I honestly don't have time to follow this up, but I hate to see history
turned like this. I was a member of the SWP at this time (late 1950s), and
an original member of the Sparticist League under the name of "Ireland."
The Cuban Revolution electrified all of us -- it was a heady atmosphere in
those days. I was among those on 125th Street in Harlem outside the Hotel
Theresa shouting "Fidel, Fidel, etc." when Castro chose to stay there when
he came to the UN. There was no traffic as the streets were filled with
people. (For non-New-Yorkers, 125th Street is the "Broadway" of Harlem.)
No-one "sneered" at the Cuban leadership; the issue was not anti-Castro as
it was trying to maintain a strong position in the advanced industrial
countries, the U.S. In an effort to turn the SWP back from its rightward
march, we were expelled, after a trial out of the movies. We were the
first group to be expelled from the SWP who did not want to go. Later, of
course, we discovered that the SWP was crawling with FBI agents, though I
don't know the percentages. I'm definitely not defending any
"sectarianism" though. Incidentally, Wolforth and Robertson split very
quickly after the expulsion from the SWP. In the SWP, we were known as the
"Revolutionary Tendency;" after the split with Wolforth, the Sparticist
League was formed.
Perhaps others on line who were around in those days could pick this up and
fill in more details. I certainly understand anyone's efforts to take new
positions, but re-writing history shouldn't be the basis of it.
Larry Shute
Thanks for your message at 04:26 PM 12/31/97 -0500, Louis Proyect. Your
message was:
>Some Trotskyists would not even give the Cubans this much of the benefit of
>a doubt. A minority in the SWP led by James Robertson and Tim Wolforth
>sneered at the Cuban leadership. Tim Wolforth, who had come to Trotskyism
>from social democracy, faulted Castro for not upholding institutions of
>worker's democracy. He instructed Castro to emulate Lenin, the architect of
>Soviet democracy. Tim Wolforth has returned to the social democracy fold.
>(Now he calls it by the less compromised term "democratic socialism.") Tim
>Wolforth still declares that Cuba lacks democracy, but blames it now on
>Cuba's stubborn adherence to Leninist norms. Tim Wolforth is hard to
>please. He spent most of the 60's and 70's as leader of the miniscule
>Trotskyist sect called the Worker's League. While others were organizing
>demonstrations against the Vietnam War, Wolforth and his followers were
>organizing meetings on "dialectics", an issue they believed that
>transcended everything. Robertson has also been consistent. He formed a new
>group called the Spartacist League in the early 60's that gave his
>sectarianism an even more virulent aspect. The cult remains faithful to the
>leader's religious beliefs to the present day.
