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(This resonates with my article on "Was there an alternative to Fidel Castro's "Stalinism".)
In my idiosyncratic Trotskyist estimation, the Cuban Revolution was the encounter of a population of workers, peasants and sections of the middle class unwilling to continue under the Batista dictatorship, U.S. domination and the misery they caused. It was before a revolutionary leadership determined to free Cuba from its oppression, a dictatorship rotten to the core, a U.S. imperialism too sure of its might and righteousness to compromise, and a Soviet Union willing to provide the military and economic support Cuba would need to cut loose from capitalism and U.S. domination.
Fidel and Raúl Castro, Che Guevara, Celia Sánchez and the other leaders of the Cuban Revolution were not seeking to create “a new class system based on state collectivism, a property form in which the state owns and controls the economy and a central political bureaucracy ‘owns’ the state.”
They were seeking to free Cuba and concluded, some sooner than others, that for Cuba to live capitalism had to die. The only way to accomplish that in the face of U.S. intransigence, they thought, was to militarize Cuban society and to turn to the Soviet Union. If Latin America had risen in revolution, they would have had more choices. But by their lights they did the best they could.
I agree with Farber that the Cuban Revolution should have been more democratic. In particular, it should have allowed political parties other than the Communist Party to exist and compete, unless they were actively fomenting counterrevolution. But I’m not sure that the practical outcome, measured as survival, would have been any better, if they had done so. Perhaps the counterrevolution would have triumphed sooner, as was the case when the Sandinistas allowed parliamentary elections in Nicaragua in 1990.
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