BY JOSEPH HANSEN  
The Cuban revolution has proved to be deepgoing. Beginning with the simple political objective of overthrowing Batista’s army-police dictatorship, it rapidly disclosed its tendency to revolutionize economic and social relations and to extend its influence throughout Latin America and beyond.

The main force opposing the logical development of the Cuban revolution is American imperialism. But the measures it has taken in attempting to stem the revolution and eventually suffocate it have had the opposite effect of spurring it forward.

The new Cuban government that took power in January 1959 has played a positive role up to now in the development of the revolution. First it secured its governing position by smashing the old armed forces and the police. It supplanted these with the rebel army, a new police largely recruited from the ranks of the revolutionary fighters, and later it set up a people’s militia almost entirely proletarian and peasant in composition. It rapidly undertook a radical agrarian reform. This has two forms: (1) division of the land among the peasants on a limited private ownership basis (the land cannot be sold or mortgaged); (2) cooperatives closely tied to government planning. The emphasis has been on the side of the cooperatives. By last fall the government initiated planning of industry and control of foreign trade. A new stage was opened with the expropriation of land held by the sugar interests. Most recently, in response to the pressure of American imperialism, measures of expropriation have been extended to important foreign industrial holdings (principally American), and a virtual monopoly of foreign trade has been instituted.

A significant indication of the direction of movement of the Castro government is its tendency to establish friendly relations not only with the so-called neutral powers but with the Soviet bloc. This includes trade pacts that cut across the long-established trade pattern with the U.S. More important, however, is the tendency to emulate the planned economic structure of the Soviet countries.

The Castro government has proved that its responses to the mass revolutionary movement in Cuba and to the counterpressure from the U.S. are not simply passive. The new government has courageously defied American imperialism, resisting blandishments, threats, and reprisals. On the domestic side, it has repeatedly mobilized the Cuban workers and peasants in political demonstrations, in taking over landlord and capitalist holdings, in disarming the forces of the old regime, and in arming the people.

The direction of development on the political side has been demonstrated in the series of crises surmounted by the government since it took power. At first it put bourgeois democratic figures in key positions (finances, foreign trade, diplomacy, even the presidency). With each crisis induced by the interaction of imperialist and revolutionary pressures, these figures either turned against the government or were pushed out, being replaced by active participants in the preceding civil war, however youthful and inexperienced in their new duties.

The bourgeois outposts in such fields as the press, radio, and TV have suffered a parallel liquidation. On the other hand, workers’ and peasants’ organizations, including political tendencies, have been granted freedom of expression on the one condition that they support the revolutionary measures taken by the new government.

The Castro leadership began in 1952-53 as a radical petty-bourgeois movement, but one that took its revolutionary language seriously. It organized and led an insurrection. In power it sought (a) to bring the various revolutionary tendencies together in a common front by giving them due representation in government offices and by opposing any witch-hunting, and (b) to form a coalition with the remnants of the bourgeois-democratic movements that had survived the Batista dictatorship. The coalition, in which these elements were a minority unable to set policy, proved to be unstable. The defection of Miro Cardona a few weeks after he was appointed ambassador to the United States epitomized the instability of the coalition at the same time that it appears to have marked its end.
 
 
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