Che Guevara, the Cuban Trotskyists and the Debate on the Restoration of Capitalism In Revolutionary Cuba

GAIDO, DANIEL FERNANDO

Beijing

Congreso; 7th. World Socialism Forum: Developing and Innovating Marxism in the XXIst Century, Beijing, October 21-22, 2016; 2016

Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

In this paper we show the connection between the repression of the Cuban Trotskyists from mid-1960 until their eventual banning in 1965, and the growing marginalization of the supporters of "Che" Guevara in the new revolutionary state apparatus as a result of the mounting pressure of the Stalinist bureaucracy, which was in turn a product of the growing alignment of Cuba with the Soviet Union in the Cold War. We review Guevara´s changing attitudes towards the Cuban Trotskyists, contextualizing them in the framework of the economic debates that took place in the Cuban leadership and of his own warnings about the danger of a restoration of capitalism, debates which resulted in his defeat, his resignation from his government posts, his departure from the island and his tragic death in Bolivia at the age of 39. But while the fate of a small internationalist working-class political tendency in Cuba coincided with that of the radical wing of the Cuban revolutionary leadership under the pressure of Stalinism, the Cuban regimen ever lost its character as an "adoptive member" of the Stalinist family, and followed a peculiar path which characterizes it until today, a quarter of a century after the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union.