Man wtf

The thousands of Cuban troops accompanying the Soviet tanks in Angola are only one of the many payments the Cuban ruling class will be expected to make to its Soviet masters on the practical front.

Not only do the social-imperialists use Cuban troops to try to bring Angola under their heel. They try to sell it all as "proletarian internationalism" and they go so far as to portray Cuba as an example of what great blessings are in store for other countries if only they tie their future to the Soviet Union and its "aid." But the fact that thousands of Cuban soldiers are sent to fight and die as pawns in this counterrevolutionary crime is a tremendous exposure of Soviet imperialism, which no amount of words can hide.

heard the Neocolony theory before but never cause they used similar rhetoric but due to being some sugar colony for the USSR.

Depending on the Maoist line it can go from they were never socialist to Fidel Castro and Cuba were a progressive country and that Che was the communist wing.

A lot of modern day communists underestimate how utterly retärded the split was bc they dont read the historical sources of the time

The attempt at diversifying the economy from sugar which went wrong was definitely a failure, but it makes no sense to use that as the central criteria for whether a country is socialist or not. Are capitalist countries that successfully diversify their country's undustries now more socialist or something?

It also makes no sense to say that the USSR was socialist until 1956 and that Cuba was never socialist. If pre-Khrushchev USSR was socialist then so was/is Cuba.

ay man i don’t know much about the cuba thing never read much about cuba at all. just sharing information i seen other Maoist say

I know comrade

@Cudderwalks what’s ur thoughts on the cuba revisionism topic

Lotta Maoists refer to the 1976 article from the RCP on why Cuba was never socialist And with all due respect to my Maoist niggas out there it truly some of the dumbest shyt I ever read ngl

Especially the part about Cuba in Angola holy s***

Like deadass what the f*** is this bullshit and why does anybody take this article seriously

The Cuban leadership often claimed that the U.S. blockade, the threat of aggression, and Cuba's short supply of some key natural resources forced them to hitch their wagon to the Soviet Union. But despite whatever real obstacles that did exist to building genuine socialism in Cuba, these were certainly no greater than the conditions faced in real socialist countries. Cuba's most important resource, the working class itself, was much larger than in Albania, for example.

They accomplished the New Democratic Revolution, but never fully consolidated socialism. They should be supported as a progressive, anti-imperialist country, and I think there’s a lot to admire and learn from Cuba. Particularly their advances in sustainable agriculture.

But there’s also a lot to criticize that kinda just get hand waved away.

I agree that RCP article is mostly not good

Maoists need to quit referencing it when discussing the topic as it’s outdated as hell. New work needs to be done on the question, albeit it’s not particularly pressing

@Scratchin_Bandit

I think this short piece does a much better job of articulating valid criticisms of Cuba. The line described here is more or less what I adhere to

bannedthought.net/Cuba-Che/Foreign-Anti/WhatIsSocialism-JSH-2013.pdf

What are some of the things you would criticize?

I think the failure of Cuba diversifying their industries is one that needs to be learned from, but I've seen a lot of Maoists act like that was something that happened because of complacency, they made efforts to diversify and it backfired on them. Maybe some would argue they should have tried more after failing in the early 60s, but the Cuban people wanted to see material gains from the revolution, and risky experiments in entirely restructuring your economy's industries while the US is waging the most brutal decades long economic war ever and thinking of new ways to overthrow your government 24/7 is really not such an obvious answer to that dilemma to me....

Or even worse, they'll say Cuba was a Soviet neocolony, which is especially slanderous and just a plain lie that the US went to insane lenghts to propagate and use to then justify their aggression towards Cuba. US intel knew this and wrote in detail about Cuba-Soviet relations deterring over time, especially since Brezhnev. They'll use the same lies of the US about Cuba's intervention in Angola and what not to support this theory too

I'm open to criticisms of Cuba, but I can't f*** with people making them out to be a pawn of Soviet social imperialism at all

Thank you I'll give it a read

Also you still got the links about dialectics

great link and sums up what I think in general about revisionism that I had a hard time communicating like the political aspect and Stalins faults

Though I do have one issue with it and its this paragraph

But any further socialist economic transformation then pretty much ceased by the mid-1930s. From that point on Stalin promoted what I call “socialist economism”, that is, the program of expanding production but without further changes to the relations of production, and with little or no progressive diminution of the law of value. Mao later explicitly criticized Stalin for not developing and implementing any further transformations in the direction of communism. He said that Stalin seemed to be “at a loss” about how to do this.

Increasing the productive forces in the mid 1930s I would say would be the correct line, considering the threat of Nazi-Germany.

i apply dialectics to everything now

its so weird

me too

diving deep into Marxist philosophy has prob been the best thing i’ve done, it also opened up my interest on other philosophies as well.

after i’m done reading all of Mao i’m a do deep dive into political economy

Thanks for linking the article and it was pretty reasonable.. until this part:

"Far more than Stalin, Castro and his associates have operated in a very paternalistic manner.

They truly do care about the welfare of the people, about improving mass education and health, etc., and have in fact made great strides in those directions. But this definitely does not mean that the working class itself is running Cuba."

Cuba is definitely not run more paternalistically than the USSR was, especially under Stalin. If anything Cuba is a model for socialist democracy in how much the proletariat is involved through popular participation. I would argue it's why Cuba has managed to maintain many of their gains from the revolution despite being under constant attack from the US.

"Within a few years of the revolution most of the progressive social transformations in the
relations of production also stopped in Cuba. Moreover, while Cuba largely escaped the clutches of U.S. imperialism, it did so by voluntarily coming under the clutches of Soviet social-imperialism—including ideologically (for the most part)."

I mean this is just not historically accurate, the Cuban revolution and the way they transformed the economy was not a linear process. When the USSR under economically liberalized, Cuba went in the opposite direction.

Also again, saying that Cuba is a pawn of Soviet imperialism, especially that their close relations even in times of disagreement was "voluntary" especially I can't agree with. Does this guy really think Cuba would have the close economic relations with the USSR if the US didn't isolate Cuba economically to the extent they did? Such reasoning borders on erasing the effects of the embargo and that kind of rubs me the wrong way ngl.

The US went to great lengths to actually push Cuba into the hands of the USSR, in the early stages of the revolution they even told the UK not to sell fighter jets to Cuba, so they would have to buy them from the USSR, which would then be a justification for their aggression towards Cuba because it would be further evidence of Cuba being a Soviet neocolony

Cuba did many things in defiance of the USSR, especially when it came to the Soviet policy of "peaceful coexistence" by supporting revolutionaries internationally, their intervention of Angola against apartheid South Africa being an example of that. The US lied about Cuba being sent out to do that on the orders of the USSR and some Maoists using it as an example of Cuba being a Soviet neocolony and social imperialism really rubs me the wrong way tbh. It was probably the most admirable thing any socialist country did internationally outside of the USSR defeating the Nazis. Even Kissinger had to admit in his memoirs that the intervention wasn't done on behalf of the USSR and that he couldn't find any ulterior motives that Cuba could have in doing that and that the only way to explain that was that Fidel was probably the most genuine revolutionary alive at the time.

@Womanpuncher69 ^^

But Cuba just had to put all aside and that suck it up and risk letting the stated goals of the embargo (economic desperation to bring about a counterrevolution) become reality so they wouldn't have to deal with accusations of ECONOMISM

yeah i can’t really point out the flaws in the arguement since i don’t much about Cuba so i appreciate the counter points u gave