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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the April 18, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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CUBAN PARTY SETS NEW CAMPAIGN

Battling Inequities Brought by "Reforms"

By Deirdre Griswold

Cuba's sugar harvest exceeded 3 million tons by the end of March, up strongly over last year's yield at the same time.

This promising economic statistic is yet another indication of a measurable, although still modest, improvement in Cuba's overall economic performance, which hit bottom after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and its allies in Eastern Europe.

For almost 30 years, Cuba's relationship with the USSR had thwarted the U.S. imperialists' attempts to isolate and strangle the revolutionary island. In the early 1960s, Washington had imposed an economic blockade on Cuba and forced nearly all the other countries of the hemisphere to abide by it. But it could not isolate Cuba from the socialist countries, even though the United States went to the brink of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union over Cuba in the missile crisis of 1962.

The period since the collapse of the USSR has been extremely difficult for the Caribbean island. Yet the revolutionary socialist government has survived an economic decline that would have thrown any capitalist country into political turmoil.

Even in this "special period," Cuba has managed to retain the great social gains of the Revolution. These gains have made the country among the most advanced in the world in public health and education.

The key to its strength lies in the enormous participation of the masses of people in the revolutionary process-and the leaders' long experience in fighting the imperialist monster just 90 miles from their shores.

The skill and dedication of this leadership was seen once again in an extraordinary meeting of the Communist Party's Central Committee at the end of March.

As reported in the Party newspaper Granma, the leadership opened a broad new campaign to combat the negative social effects of economic reforms. These reforms have been seen as necessary in order to jump-start the economy, but they have also reintroduced many of the inequities and corrupting influences endemic to capitalism.

President Fidel Castro led the plenary meeting, which heard major talks by National Assembly head Ricardo Alarcon, Defense Minister Raul Castro and economic planner Carlos Lage. They struck a common chord: The Party will not back down under U.S. pressure.

Instead, it will combat bourgeois influences, wherever they may be, by mobilizing the masses of workers.

The immediate effect was to alarm the U.S. bourgeois establishment. It had hoped to bring down Cuban socialism by strengthening the blockade through the Helms-Burton bill- recently signed into law by President Bill Clinton-while holding out the carrot of investment if Cuba weakens politically.

Washington was still digesting the significance of Cuba's having shot down two planes flown from Miami in February by counter-revolutionaries calling themselves "Brothers to the Rescue." This CIA-linked group had been testing and provoking Cuba's air defense system for months, at one time even buzzing Havana while dropping leaflets.

In making both these decisions, the Cuban leaders must have known that some of their well wishers will waver for a while under the pressure of a torrent of hostile capitalist propaganda. However, they have never sacrificed their principles in order to curry favor with bourgeois public opinion. And their faith in the support of the masses of workers-at home and abroad, especially in Latin America- has always proven correct.

The Central Committee report will now be discussed in thousands of work places and schools throughout the country, according to Alarcon. One Party institute-the Center for Studies of America-is being overhauled after Raul Castro criticized it for becoming a "servant of the United States."

After the plane incident, Time magazine interviewed President Fidel Castro and asked him whether he had given the orders to take military action. No, said Fidel, he was busy at the time reading a book about perestroika.

The message was clear. Cuba will not pursue the fatal policies that led to the disintegration of the USSR.

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