When+Castro+falls+unions+will+celebrate,+Michael+Schmidt,+S+Star

Saturday Star, October 14, 2006 //Edition 1//
=When Castro falls, trade unions will celebrate=


 * Michael Schmidt**

Few heads of state have held sway for a full half-century. Castro is one of the most derided, celebrated and misunderstood figures of the post-war era. Now, bleeding profusely in the gut, winter-grey, liver-spotted and with sandbagged eyes, the "Maximum Leader" - as he prefers to be known - has loosened his vice-like grip on power for the first time, anticipating dynastic succession to his brother Raul.

Cuba in the popular imagination means Castro's success in defying the US for so long, the image of Cliché Guevara, the gentle seductions of its hip-swaying music, and the charm of antique cars prowling its dilapidated boulevards.

It matters little if Castro is as loaded as Forbes magazine recently claimed: his self-impoverished fiefdom is not about flash or cash, but sheer naked power. Likewise, his "revolution" has only mimicked communism for reasons of pragmatism.

So a hurricane history tour of Cuba is necessary, courtesy of historians Sam Dolgoff and Frank Fernandez. The Cuban working class has a long history of militancy, from the Ten Years' War against Spain from 1868, through the founding by militants such as Enrique Roig San Marti­n in 1855 of the trade union movement, to the Independence War of 1895-1898 and the subsequent resistance to American domination.

Thus the communist Partido Socialista Popular (PSP) of Cuba was a real Johnny-come-lately at its birth in 1925.

And while the PSP's rank-and-file established solid, militant trade unions, its leaders were traitorous: they backed the brutal, US-backed regime of Gerardo Machado; and in 1933 they tried and failed to prevent his overthrow by ordinary anarchist and communist workers.

A brief interim government was soon replaced by Fulgencio Batista, who deepened Machado's oppression against independent working-class organisations. Batista soon called on the aid of the PSP leadership to run the state's new union federation, the Confederacion de Trabajadores de Cuba (CTC), on Mussolinist-Peronist lines.

Batista was given the boot in the elections of 1944 by his former colleague Ramon Grau San Marti­n, who removed the CTC's communist leadership.

Batista staged an armed comeback in 1952, sparking the Cuban Revolution in response from a range of opponents, including a lawyer called Castro.

Castro's mixed-bag Movimiento 16 de Julio (M26J) were handed Cuba on a silver platter by a windfall: when Batista fled into exile in 1959, he unknowingly handed over power to a secret M26J supporter, enabling Castro's tiny force to enter Havana with barely a shot being fired.

He only declared himself to have "always been" a Marxist when, in 1961, the island, suffering from the US blockade, sold its sugar to Russia, whose condition for the purchase was the rehabilitation of those hated former allies of Batista: the PSP.

A militarised police state was established and working-class autonomy was crushed. The true nature of Castro's revolution-by-decree is further demonstrated by the following: his first cabinet contained not one single proletarian and he established relations with the Vatican.

I'm tempted to paraphrase Donald Woods on who will celebrate when the Cuban regime collapses because so many will (including those odious types in Miami), but among them will be the remnants of Cuba's free trade unions - both those in exile for 35 years, and a new generation working underground in Havana.


 * From: http://www.thestar.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=3485831**

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