Comments Elsewhere

Kevin, thanks for this post; I think you’re right and that the lesson generalizes to a lot of other revolutions ruined by the later efforts of the self-styled “vanguard.”

On the other hand, it should be recognized that a lot of the acts of “economic warfare” that the Marxoids are using to explain Castro’s power grabs were actually perfectly legitimate. The U.S. government’s withdrawal of state-to-state foreign aid transfers, for example, ought to have been celebrated — the last thing that a revolution needs is the colonial patronage of the U.S. government. Similarly, the big oil companies’ refusal to refine Soviet oil in the refineries they built was (prima facie, at least; I don’t know how they came by those refineries) something they had a perfect right to do. It was stupid of them, to be sure, but that’s a separate issue. The embargo and sustained threats of open war were, of course, completely unjustified, and clearly count as warlike. But these came after, not before, the implementation of state capitalism and the opening wave of nationalization. Castro was baring his fangs of his own initiative, well before the U.S. government was doing anything other than withdrawing from patronage into neutrality (a move which ought to have been welcomed, not retaliated against).