Western Marxism against Cuban socialism
Overlooking the necessary dialectic of theory and practice
On June 3, 2025, “Cuba: ETECSA's rate hike, the bureaucracy and the threat of capitalist restoration,” by Jorge Martin, was published on In Defence of Marxism, a London-based website which is the organ of the Revolutionary Communist International. The article presents simply as a “rate hike” what is better understood as an adjustment in the structures of payment, designed to respond to fraudulent activities by illicit enterprises, which are taking advantage of distortions in the Cuban economy. In addition, Martin ignores the fact that the May 30 announcement by the Cuban Telecommunications Company (ETECSA) had been previously announced by Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz on December 18, 2024, at the nationally televised session of the National Assembly of People’s Power. And he ignores the fact that on May 31, at a press conference in response to the peaceful and respectful protest of the University Student Federation, ETECSA President Tania Velázquez Rodríguez declared that she and other ETECSA workers were meeting with students, and she anticipated that an announcement of adjustments in consideration of the students’ concerns would be made by June 2. (See “The internet rate hike in Cuba: Fraud, student protest, and the assertion of people’s democracy,” June 6, 2025; and “Cuba defends its new internet rates: Tania Velázquez effectively explains, Cuban style, the financial needs of ETECSA,” June 10, 2025).
In addition to simplifying what was at stake in the “rate hike,” Martin makes no mention of the role of fundamental elements of the Cuban political process of people’s democracy in the formulation of public policies, including the ETECSA rate restructuring. One of these elements is the structure of people’s power, established by the 1976 Constitution and continued in the 2019 Constitution, both of which were developed with exceptionally high levels of participation by the people. In the system of people’s power, deputies of the National Assembly are elected directly and indirectly by the people, in a process that begins with neighborhood nomination assemblies in 12,427 voting districts and that includes the election of the 420 deputies of the National Assembly by the delegates of 168 municipal assemblies. In this two-stage electoral process, mass organizations of workers, women, students, farmers, and neighborhoods—whose leaders are themselves elected by their memberships in direct and indirect elections—play a central role.
Once constituted, the deputies of the National Assembly participate in one or more of eleven commissions, including the Commission of Economic Affairs, which makes recommendations to the National Assembly. When the Prime Minister announced the new ETECSA measures on December 18, 2024, at the National Assembly of People’s Power, he was reporting on measures that had been fully discussed and debated by the deputies and that were the product of the process of people’s power and people’s democracy.
The mass organizations of workers, agricultural cooperativists and workers, women, students, and neighborhoods have exceptionally high membership rates, with 85% to 99% of their respective sectors. As noted above, the memberships elect their leaders, and leaders at the highest levels have prominent roles in public debate. With respect to university students, virtually all students become members of the University Student Federation (FEU) upon their enrollment, and they actively participate in monthly meetings and in other youth activities.
All of this is cast aside in Martin’s account. He casts the new ETECSA policy as a bureaucratic decree.
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Having ignored the role of the structures of people’s democracy with respect to the development of the new measures announced by ETECSA, Martin establishes the terrain for putting forth his myopic central thesis. He maintains that the tax-hike event illustrates the fact that the Cuban government has lost legitimacy and authority, because “the State is not really in the hands of the working class, but in the hands of a bureaucracy that has its own privileges and interests and is not accountable to working people.”
Said usurpation of power by the State and its bureaucracy is revealed, Martin maintains, by the fact that it has implemented “a series of economic measures that represent increasing concessions to the mechanisms of the capitalist market,” including authorizing the establishment of private companies. He maintains that many people wonder “if we are living under a Cuban perestroika—that is, if the Cuban leadership has decided to restore capitalism, but without saying so publicly.” He maintains that, under international threats of various kinds, the Cuban bureaucracy is moving toward capitalist restoration.
Such comments can only be based on the absence of careful observation of Cuba. In the first place, the lack of observation of the structures of people’s democracy, which the nation has developed to ensure that political structures favor the protection of the power of the people, as noted above. In the second place, the lack of observation of the practices of real socialism in the nations of the Global South. The first limitation is rooted in a Trotskyite worldview; and the second in Eurocentric tendencies, as I discuss below.