Weak and Strong Capitalisms against the Cuban Working Class

In January, the United States administration under Trump, considered Cuba a threat to national security and subsequently tightened restrictions and sanctions that have already endured for over 60 years, intensifying the existing economic crisis that plunges 95% of the Cuban population below the poverty line, surviving on less than $1.90 a day.

The embargo includes a series of economic, commercial, and financial restrictions; sanctions against petroleum suppliers; essential goods; import/export prohibitions to certain countries; and a blocking of banking activities, including access to international payment systems, all of which are of enormous hindrance to commerce.

The embargo, by drastically reducing energy supplies, has paralyzed transportation, generalized power blackouts, reduced tourism, and increased a shortage of medication and hospital equipment and school supplies, foodstuffs, flour, rice, milk, sugar and meat, in a country that depends largely on imports.

The main commercial partners are still Russia, China, Spain, Mexico,and Venezuela.

Venezuela was particularly important for petroleum supplies, supplying between 30 to 35% of Cuba’s demand in the last decades, a percentage that drastically got reduced after the new agreements following the farcical attack by the United States in Caracas and the new imposed political Venezuelan bourgeois regime.

However, the sanctions and the retreat of its main commercial partners have but aggravated an economy and way of life in Cuba already operating for Capital, despite today’s plentiful opportunists and leftists nationalists who consider Cuba a “good and socialist” model, against the model of the “evil free market” of the United States.

The Cuban Revolution of 1959 cleared the way for the development of capitalism and a national bourgeois class, freed from its backward semicolonial system. It freed itself from United States imperialism only to fall under the influence of its rival, Russian imperialism, emulating the illusion that a centralized state apparatus, an expression of the national bourgeois class, could control the market economy.

It is fitting to remember that the Cuban “socialist” regime maintained long stretches of diplomatic and commercial ties with the Franco regime in Spain, showing that ideologies are nothing more than a falsehood at the service of capital’s interest.

Here the same old history repeats itself between two conflicting bourgeois states, just like in the past and present, which support the "attacked" state against the other that is intended to be condemned. Economic and class analyses are completely set aside to make room for irrational states of mind that converge towards the two mortal enemies of the class struggle: patriotism and interclassism.

The propaganda of various fan groups strives to demonstrate which ruling class is less parasitic and anti-proletarian than the other. We are interested in reaffirming for those who ignore the fact that in Cuba, as in all countries today, capitalism prevails, with its economic categories: commodities, money, wage slavery, and consequently, inequalities and social classes. Therefore, there exists a bourgeois class that exploits its own working class, appropriating the national wealth.

Inside Cuba, particularly the Business Administration Group SA (GAESA) is a holding company that controls 40% of the island's GDP, directly administered by the Cuban Armed Forces (FAR) and linked to the Castro family. While the majority of the population lives in extreme poverty, the group controls the tourism sector by managing luxury hotels, airports, ports, travel agencies, and thousands of shops. It manages import and export operations, controlling various trade routes. It controls the flow of foreign currency, including services through Western Union and the International Financial Bank (BFI). Its financial assets, totaling tens of billions of dollars, are held in secret accounts abroad, used for massive investments in infrastructure and the private sector, at the expense of social services such as healthcare.

Several holding companies, linked to varying degrees to the country's largest economic conglomerate, are examples of these: CIMEX SA, owner of a network of stores, gas stations, import and export companies, restaurants, and financial services; ETECSA, the monopoly on telephone and internet services; Corp. Habanos SA, a joint venture between the state-owned Cubatabaco group and the British tobacco company Imperial Tobacco; BioCubaFarma, which groups together pharmaceutical companies; and Cubana de Aviación, the national airline that controls domestic and international flights. These are just some of the most important examples.

Many of these companies operate through offshore companies registered abroad, often in Panama, to circumvent U.S. sanctions, demonstrating how state capital merges with private capital.

The Cuban proletariat, increasingly impoverished and numerous, crushed by the internal struggles of the bourgeoisie, and divided between two governments under two national flags vying for control of capitalist commerce, will gain nothing by allying itself with its own exploitative ruling class. The proletariat has nothing to gain by defending the current generals in the name of the ahistorical bourgeois myth of “national sovereignty”, nor by overthrowing the military bureaucracy of GAESA if it is simply replaced by private managers flying US flags. Hunger, blackouts, and poverty will not end with a change of flag or administration of the state-owned enterprise.

Taking sides with the national power or supporting the weaker exploiter, mistakenly considered the "lesser evil", is a misleading and erroneous narrative.

For the working class, the enemy lies within its own borders: its own bourgeois exploiters, whether in Cuba, the United States, China, Russia, or Europe. Their salvation and emancipation can only be achieved through class struggle and organization to secure better living conditions, better wages, better working hours, free and efficient healthcare, education, the right to housing, and, subsequently, revolutionary unity with workers worldwide, including those in the “aggressor” states.

The historical compass is unique, both in Havana and in New York: the rejection of any interclass front for the destruction of the wage system and the law of value.