Interview with Yunier Mena, young Cuban communist

By Ubaldo Oropeza, Centro de Estudios Socialistas Carlos Marx
May 18, 2018

Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews

Yunier Mena is a young Cuban student who attended the León Trotsky International Academic Event held in Havana from May 6 to 8 of this year.

Ubaldo Oropeza (UO) – First of all, I would you like to know what you thought of the meeting about Trotsky?

Yunier Mena (YM) – What I liked most about the academic meeting about Trotsky was the fact that I felt among communists, apart from the profound and just ideas I could hear.

UO.- I have noticed, since my previous visit to Havana, that now there is a different atmosphere, a lot of business, a lot of shopping, a very strong market environment, I imagine that, as you say: “feeling among communists”, is like breaking with something that has been growing in Havana.

YM.- In Havana and throughout the country, even in the Constitution of the Republic, there is an advance of capitalism, in my opinion. There is private property, money, and goods that do not come commonly through the channels of the State enter the country and this creates a mercantilist and unpleasant situation in the country.

UO.- As a young person, do you think that young people are inclined to capitalism, to pay more attention to consumption than to understanding what is happening?

YM.- There is everything, because reality is very complex, there are young people who don’t have a political thought, most of them into circus and bread. But there are young people who think about these issues, there are many who don’t say it, but surely very soon they will say it.

UO.- I’m asking you that because when the Soviet Union fell many young people were inclined towards capitalism. As you say, in the youth there is everything, but the great majority has been depoliticized. Besides, the vast majority of the youth, the only thing they knew about socialism was the iron grip of the bureaucracy. The old revolutionary traditions of Lenin’s and Trotsky’s time were forgotten and distorted. What do you think of this situation, that at a time when youth have to choose capitalism or a planned economy, where they would turn?

YM.- The youth and the majority of the people believe that capitalism is what is good, is natural, what works best and has taken man further. There is an imposition on people’s consciousness, on people’s criteria of a supposed success of capitalism, the economic success of capitalism. This is happening outside of Cuba and Cuba is no stranger to it.

UO: At a time when private property is advancing and the market is advancing, that false certainty of the people about the supposed success of capitalism is being reinforced.

The confidence that now exists in capitalism, what is the reason for this? I think there are two factors, on the one hand the control of the government bureaucracy, which eliminated workers’ democracy, direct participation in the decision-making of the working class, and on the other hand, the economic blockade that prevented industry from developing, and of course, the isolation of the revolution.

YM.- People’s support for capitalism has to do with several questions, on the one hand, capitalism itself, how it works, its human relations, its cultural and ideological dominance makes people think that it is the only thing they can have and aspire to. There is an ideological domain that makes people support capitalism. They think that society can only function that way. The apolitical nature of young people is due, on the one hand, to this natural reproduction of capitalism in the ideology of people who participate in economic activities and relations that have to do with capitalism.

Che said that man changes while reality changes, I agree with him, I think that the state that functions vertically cannot lead us to socialism, because man does not decide for himself, does not construct reality by himself and cannot transform himself. This apoliticism cannot be transformed until man is directly responsible for his future. Until the decisions that are taken are taken by the same ones that fall the results of that decision.

UO.- Finally, there is a very complex situation at the moment because the policy of American imperialism is being very aggressive in Venezuela, trying to hang the revolution that overthrows Maduro. It also has it with Cuba, even a few days ago the so-called Helms-Burton law has been retaken which proposes restricting the sending of money to Cuba to a maximum of $1,000 every three months, lawsuits by capitalist companies that were expropriated in the revolution, there is talk of a total blockade. There are complicated periods in sight for Cuba. What do you think the youth have to do, like you, who think that capitalism is not an alternative and at the same time opposes any imperialist intervention?

YM.- I think that we have to fight without fear against imperialism and against the bureaucracy that prevents socialism from advancing. What is needed is for people to build their own reality. We must consciously oppose capitalism, confront imperialism.

One of the things I sensed in the meeting about Trotsky’s ideas is that we are not alone. That there are people in different parts of the world who oppose capitalism. The support that Cuba and socialism has in Cuba was also shown. I think that it is important to defend Cuba and that we Cubans know that we are not alone, there are many people in the world who support us.

This socialism has many problems, but it can be improved and not go to capitalism. The possible socialism that we need is not the one that asks for capitalist participation, like private property or organized production over workers. We have to satisfy collective needs, we have to produce wealth organized by the workers themselves.

I think that this country needs to produce wealth, and this wealth is not produced by capitalism. We can produce wealth in a socialist way and distribute it better and discourage ourselves. Not to fall into the game of capitalism, capital is not interested in collective human development. Only democratic and productive socialism can promote solidarity and human development.

“Trotsky will walk in Cuba”
Interview with Frank García Hernádez

By La Izquierda Socialista

Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews

Interview with Frank García Hernández, Cuban intellectual, organizer of the First International Academic Event on Leon Trotsky, in Havana.

The Socialist Left (LIS): Would you like to tell me your impressions of the Trotsky meeting we just had?

Frank: I never imagined it was going to be so shocking. When it was over, just before the event ended, I noticed so many good intellectuals, including Robert Brenner, Paul LeBlanc, Gabriel García, Helmut Dahmer, Eric Toussaint, people who unfortunately don’t know each other in Cuba -except for comrade Eric- but who are excellent academics.

Almost 10 Trotskyist tendencies were present – who were not invited as such, all the exhibitors representing universities, institutions and academic journals came – and there was no clash between them. They sat at the same table, even though they have big political differences. And at the end, at the end of the last day, comrade Rob Lyons raised his left fist and began to sing The International. He could hardly continue, many did not know what to do, but later other voices joined in, and all of them: in Iranian, Indian, Turkish, Italian, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese the International was sung. And in a few minutes, we lived the World Revolution in that small hall. Then I realized something very important: Cuba, 60 years later, is still a revolutionary meeting point.

The event had a very great reception at a global level, a participation of academic institutions, of organizations like yours. The International Marxist Tendency was one of the first to reach out to us when the meeting was just an idea, a very big thank you to you who in record time published the book The Revolution Betrayed in order to bring it to Cuba: you will have the merit of being the ones to blame for reading it. We are also very grateful for the text by Alan Woods In Memory of Leon Trotsky, a basic text and therefore very useful for Cuban youth who still do not know it. In addition, the IEPC helped us a great deal by making it possible, thanks to comrades Pablo Oprinari and Sergio Moissen, to present the title of Trotsky Escritos Latinoamericanos. But it is very important to talk about the Leon Trotsky House Museum. So much so, that’s why I mention them last: so I can stop at them with more force. The compañera director: Gabriela Pérez Noriega, always wrote to us and asked us: “What can we help you with? To each one of the requests we made, she answered affirmatively. She never put a but, rather, she had such beautiful initiatives as bringing the first photographic exhibition on Trotsky that is exhibited in Cuba. And thanks to them, Santa Clara and Havana will be flooded with T-shirts with Trotsky’s image. Trotsky will walk in Cuba.

LIS: The meeting is very significant precisely because it is being held in Cuba, at a time when the revolution is being besieged by American imperialism: Trump’s speeches have been quite harsh in the last period asking Cuba to take its hands off Venezuela, if it doesn’t it is going to have very harsh repercussions for the island. Trump still thinks Latin America is his backyard. It is a fundamental task of a Marxist revolutionary to defend the conquests of the Cuban revolution from any imperialist attack. On the other hand there is a situation that strikes me, the situation inside Cuba has changed rapidly in recent years, particularly in Havana, there are hundreds maybe thousands of new businesses, it seems that a new class is forming, what do you think of this?

Frank: First I would like to say something, even if it has nothing to do with the event. The measures that Trump is taking against Cuba are not exactly a result of what is happening in Venezuela, but this president has had a term with terrible results. He has not put a brick in the wall he had promised on the border with Mexico, the economic war with China has not brought him economic dividends but only losses, his economy has not grown, he has fought with his best allies in the European Union. He knows that by trying to apply the Helms-Burton law he will win votes in the Cuban electorate in Florida, which weighs heavily in the presidential election.

Second, which has to do with the event, is the Cuban situation. We are learning to live with private property – class struggle through -. Some want us to live peacefully with private property and accept it as such. Even if we do, the class struggle runs through us.

The bourgeoisie is born with its media, its cultural policies, its consumerism. The prices of goods -due to the fact that they are quite deregulated in the capital- soar, since the bourgeoisie needs, in order to maintain its business, to consume more than what the working classes consume. The impact is even harder because the businesses that these class controls are essentially in the service sector. This leads to food hoarding and therefore: shortages. Something that does not happen in other regions of the country, like Santa Clara, because the bourgeoisie is more controlled by the government and there is less concentration of wealth.

But comrade Yunier Mena, a Cuban speaker at the event, a philology student, rightly affirms that, more than economic strength, the bourgeoisie has strength in its ideological impact. I explain why: they present themselves as successful Cubans, concerned about culture, animal rights, the LGTBIQ community; they appropriate a good part of civil society, they speak on its behalf, they present themselves with a renovating discourse, they say they are not interested in politics and that they are misunderstood by the Communist Party, they emphasize that they are Cubans and nothing else. The result: The society, mainly the Havana society, ends up admiring them.

On the other hand, the party doesn’t know what to do. It stimulated, propitiated and guaranteed the birth of this new – old – class. It does not fight them because they believe that the class struggle is to divide the people. They forget Fidel’s stance – which kept the bourgeoisie weak: he warned them again and again that they were the fruit of a provisional economic policy. Now, the new Constitution, while insisting on the construction of a communist society, gives constitutional guarantees to their form of property: private property, which is established and exists thanks to the exploitation of human beings by human beings.

I am sure that all this caught the attention of so many participants. Only as an audience did I receive the request of 192 people to attend the meeting; if all the exhibitors had attended, there would have been 51. If I had had a larger logistic structure, I would have gladly accepted it all.

What hurt me the most is that there was not much Cuban public because the event was not publicized, but what I like the most is that all Cubans who were at the event have taken with them a copy of The Revolution Betrayed.

LIS: Victor Hugo once said that when an idea has its moment, nothing can stop it. It seems to me that, as you say, although there was little diffusion of the event, Trotsky’s ideas and thought will have an impact on the next period here. We can’t say that this is the first time Trotsky has been known in Cuba, previously there were groups calling themselves Trotskyists that participated in the different revolutionary processes in Cuba, however, now the reappearance of this figure is given a very significant moment, capitalism is in a dead end, it offers nothing to youth, women and the working class. What can you say to the youth and workers about Trotsky’s figure and its impact on Cuba?

Frank: When ideas start, there’s no one to stop them, that’s very true. I want to limit something, it’s not surprising that Trotsky’s reception in Cuba is so good, what’s surprising is that Trotsky didn’t arrive sooner.

This return of Trotsky to Cuba can never be compared to his arrival in the year 32 when Juan Ramón Breá and Sandalio Junco brought him in a suitcase. We were talking, at the time, about a capitalist society in crisis, involved in a violent class struggle against a murderous dictatorship and with a people with a literacy level of less than 50%. That first Trotskyism gradually disappeared. After the decade of the 1950s, Cuban Trotskyism never surpassed 50 militants, almost always entrusting other organizations as tiny as them. When the Revolution triumphed, they were suffocated, not only by the persecution of the Popular Socialist Party, but also by the major events that were taking place. The working classes paid more attention to the attacks of imperialism and internal counterrevolution than to the controversies, complex for them, sometimes even extemporaneous, between Trotskyism and Stalinism.

At the same time, since the 1960s a critical, heterodox Marxism was fostered in Cuba, which was censored in the 1970s, but after the fall of the Soviet Union, it reappeared with tremendous force. That Marxism has stagnated a bit. It needs more theory. Where there is a great setback in the assimilation of Marxism today is in the university student body. They continue to identify it with the official discourse. That is why Trotsky, who is not present in the study programs, is so attractive to them. This already happened in the 90’s with Gramsci and it was tried to happen with Rosa Luxemburg but it did not bear fruit. 60 years of revolution, in spite of all the errors, completely transform the mentality of society. One of Fidel’s main achievements is that he was in charge of disengaging society by constantly offering culture as an emancipatory instrument. This approach to Trotsky starts from a Marxism already studied and assumed, something that will avoid any sectarian position.

In Santa Clara, a study circle composed of university students called Cuban Communist Forum has already arisen. They have a Facebook page and I call on the world militancy to show solidarity with them by sending them magazines and bibliographies of thinkers such as Daniel Bensaid, Pierre Broué, Isaac Deutscher, Ernest Mandel, Victor Serge, Alex Callinicos, Cornelius Castoriadis, Alan Woods, Tariq Ali, Michael Löwy… They urgently need theory. See if it is important to help these students, who as soon as they returned to Santa Clara began to spread the bibliography they brought and, as I already told you, especially The Revolution Betrayed, the short biography of Alan Woods and another text, also biographical, authored by Esme Choomara, in addition to some explanatory brochures of the Permanent Revolution provided by Paul Le Blanc. These young people are not organized as a political group, they are not interested in doing so. They are born as a circle of study and debate. They do not claim to be Trotskyists, but communists. They understand Trotsky as part of a system of ideas in which Marx, Engels, Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Mariategui, Gramsci, Che Guevara, Fidel.

Trotsky returns to Cuba, to the Cuban revolution 60 years later and the situation is completely different from when he came with Junco and Breá. The analyses being done now are neither extemporaneous nor supranational. Trotsky does not land in a quagmire. There was already a knowledge of him; in November 2016 a postgraduate course on his life and work had been given. This course led to the publication in a Santa Clara cultural magazine of a fragment of Trotsky’s speech when he founded the Red Army. What is needed now is literature. For this we have to work hard on the publication of the book that gathers the memories of the event. The book will end up being a before and after the meeting. It will be the first title published in Cuba that will be dedicated exclusively to Trotsky. I call for full solidarity with that dream and with the dream of holding a second international meeting in June 2020 in Sao Paulo: one of the most beautiful fruits of the Havana meeting.

LIS: Thank you very much, Frank, we thank you for everything you have done for the meeting and for the comrades of the International Marxist Tendency and the Leon Trotsky House Museum.

Frank: My greatest greetings and acknowledgments to the International Marxist Tendency, to comrade Alan Woods who sent an emotional message. The International Marxist Tendency were the first to reach out to us when this meeting was just an idea, they were the ones who established contact with the Leon Trotsky House Museum because we had no contact with them. They have been key to developing the event, a work of almost a year, they were tremendously understanding of all our problems, especially comrade Ricardo Márquez -alias el Che- who at any time I wrote to him on WhatsApp or Facebook and he, even at dawn, took the trouble to answer me, to help me coordinate with other people with whom I could not maintain communication due to technological problems. I know that behind him there is a whole team, a support structure, of colleagues like Ubaldo, the German colleague Rosa Carolina: the first foreigner who came to ask and see what was happening -then dozens came- colleague Jordi Martorell, who was always willing to come and who always had a strong bond with colleague Celia Hart -who was my very close friend. Thank you very much to all of you. Excellent magazine América Socialista, we hope to have more issues of this magazine in Cuba and be able to collaborate with it.

Frank Garcia Hernandez. Organizer of the first international academic event on Leon Trotsky, in Havana.