The Dialectic of the Besieged Fortress: Defending Cuba, Condemning Revisionism

Comrades, hello.

When Cuba is mentioned in left-socialist circles, two things immediately come to mind: either Che Guevara's romantic bearded silhouette and an unshakeable slogan of "we must defend Cuba," or the bourgeois media's propaganda that "look, socialism brought hunger."

As a Marxist — and as someone who takes a particular interest in epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge) — I must tell you this: To be deceived by appearances is the greatest trap of bourgeois rationalism. Lenin, while reading Hegel in Philosophical Notebooks, wrote this very note: "Human reason must grasp objective reality not as something frozen and static, but as the movement of contradictions."

That is why, when explaining the process to a comrade who lacks deep knowledge of Cuba, we will surrender neither to blind romanticism nor to bourgeois black propaganda. We will put Cuba on the table armed with the clear, uncompromising, and scientific scalpel of the CIPOML (International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations) line — the common will of the world's revolutionary Marxist-Leninist parties.

Come, let us set out step by step on a journey from appearance toward essence.

The First Face of the Medal: Why Must We Defend Cuba Unconditionally? (The External Contradiction)

If a comrade before us knows nothing about Cuba, we must begin with this unshakeable principle: We Marxists are the relentless defenders of the Cuban people and the island's sovereignty against the American imperialist blockade of Cuba.

• Historical Siege (Blockade): Since the 1959 revolution — that is, for more than 60 years — Cuba has lived under the economic, financial, and commercial blockade of U.S. imperialism right on its doorstep. The power outages, shortages of medicine and food experienced on the island today (as of 2026) have deepened further with the oil embargo imposed by the Trump administration in the recent period.
• Leninist Anti-Imperialism: Lenin teaches us that in the age of imperialism, every independence struggle waged by an oppressed nation against an imperialist monster must be supported. If the Cuban people refuse to raise the white flag despite all this deprivation, that is their historical honor — and the left's task is to raise its voice against this blockade.

Up to this point everything is clear. The idea that "Cuba must be defended" is the alphabet of the anti-imperialist struggle. Yet for a Marxist, analysis does not end here — on the contrary, it only begins.

From Appearance to Essence: The Class Character of the Cuban Revolution

Now let us turn the other face of the medal and, philosophically, free ourselves from "nominalism" — the error of believing something is socialist simply because it is called "socialist."

What happened in Cuba in 1959? The guerrillas led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara overthrew the pro-American dictator Batista. In left circles this has always been perceived as a "pure proletarian (workers') revolution." Yet historical materialism presents us with a different picture:

• Petty-Bourgeois Radicalism: The 26th of July Movement, when it set out, did not possess a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party program. It was an anti-imperialist, radical-democratic, and patriotic petty-bourgeois movement.
• A Mechanical Method (Focoism): The revolution did not begin, as Lenin advocated, with the mass, organized, and conscious uprising of the working class; it began with the military focus of a group of guerrillas in the mountains (Foco theory). Yes, the general strikes of workers in the cities completed the revolution, but the structure of power was shaped from top to bottom in the hands of a military-bureaucratic elite.
• A Forced Alliance: After coming to power, Castro was forced to form an alliance with the USSR in order to survive in the face of U.S. aggression, and only in 1961 did he declare the revolution to be of a "socialist" character.

Internal Contradictions Through the CIPOML Lens: Why Cuba Is Not Genuine Socialism

Comrades, the most fundamental methodological principle of dialectical materialism is to grasp objects not as static, frozen labels but through the struggle of opposites within them and the laws of their movement. Lenin, while passing Hegel through a materialist filter in Philosophical Notebooks, points precisely to this: "Essence flashes forth; appearance is essence." Yet bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideologies produce a tremendous illusion by putting appearance in place of essence.

The Cuba question is the litmus test where this epistemological blindness is most clearly experienced within the world socialist movement. Cuba's red flags, anti-imperialist rhetoric, and social gains (health, education) are the "appearance" on the surface. But the class character of the relations of production, the form of property, and the nature of the state apparatus give us the "essence."

CIPOML (International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations), the international will of the world's anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninist parties, addresses Cuba with this methodological clarity. Let us deepen these internal contradictions, including the positioning of the international socialist camps and the petty-bourgeois deviations of left circles in Turkey along the Enver Hoxha line.

Cuba Within the Socialist Camps: CIPOML's Distinctive Place

The approach to Cuba is an indicator of how faithful philosophical and political currents in the modern world are to Marxism-Leninism. On the international plane there are three basic revisionist/opportunist approaches toward Cuba, and CIPOML philosophically rejects all three lines:

• Khrushchevite/Brezhnevite Modern Revisionism: This line sanctifies Cuba as an "uninterrupted and flawless socialist paradise." For them, a country need not have the working class in actual power to be socialist; it is enough that it has good relations with the USSR, pursues an anti-American foreign policy, and runs the economy through a bureaucratic state. This is the emasculation of the class essence of Marxism.
• Trotskyist "Deformed Workers' State" Thesis: Trotskyism defines Cuba as "a state in the ownership of the working class but deformed by bureaucracy." This approach severs the dialectical bond between base and superstructure. To speak of a "workers' state" where bureaucracy fully controls production and surplus value and the worker has no say over the means of production is philosophical idealism.
• Maoist "Three Worlds Theory" Pragmatism: This line, derived from Chinese revisionism, long saw Cuba merely as "a satellite and advanced outpost of Soviet social-imperialism," missing the island's internal contradictions and the objective character of its anti-imperialist resistance.

Where Does CIPOML's Difference Lie? CIPOML upholds Leninist integrity. It neither treats Cuba like a market stall of the bourgeois world nor sanctifies it as false socialism. According to CIPOML, Cuba is an artificial state-capitalist model that was not built under the leadership of the revolutionary vanguard party of the working class and that failed to construct the dictatorship of the proletariat. CIPOML takes upon itself the anti-imperialist defense of the island while not shying away from exposing the revisionist character of the regime within.

Enver Hoxha and Cuba Criticisms of His Era: The Anti-Revisionist Barricade

The leader who most sharply laid bare the philosophical and practical anatomy of the Cuban regime in history was Enver Hoxha. In the theoretical struggle the Party of Labor of Albania (PLA) opened against Soviet revisionism from the 1960s onward, it coded Cuba as the most dangerous laboratory of that deviation in Latin America.

The Cuba criticisms crystallized in Hoxha's Imperialism and Revolution (1978) rest on three fundamental epistemological pillars:

"Castroism" Is a Petty-Bourgeois Ideology

Enver Hoxha says that the philosophical background of Fidel Castro is not Marxism-Leninism but nineteenth-century bourgeois radicalism, Latin American nationalism, and petty-bourgeois adventurism. The acceptance of Marxism after the revolution is not a move of theoretical consciousness but a pragmatic "change of name" (nominalism) brought about by taking refuge in the USSR in the face of U.S. aggression.

International Adventurism and the Mercenary Role of Social-Imperialism

In the Enver Hoxha era, Cuba was intervening militarily in Africa (Angola, Ethiopia). While the romantic left applauded these interventions as "internationalism," Hoxha exposed the truth behind them: the Cuban army was doing mercenary work for the geopolitical interests of Soviet social-imperialism. Genuine internationalism means supporting peoples in making revolution through their own vanguard parties; exporting guerrillas or military units from outside (focoism) is a denial of Marxism-Leninism.

Economic Dependence and the Rejection of Socialist Construction

The construction of socialism in a country is possible through the balanced development of the productive forces and a break from the imperialist market. Hoxha characterized Cuba's sale of sugar cane to the USSR in exchange for oil and grain as a "new colonial division of labor." Cuba was made dependent on a single product (sugar), rejected socialist industrialization, and was integrated into the laws of the capitalist market (through COMECON).

The Petty-Bourgeois Misery of Cuba-Supporting Circles in Turkey

Now let us turn to the corridor debates in our philosophy community and the Cuba illusion among left/socialist circles in Turkey (TKP, Sol Party, TİP, and various neoromantic groups). The Cuba defense of these circles is, in the full sense, petty-bourgeois philistinism and epistemological collapse.

Recall the narrow-minded characters in Gorky's The Petty Bourgeois (1902) who put their own comfort and superficial aesthetics above everything. That is exactly the situation of Cuba admirers in Turkey. The shallowness of their "petty-bourgeois uncritical" and false defense of Cuba is as follows:

Reducing Socialism to the "Welfare State"

When left circles in Turkey praise Cuba, they always use this argument: "Health is free there, education is free, no one is homeless." This is the crudest reformist distortion of Marxism.

• Class Analysis: Free health and education are not enough to prove that a system is socialist. After the Second World War, the social-democratic "welfare states" in Europe (for example in Sweden) or in Bismarck's Germany also granted enormous social rights to the working class.
• The Real Question Is This: In Cuba, who owns the means of production? Who appropriates surplus value? Is the working class in power at the factory, or is it a wage slave carrying out the orders of the state bureaucracy? Because petty-bourgeois leftism in Turkey refuses to discuss production and exploitation and focuses only on the distribution mechanism (consumption), it imagines Cuba to be socialist.

Petty-Bourgeois Leftism: Focuses on Consumption (Free health, education, tourism aesthetics)
                                   VS
Marxist-Leninist Science: Focuses on Production (Property relations, control of surplus value, workers' power)

"Lifestyle" Socialism and Nostalgic Romanticism

For urban petty-bourgeois leftists in Turkey, Cuba is a romantic holiday village to flee to from the savagery of capitalism. American cars, old streets, cigars and music... These circles ignore the heavy suffering of the working class on the island in daily life, the pressure of bureaucracy, and the stagnation of production. For them, Cuba is a "museum of nostalgia" in which they cover over their own theoretical inadequacies and the lack of revolutionary practice in Turkey.

Class Blindness and the Legitimization of Revisionism

These circles in Turkey either ignore the latest economic reform packages approved by the Cuban parliament (private companies, foreign capital partnerships, private banks) or try to legitimize them by saying "There is a blockade, what can they do, this is also a strategy."

Yet this rationalization is Kautskyite opportunism itself, which Lenin fiercely criticized in The State and Revolution (1917). Kautsky too argued that the bourgeois state apparatus could be transformed and that market mechanisms could serve socialism. By applauding the Cuban bureaucracy's step-by-step march of the island toward capitalist restoration (the China line), the Turkish left in fact exposes its own petty-bourgeois reformist character.

Let Us Clarify Our Class Line

Comrades, as we reach the end of this theoretical reckoning, the place we have arrived at is not an abstract point of intellectual satisfaction. On the contrary, we have struck the most fundamental truth of epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge): Knowledge is not neutral; every theory of knowledge is, in the last instance, the product of a class standpoint.

Lenin, tearing off the "neutrality" mask of bourgeois philosophers in Materialism and Empirio-criticism, put forward the principle of partisanship (partiinost) in philosophy. Partisanship in philosophy is from whose eyes you read objective reality — which class's eyes. The Cuba question, too, demands of us that we put forward this partisanship, our class line, with steel clarity, granting no premium to any romanticism.

The CIPOML Perspective and the Class Backbone of Organization

The International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations (CIPOML), while preserving the historical and methodological legacy of Marxism-Leninism, reminds us of this vital truth: The class base of a revolutionary organization is the sole backbone that determines its philosophical and practical future.

• The Danger of Class Substitution: The fundamental deviation we see in Cuba and in many revisionist experiences is the removal of the proletariat (working class) as the founding and governing subject, and its replacement by bureaucracy, the army, or petty-bourgeois technocrats.
• The Epistemology of the Workbench vs. the Epistemology of the Desk: Class consciousness is born from that naked exploitation and collective labor within the production process at the factory. The moment the base of organization detaches from factories, mines, and shipyards and shifts to government offices and bureaucratic councils, the epistemology of the organization evolves from dialectics toward pragmatism and status-quo conservatism.

The CIPOML line, for precisely this reason, insistently upholds the independent organization of the working class and its vanguard role in the factories. No structure without a solid class base can ideologically resist the imperialist siege at its doorstep; in the end it surrenders to market laws and capitalist restoration, as is happening in Cuba today.

Future Vision in Marxist Theory: From Necessity to Freedom

Marxist theory possesses a magnificent future vision that does not imprison humanity in today's shallow contradictions — a horizon set toward humanity's liberation. This vision, as Friedrich Engels stated in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, is humanity's passage from the realm of necessity to the realm of real freedom.

Our future vision cannot be limited to a welfare state stuck within the boundaries of the capitalist world market, keeping the people waiting in queues for basic needs while writing "free health" on its shop window.

• Our horizon is communism — where commodity production, wage slavery, and the value form are completely abolished,
• Where classes and the state apparatus wither away,
• Where the productive forces are organized not for profit but for social needs and human self-realization.

Cuba's drama today (the impasse of the 2026 world) is the objective limit of the claim to build "socialism" in a single country, cut off from the vision of world revolution and on a revisionist basis to boot. The future lies not in the island closing in on itself and making concessions to the capitalist market; it lies in the all-out assault of the world proletariat that will eliminate global capitalism.

How Should We Stand on Cuba? Our Dialectical Manifesto

So comrades, what stance should a Marxist-Leninist adopt toward Cuba in light of these facts? Our answer is a two-front, dialectical barricade:

A Trench Against Imperialism, a Scalpel Against Revisionism!

1. Outward (The Trench): Defending Cuba's sovereignty against U.S. moves to starve the Cuban people into submission through blockade and sanctions is the honor debt of communists. Neutrality is impossible here. At every attack of imperialism we will stand shoulder to shoulder with the Cuban people.
2. Inward (The Scalpel): We must criticize in the sharpest terms the state-capitalist character of the regime on the island that dispossesses the working class, the bureaucratic dictatorship, and the capitalist restoration (market opening) packages being applied today. Defending the errors of the Cuban leadership is treason to Marxism-Leninism.

Truth That Transcends Borders: The Universality of Comradeship

Comrades, let us conclude our writing and our theoretical stance with socialism's most founding, most aesthetic concept: The Universality of Comradeship.

That magnificent internationalist spirit brought to life in the figure of Pavel Korchagin in Mikhail Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the Don or in Nikolai Ostrovsky's How the Steel Was Tempered (1932) teaches us that comradeship does not end at border gates. Comradeship is not a concept that can be defined by states' diplomatic relations, trade agreements, or bureaucratic handshakes.

Our comradeship is not with those suit-wearing, epauletted state bureaucrats who govern Cuba, control tourism revenues through the GAESA holding, and today approve the opening of private banks! They are representatives of a layer historically condemned to wither away.

Our comradeship is with:

• Those sweating in Havana's tobacco factories,
• Those who, despite 20-hour power outages, refuse to let imperialism trample the honor of the revolution in the streets,
• Those struggling to keep people alive in hospitals despite the lack of medicine,
• The Cuban working class, the Cuban toilers who await the dawn of that genuine dictatorship of the proletariat that will take ownership and management into their own hands.

The universality of comradeship is to feel in one's own heart the pain of every exploited worker wherever they are in the world, and to preserve the ideological sharpness that will eliminate that exploitation under all conditions. To sanctify the Cuban regime as the petty-bourgeois left in Turkey does, while turning a blind eye to the exploitation of the Cuban worker, is not comradeship but political hypocrisy.

Walking along that clear path opened by CIPOML, we will continue to look at the world through the scientific philosophy of the working class, to be trench comrades with the Cuban people against imperialism, and to lash every door opening to capitalism with the theoretical whip of Marxism-Leninism.

For humanity's future lies neither in Popper's bourgeois engineering, nor in Şengör's elitist shallowness, nor in the market reforms of the Cuban bureaucracy; the future lies in the universal comradeship of the world proletariat and in its red dawn!