Reflections on Cuba

Ask ten socialists at random whether public ownership is a good thing and you’ll likely receive a fairly uniform answer. Ditto over quite a wide range of basic ideas, such as the right to strike, opposition to nuclear weapons, progressive taxation, and so on. Ask the same group of socialists to characterise the nature of a foreign movement or country and the answer can start to diverge dramatically, dependent on the socialist tradition or particular theoretical viewpoint the responder might adhere to.

Cuba is a case in point. Most socialists will agree the Cuban revolution, led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, was a good thing. A huge majority will oppose US imperialism’s economic blockade of that island nation. But is Cuba fully socialist? Or is it a ‘deformed worker’s state’? Should Cuba be defended unconditionally or critically? And which way is Cuba headed – back to capitalist restoration or towards a non-Leninist form of socialism?

If you want decisive – and possibly decisively wrong - answers to these questions look elsewhere. There are dozens of socialist publications at home and abroad who will trot out a well developed ‘party’ line on Cuba. DGS online magazine has decided to take a slightly different approach. We’ve asked four active socialists – all from different political traditions and backgrounds and all who’ve travelled in Cuba recently and experienced it at first hand - to give us their take on what Cuba was really like and where it might be headed.

We hope this can kick start a reflective rather than polemical debate on the future of the Cuban revolution, and perhaps the development of progressive movements in Latin America as a whole. Click on each of the four quadrants on the map of Cuba below to access four very different short essays on Cuba, and if you feel like contributing to the debate, please write to us at democraticgreensocialist@talktalk.net