Cuban people ‘will never negotiate the revolution or our sovereignty’
https://themilitant.com/2021/01/16/cuban-people-will-never-negotiate-the-revolution-or-our-sovereignty/
BY SARA LOBMAN
Vol. 85/No. 3
January 25, 2021
From left, Pedro Luis Pedroso, Cuban ambassador to the United Nations,
and Dave Prince and Mary-Alice Waters, from the Socialist Workers Party
National Committee, at celebration of the 62nd anniversary of the Cuban
Revolution Jan. 9 in New York City.
MILITANT/MIKE SHUR
From left, Pedro Luis Pedroso, Cuban ambassador to the United Nations,
and Dave Prince and Mary-Alice Waters, from the Socialist Workers Party
National Committee, at celebration of the 62nd anniversary of the Cuban
Revolution Jan. 9 in New York City.
NEW YORK — This past year “was an especially challenging and complex
year for our country,” Ambassador Pedro Luis Pedroso, Cuba’s permanent
representative to the United Nations, said at a Jan. 9 celebration of
the 62nd anniversary of the Cuban Revolution here. In addition to
confronting a worldwide pandemic, the administration of President Donald
Trump “tried everything in its attempt to break our resistance and force
us to make concessions.”
“But once again the imperialist masters were wrong,” Pedroso said. “Not
only were they unable to crush our patriotic and revolutionary
resistance, we can show achievements and lessons that make the
revolution more robust.”
Quoting Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel, he added, “They insisted on
killing us, but we insisted on living and winning. The Cuban people
exceeded their own expectations.”
More than three dozen people joined together at the meeting, which was
organized by the New York and New Jersey branches of the Socialist
Workers Party. Members of the local Cuba Sí coalition also participated.
Surrounded by displays of enlarged photos taken from Pathfinder Press’
Red Zone: Cuba and the Battle Against Ebola in West Africa by Enrique
Ubieta — which describes how Cuba’s internationalist medical workers
were decisive in pushing back the deadly disease — participants enjoyed
a large spread of good food. Ubieta is the editor of Cuba Socialista,
the theoretical magazine of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist
Party.
Stands full of books on working-class history and writings by SWP
leaders, Cuban revolutionaries and other revolutionary fighters lined
one wall at the meeting.
“I really appreciate that people in America are celebrating the Cuban
Revolution,” Tarik Haskins, a member of the New York-New Jersey Cuba Sí
coalition and Black Panther who spent years behind bars as a political
prisoner, told the Militant. “It’s important to me that the Cubans
contributed to the liberation of the whole southern African region, with
a decisive role in the battle of Cuito Cuanavale that was key to the
freedom of Angola.”
Support for Cuba in the U.S.
Pedroso noted the SWP’s long, unbroken history of support in the U.S.
for the struggle to build an “independent, sovereign and socialist Cuba.”
“Even under the most difficult conditions,” he said, “you have been
resolutely and decisively supporting our demands for the end of the
unjust and criminal economic, commercial and financial blockade that 12
U.S. administrations have maintained against our country, seeking to
bring the revolution and our people to their knees.”
“Not even the COVID-19 pandemic could hamper your extraordinary
solidarity with Cuba,” Pedroso said.
Participants in Jan. 9 celebration of 62nd anniversary of Cuban
Revolution sponsored by SWP in New York, New Jersey. Program featured
Pedro Luis Pedroso, Cuba’s ambassador to the United Nations.
MILITANT/MIKE SHUR
Participants in Jan. 9 celebration of 62nd anniversary of Cuban
Revolution sponsored by SWP in New York, New Jersey. Program featured
Pedro Luis Pedroso, Cuba’s ambassador to the United Nations.
The ambassador singled out three of the public activities organized in
New York since the pandemic began — the launch of the Pathfinder edition
of Red Zone at a well-attended event at The People’s Forum in early
March; a July 26 picket line at Union Square on the anniversary of the
attacks by Cuban revolutionaries on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de
Cuba and the Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Barracks in the city of Bayamo in
1953, considered the opening of the Cuban Revolution; and a car caravan
Dec. 17 demanding an end to the U.S. economic war against Cuba.
He also thanked the Militant newspaper for its “tremendous contribution”
in telling the truth about the Cuban Revolution over the past six decades.
Pedroso noted that the Cuban people will continue to face challenges in
the coming year. “We learned long ago that for those who do not make
concessions, there are no easy circumstances.
“While continuing to face the impact of a criminal blockade, Cuba must
strengthen its economy, resume economic growth and development, and
permanently control the incidence of COVID-19 in our country,” he said.
“With the permanent faith in victory that Fidel left us, we are
convinced that our people will sail safely through the new challenges.”
The ambassador reiterated his country’s willingness to build a
“respectful and lasting relationship” with the United States, but “we
will never accept concessions in our principles or conditions of any
kind,” he said. “We will never negotiate the revolution, socialism, or
our sovereignty.”
A socialist revolution
Pedroso was introduced by Mary-Alice Waters, a longtime member of the
SWP National Committee, and editor of Pathfinder Press’ series of more
than 30 books on the Cuban Revolution.
“It was 62 years ago yesterday that the Liberty Caravan led by Fidel
Castro entered Havana after a weeklong journey across Cuba,” Waters
said. In every city and town, the population poured into the streets to
welcome Fidel and the “Men of Moncada.”
“The popular revolutionary insurrection had triumphed, opening the door
to the first free territory, the first socialist revolution in the
Americas.”
“The greatest tribute to Fidel’s leadership and to the capacities of
Cuba’s toilers” is that fact: 62 years and counting, she said, “and the
Cuban Revolution still stands.”
Waters pointed to the internationalism of the revolution, especially the
hundreds of thousands of Cubans — including Ambassador Pedroso — who
between 1975 and 1991 had helped defeat the U.S.-backed South African
army invasion of Angola, leading to the independence of Namibia, the
release of Nelson Mandela and the end of the apartheid regime.
The bourgeois media — both mass and social — refer to the Jan. 6 events
at the U.S. Capitol as an “insurrection,” Waters said. “They howl in
fear, not of Trump or a handful of out-of-shape paramilitary conspiracy
theorists, but of the tens of millions of ‘deplorables’ — working people
— who refused to vote for Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris.
“They refused because they know them and what a Biden-Harris
administration will mean for the working class. That lesson was learned
from the bitter experience of life under the Clintons, Bush and Obama.”
The Cuban Revolution was the real thing, Waters said, “a genuinely
popular revolutionary insurrection.” When the Batista regime crumbled in
face of the revolutionary uprising of millions led by the Rebel Army and
July 26 Movement in 1959, “workers and farmers of Cuba began to remake
their society. For the first time since the early years of the 1917
October Revolution in Russia they began to show the world what socialism
and communism really mean.”
“The Cuban Revolution is our revolution as well,” Waters said. “Together
with the revolutionary struggle of the Black proletarian masses that
brought down Jim Crow segregation and changed social relations in the
U.S. forever, it showed new generations of workers and youth the class
forces capable of making a socialist revolution right here in the U.S.”
‘A good year’
Dave Prince, the Socialist Workers campaign chair in New Jersey and a
longtime member of the SWP National Committee, also spoke.
“In 2020, as the brutal realities of the capitalist crisis unfolded, the
SWP and its national ticket of candidates for president, Congress and
other offices responded boldly to explain that the working class is the
only class that can end the crises of the imperialist epoch, including
its wars, racism, and exploitation,” Prince said. “The working class has
to take power in struggles that transform us and use the power of a
workers and farmers government to rebuild society on the foundation of
solidarity in cooperation with the toilers of the world.” This is what
the example of Cuba’s toilers has shown us.
“2020 was not a bad year for the Socialist Workers Party, it was a good
year,” Prince said. “We stood with our class, going to work every day
alongside millions of our co-workers, suddenly deemed ‘essential’ by the
propertied rulers.”
Prince explained how members of the SWP spoke to thousands of workers
and farmers on their doorsteps in cities, towns and rural areas across
the country, how they joined strike picket lines and social protests.
Prince said the party looks forward to an even better 2021, and
introduced Joanne Kuniansky, the Socialist Workers candidate for New
Jersey governor in 2021, and Candace Wagner, a rail worker (who couldn’t
be there because she was working), as the party’s candidate for
lieutenant governor.
He invited all interested to join in helping to put the SWP on the
ballot in at least nine states.
Róger Calero, who chaired the program, announced the next activities
planned by the Cuba Sí coalition in defense of the Cuban Revolution,
beginning with a Jan. 31 car caravan.
Over $1,700 was raised for the work of the New York and New Jersey
branches of the Socialist Workers Party. Participants ended the program
with an apple cider toast to the Cuban Revolution.
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