La Verdad Obrera (LVO), a publication of the Argentine Socialist Workers Party, has an interesting critical piece on the recent political developments in Cuba from a Trotskyist perspective.
The following incisive paragraphs were transcribed from the story:
Bureaucracy and corruption
Accompanying the announcement of prisoners being released and an economic adjustment is the corruption scandal at the highest levels of the state apparatus. Cuban authorities called upon Chilean businessman and Fidel Castro’s friend Max Marambio (ex-MIR militant, custodian to Salvador Allende and Marcos Enriquez Ominami’s presidential campaign director) to appear before them as he is accused of malfeasance and fraud against the Cuban state through his aliment company, Río Zasa. News of this tailspin into a scandal because of the strange death of general manager of the Chilean company Roberto Baudrand. Corruption in the highest levels of government splashed recently upon Cuban ministers Jorge Luis Sierra and Luis Manuel Ávila.
This situation confirms the denouncements reproduced in LVO 382 by Esteban Morales, researcher at the Center of Hemispheric Studies and United States in Havana, who was thrown out of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) for pointing out that “corruption is the true counterrevolution” (Esteban Morales’s blog, July 7) and correctly signals out that state corruption is the way to place capitalist restoration in leadership circles within the state and PCC.
Bureaucracy and power
The public reappearance of Fidel Castro, even though declarations have not been made, expresses the support of the historic leader to his brother and the existing unity in the old guard gerontocracy of the Castroist bureaucracy that is evermore supported by the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) to exercise power with an iron hand and keep up under his control the new phase of the Cuban political process. The active reappearance of Fidel looks to put a limit to the conflict between different factions of the governing bureaucracy and discipline them in a time beset by a world crisis and financial upheaval, the regime’s challenge is to diminish the crisis over the masses’ movement of taking new steps on the road to pro-capitalist reforms.
In this sense, the release of anti-Castro opposition prisoners is far from being an expansion of freedoms and political rights of the worker and peasant masses of Cuba, so that they can organize themselves to defend their gains (as we Trotskyists explain) express an attempt by the bureaucratic regime, haunted by the specter of financial ruin, to reinforce a political bargaining and making concessions to imperialist and restorationist forces.
(Image: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.)