Just a quick plug for this event organised by some students at Wadham College (inevitably, says I with a swell of pride!) It looks quite impressive, with lots of people coming and some really good speakers, including my comrades Dan Randall and Sofie Buckland. It’s going on for three days (commendably ambitious!) so I doubt if anyone, barring the organisers, will be there for the whole thing - but people can drop in for whatever meetings or events they like.
Hope to see you there!
On Wednesday Fidel Castro announced that he is definitively stepping down from the inextricably linked posts of President of the Council of State and commander-in-chief of the Cuban armed forces. He has been the twentieth century’s second most durable head of government - second only, that is, to Kim Il-Sung. This is not something to be proud of.
Of course, it must be recognised that Cuba and North Korea are very different phenomena. In North Korea millions of people have starved to death. In Cuba the government has established free universal healthcare and education, ensuring 98% literacy. Cuba’s public services are the envy of the 35 million people in the United States without health insurance - and many of those with, as Michael Moore recently demonstrated.
However, Cuba under Castro has been fundamentally a Stalinist state. There are no forced-labour camps, but there are political prisoners; there are no show-trials, but there is a secret police force. Most importantly of all, there are no free elections. There are still some in the western world who call Cuba socialist, on the grounds that they understand socialism as reform and Cuba has enacted some impressive reforms (though often it is the most right-wing fake reformists who are the most enthusiastic: take George Galloway for example). However, Cuba’s regime lacks the instincts of democracy and popular sovereignty, as well as the fierce working-class allegiance, that characterise the best reformists. In that respect, a great gulf separates Fidel Castro and Nye Bevan.
What is more, the course of reform in Cuba has not run smoothly. Facing an economic crisis following the cessation of Russian aid, the regime chose to deal with it not by relaxing the state’s political stranglehold but by inviting capitalists to set up tourist resorts inaccessible to all Cubans except for the privileged bureaucratic elite and those employed as skivvies. Prostitution, the elimination of which was one of the first achievements of the Castro government, has sprung up again as some desperate Cubans cannot make ends meet any other way.
So what will happen in Cuba now? In the short run, not very much. The regime has named as interim president Fidel’s brother Raul, who has effectively been running the country since Fidel became ill in 2006. Fidel’s resignation statement, however, hints at knowledge that this situation is unsustainable. Cuba is not China, where the “Communist Party” has turned itself into the mouthpiece of a flourishing new capitalist class; it is much smaller and the potential for that kind of elite transition does not exist. The Cuban people have but up with Castro because he has enacted reforms and defied the United States, but now he has gone they will no longer consent to be ruled by a coterie of elderly Stalinists. In the medium term, then, either the system ludicrously and insultingly called “People’s Power” will have to be dismantled or there will be massive popular mobilisation to bring it down.
In the long term, there is, as the saying goes, everything to play for. Cuba seems unlikely simply to collapse as the Eastern Bloc did. Will the people of Cuba be able to hold on to and extend the social reforms they have brought about while building a genuinely democratic system of government - a workers’ democracy? In isolation, the Cuban people have with their own hands and brains maintained their first-class public services and, perforce, made great strides in the development of cheap generic drugs and green technology. If they can build a free society on this - as they will if they are not crushed between the twin monsters of Stalinism and free-market capitalism - they could be in reality what the Castro regime’s supporters foolishly or mendaciously proclaimed it to be - a socialist beacon of hope to the world. They will need our support.
Mike Treen of the Unite union (New Zealand), organiser of the first successful strike of low-paid and vulnerable workers in Starbucks, is currently on a week-long speaking tour of Britain organised by No Sweat. His first meeting is here in Oxford, at 1pm tomorrow (Monday) in Lecture Room 23, Balliol College, Broad Street, organised in conjunction with the Oxford University Living Wage Campaign.
Mike is by all accounts a fascinating and inspiring speaker, and I hope lots of people will turn up and make a good impression on a comrade who has, after all, come half-way round the world! There will also be information on the campaign for a living wage in the university and in the city of Oxford, and how to get involved here in the sort of fight Mike and the Starbucks workers have waged so sucessfully in New Zealand.
More on the Unite (NZ) “Supersize My Pay” campaign here.
An inspiring story from France in the latest issue of Solidarity. We must act in the same spirit here.
BY ED MALTBY
IN France, bosses have limited powers to regularise migrant
workers; and in recent strikes in the Essonne region, this has been used against them. Last summer, at nine branches of the Buffalo Grill steakhouse chain, around 30 staff went on strike to demand that their bosses regularise them. They occupied one restaurant for several days, and most of them won legal status. Shortly after the Buffalo Grill strike, workers at an industrial laundrette called Modeluxe struck in solidarity with their undocumented co-workers’ demands for regularisation.
The strikes have changed the way union activists and sans-papiers look at the issue. “Before,” explained the CNT militant, “sanspapiers would just join a union for protection on workplace issues. But now they’re starting to join because they see that as a way to win legal status. It will take a while to build up momentum, and people are naturally nervous about reprisals if they strike, but it’s begun.”
A number of union branch activists all over France have started targeting sans-papiers, distributing a leaflet which explains about rights at work, rights which apply even if to those working illegally, and the ways that unions can protect them from deportation as well as the actions of employers. “Union bureaucrats don’t want to touch this”, a socialist activist told me, “why would they? It’s a lot of fuss, it upsets their cosy desk jobs.”
But the government is stepping up its war on undocumented migrant workers. Sarkozy’s ministers have multiplied police round-ups and deportations of suspected migrant workers. French bosses like this. The CGT union say that in the fast-food industry, bosses are “systematically” employing workers they know to be undocumented, in order to deny them employment rights. A CNT union activist working with sans-papiers in Paris, told me that “employers use immigration law like a whip: they say to undocumented workers, ‘if you don’t work harder, I’ll report you’.”
Another activist told me that the hotels in which undocumented workers and their families are lodged at extortionate prices and in terrible conditions enjoy the tacit support of the government: “At Saint-Ouen there are two hotels, with one shower, one toilet each in the lobby, with 468 families living in them. The cops know and they don’t touch the place. I think the government subsidises them. MEDEF (equivalent of the CBI) want these workers to stay in France.”
More heat is being generated by a series of revolts in detention centres. An African union activist was recently taken to a detention centre next to Charles de Gaulle airport. The socialist activist tells the story: “He raised hell, made speeches, organised a revolt. There were demonstrations, hunger strikes, riots. The authorities quickly moved him, to Vincennes, where he did it again. People were setting fire to their beds, refusing to go back in their cells after exercise, refusing to be counted. They made the place ungovernable. Some wrapped razor blades in chewing gum and swallowed them, so that they’d have to be taken to hospital. I t’s very dangerous, but it means that they have to let you go. You can only be detained for so many days before they must either deport you or let you go.”
At a recent demonstration outside the Vincennes detention centre in support of the protestors “a lot of sans-papiers turned up, which was brave. There were people there from the CNT, especially members of our cleaners’ section, which is growing fast. There’s going to be another demonstration soon.”
