“The workers... battle-cry must be: 'The Permanent Revolution.'” — Marx and Engels, 1850

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Celia Hart Santamaría (1962 – 2008)

Celia Hart, along with her brother, were killed in a traffic accident in Cuba in early September. She was known on the European and international left as a critical thinker and sympathiser of Trotsky – a rarity on the Cuban left....writes Stuart King...

Her parents were long time supporters of the Cuban revolution. Her mother took part with Fidel Castro in the attempt to seize the Moncada Barracks in 1953 in the struggle against the Batista dictatorship and her father Amando Hart was Minister for Education and then Minister of Culture in the Cuban government.

Indeed it was through her father that she came to sympathise with Trotsky and Trotskyism. A physicist who studied in East Germany in the mid-1980s, she returned deeply disillusioned with Stalinism. Her father as a result of her worries, lent her copies of Revolution Betrayed and Deutscher’s three volume biography of Trotsky – it was from reading these she became convinced that the Russian revolution had been betrayed by Stalinism.

Celia was a regular speaker on platforms of the far left in Europe and internationally, and was instrumental in the launching of a new Spanish version of Trotsky’s Revolution Betrayed last February at the Havana Bookfair.

Celia was well aware of the dangers of the marketisation process going on apace in Cuba and talked of “the nightmare” possibility that Cuba would follow the Chinese road of restoration of capitalism. Her death is a sad political loss in Cuba at a time when critical voices who support genuine socialism are few and far between.
 
Tributes, reminiscences and obituaries can be found at: http://liammacuaid.wordpress.com and at www.marxist.com
 

Thu 11, September 2008 @ 18:54

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discussion of this article

Wladek Flakin said…

I'm not convinced she can be described as a voice of genuine socialism. She was, like the IMT, an advocate of self-reform of the Stalinist bureaucracy.

Two Trotskyist tendencies from Latin America, the FT-CI and the LIT-CI, took the opportunity of Hart's death to publish long polemics against her:

http://www.ft-ci.org/article.php3?id_article=1440

http://www.litci.org/MateriaES.aspx?MAT_ID=1375

Mon 15, September 2008 @ 09:54

Duncan Chapel said…

The leaflet for the memorial meeting is here:

http://www.slideshare.net/duncanchapel/celia-hart-menorial-meeting-leaflet-presentation/

COmrade Wladek is mistaken about Celia's politics. She was a strong opponent of Stalinism and of bureaucracy, and railed against both in her book 'It's never too late to change the world'.

Tue 30, September 2008 @ 14:41

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