Spain Mass Moves in Barcelona

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On February 2nd the rapidly advancing struggle of the Spanish working class took a new leap forward.

In Barcelona on that day 70,000 demonstrators took to the streets to call for a complete amnesty and an end to the dictatorship.

The fascist authorities using rubber bullets, tear gas and smoke bombs and charges of mounted police failed for four hours to stop the continual regroupment of the demonstrators.

The workers and students overturned cars and tore up manhole covers to make barricades against police attacks.

Thousands of motorists in the traffic-bound streets and residents in surrounding houses hooted and cheered their support for the This is a new illustration of how the demands and actions of the working class are breaking through the bounds within which the Stalinist and reformist leaderships wish to keep them.

At the same time the fascists are hopelessly raising their own barricades against change.

Prime Minister Arias Navarro's speech to the Cortes, Spain's caricature 'parliament', on January 28th was even further to the right than the policy statement he made 1.'-a Fanann'n lifotimo need for 'continuity of the work inherited from Franco'.

This mixture of the most merciless reaction with the upsurge of workers' preparedness to fight for their demands is an explosive one.

Terror of this explosion is causing widening fissures in the Spanish ruling class. Realising that Arias Navarro's speech supplied little or nothing for the leaders of the Stalinist and reformist parties to cling onto as a basis for their collaborationist policies, virtually the whole of the Spanish press were sharply critical.

This included Pueblo the paper of the official corporatist "unions'. The only exception was El Alcazar, the paper of the Francoist federation of civil war veterans.

What none of the papers dared to report was that, while the Cortes applauded all references to Franco in Navarro's speech, it met every reference to King Juan Carlos with stony silence.

The power of Spanish fascism now has all the stability of a sandcastle. Its most sophisticated leaders, such as interior Minister Fraga, know that the only thing which can stop it being washed away by the tide of the workers' offensive is the collaboration of the Stalinist and reformist leaderships.

With a principled and uncompromising leadership this offensive is powerful enough to obliterate the

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PART THE After being promised for over 5 years, the first Congress of the Cuban Communist Party (now having 203,000 members) finally took place in late December - more than ten years after the Party was hammered together out of the old Stalinist party (the Popular Socialist Party) and the remains of Fidel Castro's 26 July Movement.

Castro apologised for the brevity" of his speech, which in fact lasted for over nine hours and took up 1½ days of the 5 day Congress! Its content ranged from the history of the Cuban independence movement in the 19th century to information on the number of pencils distributed to educational institutions in 1974 (46 million of them).

PURPOSE

But the political purpose of the speech was to present the Cuban leadership's current "authorised version" of Cuba's political history of which the main points are:

- that the political positions of the late-nineteenth century Cuban writer and independence fighter Jose Marti, the prophet of Castro's petty bourgeois radical 26 July Movement, were identical to those of Lenin;

- that the leadership of the 26 July Movement, though not its supporters, had always been Socialist Marxists;

that the political record of the PSP was unblemished;

- that the policies of the 26 July Movement and the PSP in the 1950s were tactically complementary; the former merely added the correct tactic of guerilla war to the correct political positions of the latter; "sectarianism of 1962 (when the PSP secretary Anibal Escalante was exiled to the Soviet Union) any previous political errors were those of idealism made by the 26 July Movement.

In these gross distortions, there is an attempt to have the long record of opportunistic twists and Luns, betrayals and compromises of both political movements expunged from the record, along with the bitter quarrels between the two.

The bourgois radical and stalinist threads of the history of the Cuban revolution are now claimed to have always been firmiy plaited REHABILITATION The total rehabilitation of the PSP was formally marked by the addition of Blas Roca and Carlos Raphael Rodriguez (PSP leader since the 1930s) to the Political Bureau of the Cuban CP, hitherto the preserve of Castro and his closest colleagues in the leadership of the 26 July Movement and the Revolutionary Directorate.

Parallel to this, the international • INTERNATIONAL NEWS I section of the speech was a panegyric of the Stalinist policy of peaceful coexistence.

On Cuba's own international policy, apart from a vigourous defence of Cuba's material assistance to the MPLA in Angola, the emphasis was placed on the development in the last few years of increasingly friendly relations with a large number of bourgeois governments, from the reactionary military clique in Peru (who, Castro said, open 'a new era in the position of certain military forces in Latin America') and Mrs. Gandhi (whose state of emergency he supported) to France and Britain.

In an otherwise exhaustive survey of compromise Castro omitted to mention Spain with which throughout the period since the revolution Cuba has done more trade than with any other capitalist coutnry.

Cubans, however, will not nave forgotten that it is barely two months since flags in Cuba flew at half-mast for 3 days to mark the death of General Franco.

The work' of the Congress, apart from listening to Castro's almost interminable addresses, consisted in ratifying (not in any serious way discussing) a series of resolutions which embodied. some major changes in policy already decided upon by the leadership.

The principle resolutions were about 'Peoples Power' and the new Economic Management and Planning System.

'Peoples Power' is a new system of local government based on elected assemblies for each of the newly delineated provinces.

The Economic Management and Planning System involves reintroduction of the categories of price, cost, profit, accountancy, credit and interest in the operation of all state-owned enterprises (that Taxation (abolished in Cuba in 1967) is to be reintroduced in the form of a general turnover tax (similar to VAT) which will form the basis of central and local government revenues.

This complete reversal of Cuba's previous economic policies is a response to the continual economic decline produced in the 1960s by policies which idealistically abolished all relationship between costs and the value of production; these culminated in the economic disaster of the 1970 sugar harvest. For these policies Castro is now (only too rightly) self-critical.

Just as the errors have been extreme so now are the remedies. In 1973 a relationship between work and pay was re established via a full-scale piece-work system throughout the economy.

While this has helped to produce a very fast growth in production in the last two years, at the same time it involves the loss in practice of the minimum wage provision operating before then.

The resolutions were, needless to say, adopted by Congress, as the theses on whic they are based were voted for by 9 per cent of the 6½ million Cubar who. had (according to Castro articipated in discussions at wo ornanisation in the wetks belon entres the Congress.

As before the Trade Union Conpress 1973, the Cubai leadership attempted to create th illusion the resolutions emerged democratically as the wil of the masses.

In fact, policies decided upon bi the leadership were submitted to form of 'discussion' in which it wa not possible to advocate any mor detailed amendments to drafting.

The this resolution peasantry advocating speed; incorporation of small-holding peasants into cooperative production units and the stat