Defending the Cuban Revolution, strengthening US working people
https://themilitant.com/2020/11/07/defending-the-cuban-revolution-strengthening-us-working-people/
BY MARY-ALICE WATERS
Vol. 84/No. 45
November 16, 2020
United actions have been at center of Socialist Workers Party’s defense
of Cuban Revolution for six decades. Above, April 15, 1961, picket at
U.N. called by Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which organized in U.S. and
Canada to halt attacks on Cuba. Inset, SWP leader Mary-Alice Waters,
right, and party’s 2008 presidential candidate Róger Calero carry banner
in September 2008 march to free Cuban 5 in Washington, D.C. Also
participating were IFCO/Pastors for Peace, National Network on Cuba,
Party for Socialism and Liberation, Green Party, D.C. Metro Committee to
Free the Five and others.
ABOVE, GUARDIAN; RIGHT, MILITANT/PAUL MAILHOT
United actions have been at center of Socialist Workers Party’s defense
of Cuban Revolution for six decades. Above, April 15, 1961, picket at
U.N. called by Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which organized in U.S. and
Canada to halt attacks on Cuba. Inset, SWP leader Mary-Alice Waters,
right, and party’s 2008 presidential candidate Róger Calero carry banner
in September 2008 march to free Cuban 5 in Washington, D.C. Also
participating were IFCO/Pastors for Peace, National Network on Cuba,
Party for Socialism and Liberation, Green Party, D.C. Metro Committee to
Free the Five and others.
An article headlined “Would a Joe Biden White House Be Better for Cuba?”
appeared in last week’s print edition of the Militant. It was retracted
and not included in the online edition after the National Committee of
the Socialist Workers Party pointed out to the editor that the article
was contrary to the longstanding editorial positions of the Militant. An
editorial concerning the article appears in this issue (see page 9).
I welcomed the editor’s invitation to explain, on behalf of the SWP’s
elected leadership, why the article represented neither the party’s
views nor our decadeslong course of action.
The problems begin with the headline itself. It poses a question the
article never addresses. Moreover, it is a question that can’t be
answered. What is there to say except, “If Joe Biden becomes the next
president of the United States, we’ll see.”
What we do know are two things:
First, whether Biden or Donald Trump is installed in the White House on
Jan. 20, 2021, the revolutionary leadership of Cuba will continue on the
course they’ve followed from 1959 to today, through 12 U.S.
administrations. As they have affirmed many times over the decades,
Cuba’s sovereignty and revolutionary principles are not up for
discussion, much less negotiation. They are willing at any time to
explore ways to resolve problems of mutual concern between Cuba and
Washington — or any other government — but only on the basis of equality
and mutual respect.
Former Cuban President Fidel Castro explained this course with clarity
in his 2016 article “Brother Obama.” That short piece by him had nothing
to do with any U.S. election or with one political party versus another,
which was how it was quoted and used in last week’s Militant. Fidel was
affirming the unbroken record of the Cuban people in defense of their
revolution: “Nobody should be under the illusion that the people of this
dignified and selfless country will renounce the glory, the rights, or
the spiritual wealth they have gained with the development of education,
science and culture. … [W]e are capable of producing the food and
material riches we need with the efforts and intelligence of our people.
We do not need the empire to give us anything.”
Second, for our part, irrespective of who occupies the White House for
the next four years, the Socialist Workers Party too will continue on
the course we have followed from 1959 to today. We will do everything in
our power to make the truth about Cuba’s socialist revolution known to
working people in the United States and throughout the world, and
organize them to defend what workers and farmers have achieved in Cuba
by winning and using state power.
Workers at Shop-Vac protest in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, Sept. 28,
after bosses announced 427 layoffs. Capacities of working people are
discounted by U.S. rulers, as were those of Cuban workers and farmers
who overturned capitalist rule, transforming themselves in the process.
PAUL WEAVER/SIPA VIA AP IMAGES
Workers at Shop-Vac protest in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, Sept. 28,
after bosses announced 427 layoffs. Capacities of working people are
discounted by U.S. rulers, as were those of Cuban workers and farmers
who overturned capitalist rule, transforming themselves in the process.
Acting together with others, regardless of views on this or other U.S.
elections, the SWP will continue to fight each and every aspect of the
U.S. ruling class’s political, diplomatic, and economic war against the
Cuban people. We will celebrate as a victory for the Cuban people, and a
victory for working people everywhere, any step by any administration,
Republican or Democrat, that loosens the imperialist chokehold aimed at
overturning the Cuban workers’ political power.
For the SWP, this is not a matter of solidarity alone. It’s also a
life-and-death question for the U.S. working class. Without winning a
substantial portion of working people in the United States to understand
the Cuban Revolution and seek to emulate the example of Cuban workers
and farmers, there will be no victorious socialist revolution in the U.S.
That is not some utopian dream. Emulating the example of the Cuban
toilers is integral to the working-class consciousness that can and will
develop as we together go through growing struggles of our own. This is
an irreplaceable part of the political continuity of the Socialist
Workers Party and its leadership, of the SWP’s revolutionary
working-class course.
2020 elections and Cuba solidarity
The second major problem with the article “Would a Joe Biden White House
Be Better for Cuba?” is its opening sentences. “A number of groups here
and around the country that consider themselves ‘friends of Cuba’ are
promoting Joe Biden’s bid for the presidency as a way to relieve the
effects of over 60 years of Washington’s economic and political attacks.
These groups are organizing car caravans [in Miami], peddling the myth
that Democratic administrations … ‘have been better’ for relations
between Washington and Havana.”
The journalistically unacceptable anonymity of the phrase “a number of
groups” is plenty reason enough to reject such a lead sentence in a
working-class newspaper. But why is it a problem that some friends of
Cuba are urging a vote for Joe Biden? Or Donald Trump? Is it a problem
that the Socialist Workers Party advocates and organizes everyone we can
to support the SWP ticket of Alyson Kennedy and Malcolm Jarrett?
Such differences are hardly limited to the Cuba solidarity movement.
They are among the broadest and most important political questions
confronting the working class and other oppressed and exploited layers
of the U.S. population.
Virtually every individual involved in Cuba solidarity activity supports
one or another presidential ticket in 2020. If that fact were a problem
that the Militant needs to expose and polemicize about, then there would
be no political basis for the National Network on Cuba or any other
solidarity coalition in any city or region of the country.
If one or another of those parties or individuals sought to impose
support for “their” party or their views as a condition for common
action around the one issue that brings us together — opposition to the
U.S. imperialist rulers’ policies aimed at crushing the Cuban Revolution
— that would be a problem for the Militant to write about. Damaging
sectarian factionalism of that kind does regrettably divide Cuba
solidarity forces in many countries. But it’s not the issue addressed by
the article.
The entire course of the SWP from the earliest months of the revolution
has been to build the broadest coalitions possible in defense of Cuba
and the Cuban Revolution. That began with our collaboration in early
1960 to build the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, working together with
liberal CBS journalist Robert Taber; with members of the U.S. Communist
Party; with prominent writers, artists, academics and religious leaders,
including James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Waldo Frank, Carleton Beals and
others; with embattled Monroe, North Carolina, NAACP leader Robert
Williams; and other Black rights fighters.
In more recent years, the work to build the broadest possible movement
in the U.S. and internationally in the successful fight for the freedom
of the five Cuban revolutionaries framed up and locked away in U.S.
federal prisons embodied the same course.
In joining together to help defeat the U.S. rulers’ attempts to destroy
the Cuban Revolution, it makes no difference what party someone
supports, what your religious views are, or your position on Israel,
Palestine, abortion rights, sex and gender issues, or any other disputed
social or political question.
What matters is what you do to help involve new forces and advance the
common goal. What you do to oppose attempts to exclude individuals or
groups with whom you disagree on other issues. What you do to foster
free exchange of political literature, and open, civil debate and
discussion.
Trump, Biden and Cuba today
There’s a third way in which the article “Would a Joe Biden White House
Be Better for Cuba?” did not express the editorial line of the Militant
or the positions of the Socialist Workers Party. That is the way in
which it presented the differences between executive actions taken by
the Barack Obama administration during its second term versus measures
imposed by the Trump administration. The latter have included cutting
back travel rights in both directions and depriving Cuba of necessities
such as oil, access to the international financial system, and
remittances from family members living abroad.
Building on decades of bipartisan measures to economically strangle the
toilers of Cuba, the White House over the last two years has added some
of the most draconian political and economic measures yet taken against
Cuba. These have amplified the impact on the Cuban people of the
deepening world capitalist crisis plus the COVID-19 pandemic. Shortages
of fuel, medicines, imported food and personal hygiene products are
taking a toll on the daily lives of Cuban working people. Last week’s
article, which didn’t even mention these consequences of the Trump
administration’s course, can seem clueless, even callous.
Instead, the piece concentrated on the case against Biden. Speaking in
Miami on Oct. 5, the Democratic Party presidential candidate repeated
timeworn lies about the Cuban Revolution. “The [current]
administration’s approach is not working,” Biden said. “Cuba is no
closer to freedom and democracy today than it was four years ago. In
fact there’s more political prisoners, the secret police are as brutal
as ever, and Russia is once again a major presence in Cuba.”
Being deliberately vague, Biden has also said he would roll back some of
the measures taken by the current administration and return to policies
carried out by the Obama administration.
It is wise to remember, of course, that campaign promises are easily and
frequently discarded once in office, and Trump holds no corner on
aggression against the Cuban people. Examples abound: The 1961
U.S.-organized mercenary invasion at the Bay of Pigs. The 1962 missile
crisis, when the U.S. government dangled the threat of nuclear
annihilation over not only Cuba but also much of the U.S. and the Soviet
Union. The yearslong program of attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro and
other central leaders of the revolution. The passage of the Helms-Burton
Act in 1996. The 1998 arrest, prosecution and imprisonment of the Cuban
Five.
These are only a few of the U.S. rulers’ most notorious acts of
aggression against Cuba, and all were carried out under Democratic Party
administrations.
That doesn’t mean, however, that the differences within the U.S. ruling
class voiced today by Biden and Trump over how best to undermine the
Cuban Revolution are irrelevant to the Cuban people.
If a Biden administration were to reverse the direction of some of
Washington’s current policies, it would open some breathing room for
Cuban working people and their government to more easily deal with the
challenges they face. If the boot on their neck pressed less tightly,
they would be quite capable of doing that. We would celebrate any motion
in that direction, just as we did the steps during Obama’s final years
in office to free the last three of the Cuban Five incarcerated in U.S.
prisons, reestablish diplomatic relations with Cuba, make it easier for
U.S. residents to travel to the island, and other measures.
Vote for the ‘lesser evil’?
For these reasons, it’s probably safe to say that a majority of Cuban
working people and their leadership are hoping for a Biden electoral
victory. Does that mean it’s in the interests of U.S. working people to
give political support to a capitalist party and its candidates?
That question was neither asked nor answered in the article “Would a Joe
Biden White House Be Better for Cuba?” But for class-conscious workers
in the U.S., that’s the most important question. And the answer is an
unequivocal “No.”
For well over a century, the great weakness of the working class in the
U.S. — workers of all skin colors, religious beliefs and national
origins, both men and women — is the fact that the parties the big
majority of working people look to for political leadership are
instruments of the capitalist class whose wealth and power stem from
exploiting us. Trade unions, churches, organizations claiming to speak
for the interests of debt-laden farmers, shopkeepers and contract
laborers, African Americans, women, Hispanics, immigrants, Indigenous
peoples and more — all, almost without exception, are integrated into
the political machinery of the capitalist state and its political parties.
The working class has no political instrument of our own, through which
we can debate and make our own decisions, independent of the bosses and
their Democratic, Republican, or various “third” capitalist parties. To
the degree workers and our unions are drawn into political activity,
it’s to try to engage us in capitalist electoral politics. Is he worse
or is she worse? Throw the current “bad” guys out and bring the “good”
guys in, then repeat the cycle with the same results, year after year,
decade after decade … until world capitalism does us all in, in one or
another manner.
That profound miseducation will only begin to be bypassed as class
battles unfold in factories and other workplaces over wages and working
conditions, and struggles for Black rights, women’s equality and other
burning social issues become more working class in composition and
leadership. The course of those struggles and growth of working-class
consciousness will at the same time be accelerated by advances in
revolutionary struggles in other regions of the world, in the same way
the Cuban Revolution educated and helped transform earlier generations
of workers and youth in the United States and elsewhere. Today’s
deepening world capitalist crisis brings those days closer.
That’s why the most important aid we can bring to our embattled brothers
and sisters in Cuba or anywhere else in the world is to do everything in
our power to advance those struggles as we tirelessly educate about the
example set by Cuban working people that socialist revolution is not
only necessary — it can be made.
Above all, as SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes wrote in Cuba and the
Coming American Revolution, we are confident in our knowledge that in
the U.S. “the political capacities and revolutionary potential of
workers and farmers are today as utterly discounted by the ruling powers
as were those of the Cuban toilers. And just as wrongly.”
A needed correction, worthy of study
EDITORIAL
This week’s issue of the Militant features an article by Mary-Alice
Waters, “Defending the Cuban Revolution, Strengthening U.S. Working
People.” Writing on behalf of the National Committee of the Socialist
Workers Party, Waters rejects the content and political line of an
article that appeared in the print edition of last week’s paper under
the headline, “Would a Joe Biden White House Be Better for Cuba?”
Waters is a former editor of the Militant and a longtime member of the
SWP National Committee whose leadership responsibilities include
politically directing the party’s work in defense of the Cuban Revolution.
The article “Would a Joe Biden White House Be Better for Cuba?” appeared
under the byline of Miami Militant correspondent Steve Warshell, but
responsibility for its line and content lies with the Militant editor.
The editor retracted the article and pulled it from the online edition
as soon as the SWP National Committee pointed out that it was contrary
to the longstanding positions of the Militant as well as those of the
Socialist Workers Party. The print edition, however, had already been
mailed to subscribers and distributors in the U.S.
The intent of the editor in the retracted article had been to explain
that Washington’s decadeslong course to overturn Cuba’s socialist
revolution, and to return the island and its people to exploitation by
the U.S. imperialist ruling families, is supported by both capitalist
parties. That effort will continue no matter who occupies the White
House come Jan. 21, 2021. Our editing of the article not only failed to
do that, however, but introduced the errors explained and rebutted by
Waters.
The Militant editors wholeheartedly agree with “Defending the Cuban
Revolution, Strengthening U.S. Working People.” It’s worth reading more
than once. We urge our readers to study and discuss it.
A needed correction, worthy of study
This week’s issue of the Militant features an article by Mary-Alice
Waters, “Defending the Cuban Revolution, Strengthening U.S. Working
People.” Writing on behalf of the National Committee of the Socialist
Workers Party, Waters rejects the content and political line of…
Front Page Articles
Join fight to defend political rights in Washington state
Whoever’s in the White House, workers need to fight for jobs
‘Charge cops in killing of Walter Wallace Jr. in Philadelphia!’
SWP campaign to win readers expands reach of the ‘Militant’
Capitalist for-profit health industry no better prepared for ‘2nd wave’
of virus
Feature Articles
Defending the Cuban Revolution, strengthening US working people
Also In This Issue
Canada’s rulers responsible for Native, commercial fisher conflict
Thousands in Belarus keep fighting to topple regime
After new Islamist attacks, Paris responds with repression
‘First Amendment freedoms threatened by disclosures’
Oberlin College aims to crush small store owner
Socialist Workers Party Fund Drive Sept. 26-Nov. 24 (Week 5)
Fall Campaign to sell Militant subscriptions and books Sept. 26 - Nov.
24 (week five)
Editorials
A needed correction, worthy of study
On the Picket Line
Dominion strike continues, as workers win solidarity
Laid off NY Remington workers fight for severance, vacation pay
Quebec cement truck drivers fight for equal wages
25, 50 and 75 years ago
Corrections
© Copyright 2020 The Militant - 306 W. 37th Street, 13th floor - New
York, NY 10018 - themilitant@xxxxxxx
Cookies
This site uses cookies to improve your experience. Learn more.
Okay, thanks
--
___
Sam Harris
“Are you really surprised by the endurance of religion? What ideology is likely
to be more durable than one that conforms, at every turn, to our powers of
wishful thinking? Hope is easy; knowledge is hard. Science is the one domain in
which we human beings make a truly heroic effort to counter our innate biases
and wishful thinking. Science is the one endeavor in which we have developed a
refined methodology for separating what a person hopes is true from what he has
good reason to believe. The methodology isn't perfect, and the history of
science is riddled with abject failures of scientific objectivity. But that is
just the point-these have been failures of science, discovered and corrected
by-what, religion? No, by good science.”
― Sam Harris
