When Anastas Mikoyan, then deputy head of government of the Soviet Union, visited Cuba for the first time in February 1960, the Cuban Revolution was barely a year old. "Yes, [Castro] is a revolutionary. Completely like us,’ he declared. ‘I felt as though I had returned to my childhood."^[1] Mikoyan had been one of the leaders of the Russian Revolution in the Caucasus, but that had been four decades prior. The stagnant Soviet Union did not have the allure of the young, bearded guerrilla fighters in Cuba.

Nowadays, 66 years later, the Cuban Revolution appears to most foreign observers as even more fossilized than Mikoyan’s Soviet Union. For example, in the different Communist movements within the Spanish state — the environment in which I had my political education — open admiration of the Cuban Revolution tends to be associated with an older generation that has lost touch with the world. Before the decades-long US siege on Cuba was severely strengthened under Donald Trump and Marco Rubio, and the humanitarian crisis in the island has made some sort of support for Cuba fashionable and easy, an explicit defense of the Cuban government is normally paired with negative labels such as campist or tankie, not to mention a historically deeply critical assessment from much of the Trotskyist tradition. However, the history of the Cuban Revolution is, luckily, far more complicated than much of the criticism from the left suggests. My aim in this article is to provide an anti-sectarian vision that goes against the grain on what the contribution of the Cuban Revolution is to the history of Marxism and Communism and, in essence, why all Marxists should be invested in studying and appreciating the past, present, and future of the Cuban Revolution.

What do we talk about when we talk about the Cuban Revolution?

Most who are familiar with the Cuban Revolution will know that, at first, it was not a Marxist revolution. In 1960, Fidel Castro had famously declared that he was not a Communist, and the socialist character of the Revolution was not declared until mere hours before the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, two years after the revolutionaries took power. The fact that the revolutionary struggle was not led by a Communist party (the Communist Party of Cuba was not created until 1965) and carried an originally nationalist character was a source of criticism from different currents of Marxism. Ironically, while the first accusations of the Revolution being simply an insufficiently Marxist populist nationalist regime came from militants of the original Cuban Marxist-Leninist party, the PSP, nowadays it is a popular talking point among Trotskyist critiques of the Revolution.^[2] Again, Cuba’s relationship with the different branches of the global left has been a complex one.

The Cuban Revolution might not have had pure Marxist origins, but it is inaccurate to portray it as non-socialist. In October 1968, in the 100th anniversary of an uprising led by Carlos Manuel de Céspedes that would signal the start of Cuba’s fight for independence, Fidel Castro remarked that "in Cuba there has only been one Revolution: the one started by Carlos Manuel de Céspedes on October 10th 1868. And which our people carry forward in this very moment."^[3] The Revolution saw and still sees itself as the logical culmination of Cuba’s fight for freedom, which in Cuba’s specific circumstances could only take a socialist twist. The program was clear: in 1969, Fidel declared that "Marx conceptualised socialism as a result of development; today, for the underdeveloped world, socialism is even a condition for development."^[4]

The socialist character of the Revolution came, first, due to the often underappreciated egalitarian character in Fidel’s political and economic thought that can be observed even in his first speeches — notably in History Will Absolve Me — and in the strong connection between the Revolution and the working class, which historians such as Steve Cushion have highlighted.^[5] The process of nationalizations began by targeting those goods that had been embezzled by Batista’s regime, but the measures targeting US interests in the island swiftly followed in the second half of 1960, drawing a clear connection between anti-imperialism and the nationalization of production. Furthermore, the measures against the Cuban national bourgeoisie started in late 1960, a process that would be accelerated by a class exodus to Florida. The Cuban bourgeoisie would disappear as a class during the 1960s: the 1968 Revolutionary Offensive culminated this process with the nationalization of small businesses and the virtual abolition of private business in the country. Secondly, of course, this socialist character surfaced due to the position of the Soviet Union as both an enemy of the United States and as an ally to underdeveloped nations.

Cuba and the Global Cold War

Thanks to the October Revolution, the wretched of the earth could stop philosophizing with a hammer and a sickle and start doing so with AK-47s and long-range missiles. Traditionally, Soviet-Cuban friendship has been seen as Latin America’s entry into a binary Cold War — the Cold War understood as a battle between two hegemons. This view has been complicated by scholars associated with the ‘new Cold War history’, who have stressed that the Cold War was rather a polycentric conflict between two visions of modernity, also rooted in regional tensions.^[6] The Cuban Revolution is not any different from other struggles for national and social liberation in Latin America and around the world, such as the Haitian Revolution, the Palestinian liberation movement, or the Vietnam War. As we have seen, these two stories intersected in Cuba: the binary Cold War complicated and gave another twist to a conflict that is deeply hemispherical — that of US imperialism in the Americas.

However, Soviet-Cuban relations were not always placid. Khrushchev’s decision to negotiate with the United States during the Cuban Missile Crisis without securing better conditions for an island that had recently experienced an attempted invasion led to the first low in Soviet-Cuban relations. An additional dimension of this conflict is that it occurred during the time of the Sino-Soviet Split, in which Cuba held an uncomfortable position. As Polish journalist KS Karol argued in the late 1960s, "Castro’s stomach is in Moscow but his heart is in Beijing."^[7] While Soviet help proved vital — not as a simple subsidy but as a mechanism to overturn unequal exchange between industrialized and underdeveloped nations — once again, historical reality has proven to be much more complicated than most accounts of Cuba’s position within the global left.

To understand Cuba’s position within the history of Marxism, we must understand the Marxism of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara. Mostly known for his larger-than-life image as a romantic guerrilla fighter, the work of scholars such as Helen Yaffe has shown that his contribution to political economy is also invaluable.^[8] Guevara’s Marxism demonstrated a deep critical engagement with the Soviet and Eastern European socialist models, a vision that was radically open to learning from socialist and non-socialist experiences and, significantly, a commitment to the unity of theory and praxis — this was not just a sophistical exercise, but an active effort to understand how to break the chains of underdevelopment without resorting to capitalist mechanisms and, ultimately, build socialism.

Guevara’s Marxism did share elements of Mao’s critique of the Soviet model. According to scholar of Cuban Marxism Renzo Llorente, a few common features would be a focus on the peasantry as revolutionary subjects and on guerrilla warfare, the preference for moral incentives rather than material ones, the idea that skipping historical stages in order to reach socialism was feasible, and an opposition to bureaucracy and peaceful coexistence with imperialism.^[9] These are all elements that were critical responses to Soviet orthodoxy, but what makes Guevara’s Marxism even more interesting is that this was not a product of a direct imitation of the Chinese model: it was an original response to the wider crisis of the Soviet Union’s leadership of the global Communist movement that was based on the specificities of Cuba.

Guevara, again, went against orthodoxy. Guevara engaged in a fascinating public debate, known as the Great Debate, in which he and his followers argued against Soviet-inspired Cuban Communists — led by Carlos Rafael Rodríguez — on the question of which economic model should Cuba adopt. While the more orthodox participants in the debate favored a Sovietized model, Guevara devised the Budgetary Finance System (BFS), which was based on overcoming the use of various capitalist mechanisms that the Soviet Union was still using. Even though he did not think the Soviet Union had become capitalist, he asserted that it was a "hybrid’ system and that ‘the theory is failing, because they have forgotten that Marx existed."^[10]

Considering this, it is not hard to understand the overwhelming appeal that Cuba had in the 1960s among the global left, but especially from the margins. Out of all the participants in the Great Debate, only two were foreigners — Ernest Mandel and Charles Bettelheim, the former a Trotskyist and the latter a China-aligned author. Cuban socialism was grappling with the circumstances that made Mikoyan nostalgic when he first visited Cuba: the triple effect of de-Stalinization, peaceful coexistence, and economic stagnation in the Soviet Union. As Marxist political economist Samir Amin argued, "Che, Mao, and Palmiro Togliatti, each in his own way, had understood that the Soviet model had exhausted its capacity to innovate and move society along the path to socialism. Each in his own way had understood that the deviation led to a capitalist restoration, the inevitability of which was clearly revealed in the years 1985-91."^[11] In this sense, Cuban socialism must be seen in the same context as the Sino-Soviet Split, the rise of the New Left (and eventually Eurocommunism) in the West, and the economic reforms in Yugoslavia, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia during the 1950s and the 1960s.

When Eric Hobsbawm attended the 1968 Cultural Congress of Havana, he saw (quoting from Richard Evans’ biography of him) “neo-Dadaists, Trotskyist surrealists, Reichians arguing for the political function of the orgasm, and other representatives of [and now it’s Hobsbawm’s words] ‘that fringe of dottiness which is so engaging a part of the left [sic].”^[12] Cuba was an alternative, a third way out of the Sino-Soviet Split that had not yet been stagnated by revolutionary bureaucracy, where Trotsky’s words about revolutionary life still rang true: "life in Revolution is camp life. Personal life, institutions, methods, ideas, sentiments, everything is unusual, temporary, transitional, recognizing its temporariness and expressing this everywhere, even in names."^[13] The revolutionary island was an ideological refuge for critics of Soviet orthodoxy and the Brezhnev Doctrine, revolutionaries who believed that the second and third Vietnams would also be in the Third World and, in general, Marxists who were aiming at a new understanding of what socialism could be.

The 1960s Cuban heresy, therefore, remains relevant for those interested in criticizing the Soviet experience from the left, especially considering the Gorbachev years. Guevara’s ideas echoed avant la lettre elements of later Marxist tendencies, such as value criticism or Wertkritik. Some of his lines, for example, when he asserts that "abstract labour, which forms the value of the commodity, is a historical category, a specific form of social labour, only inherent to the mercantile economy", which he treated as an "important" consideration when discussing a "socialist regime", anticipate the work of Marxists such as Moishe Postone or Michael Heinrich.^[14]

It is true that the 1970s saw a Sovietization of the Cuban system. The economic system until the mid-1980s resembled the Soviet one much more than the BFS. However, Cuba still maintained original elements that remain key contributions to the global Communist movement. Cuba experimented with workers’ democracy, especially in times of crisis, to a largely unprecedented degree in a dictatorship of the proletariat, especially in a country that is under a constant state of siege. Most famously, Cuba still punched way above its weight in terms of internationalism and forced the Soviet Union to strengthen its support of national liberation in the Third World, most importantly in southern Africa. Cuba sent hundreds of thousands of soldiers to Angola to help defeat apartheid South Africa’s army and liberate Namibia, Angola, and South Africa. Again, Cuba’s position remained an independent one in national and international policies.

Cuba and the post-Soviet world

The world that has just been described does not exist anymore. The Soviet Union disappeared 35 years ago, Cuba is isolated, and the time when it played such a central role in the imagination of the global left has long passed. The global socialist movement has changed, but has Cuba changed as well?

A useful framework is what Helen Yaffe called the ‘Guevarista pendulum’, which showcases the constant dialectic between the ideal that the Revolution still adheres to (Guevara’s model) and necessity, which might force pragmatic measures in other directions. Yaffe has described a series of swings towards and away Guevara’s ideas between the 1960s and the 21st century.^[15] Since Miguel Díaz-Canel became the President of the Republic, one of the most popular mottos of the Revolution has been ‘we are continuity [somos continuidad]’, which one can find everywhere in, for example, Díaz-Canel’s posts on social media. Cuban revolutionaries know that they do not live in the 1960s anymore, but the ideal that they adhere to is still the same one: a Marxism that is radically open and Cubanized, but circumstances have not always allowed it to appear as the Revolution would want to.

And in this case, ‘circumstances’ is a euphemism for the US blockade, which has seen many phases and started in 1960. The US blockade of Cuba is the longest and most comprehensive set of unilateral sanctions imposed on a country in modern history, and, at the time of writing, includes a complete fuel blockade on a nation that is not self-sufficient in terms of energy. The blockade is an insurmountable condition for any attempt at overcoming Cuba’s underdevelopment. Any call for industrialization or further liberalization of the economy faces the barrier of the blockade: where would machinery and raw materials be imported from? Who would trade with Cuba? What about foreign current reserves? These abstract criticisms of the Cuban government fail to acknowledge who has the upper hand in this situation.

Even in these circumstances, the Cuban Revolution has resisted and prioritized its population. The Revolution, just as it did during the deep crisis of the 1990s that ensued the fall of the Socialist Bloc, is spending a vast amount of its budget on financing a minimum of food and basic consumer goods that the population requires through rationing. Despite these harsh conditions, Cuba became the only country in the Global South to create its own COVID-19 vaccine and make it available to its population and to other countries. In times of crisis, such as the “Battle of Ideas”, in which the Revolution tried to find its path after the fall of the Socialist Bloc, or during the drafting of the 2019 Constitution, the Cuban Revolution turned to the Cuban population and launched ambitious processes of grassroots participation. Even with these limitations, the revolutionary project remains flexible and committed to the same values.

The truth is that the future of Cuba is not in the hands of Cubans. The future of Cuba is in the hands of Marco Rubio and the Trump administration, and stating the contrary is either a delusion or anti-Communist bad faith. The imperialistic siege on Cuba is inextricable from other issues that have mobilized the global left around the world, such as the genocide against the Palestinian people. Presenting the Cuban story as a uniquely regional event, which also always carries the caveat of also blaming the policies of the Cuban government, instead of a story of the innumerable attacks of the United States against humanity, stems from a complete misunderstanding of the meaning of the Cuban Revolution, both for Cuban and global history. The fact that the lives of millions of Cubans depend on the end of a US siege is more than enough to declare that the Cuban question is one in which all socialists should have the same position on, but the fertile history of Cuban Marxism and its decades-long heroic struggle against the empire should make all of us side with our Cuban comrades and say with one voice: let Cuba live!

1. William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (W.W. Norton, 2002), pp. 532-533.

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2. The most famous PSP critic of the Cuban government was Aníbal Escalante, famous for having a leading role in different moments of internal infighting within the Party. For the most comprehensive Trotskyist analysis of the origin of the Cuban Revolution, read Samuel Farber, The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered (University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

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3. Fidel Castro, ‘Discurso de Fidel Castro en el resumen de la velada conmemorativa de los Cien Años de Lucha, efectuada en La Demajagua, Monumento Nacional, Manzanillo, Oriente, 10 de Octubre de 1968,’ in José Bell Lara; Tania Caram León; Delia Luisa López García (Eds.), Documentos de la Revolución Cubana: 1968 (Ciencias Sociales, 2018), p. 576.

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4. Fidel Castro. ‘Discurso pronunciado por el Comandante Fidel Castro Ruz en la graduación de 244 alumnos del Instituto de Economía de la Universidad de la Habana, efectuada en el teatro de la CTC, el 20 de diciembre de 1969’. Available from: <http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1969/esp/f201269e.html>.

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5. Steve Cushion, A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution. How the Working Class Shaped the Guerrillas’ Victory (Monthly Review, 2016).

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6. Many authors can be cited here. The most important early work was Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of our Times (Cambridge University Press, 2004). In the specific Latin American case, read Tanya Harmer, ‘The Cold War in Latin America,’ in Artemy Kalinovsky; Craig Daigle. The Routledge Handbook of the Cold War (Routledge, 2014) and William A. Booth, “Rethinking Latin America’s Cold War”, The Historical Journal (2020).

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7. KS Karol, Los Guerrilleros en el Poder (Seix Barral, 1972), p. 334.

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8. Helen Yaffe, Che Guevara. The Economics of Revolution (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).

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9. Renzo Llorente, “Che and Maoism”, Globalizations (2022), pp. 4-5.

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10. Yaffe, pp. 45-6.

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11. Samir Amin, The Long Revolution of the Global South. Toward a New Anti-Imperialist International (Monthly Review Press, 2019), p. 361.

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12. Richard J Evans, Eric Hobsbawm. A Life in History (Oxford University Press, 2019), p. 447.

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13. Leon. Trotsky, Literature and Revolution (George Allen & Unwin, 1925), p. 77.

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14. Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, Apuntes críticos a la economía política (Ocean Sur/Centro de Estudios Che Guevara, 2006), pp. 64-65; Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination. A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2003); Michael Heinrich, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Marx’s Capital (Monthly Review, 2004).

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15. Yaffe, pp. 263-7.

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