This question was posed in an article published in late June and subsequently republished by several Greek mainstream media outlets. The author frames the issue as follows: "With the threat of a U.S. invasion hanging over Cuba, are these the final days of socialism on the island, or can Havana's recent reforms still save something from the wreckage?".
We know that this imperialist hostility did not arise without reason. It was provoked by the Cuban people's conscious and militant decision to overthrow, through revolutionary means and armed struggle, a bourgeois dictatorship and embark upon the construction of a new socialist society, free from the exploitation of man by man. The first socialist revolution in the Americas provoked the "holy" outrage of exploiters of every kind throughout the world, together with their political representatives and ideological mouthpieces.
For many years, the Cuban people defended that historic choice, at times with arms in their hands. It is equally well known that they pursued this path with the support of the Soviet Union and the other socialist states of Europe. During those decades, Cuba achieved remarkable social advances that made it—especially in the eyes of the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean, whose productive forces were at a comparable level of development—a living example of what a people can accomplish once capitalist barbarism has been overthrown.
Its achievements included:
- Universal, free healthcare through the establishment of an extensive and pioneering public health system.
- The eradication of illiteracy through the great Literacy Campaign of 1961, while functional illiteracy remains widespread in many countries across Latin America even today.
- Free, universal public education at every level.
- A high life expectancy and low infant mortality, surpassing that of many countries in the region.
- An outstanding record of medical internationalism, with thousands of Cuban doctors serving in countries across Africa, Latin America and Asia.
- A consistent commitment to social equality and the elimination of racial and social discrimination, even as such inequalities continue to deepen in neighbouring United States.
- Agrarian reform that redistributed vast landed estates into state-owned and cooperative forms of ownership.
- An unwavering anti-imperialist foreign policy, including the deployment of volunteer military forces to Africa, where Cuban internationalists played a decisive role in the liberation struggles of Angola and Namibia and in the defeat of apartheid in South Africa.
- An example of steadfast resistance that inspired revolutionary and progressive movements throughout Latin America and beyond through Cuba's refusal to bow to U.S. intervention, subversion and military intimidation.
- The promotion of mass participation in sport and culture, achieving remarkable international success while guaranteeing broad public access to the arts—areas increasingly commodified throughout the capitalist world.
The dangers posed by economic reforms
As part of its internationalist duty to express steadfast solidarity with Cuba and its people, the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) has consistently and responsibly studied both the hostile international environment in which the Cuban people continue their struggle and the developments taking place on the Island of the Revolution itself. For this reason, the Party has never concealed the fact that Cuba faced immense difficulties following the overthrow of socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
The mistaken assumption that socialist construction had entered an irreversible stage—a position widely held within the International Communist Movement—left Cuba unprepared for the dramatic changes that followed. Key sectors of the economy remained insufficiently developed, while self-sufficiency in essential goods had been neglected. As a result, the dissolution of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) and the collapse of socialist economic cooperation greatly intensified the hardships already caused by the criminal U.S. blockade.
These developments weakened and ultimately brought to an end, in 1992, the Process of Rectification of Errors and Negative Tendencies, the policy adopted by the Communist Party of Cuba in 1986 to reverse a series of market-oriented reforms introduced during the preceding years.
In the years that followed, the Communist Party of Cuba made significant concessions, reflected most clearly in the resolutions adopted at its Sixth Congress in 2011. One consequence was the emergence of private entrepreneurs legally permitted to employ up to one hundred wage workers.
A private business sector emerged, initially justified as a necessary retreat under exceptionally difficult circumstances. During the same period, the European Union—competing with the United States for influence in Cuba—intensified its own efforts to penetrate the Cuban economy through the so-called EU–Cuba Political Dialogue and Cooperation Agreement. At the same time, the EU continued to exploit its long-running campaign in support of counter-revolutionary forces inside Cuba, cynically invoking alleged human rights violations as a pretext for intervention.
Today, on the basis of decisions adopted by the Communist Party of Cuba and subsequently approved by the country's National Assembly, a series of measures is being implemented that further expand commodity-money relations within the economy. Among them are provisions allowing state enterprises to be converted into joint-stock companies, permitting private capitalists to employ more than one hundred workers, abolishing the state monopoly on foreign trade, facilitating the entry of foreign capital and banks, and opening key sectors of the Cuban economy to large-scale investment by capitalist enterprises. Land is also being made available for private business activity, among other measures.
However these policies may be presented—as measures designed to strengthen socialism—they move in precisely the opposite direction. They weaken social ownership of the means of production and central planning, both of which are fundamental laws governing socialist construction. In doing so, they create serious dangers for the Cuban people and for the historic achievements of their Revolution.
History offers an important lesson. In the Soviet Union, perestroika was never launched under the slogan of restoring capitalism. On the contrary, its advocates promised "more democracy, more socialism!" Yet the process ultimately culminated in the restoration of capitalism. For the same reason, attempts to justify Cuba's current reforms by pointing to China are deeply problematic. Capitalist relations of production have long since become dominant there, and China now competes directly with the United States for supremacy within the global capitalist system—for markets, geopolitical influence and the profits of Chinese billionaires, many of whom are members of the Communist Party of China, in competition with their American, European, Russian and other capitalist rivals.
Nor are comparisons with Lenin's New Economic Policy (NEP) historically valid.
The NEP was conceived as a deliberate, carefully planned and, above all, temporary retreat by the world's first workers' state. Within only a few years it had fulfilled its purpose, after which Soviet power advanced decisively toward consolidating and strengthening socialist relations of production. Furthermore, the capitalists of the NEP period—the so-called Nepmen—were not admitted into the Communist Party, the Party of the Bolsheviks. On the contrary, they were stripped of all political rights.
Immediately following the overthrow of socialism in the Soviet Union, the Communist Party of Greece undertook an extensive study of the causes that led to capitalist restoration. This analysis focused on economic reforms, changes introduced into the political superstructure and the strategic orientation of the international communist movement.
Among its conclusions, the Party highlighted the ideological struggle within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the growing dominance of market-oriented conceptions, and ultimately the decisive role played by the expansion of commodity production and market mechanisms, together with the weakening of social ownership of the means of production, central scientific planning and workers' control—all of which constitute essential principles of socialist society.
No matter how much some may believe they can rewrite history, they will not succeed.
The contradictions and dead ends of the capitalist mode of production are so profound that socialism remains the only realistic alternative for humanity—even if the gains of the great wave of socialist revolutions of the twentieth century have, for a time, been reversed.
The twenty-first century will continue to be illuminated by the example of the social achievements that peoples can attain in a world free from exploitation—a world such as the one that was built, despite its weaknesses and mistakes, in the Soviet Union, in Cuba and in the other socialist countries.
The words of Che Guevara will continue to inspire us: "For us, there is no other valid definition of socialism than the abolition of the exploitation of man by man."
And we shall continue to be guided by Fidel Castro's historic call: "Socialism or Death!"
The twenty-first century will inevitably become the century of new victorious socialist revolutions.
