Another November 7th

Daisy Valera

On Saturday, November 7, daybreak came with a fine drizzle under a gray sky.

Those who might think that a morning with weather like this is a sign of melancholy or sadness would be mistaken.

Cubans generally love it when the temperature drops a few degrees and the sun hides a little; we can then go out into the street wrapped up and smiling.

I begin talking about the weather on this winter morning because it was the only thing that many of those I know noted this November 7.

I don’t blame them; the scant news coverage on TV doesn’t help too much to counteract the amnesia that we the younger generation have when it comes to the history of Marxism.

Only a few of my friends recalled that this day was the 92nd anniversary of the triumph of the socialist October Revolution.

Along with my comrades who remembered it, I got into a bus under the rain and headed out for San Jose, a municipality of Havana Province.

Waiting for us there were leaders of the Hermanos Saiz Association and those with whom we would share a round of debates on the “Legacy of October.”

The purpose of everyone attending was to prevent from falling into oblivion something that we consider -today, more than ever- indispensable for Cuban society: The history of the USSR.

In these times of world economic crisis with increasingly radical changes that especially affect the poorest on the planet: the workers.

We Cubans cannot afford the luxury of forgetting the errors of the past; otherwise we run the risk of repeating them in the future.

If the purpose of our society is to build an advanced form of socialism, we cannot stop examining a past society that shared our same aims.

Bureaucracy, dogmatism, capitalist penetration, the lack of freedom of speech, ever increasing differentiation between classes, opportunism, the disastrous policy in which some command and others obey, and false proletarian internationalism were the ruinous contributions that Stalinism made to the revolution in the USSR.

These were contributions shamelessly made in the name of Marxism, and which still today stain that name.

To prevent those things from deepening even more in our society is the challenge faced today by the revolutionary Cuban left.

The Cuba Revolution must be ongoing, and we must all be the leaders; events like those organized by the Observatorio Crítico reaffirms that this is the solution to moving forward toward a better social system on this island.