Albert Gil has written the rare defense of Cuba that argues rather than asserts, and his letter deserves a reply in kind. He is right about the thing that matters most immediately: the United States blockade is the longest and most comprehensive set of unilateral sanctions in modern history; it is now tightening toward a fuel embargo on an island that cannot feed or power itself without trade, and no socialist worth the name should equivocate about ending it. On that note, there is no debate between us. Let Cuba live.

But Gil wants more than solidarity against the siege. He wants us to accept the Cuban Revolution as “a bold experiment in socialism” and to do so on the strength of an intellectual genealogy that runs from Guevara’s Budgetary Finance System through, of all destinations, the value-form criticism of Moishe Postone and Michael Heinrich. It is precisely because I share that theoretical tradition that I cannot let the recruitment pass. The argument does real damage to the categories it borrows.

Gil quotes Guevara’s observation that abstract labor is “a historical category, a specific form of social labor, only inherent to the mercantile economy” and reads it as anticipating Wertkritik. The sentence is genuinely Marxian. The conclusion Guevara drew from it is the opposite of what the value-form tradition draws. For Postone and Heinrich, value is not a moral error or a residue of bourgeois habit that an honest planner can suppress by decree; it is the form taken by social labor when production is privately and independently undertaken and validated only after the fact, in exchange. Abolishing it is not an administrative act. It is the transformation of social relations that makes labor abstract in the first place, which is to say, it is the self-organization of the associated producers, or it is nothing.

Guevara’s Budgetary Finance System did the reverse. It sought to suppress the appearance of value: internal prices, enterprise autonomy, monetary settlement between state firms, while leaving the substance untouched: a centralized apparatus that allocated labor from above and validated it through the plan rather than through the workers who performed it. That is not the supersession of abstract labor. It is its administration by other means. To call this a forerunner of value-form theory is to confuse a critique of markets with a critique of value, and the whole point of the tradition Gil invokes is that the two are not the same.^[1]

This is not a footnote quibble. It goes to what Gil means by “socialism,” and here the essay’s evidence is more revealing than its claims. Asked to show Cuban workers’ democracy, Gil offers grassroots consultation: the drafting of the 2019 Constitution, the “Battle of Ideas,” the rationing system that spends scarce budget to keep the population fed. These are real, and under blockade conditions they are not nothing. But each is a measure of how the state treats the population, not of how the population governs the state. Consultation is what a benevolent apparatus does to a class; power is what a class exercises for itself. The distinction is the entire content of the socialism-from-below tradition, and Gil’s case for Cuban socialism survives only by quietly substituting the first for the second.^[2]

The blockade argument then does a second, quieter job. Gil writes that “the future of Cuba is not in the hands of Cubans” but of Rubio and Trump, and that internal criticism is therefore either delusion or anti-Communist bad faith. The first clause is materially true and the second does not follow from it. That the empire holds the upper hand explains why the Cuban state is constrained; it does not establish that the constrained form is the socialist content straining to emerge. The siege is an alibi that can absorb any question one might ask about the structure of power on the island, because there is always a further degree of pressure to which the structure can be attributed. A theory that cannot, even in principle, distinguish what the blockade forces from what the regime chooses has stopped being an analysis and become a loyalty oath.

Gil cites Farber’s Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered as the sectarian foil to be overcome.^[3] But Farber’s charge has never been that Cuba failed to nationalize, or failed in internationalism — the Angola intervention and the COVID vaccine are real achievements, and Gil is right to name them. The charge is that the Revolution was made for the working class and at no point by it; that a guerrilla cadre, not the self-activity of workers, took and held the state; and that the absence of independent workers’ institutions unions that can strike, a press that can oppose, parties that can compete is not a deformation imposed from Washington but the constitutive form of the regime from 1961 forward. None of Gil’s evidence touches this, because consultation, internationalism, and rationing are all things a state does to or on behalf of a population that does not rule.

So I will end where Gil and I agree, and mark where we part. End the blockade, without condition and without the caveats that smuggle the State Department’s framing back in. Defend Cuba against the empire as we defend Palestine against it, and for the same reason. But solidarity against imperialism is not endorsement of a state-form, and the Marxism that taught us to read value as a social relation should be the last tradition to mistake a planning apparatus for the emancipation of labor. The Cuban people deserve both: an end to the siege and the workers’ power that no siege and no apparatus have yet let them hold.

— Anthony P. Teso

1. Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination (Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. ch. 1–2; Michael Heinrich, An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Marx’s Capital (Monthly Review, 2012), ch. 3.

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2. Hal Draper, The Two Souls of Socialism (1966).

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3. Samuel Farber, The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered (University of North Carolina Press, 2006). It is the work Gil names as the standard against which he writes.

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