The legacy of Fidel Castro contains two critical lessons for the international working class. The first is that workers will never advance toward communism under a leadership that holds on to capitalist inequalities. The second: Reform victories under the profit system are neither adequate nor lasting. Only a dictatorship of the proletariat can smash racism, sexism, and capitalist exploitation. Only a communist society, run by and for workers, can serve the needs of our class.
In the wake of Castro’s death on November 25, the bosses’ media celebrated “the end of communism” in Cuba. The left-liberal media acclaimed “the Cuban experiment” was to move the working class toward “socialist” or even “communist” liberation. Both camps are wrong. Essentially, the Fidelistas were liberal reformers. They exerted state control over the means of production while preserving the rotten core of the profit system, from wages and social inequality to racist unemployment and incarceration. In short, they were state capitalists. They traded domination by U.S. imperialism for the heavy hand of the imperialist Soviet Union under the rotten, revisionist (fake-left) Nikita Khrushchev. Fidel actively encouraged a cult of personality, elevating his own erratic judgment over the collective wisdom of the working class. Eventually, Cuba’s market-oriented tilt under Castro exposed his self-proclaimed Marxist-Leninism for what it always was—a deception.
Where Castro Went Wrong
Initially, Fidel was daring and resourceful. In 1959, his small rebel group won state power through armed struggle. It smashed the oppressive ruling clique of President Fulgencio Batista—a big defeat for U.S. imperialism, which had enjoyed free rein in exploiting Cuba since the Spanish-American War of 1898. Castro won support from Cuban workers with significant reforms: a price freeze, a tax cut, reduced rents, and, most notably, universal literacy and health care. He abolished official segregation and opened labor unions to Black members. He expelled the Mafia gangsters who controlled Havana and ran its gambling, drug, and commercial sex rackets. He made mortal enemies of the U.S. bosses by expropriating $1 billion worth of U.S. corporate holdings, including oil refineries, banks, and sugar mills.
In response, the U.S. rulers slapped an economic embargo on the island nation. Beginning under the Dwight Eisenhower administration and escalating under President John F. Kennedy, the U.S. began organizing an invasion to overthrow Castro. Meanwhile, several hundred thousand white middle-class Cubans—virtually the entire urban professional class and commercial bourgeoisie—fled to Miami, taking much of the country’s financial reserves with them.
Facing desperate shortages of basic commodities, Castro could have pursued a communist path of self-sufficient economic development. He could have liberated Cuba from the world market and freed workers from the grip of imperialism. Had he chosen that path, it would have lowered material living conditions for many in the short term—though not for the most oppressed workers, who might have become the base for a true revolution.
But Castro was limited by his nationalist ideology. He could not envision a fundamental reorganization of social and production relations. Instead, he turned to a new trading partner—Moscow. By 1960, Khrushchev had openly renounced the revolutionary goal of a working-class dictatorship over society. The Soviet Union’s state capitalist regime wanted to supplant U.S. imperialism in the world market and saw its opening in Cuba, on the doorstep of the U.S. bosses. The Soviet Union agreed to provide Cuba with crude oil, industrial goods, and a $100 million loan in return for sugar, fruit, fiber, and hides (Peter Bourne, Fidel: A Biography of Fidel Castro, 1986). Cuba’s die was cast. For the next three decades, until the Soviets’ economy collapsed, Cuba was tied to an imperialist super-power that systematically betrayed the great Russian Revolution.
Socialist Speeches, Capitalist Deeds
In April 1961, Castro’s forces routed the U.S. CIA-directed invasion at the Bay of Pigs, drawing Cuba even more tightly within the Soviet orbit. Fidel declared, “What the imperialists cannot forgive us, is that we have made a socialist revolution under their noses” (Bourne, 1986). In fact, Castro’s socialism had a solid capitalist foundation. Workers were exploited to increase profits and accumulate capital. Guided by Soviet advisors, Fidel’s regime imposed rigid discipline in production, with higher pay for more efficient workers. As with every wage system, these differentials divided the working class.  
By 1962, Cuba’s economy had reached full capacity. More coal and electric plants, transmission lines, and roads were needed. Short of hard currency, Castro’s government subordinated the country to the world market by expanding exports of its one marketable commodity. Cuba became the Soviets’ “sugar colony.” To accumulate more capital, the government imposed “communist consciousness” by cutting wages in the state sector for all but the lowest-paid.
Slowly but surely, capitalist policies expanded the private profit sector. First, licenses were sold to individuals to open small businesses for auto repair, carpentry, and plumbing. By 1981, private contracting cooperatives were building 38 percent of new housing units. Private farmers diverted produce from the state, which paid low fixed prices, and sold it instead on the open market for their private benefit. To increase production and profits, the sugar industry was mechanized, reducing the number of cane cutters from 350,000 in the 1960s to 72,000 in 1985. A new elite was born, defined by their wealth in money.
Apartheid Tourism and Racist Inequalities
In recent years, these capitalist practices have grown even stronger. After a boost from Barack Obama and the reopening of U.S. diplomatic relations, the Cuban tourist industry now earns as much hard currency as the sugar industry. Mexican and Spanish bosses can own up to 51 percent of hotels and export 100 percent of their profits, earned on the sweat of powerless hotel workers. Prostitution, a hallmark of the bad old Batista/Mafia days, is booming once again.
Local workers are barred from these hotels as guests; they call it “apartheid tourism.” Like capitalism everywhere, capitalism in Cuba needs racism to divide and super-exploit workers. [Spanish ships brought 900,000 Africans to Cuba as slaves, about twice the number forced brought to what is now the U.S. (http://bit.ly/2gE6fH5.] While Fidel’s early reforms undeniably helped poor Black workers, he overstated the case in 1961, when he claimed that racist discrimination in Cuba was a thing of the past. In 2005, a year before the end of Fidel’s rule as president, Black workers were unemployed at double the rate of white workers. While darker-skinned Cubans made up somewhere between one-third and two-thirds of the population, they accounted for 85 percent of the nation’s inmate population (Al Jazeera, 8/13/15). Under Fidel’s brother and successor, Raul Castro, as Cuba has accelerated its market capitalist reforms, racist inequalities have kept pace. From Al Jazeera:
“The problem,” said Alejandro de la Fuente, director of the Institute of Afro-Latin Studies at Harvard University, “is that the new policies produce losers, because their chief concern is not social justice, but economic growth and survival. None of these policies is racially defined, but they produce new forms of social inequalities, and those inequalities tend to be racialized quickly because of unequal access.”
Under the relentless pressure of the profit system, Fidel’s most admired reforms have suffered. “[A]doption of the Soviet model of economic development contributed to two internal factors that have undermined health care: low productivity of labor and the growth of bureaucracy. Social expenditures declined from 70% of the GNP in 1970 to 36% in 1995,” after the end of Soviet bloc aid (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7593738). As of 2012, according to Al Jazeera, Cuba’s infant mortality rate remained lower than the rate in the U.S. Life expectancy was among the world’s highest. But non-emergency operations were routinely delayed, and there was a chronic shortage of medicines (6/18/12).
The Only Solution is a Communist Revolution!
Yes, the liberal reformers of Fidel’s Cuba improved most workers’ standard of living, at least for a time. They constructed a defense against hurricanes unequaled in the hemisphere. But despite these achievements, the return of capitalism to Cuba is restoring all the evils that are part and parcel of the profit system. In field and factory, Cuban workers need an egalitarian society that will abolish the wage system and its artificial division between intellectual and manual labor. Like Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the sweatshop economy in today’s China, Castro-style “socialism” has confirmed the fallacy of the two-stage theory of communism. When a revolution leaves capitalist components in place, it inevitably decays back to full-blown capitalism.
The working class of Cuba needs what Fidel Castro often promised but never pursued: a communist revolution.

NEW YORK CITY, December 7—The hung jury in the trial of kkkop Michael Slager who murdered Walter Scott once again exposes the courts’ role in upholding a racist system. We will continue to fight for justice for Walter, and the countless targets of racist police murders.
The court system is part of the capitalist state, an arm of the ruling class to enforce racist laws and a racist prison system. While there have been a few instances where the courts were forced to convict, their main job is to work with the police to enforce racism and anti-working class laws designed to keep the capitalists in power.
When you go to court, the judges, the prosecutors the police and even the defense attorneys all work together on a daily basis. Cop Slager was part of that system, a system that needs its police to feel free to terrorize workers, especially Black workers.
Walter was a 50-year-old forklift operator who had served two years in the U.S. Coast Guard. He was struck with five bullets, three of them in the back.
In this particular case, the bosses are trying to put the blame for the acquittal on the jury. Certainly the jury was full of racism. It’s a society that was founded on slavery and the forced segregation of Black and white workers. It’s a society that has filled the prisons with Black men and women, and filled our minds with racist lies.
Slager chose a jury trial because his lawyers played the overwhelming odds that the racism would prevail. His lawyers knew the prosecutor would not take the path of exposing this murder as an inevitable outcome of a racist system.
We will fight for justice for Walter Scott in the streets, in the courts, in the schools, in our work places and every other battlefield. Ultimately, justice will be in the form of freeing ourselves to smash capitalism once and for all.

BAY AREA, UNITED STATES—This year, 2016, is the 50th anniversary of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) in China. The 10-year period from 1966 to 1976 is viewed by communists as the most left period in post-revolutionary China, the farthest any society yet progressed toward trying to put ordinary industrial and agricultural workers in charge of running things. It is also the period of China’s history most attacked and slandered by the capitalists who now rule China.
These political traitors who still call themselves the “Communist” Party of China have grown incredibly wealthy at the expense of the working class. Most academics in Europe and North America are eager to amplify and spread the distortions and lies about the GPCR published by the capitalist scholars and politicians who dominate China today.
There is another side to the story. Gatherings in China celebrating the positive accomplishments of the GPCR, mostly low profile, have taken place in a number of cities. There have also been pro-communist gatherings in other countries, including the U.S. One in particular was held in the Bay Area of northern California in October.
The evening centered on reproductions of two giant character posters (dazibao), one written by communists from the U.S. who were living and working in China. One of the poster writers, in her 80s and wheelchair bound, was present at the conference. She was an inspiration to the younger generations present. In 1966, she wrote posters criticizing the Chinese authorities for giving them and other foreign “experts” special treatment, like better living conditions and no expectation for manual labor. They declared that they, too, aspired to be real revolutionaries and the special treatment undermined their political will and created a separation from the Chinese masses. The special treatment undermined internationalism.
At the event, many new publications were discussed about the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution at the Margins by Yiching Wu (Harvard University Press, 2014) starts from the perspective that the restoration of capitalism began with Mao Zedong’s betrayal of the revolutionary aspirations of the masses of left workers and students mobilized in the first months of the GPCR. He writes, “Quashing the restless rebels as early as late 1967, Maoist politics … exhausted its once explosive energy. … [and] eventually led to the historic changes in the social, economic and political life in post-Mao China.”

To find out more about the Cultural Revolution you can see three articles from PL Magazine, available on PLP.org:
The Gpcr & The Reversal Of Workers’ Power In China (1971)
Whither China? (1972)
Why Were Communist Revolutions Reversed In China And The Ussr?
Additionally:
The titles and brief summaries of the papers from the San Francisco Conference are now posted at www. wholeworldjustice.org

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) was an historic uprising of the working class led by the most advanced communist ideas at the time. It was the first time the working class attempted to take state power back from a former communist party that had returned to capitalism.
The leader of the Communist Party of China (CPC), Mao Tse Tung, initially encouraged the Cultural Revolution to get rid of a few people in the leadership of the Party, the left forces in the Cultural Revolution recognized that the official Communist Party  was already in the hands of a capitalist ruling class at the time the GPCR began, that the vast majority (90 percent) of the leading cadres were part of that oppressor class, that the People’s Liberation Army (or PLA, the military) was its tool to smash the real Left and maintain power, that the new “red” bourgeoisie had emerged during the 17 years from 1949-66 from the ranks of the revolutionaries themselves and, therefore, that the GPCR was not, as Mao said, a struggle to consolidate proletarian rule, but the first revolution in history to attempt to take power back from the fake “communists,” known as revisionists. This analysis led the left workers and students leading the Cultural Revolution to carry out the following political campaigns.
1) They demanded the ouster of the chief representative of China’s “red” capitalists, Chou En-Lai, along with the high-ranking economic and administrative ministers he was sheltering.
2) They demanded that the GPCR be carried into the Army Officer Corps, which they saw a part of the new ruling class. They engaged in arms seizures from the PLA, raiding depots and arms trains, on the principle that a revolution to overthrow the bourgeoisie had to be an armed struggle of the masses.
3) They opposed China’s foreign policies of alliance with capitalist countries. To carry this through they seized foreign ships in the harbors, burned the British consulate in August of 1967, launched a liberation struggle in Hong Kong, seized Soviet arms going to Vietnam over China’s railroad lines and opposed China’s nuclear development program.
4) They began to discuss and implement the formation of a new Communist party, given their assumption that the CPC had become the party of the bourgeois apparatus that was restoring capitalism under the ideological cover of a fake brand of communism.
The left forces presented a view of what was going on in the GPCR which was contradictory to the official views of the CPC under Mao, who claimed “95% of the cadres are good” vs. the left-wing forces in the GPCR who said “90% of the political cadres must step aside.”
Fake “Communists” Spread Capitalist Lies
To amplify how completely the Chinese bosses have now moved to capitalism, they now tell the same lies about the Cultural Revolution as the U.S. bosses. The distorted historical narrative told by the capitalists who currently rule China, and retold and amplified by capitalists around the world, is that the Cultural Revolution was “10 lost years” in which the Chinese economy was on the brink of collapse.
However, when one of the participants in a San Francisco conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution went to China with a group of Western economists in the midst of the Cultural Revolution in 1972, the iconic liberal mainstream economist John Kenneth Galbraith was in the delegation and reviewed economic data made available by the Chinese leadership and calculated that the GDP was growing at about 9% per year, similar to the rate touted as the “Chinese miracle” after the restoration of capitalism after the late 1970s.
The participation of millions of workers and farmers in political meetings did not cause production to stop, or even to slow down. The criticism of factory or farm managers to a previously unheard of degree, and active involvement in “non-productive” activities that amounted to having a say in the running of society, in fact energized the masses of workers and farmers.
The Communists accomplished feats that would be called miracles under capitalism, starting with spreading literacy across a country of a billion people, introducing health care and ending starvation in what had been one of the poorest countries in the world prior to the communist revolution. Their efforts in the GPCR showed the importance of continuing the struggle for workers power even after a revolution. But to ultimately succeed in building a communist society we have to look at the errors of the CPC as well. While the left forces in the GPCR did so many great things they ultimately were defeated and capitalism was firmly established in China. It is important for us to try to understand why the GPCR failed.
One Step Forward,
Two Steps Back
Communist movements will inevitably make many mistakes big and small. The Progressive Labor Party previously believed in fighting for socialism as an intermediary step towards communism. Now, largely from looking at what happened in the former Soviet Union and China, we are fighting for the building of a communist society directly. It is not the only correction we have made or will have to make going forward. For the working class to take and hold power it is essential that the revolutionary communist movement be able to correct ideological errors and bad practice. Criticism and self-criticism of our ideas and activity is the only way we can deal with problems and mistakes that arise. The leadership of the Party especially, has to honestly and soberly evaluate their own ideas and practice and be open to criticism from others.
Perhaps the main weakness that led to the defeat of the GPCR was the belief in the cult of the individual surrounding Mao Tse Tung. A big weakness of the old communist movement was that it built up individual leaders as people who could do no wrong. While the Left forces in China recognized that China had moved back to capitalism, they held on to the wrong idea that Mao, the leader of the country, was not a supporter of the backward changes. He was, and ultimately Mao used his influence and his control of the Army to put down the revolution.
Struggle, Fail, Struggle… WIN
The lessons of the GPCR are one of the driving forces in history that has given PLP the confidence that the working class will fight for a communist future. It has also helped us understand the need to continually struggle against capitalist ideology of individualism in ourselves and in the communist movement. The effort of the working class in the GPCR has been an invaluable contribution to the fight for communism.
Other lessons learned from the GPCR:
Confidence in the working class and the need for a mass communist party: We are building a party that is open to everyone who wants to fight for a communist future for the working class. People can make contributions in many different ways and the more people who participate in building the Party and ultimately running society the better off we will be.
Breakdown of the separation between “experts” and “followers.” In CHALLENGE, we try to explain what is going on in the world as well as have articles on fighting back in the class struggle. We believe that we can only understand the world by trying to change it and knowledge and understanding comes out of putting communist ideas into practice. We call this “better red than expert!”
The struggle for communism will continue for generations. The working class taking state power is only the beginning of the fight to build a communist society.
This 50th anniversary of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is an opportunity to struggle with our coworkers and friends to renew our efforts to smash this racist, sexist, imperialist system of capitalism once and for all. Fighting back also means understanding what previous generations in this fight have done – both right and wrong. As the world lurches toward fascism and inter-imperialist war, we have our work cut out for us. We, heirs to the struggle for a communist world, truly honor the heroic masses who fought in the GPCR by organizing on our jobs and in our mass organizations for armed communist revolution. Dare to struggle, dare to win!