President François Hollande has well summarized this approach aiming to explain that Fidel Castro played a genuine “anti-imperialist” role, but that the regime put in place was not consistent, not democratic, and so on.

The reason for this is that there is in Latin America a gigantic “anti-imperialist” populism, which in reality aims only to fall into the arms of others powers. The “anti-imperialism” of Salvador Allende in Chile, of the FMLN in El Salvador, of the FSLN in Nicaragua, was in fact a direct support to Soviet social-imperialism.

Cuba sent as many as 500,000 troops to Angola between 1975 and 1988 to support the pro-Soviet Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola; its soldiers also intervened in Ethiopia.

Cuba was also the “anti-imperialist” intermediary of the USSR to supply arms to “independent” Algeria, but also special advisers and weapons in Guinea-Bissau, Congo-Brazzaville, Zaire (Congo-Kinshasa), Benin.

In addition, of course, of South Africa, the ANC being a pro-Soviet force, and consequently also armed with special weapons and advisers.

Soviet social-imperialism has historically dressed its interventionism, its aggressions, behind the mask of “anti-imperialism”.

In Europe, campaigns in support of Nelson Mandela or the Sandinistas of Nicaragua enabled the revisionists to give themselves an anti-imperialist, progressive image when in fact all of this was at the service of the USSR, whose military budget swelled from year to year, with a military-industrial complex of extreme weight.

The Maoists have of course always denounced this historically.

One can only understand, to give an example of revisionism, that the “Maoist Communist Party of Italy” has nothing of Maoist, since it “salutes” Fidel Castro as an “anti-imperialist revolutionary”.

Cuba would have been “a point of reference and support for the entire anti-imperialist movement and the anti-imperialist struggle on the continent”, “influencing an anti-imperialist generation in the world”.

This is entirely false, since Maoism develops itself against the Cuban conceptions synthesized by the Frenchman Régis Debray in his book “Revolution in the Revolution” (slogan which, moreover, the “Maoist Communist Party of Italy” defined recently absurdly as a slogan of the Chinese cultural revolution!).

The Communist Party of Peru has historically published a document presenting in depth the issue of the opposition of Maoism to Castroism and its Guevarist variant, although this latter form is relatively more ambiguous because of its voluntarism.

The Maoists have never considered that Cuba has, as the “Maoist Communist Party of Italy” thinks, “interrupted its march towards socialism” by supporting the USSR, but that it has become a semi-feudal semi-colonial satellite.

The 1984 declaration of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, a structure regrouping the pro-Mao Zedong forces to which the ancient form of the “Maoist Communist Party of Italy” belonged at the time, is absolutely clear:

“The main deviation in the recent period in the colonial, semi (or neo) colonial countries has been and remains the tendency to deny or negate this basic orientation for the revolutionary movement in these types of countries:

the negation of the leading role of the proletariat and the Marxist-Leninist party; the rejection or opportunist perversion of people's war;

the abandonment of building a united front, based upon the worker-peasant alliance and under the leadership of the proletariat.

This revisionist deviation has taken on in the past both a "left" and an openly right-wing form.

The modern revisionists preached, especially in the past, the "peaceful transition to socialism" and promoted the leadership of the bourgeoisie in the national liberation struggle.

However this openly capitulationist, right-wing revisionism always corresponded with, and has become increasingly intermingled with, a kind of "left" armed revisionism, promoted at times by the Cuban leadership and others,

which separated the armed struggle from the masses and preached a line of combining revolutionary stages into one single "socialist" revolution,

which in fact meant appealing to the workers on the narrowest of bases and negating the necessity of the working class to lead the peasantry and others in thoroughly eliminating imperialism and the backward and distorted economic and social relations that foreign capital thrives on and reinforces.

Today this form of revisionism is one of the major planks of the social-imperialist attempt to penetrate and control national liberation struggles.”

It is significant that, thirty years after this declaration, the “Maoist Communist Party of Italy” salutes Fidel Castro who was denounced before. This is a good example of what is called revisionism.