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The Militant (logo)
Vol. 80/No. 2 January 18, 2016
(editorial)
Defend, emulate Cuban Revolution!
We join millions around the world in solidarity with revolutionary
Cuba on the 57th anniversary of the workers and farmers coming to power.
The Socialist Workers Party stands shoulder to shoulder with all those
defending Cuba and its socialist revolution, as we have done since Jan.
1, 1959. We seek to emulate the Cuban example here.
In Cuba and the Coming American Revolution, SWP National Secretary Jack
Barnes describes how the party campaigned to defend the Cuban Revolution
on the eve of the U.S.-led 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion:
“We pointed to the immense popularity of the revolution among the Cuban
people in response to the measures the new government was organizing
them to take. The Mafia-run gambling dens and brothels, a national
shame, had been shut down. Land had been distributed to more than
100,000 tenant farmers, sharecroppers and squatters. House and apartment
rents, as well as electricity and telephone rates, had been slashed.
Racial discrimination was outlawed and equal access not only made law
but also enforced. The best public beaches, which had been previously
off limits to Blacks, had been opened to all. A nationwide campaign to
eliminate illiteracy had been launched — part of a broader extension of
public education to the countryside, among the poor, and for women.
Popular militias had formed in factories, other workplaces, schools,
neighborhoods, and towns across the island, as Cubans demanded arms and
military training to defend their new conquests. The huge money-gouging
U.S. monopolies had been nationalized, as well as the major landed,
commercial, and industrial property holdings of the wealthy Cuban
families who had been the social and political base of the Batista
dictatorship.
“Through more than two years of popular mobilizations, the workers and
farmers of Cuba had begun transforming not only their country but
themselves,” Barnes says. “It was precisely for this reason, we
explained, that Cubans could, and would, fight to the death to defend
their revolution — and do so successfully.”
The Cuban Revolution helped win a new generation of workers and youth to
the fight to make a revolution here in the U.S., the center of world
imperialist exploitation and oppression, Barnes writes.
Today, as crisis-ridden capitalism offers working people nothing but
continued wars, grinding depression and attacks on rights and living
conditions on a world scale, new forces are entering struggles — from
the fight for $15 an hour and unionization, to fights against police
brutality and abuse, to efforts to push back the bosses’ drive to divide
our class through two-tier wages.
New generations can draw on the example of the Cuban Revolution —
including the Cuban people’s victory in standing up to the world’s
mightiest imperialist power for 57 years, continuing to defend their
revolution and extend the hand of international solidarity around the
world — to build the revolutionary working-class movement here.
As Barnes puts it, “What the workers and farmers of Cuba showed us is
that with class solidarity, political consciousness, courage, focused
and persistent efforts at education, and a revolutionary leadership of a
caliber like that in Cuba — a leadership tested and forged in battle
over years — it is possible to stand up to enormous might and seemingly
insurmountable odds and win.”
Related articles:
Cuban workers and farmers mark 57 years of revolution
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