the Executive Committee. The motion was overwhelmingly approved, thanks to the workers' absolute support to Fidel Castro. Finally 6 delegates, including 3 communists, went on to the Committee. The communists grasped the strategical posts of secretaries of organization and foreign relations. Purge of the non-communist leaders began immediately. David Salvador resigned and was later arrested when trying to flee Cuba.
According to official history, the "unitary" point of view was imposed and "many former labor leaders from unitary times joined the CTC and strengthened worker's unity". These supposedly unitary times were the years 1938 to 1944, when PSP controlled the labor unions thanks to the consenting Batista first government, which included Communist ministers. So, when the following Congress was held in November 1961, "...the problem of the 'labor tendencies' and personal leaderships had ended". An old communist leader, Lazaro Peña, was appointed as the chairman of the CTC and remained in that post until his death, in 1974.
This state intervention in the unions and the capture of them by the local Stalinists were accepted by the grass roots due to the outstanding prestige of the revolutionary government, but it would have ill effects. Ernesto Guevara, analyzing the problem of the high absenteeism in workplaces in 1962, asserted: "We have fallen behind in trying to get the workers involved in its new leading tasks. Who is guilty? They are clearly not guilty. We the ministry and the labor leaders are guilty... we have became perfect bureaucrats..." " ... sometimes we analyzed in our boards of directors, why this apathy. Why massive tasks that should be taken by the working class had always to appear as bureaucratic initiatives? ... What could we do in order to manage to get the working class participating in their workplaces' leadership?"
This apathy actually was the effect of a structure that the very Che had contributed to create:
"The leaders of a country who are identified with their people think about what is better for the people, they write it on more or less arbitrary numbers, but with a logical foundation. Then they send the numbers from top to bottom, namely, from the Central Board of Planning to the Ministry of Industries, where this body makes the convenient corrections, because it is closer than the Board to reality. From there it goes on down to the companies, which make more corrections. From the companies it passes on to the factories where more rectifications are made. Afterwards the plan passes from the factories to the workers, who have the last word."
According to that hierarchical scale, the only thing that the workers could do was just to say "the last word". What arrived at the workplaces where totally worked-out plans, already decided, to which the workers could only say yes or no, and the factory managers could take notice, or not take notice, of their comments. At best, workers could try to improve the plan, or be encouraged to try new and efficient production methods (a similar deal to the "teams" that are used in the modern capitalist factories). But by no means could the workers question the premises of the plan on a large scale. This was a peculiar "road to socialism", without basic democratic workers’ bodies and with a leadership that was perpetuated in the government. This leadership had unlimited power to make plans and laws, and enforce them, according to the leaders’ presumption on what was best for the people. This road could generate nothing but "apathy" in the class that supposedly was "the subject of the revolution".
Fidel Castro had to wait to September 1970, after the failure of the 10 million tons of sugar crop, to admit that democratization in the labor bodies was necessary. It was a dramatic admission, after ten years of "socialist building" and  "proletarian dictatorship". Forty years later, Fidel could come again to the same conclusion.

4) Cuban Revolution and Stalinism.

In the early days of the revolution, the American Establishment and the Cuban bourgeoisie had their suspicions of a covered-up communism among the revolutionary leaders. The early admission in 1961 of the former PSP militants to join the new revolutionary movement strongly contributed to the suspicions. As we have seen, PSP militants actively took part in the capture of the labor leadership. They were also engaged in the organization of the new unified revolutionary party: the ORI. It is said that the Castroite leadership badly needed to get a disciplined political body, since the early MR26-7 was a heterogeneous and amorphous collection of militants. This necessity forced the leadership to turn to the old Cuban communists, who were trained in the school of Third International's  "democratic centralism". Their habit of blindly trusting in the top leaders and their conviction that Socialism must be built from above, were highly appreciated qualities for Fidel Castro. The strengthening of economic and political links with USSR seemed to give to the old Communists a growing power, as transmission belts of the Soviet pressure on domestic and foreign Cuban policy. It was not so. The Communist ambition, if it existed, collided with Castro's ideas. In the Cuban Revolution there was no room for Eastern European style puppets. In March 1962 Fidel drastically turned the helm and publicly denounced the "sectarianism" of some PSP former leaders. They were accused of seeking to take hold of the whole state's management and to bureaucratize the Revolution. At that moment many supporters hoped that the Cuban Revolution would begin then to show the truly  "human face" of socialism.
In October 1962, Khruschev directly dealt with, and came to an agreement with, Kennedy, on removing the Soviet missiles from Cuba and a status quo for the island. The Cuban government felt itself to be only an embarrassed witness to the deal. The Cuban leadership was terribly disappointed by this event and Castroism began to rid itself of the "orthodox proletarian" view of its own revolution and regime. Former PSP leaders who agreed with the Soviet viewpoints were removed from the key positions in the government and the party. Ernesto Che Guevara formulated the Cuban Revolution’s domestic interpretation as a unique revolutionary socialist process, different to the Leninist, Trotskyite or Maoist conceptions. According to this new theory, the subject of the Revolution was the guerrilla vanguard, with undefined social links, which was the only one able to express and to awaken the exploited classes and their necessities.
In January 1968 a "micro faction" was prosecuted. Again, a group of old PSP leaders were accused now of trying to organize a faction within the Cuban Communist Party. Evidently, this was a political plan, but it was treated as a crime. The prosecution of this sort of crimes had no precedents, neither in Cuban nor in Soviet jurisprudence. Even in Moscow trials in the 1930s, the political disagreements were not presented as crimes. Stalin's prosecutors charged the old Bolshevik guard with the worst crimes against the Soviet State – spying for Hitler, for example – in order to try to conceal the actual political motives behind the sentences.
In the prosecutor's arguments, Raul Castro said: "I proposed to a group of comrades who were checking these texts: let us find at least one thing that the Revolution had made that was supported by this people. We found not one. That is, there was opposition to, and criticism of, every measure, be it important or not, adopted by the revolutionary power." This could be seen as a warning that from then on any criticism or disagreement with the official political line could be penalized. This pretended attack on Stalinism, but in fact with copied and remarkably enhanced methods learned from the very Stalinism is an original political contribution from the Castroite leadership. Developments with similar features had emerged in some other occasions, namely, the Ochoa affair in 1989.
So, can we describe the Cuban regime as Stalinist? The Cuban Revolution’s origin is substantially different from the Russian one. Stalin’s rise to power was possible thanks to the failure of the European revolution. A number of factors also provided the foundations of that rise. Namely, the international siege of the USSR; the physical and political exhaustion of the urban working class in the civil war; the emergence of privileged social layers; the bureaucratization of the Communist Party, the pressure from tsarist remnants on the Soviet state, and so on. None of these factors emerged in the Caribbean Revolution. And if some did, at least, they did not emerge to the same extent.
However, the history of this century is littered with regimes whose state-party frameworks and political methods are closely related to the Stalinist ones, despite its different origins or being unaffiliated to Moscow franchise-holders, or even opposed to them.

If when we say "Stalinist" we mean a political-social-economic pattern enforced by terror, just like the Soviet regime in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the regime born from the Cuban Revolution clearly is not Stalinist. Nevertheless, the Cuban way of "building socialism ", even with varying features throughout the four last decades, is a way that excludes a truly democratic management from the Cuban workers, and is closely related to Stalinism. People's participation in "mass organizations", and their sometimes wholehearted support to the revolutionary government, is not the same thing that having the right to an actual decision making by the grass roots. Actually, the rank and file is relegated to a decorative role, only convoked ritually in order to approve decisions from above.
Certainly, this regime is deeply rooted in Cuban history. Cuban people, no matter their social origin, overwhelmingly supported the anti-dictatorial coalition led by Fidel Castro. It was similar to many other antidictatorial Latin American movements, except in one major way: the Cuban coalition was led not by older, traditional politicians but by a young, relatively unknown leadership with little or no political background. These young militants were filling the political vacuum left by the old opposition political parties, which had practically collapsed shortly after the Batista coup in 1952. When Fidel ended his social and political honeymoon, he turned against his former supporters in the upper and middle classes and encouraged popular hostility toward them. While the revolutionary government shifted its orientation from one social class to another, it always retained complete initiative and control of the process of social transformation. Cuban Revolution passed very fast through a number of stages while the same top leadership remained in power. This is a remarkably uncommon fact in the history of revolutionary processes, which has not been sufficiently analyzed. Castro was above and beyond social ties, which might have doomed his leadership. Fidel Castro was able to carry out his own kind of "permanent revolution" and consolidate his power without the political situation ever threatening to get out of his hands. This process was the reflection of the constitution and consolidation of what we could call a revolutionary Bonapartist regime, emerged thanks to a political paralysis of the Cuban peasantry and working class while at the same time the weakened hegemony of the upper and middle classes. In fact, there was a class deadlock; the main social classes, while numerically large, were fairly weak in terms of organization and political consciousness. Political roots of Bonapartism must be traced in the history of the barely half a century of  "Independent" Cuba. In said period, Populism and Bonapartism were the two faces of the same political coin. Large numbers of Cubans were attracted to inarticulate and vague populist movements. It was a reflection of the absence of more defined social classes, parties, and programs, due to the overwhelming economic and social weight of American imperialism in Cuban society. This situation encouraged both conservative rulers and emerging revolutionary leaders to assume Bonapartist roles which in their turn, further hindered the development of independent class organizations that could have challenged their individual power.
The notion of "Bonapartism" was utilized by Karl Marx while trying to explain the rise of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte in France, and having to face the problem of the relations between social classes and political leaders. According to Marx’s analysis, once a political and social deadlock exists, it is not necessary that the rising leader have great popularity or personal magnetism, sometimes it is sufficient that the main social classes be on the defensive and that they accept a political leader for largely negative reasons. Marxist use of the concept of Bonapartism may be extended to other cases. This broader use of the term, though somewhat less precise, still helps to clarify the complicated relations between political leaders and social classes. For example, in semicolonial or dependent countries, where the political and economic weakness of the domestic ruling classes has often made easy the rise of  "sui-generis" Bonapartist regimes, that are founded on state and military bureaucracies, and some times, up to a certain point, on labor bureaucracy.
In the Cuban case, some of its original traits have given a characteristic feature to the Bonapartist Revolutionary regime known as "Cuban Socialism". Namely, the anti-imperialist internationalism developed in the early stages of the revolution, including economic and public health assistance to many Third World countries, and a domestic relatively egalitarian system of incomes and supply of goods and services. However, we cannot conclude from the fact that the Cuban regime was not dragged by the Soviet implosion, that there was a substantial difference between both "Socialist countries". We have aforesaid that the nationalist character of the Cuban regime has contributed to its political stability. But the Castroite totalitarian domination has also strongly helped to that stability, hindering the emergence of a truly civil society, that is, free from state control. There are some minor autonomous organizations, but practically there are no important organizations comparable to, namely, the Catholic Church in Poland and East Germany, or a worker's Solidarnosc. Nothing alike the Czechoslovakian "Letter 77", the Hungarian "Petofi Circles", or the Soviet Samizdat has emerged until now from the Cuban intelligentsia.
Hal Draper has described as "Socialism from above" the conception of building a Socialist Society by a single leader or by a tiny group of well-meaning leaders, who know best what is convenient to the ignorant masses. This conception is alien to Karl Marx’s ideas, but has been often disguised as "orthodox Marxism", and presented in many variants, be they "reformist" or "radical" ones.  What is commonly know as Stalinism is surely the culmination of all those variants, and the most perverse, that was accompanied by the emergence of features of domination, oppression and exploitation that were unforeseen by the socialist classics. Again, we cannot strictly call "Stalinist" to the current Cuban regime. But this regime shares with former USSR and its client Eastern European states deep traits of the Stalinist Bonapartism and Cuban "Socialism building" does not substantially differ from the tragic parody that was performed in said countries until 1989-1991.

5) The great economic debate

The INRA (Land Reform National Institute) controlled the Cuban economy in the early years or the Revolution. At the same time, JUCEPLAN (Central Board of Planning), presided over by Fidel Castro, was created in 1960 with the aim of a coordination between the government's economic policy and the private sector, by way of an "indicative planning". The radicalization of the Revolution quickly modified the character of the Planning Board, which took the same features of their counterparts in the "Socialist Countries". Many planning specialists arrived from Eastern Europe and the USSR, bringing also the new theories on the utilization of market mechanisms in order to solve the grave troubles emerging from the bureaucratic Planning.
Industry Minister Che Guevara had adopted for its enterprises the "financing budget system". It was a highly centralized management system, founded on meeting production targets, no matter about the profitability of the production. Meanwhile, the INRA tried to apply the "economic calculus" method. It meant financial autonomy for the firms under its jurisdiction, which should be profitable and give monetary incentives to the workers, in order to increase production and to enhance its quality. In June 1963 Che Guevara published an article starting a discussion on the validity of the law of value in a socialist society, arguing that new values, as social justice and equality should interfere with market mechanisms. Charles Bettelheim replied in his work "Forms and Methods of Socialist Planning and the development of the productive forces" that the law of value would operate in Cuba as long as scarcity existed. Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, chairman of the INRA, agreed with the latter. Ernest Mandel, who was then an adviser to the Industry Ministry, supported Che's thesis in his essay "Mercantile categories in the transition stage". According to Mandel, the economic order of the societies in transition from capitalism to socialism was ruled by the conflict between two antagonistic economic rationales: the law of the plan and the law of the market. Each law corresponded to opposite social interests.  The former was the interest of the proletariat and the latter was the interest of the bourgeoisie and privileged social layers.
It was often an obscure and technical debate, but it was based on a political ground. The background was a growing economic integration with the Soviet bloc, and a resulting shift of the political balance in Cuba. In fact, the "technical" arguments should be read at two levels, being at the second level a true debate on the political fate of the Revolution.
Nevertheless, there was an important gap in the debate. Neither Che nor his opponents had come to grips with the problem of political power in, and the political organization of, all those societies where centralized or decentralized ways in planning and economic management were taking place. For the so-often-quoted classics, socialism was not reduced to a simple problem about how efficient the leaders could be in deciding on behalf of the people, the best way of life and work of the society. However, for the debating protagonists it was as if  "soviet power" had become a reality in Cuba and the whole problem no longer concerned them. But the problem indeed existed. The trouble emerges when statization of the means of production means is equated to "socialization" of them, and the political power is verticalized, with isolated decision-makers at the center and ordinary workers outside the decision-making structure. Then, no matter how devoted to revolutionary ideals the leaders or commanders may be, the seeds of a new exploitation system will be sown.
Castro solved the discussion a few years later. In 1966 he took Che's position and carried it to its extreme. The climax arrived in 1968, with the "revolutionary offensive", a sort of local version of  the Maoist "big leap forward" – a major popular mobilization to harvest ten million tons of sugar in 1970, that supposedly would launch Cuba onto the plain of economic self-sufficiency. The results of this drive were disastrous. Given the failure of the harvest, the administrative chaos and the general level of discontent in Cuba, the leadership adopted a new, Soviet-like economic policy, abandoning the primacy of the moral incentives as "idealist mistakes". Guevara's economic thought would just be rediscovered and readopted 15 years later.

6) The international scope of the Revolution.

As we have said above, the Cuban Revolution in its early years echoed through the Latin American continent. The revolutionary leadership was aware of the necessity of the extension of the revolution in order to survive, given the scarce resources and the economic underdevelopment of the island. Che Guevara reflected on the subject in one of his first speeches: "Social projections of the Rebel Army". There was an unsolved contradiction in his thought that would appear sometimes in his works. On the one hand, his conception of economic planning was clearly influenced by the traditional Soviet school, and the need of the nationalisation of basic resources and services. On the other hand, his awareness of the danger of isolation and his struggle for an internationalist policy in order to overcome the problem of a sieged Cuba and its inability to evade to a new dependence status. How could the Cuban internationalist policy fit in the world order? Guevara's ideas on this subject were consistent with his analysis and conclusions on the Cuban Revolution and ruled out the setting up of working class organisations for the struggle on an international scale. All that Cuba could do was to export his own Praxis and his own pattern of political, social and military organisation. Therefore thousands of young Latin American militants went to the revolutionary island in order to learn and train following the model of Sierra Maestra saga. Guerrillas emerged in Guatemala, Paraguay, Venezuela... and so did the first defeats.
The departure of Che, first to Congo and then to Bolivia, was the climax of that international policy. Nevertheless, that departure could be read in a different way. Namely his public criticism to Soviet foreign policy, and an implicit disagreement with the process of integration of the Cuban economy to a new labour division, within the area of "really existing socialism". In his farewell letter, he claimed that "I have been always identified with the foreign policy of our Revolution, and I continue to do so". He excluded himself from his identification with the "domestic policy" (because he did not say "...with the whole of the policy of our Revolution"). That remarkable pointing out confirms crystal-clear the double meaning of his departure.
It is said that the foreign policy of a government is the continuation of its domestic policy. In some moment the dichotomy would reach a crisis point and end in a way or another. Che Guevara's death in Nancahuazu marked the beginning of the end of the dichotomy and meant the strategic defeat of OLAS, an international organisation created by Cuban leadership in order to promote the revolution in Latin America. But the consequent shift in policy was not immediate. Still in the early days of 1968, in a Cultural Congress held at Havana, Fidel Castro launched his deepest attack on Soviet policy: "Nobody owns the whole revolutionary truth".
Nevertheless, in August 1968 Fidel supported publicly but critically the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. His statement surprised not a few of his supporters, and reflected both reconciliation with the USSR and his personal conception of power and socialism, which was directly opposed to the independent mobilisation of grass roots in the political arena. The emphasis on continental revolutionary strategy shifted to the battle against the underdevelopment of the island. The reconciliation with the Soviet leadership deepened after the failure of the ten million tons crop. Thus the domestic and the foreign policy were increasingly harmonised. Nevertheless Castroism’s prestige as a leadership in the struggle against oppression among the people of the colonial and neo-colonial countries did not fade. Neither did Cuba's reputation as the bearer of a new revolutionary spirit, whose symbol in the mind of masses of militants and fighters was Che Guevara.

7) Alignment with USSR and the institutionalization: The 1971/1986 period.

1970 was a watershed year. A new economic strategy was adopted by the leadership: the full integration of the Cuban economy to the Soviet Union’s and Eastern Europe's market. Besides trade, where Cuba was the sugar and tropical fruits provider, it included the adoption of economic forms, as material incentives and growing autonomy for the managers. A new "Management and Planning System" (SDPE) was adopted, according to Soviet patterns. On the other hand, besides the failure of the harvest and the administrative chaos in all the productive branches, there was in the people a generalized mood of rising discontent. High levels of absenteeism from work and other "unrevolutionary" attitudes developed during the period of the supposed "revolutionary offensive".
The leadership sought to channel the discontent creating a space for its expression within a different framework but guided by the same paternalistic rule as in the previous decade. New local, provincial and national bodies of power were created: the People's Assemblies. This institutionalization also involved the activation of the Communist Party structures, which had been inactive in the 1960s. The 1976 Constitution stated that the Party was the highest leading force of society. Fidel himself was institutionalized: First Secretary of the CC of the CP, President of the Council of State and of the Council of Ministers, and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. According to Fidel, the People's Power Assemblies would "give the masses decision making power in many problems... This implies the development of a new society and of genuinely democratic principles, replacing the administrative work habits of the first years of the Revolution. We must begin to substitute democratic methods for the administrative methods that run the risk of becoming bureaucratic methods."
Nevertheless, power decentralization implied by the election at municipal level sharply contrasted with what happened at the system's higher echelons. Rank and files could not select the members of the Provincial and National Assemblies, but the Municipal delegates, on lists of candidates provided by the Party and the "mass organizations" controlled by it. The Cuban people perceived these deficiencies in what was called "the most democratic system in the world". In July 1990 the magazine Bohemia published a series of articles on the "Popular Power". 40 % of the surveyed people felt that they played no role in the governing of their country and expressed their lack of confidence in their local delegate. 50 % stated that their delegates did not have the authority to resolve the problems with which they were confronted.
While these dramatic changes developed in the economic and political areas, on the cultural arena Cuba was ideologically subjected to the Soviet Union and any difference from that subjection was considered antisovietism. The Faculties of the University of Havana that used to be radical think tanks in the 1960s were silenced, the social sciences were practically banned, the Philosophy Faculty was diluted and the journal Pensamiento Critico was closed. The cultural scene became the stronghold of a generalized bureaucratization, formalization and ritualization. Authoritarianism, blind follower-ship, and privileged groups mushroomed in that period. Any different opinion to what was considered the official thinking was repressed. The realm of self-censorship and simulation was established, laying the base of the future indifference or aversion to the official ideology.

8) The rectification campaign and the "special period".

During the second half of the 1980s, the Cuban Revolution appeared to the media as the negative of what was then considered a movement toward democracy going on in the USSR. If Gorbachev was pragmatic, then Castro was intransigent. If the Soviet leader was future-oriented, then the Cuban Commander was backward looking. And so on. The new policies applied in the Soviet Union, perestroika and glasnost, sharply contrasted with what was called as the old-fashioned, dogmatic Marxism inherent in the "Rectification Campaign" on course in Cuba.
The meaning of the rectification campaign was never clear defined. For some Cubans it was a readjustment of the economic mechanisms within the economic policy. Some have understood it to be the means by which Fidel could rid himself of the technocrats around him. Others saw in it the beginning of a critical point at which the basic structure and workings of the Revolution would be reexamined. The first steps of the rectification were taken in the army, in the aftermath of the American invasion of Grenada. This move, to which nobody was opposed, carried an ominous message to the Cuban leadership. Anyway, Fidel began with speeches that echoed the mood of the 1960s and the promises of the 1970s about the people's control. He undertook the campaign as the opposition chief to his own regime, a role that he had taken on some other occasions, and gives such an unique coloration to Castroite Bonapartism.
Despite the deep common features with really existing socialism, Cuba was not in the same situation as the Soviet Union and its client states. These states, according to Zygmunt Bauman, "revealed an unbelievable inner weakness: they surrendered to an unarmed crowd while ostensibly threatened by no more than that crowd's resolute refusal to go home… Can one imagine a similar effect of a public gathering at Trafalgar Square? Or the Champ Elysees?"
Castro's reply was preventive. He was afraid that protests from bellow might emerge, triggered by the Eastern European and Soviet developments. Then he led with his characteristic audacity the Cuban workers' long contained anger, sacrificing some of his close aides when necessary, and resorting to the ideals of the 1960s in order to legitimize his new policy, seeking the survival in a post-Stalinist world. Who could best symbolize the guiding values of the rectification campaign but Che Guevara? It was necessary to take his legacy, for "Guevara had anticipated European Communism’s failures" and weaknesses, and he considered that his duty was "to avoid them in Cuba".

In a way, the falling of Berlin's wall and afterwards the Soviet implosion meant a political victory for the Castroite leadership, because it mproved them right in the debate with Gorbachev and Soviet reformers. Nevertheless, the Soviet collapse and the dissolution of Comecon, combined with the hardened American boycott, pushed Cuba to the brink of a catastrophe. The Cuban Government adopted a stern policy, known as "the special period in peace time". It consisted in generalized rationing of products and services, the military mobilization of "voluntary" work-force, decentralized management in factories and state farms, drastic cutbacks in oil and energy consumption, development of three key economic items: sugar, tourism and biotechnology. Besides these measures, foreign investment in joint ventures was encouraged, military cadres were increasingly involved in the economy management and the dollar was officially accepted in many transactions. With this policy the government sought to reinsert Cuba in the world market and thus the survival of the revolution... or, at least, of the regime.

American imperialism is the main culprit of the Cuban people's terrible shortages and hardships. The four-decades-old U.S. blockade pursues an exemplary punishment to Cuban people for daring to rebel against the imperial domination and seek a path on their own. Cuban government painful measures are forced by the American vicious policy. But the problem does not reside in the adopted harsh means, but in who are the decision-makers of the criteria for the distribution of the scarce goods and services.  The Cuban working class is nor discussing neither making those decisions. A responsible-to-nobody leadership, prioritizing the most efficient segments of Cuban economy, seeking its survival and competitiveness in the world market adopts decisions and criteria. If exceeding resources are distributed in a more or less egalitarian way between Cuban masses is not so important as the fact that they cannot decide who and which criteria should be prioritized or disregarded.

There is no doubt that Ernesto Che Guevara played in a very significant part in the building on the Cuban revolutionary regime, with all its achievements and shortcomings. But it is doubtless also that his memory and theoretical legacy are currently manipulated in order to justify actions and procedures that he would have surely condemned. Though we do not totally share Guevara's revolutionary strategy and tactics as a whole, we cannot but to agree with his revolutionary spirit, his rejection to capitalism, which nowadays is driving humanity to even greater horrors than he could  witness in his time. We coincide also with his will to struggle and sacrifice his own life in order to build a better society in which new women and men could live a more enriched and desalienated life. To achieve this we must return to the authentic Marxist tradition, that is, ordinary workers, women and men, developing themselves their own organizations, doing their own revolutions, doing their own mistakes, and achieving their own conquests. As Hal Draper said, enabling themselves, through struggle, to rule in their own behalf. Only fighting for democratic power they will educate themselves and will rise to the level in which they will be able to rule. There has never been other way for any class.