What Venezuela Teaches Us About Defending Cuba
Patrick Baker Was Right
Patrick Baker would have appreciated the bitter irony. Thirty-five years ago, as the Eastern Bloc crumbled and Cuba’s Fourth Congress rejected the democratic reforms he argued were essential for survival, Baker warned in Socialist Outlook that bureaucratic centralization “throws away one of the best chances of maintaining popular support for anti-capitalist policies.” On 3 January 2026, Venezuela’s 4.5 million militia members evaporated without resistance as the boliburguesía handed Nicolás Maduro to American forces. Patrick, a witty and modest bon viveur who died several years ago, did not live to see his analysis confirmed so brutally. But those of us who remember him; those of us trying to defend Cuba against the Trump administration now openly targeting it; we owe him the acknowledgment. He was right.
Sunday would have been his birthday. This seems as good a time as any to revisit his argument.
The Investigator
Patrick was not an armchair theorist. A longtime activist in the struggles for lesbian and gay rights, he understood that socialist politics must embrace the full breadth of human liberation. As a journalist for Socialist Outlook in the 1980s and 1990s, he did not merely write about workers’ movements; he interviewed furniture workers in Britain facing redundancy, South African unionists building the post-apartheid labour movement, German socialists watching unification swallow the GDR. His Spanish and French opened Latin American and European movements to English-speaking readers. Later, after more than a decade as a lecturer in European Politics at Goldsmiths, he served on the editorial board of the Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans. The trajectory was characteristic of a generation of 1980s activists who carried the revolutionary tradition into academic spaces without abandoning it.
I should declare an interest, since I knew him as a comrade and friend through the 1990s and into this century. In March 2006, Patrick was listed among the founding sponsors of Socialist Resistance, though by then he was no longer active as a Fourth International member. He remained supportive, particularly of our early collaboration with comrades in the Green Left current of the Green Party of England and Wales, like Derek Wall, who was also teaching at Goldsmiths at the time. It was Patrick who nudged me and others in Socialist Resistance to think in a more structured way about ecosocialist regroupment; about how revolutionary socialists might cooperate with currents we had traditionally kept at arm’s length. Twenty years later, the Fourth International’s ecosocialist turn has vindicated that instinct too. Patrick had a knack for seeing where the movement needed to go before the rest of us caught up.
In 1991, he was conducting what amounted to a systematic investigation into the crisis of bureaucratic socialism. The seismograph readings from the fault lines of the twentieth century. He interviewed Salim Vally of South Africa’s Workers Organisation for Socialist Action on the necessity of independent mass action; German socialists on why the New Forum failed to provide an alternative to Christian Democratic annexation; Oliver Macdonald of New Left Review on Yeltsin’s authoritarian trajectory and the absence of working-class organizations capable of challenging the “road to market.” His Cuba article was the culmination of that investigation: the application of lessons being drawn in real time from Berlin and Moscow to a revolution that still had a chance to learn from others’ catastrophes.
The Fourth Congress and the Rejection of Reform
Cuba’s Fourth Party Congress met in October 1991, two months after the failed coup against Gorbachev and weeks before the final dissolution of the Soviet Union. The timing could not have been more critical. Soviet subsidies had sustained the Cuban economy for three decades; their disappearance would trigger a 35% GDP contraction, the “Special Period” that would define the 1990s. The Congress was Castro’s opportunity to chart a new course.
He rejected it. The Congress refused to legalize small-scale private initiative (a decision reversed under pressure in 1993), maintained the one-party monopoly, and reinforced what the Fourth International characterized as a “centrally administered economy” that left “no space for the initiative of the producers.” Whatever popular assemblies had preceded the Congress, whatever debates had occurred in workplaces and neighbourhoods, the outcome was bureaucratic retrenchment at precisely the moment when the Eastern Bloc was demonstrating the consequences of such a path.
Patrick’s response in Socialist Outlook was unsparing. Castro, he wrote, “rejected any radical changes to the political or economic system.” The claim that the party still commanded overwhelming support was “almost certainly true”; the dissident groups receiving massive Western media coverage “clearly represent very little.” But this was precisely the point. The revolution retained legitimacy. It had achievements worth defending: healthcare, literacy, the transformation of a Batista-era plantation economy into something approaching dignity. The question was whether the leadership would squander that legitimacy by refusing to let the Cuban people defend their own revolution.
“The rejection of a move towards more democracy or pluralism,” Patrick wrote, “throws away one of the best chances of maintaining popular support for anti-capitalist policies.” And then the line that history would vindicate: “The best way to defend social gains in Cuba is for its people to be as involved as possible in running their society; and that means pluralism and democracy.”
Why the Gains Matter
Some on the left will object here. Why defend Cuba at all? Why not let the regime fall and hope something better emerges from the wreckage? This is the position of the state capitalist tendency, and it must be confronted directly.
In 1969, Ernest Mandel debated Michael Kidron of the International Socialists on precisely this question. Kidron argued that Cuba, like the USSR and China, was merely “state capitalist”; that nothing fundamental had changed in the lives of ordinary people; that socialists had no side in conflicts involving such regimes. Mandel’s response was devastating:
You have to go there to see it with your own eyes, as I went and as many other people went; you have to go there to see the change in the type of life people lead, how people were completely oppressed, servile before, and to see the tremendous awakening of the people that this revolution meant, how everybody learned how to read and write and learned it in a voluntary mobilization with hundreds of thousands of young people going to villages in order to teach the people.
Mandel spoke of two million people in a country of six and a half million having access to arms, making armed demonstrations at the end of every week. He spoke of medicine and social services brought to villages that had never seen them. He spoke of “the intellectual, moral, psychological, political change, much more important even than the economic change which the revolution has brought there.”
This was not romanticism. Mandel was the foremost critic of bureaucratic deformation in the Fourth International tradition; his 1979 resolution on “Socialist Democracy and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” remains the definitive Trotskyist case for pluralism. But he understood that the question was not whether to defend Cuba’s gains. The question was how.
Patrick’s answer was the same as the Fourth International’s: you defend revolutionary gains by extending them, not by freezing them in bureaucratic amber. You defend them by trusting the working class to lead. You defend them by creating the conditions under which ordinary people have a stake in the revolution’s survival; not as passive recipients of benefits distributed from above, but as active participants in their own liberation.
The Eastern Bloc Lesson
Patrick’s 1991 interviews traced the mechanism with painful clarity. In Germany, he spoke with socialists from East and West about why the New Forum movement had failed to provide an alternative to Christian Democratic annexation. The answer was structural: the movement “remained too heterogeneous and lacked a distinct political profile or coherent economic programme,” leaving voters to choose “the strongest apparatus” on offer. Decades of bureaucratic suppression had left no independent working-class organizations capable of articulating an alternative. When the wall fell, ordinary East Germans watched as their country was absorbed into the Federal Republic. They did not resist because they had nothing to resist for.
The same pattern held across the bloc. In his interview with Oliver Macdonald following the August coup, Patrick explored why Yeltsin was consolidating power so rapidly. The answer, again, was the absence of independent organization: Russia “lacked genuine, organised political parties,” and the working class lacked “the necessary independent organisations to challenge the rapid road to market.” The CPSU had spent seven decades ensuring that no rival centres of power could emerge. When the party collapsed, there was nothing to replace it but Yeltsin’s authoritarian marketization.
The contrast with South Africa was instructive. Salim Vally of the Workers Organisation for Socialist Action told Patrick that “only independent mass action by the working class” could secure genuine transformation; that workers must “remain independent” to ensure the struggle resulted in revolution rather than “reformist settlement.” South Africa had COSATU, the UDF, a dense network of community organizations and shop steward committees. Whatever the limitations of the post-apartheid settlement, the transition was contested. The working class had organizations through which to fight.
Cuba in 1991 faced the same choice. It could open political space, allow the “pluralist expression of different currents,” and trust that a revolution with genuine popular support would survive the contest of ideas. Or it could double down on bureaucratic centralization, treating the population as objects to be administered rather than subjects capable of self-organization. Castro chose the latter. Patrick predicted the consequences.
Venezuela as Proof
The extraction of Nicolás Maduro from Caracas on 3 January 2026 was a crime. Let us be clear about that. The United States military kidnapped the head of a sovereign state, seized control of the largest oil reserves on the planet, and installed a successor regime within forty-eight hours. Trump’s boast that American oil companies would now “go in” to “fix broken infrastructure” is imperialism without a mask.
But the most striking feature of the weekend’s events was not the American assault. It was the absence of resistance. This was not regime change. It was regime capture: what analysts are already calling “Madurismo without Maduro.” The JSOC operation involved only 200 personnel and produced no American fatalities; the Presidential Guard did not engage. Defence Minister Vladimir Padrino López endorsed the transition within forty-eight hours, urging the population to resume “normal activities.” Even Trump dismissed the liberal opposition leader María Corina Machado, stating she lacks “respect” and “support” inside the country; Washington prefers to work with existing technocrats like Vice President Delcy Rodríguez. A “regime tweak” rather than democratic transition. The bureaucracy survives; the oil flows; Chevron resumed exports to the Gulf Coast on Monday. The working class, as ever, had no say in the matter.
The 4.5 million militia members Maduro claimed to have mobilized in August 2025 did not materialize. Security analysts now describe them as a “semantic construction” designed for social control rather than combat. The boliburguesía chose collaboration because genuine popular mobilization would have threatened their own position as surely as American intervention. They had spent years suppressing the Venezuelan Communist Party, attacking the “Popular Democratic Front,” hollowing out the workers’ movement that might have defended the revolution. When the crisis came, there was nothing left to mobilize. The internal arrangements were already in place: reports indicate that Trump administration officials had identified Delcy Rodríguez as a potential “business partner” weeks before the operation, based on her existing ties to Wall Street and international oil interests.
The mechanism Patrick identified in 1991 operated with textbook precision. Bureaucratic centralization led to demobilization of independent organization; demobilization led to inability to resist; inability to resist led to managed capitulation. The 80% GDP contraction between 2013 and 2025 was not merely the result of sanctions and oil price collapse. It was the “mathematical inevitability” of a regime that had suppressed workers’ control, placed loyalty over competence, and treated mass organizations as transmission belts rather than independent organs of popular power. When the moment came, the bureaucracy’s class interest in self-preservation made it a reliable partner for imperialism.
The damage extends beyond Venezuela’s borders. As the Ukrainian socialist Denys Pilash observed, Maduro “has become a useful bogeyman for every regional fascist to demonize any local leftist by his example.” Bureaucratic degeneration does not merely weaken the revolution internally; it discredits the left across the entire continent. Every authoritarian “socialist” who suppresses workers’ movements and presides over economic collapse provides ammunition for the right. Milei in Argentina, Bukele in El Salvador, the Venezuelan opposition now lining up to collaborate with Trump: all of them point to Maduro as proof that the left means tyranny and ruin. This is the international cost of abandoning socialist democracy.
Cuba Now
Trump and Rubio have made no secret of their intentions. The “model being established in Caracas,” as we noted last week, “will be applied elsewhere if it is not defeated here. Cuba is the obvious next target.” The Venezuelan operation demonstrated that Washington prefers a “regime tweak” to prolonged conflict; that bureaucracies will trade their figureheads for institutional survival and continued access to the rents; that decades of rhetorical anti-imperialism mean nothing when the alternative is mobilizing a working class that might threaten bureaucratic privilege. “Madurismo without Maduro” is the model. “Díaz-Canelismo without Díaz-Canel” is presumably the offer already being prepared for Havana.
But the threat may be even graver than simple repetition of the Venezuelan playbook. Pilash has articulated the fear that haunts genuine internationalists: “a global deal between two imperialisms: ‘you leave us the Western Hemisphere, we leave you Ukraine.’” If Trump’s Venezuela operation is part of such an accommodation; if Washington gets a free hand in Latin America in exchange for abandoning Kyiv; then Cuba faces not just the hostility of the Florida exiles but the logic of great-power carve-up. The island would be traded between empires, as it was in 1898. And once again, the Cuban people would have no say in their fate; unless they have the democratic organizations through which to resist.
The July 2021 protests revealed the depth of Cuba’s crisis. Economic hardship, the failed monetary unification, a younger generation disconnected from the historical legitimacy of 1959: the government’s response; labeling all protesters as “mercenaries” of the United States; was a dangerous simplification that ignored legitimate social and democratic demands. The Fourth International called for immediate legalization of the right to peaceful demonstration, the right to strike in the growing private sector, an end to censorship of artists and intellectuals. The Díaz-Canel administration responded with summary trials.
This is the road to Venezuela. Not because the situations are identical; Cuba’s social gains remain more substantial, its revolutionary legitimacy deeper. But the mechanism is the same. A bureaucracy that treats popular mobilization as a threat rather than a resource will eventually face a crisis it cannot survive. When that crisis comes, it will discover that the masses it claimed to represent have no reason to defend it. Worse: the bureaucracy itself will have every incentive to cut a deal, trading the figurehead for institutional continuity, opening the economy to American capital, and suppressing whatever resistance remains. Padrino López urging Venezuelans to resume “normal activities” while Chevron resumes exports is the model. The Cuban nomenclatura is watching and drawing conclusions.
Patrick understood this thirty-five years ago. “Cuba must be defended against Bush’s offensive,” he wrote in 1991, “the aim of which is to turn Cuba into another client state, so familiar from Central America. This is the primary duty of socialists in the West. But, at the same time, we must be honest.” Honest about the costs of bureaucratic centralization. Honest about the necessity of pluralism. Honest about the fact that the best defence of revolutionary gains is not uncritical solidarity with whoever happens to be in power, but active support for the independent organization of the working class.
The Vindicated Tradition
Patrick Baker was a socialist journalist, a gay rights activist, a linguist, an academic, a comrade. He was, by all accounts and in my own experience, excellent company; the kind of person who made editorial meetings bearable and political work feel like something other than grim duty. He nudged Socialist Resistance toward ecosocialist regroupment years before the rest of the movement caught up. He saw where we needed to go.
He also deserves to be remembered for being right. His 1991 analysis of Cuba was not an isolated insight but the application of a theoretical framework; the Fourth International’s long-standing argument that socialist democracy is not a luxury but a strategic necessity; to the most urgent crisis of his moment. He watched the Eastern Bloc collapse because ordinary people had no stake in defending bureaucracies that had suppressed their independent activity for decades. He warned that Cuba was heading down the same path. He was ignored.
Venezuela has now provided the final confirmation. A revolution is only as strong as its democratic institutions. A regime that excludes popular participation cannot mobilize popular defence; worse, its bureaucracy will find it easier to accommodate imperialism than to risk genuine mobilization. The gains of 1959 are worth defending; Mandel was right about that. But they are indefensible without “the pluralist expression of different currents,” without factory assemblies having “control over the current economic restructuring,” without the active, self-organized participation of the Cuban working class in determining their own future.
This is what genuine solidarity looks like. Not uncritical cheerleading for whoever opposes Washington. Not campist apologetics that subordinate the interests of workers to the survival of bureaucracies. But honest, rigorous, comradely analysis that takes seriously both the threat of imperialism and the threat of bureaucratic degeneration; that understands these as complementary dangers rather than competing priorities.
Patrick got this right. On his birthday, we remember him. And we continue the work he helped us begin.