https://themilitant.com/2019/03/02/these-books-give-a-perspective-we-dont-often-hear/
‘These books give a perspective we don’t often hear’
Havana International Book Fair event discusses class struggle in the
United States
By Martín Koppel
and Jonathan Silberman
Vol. 83/No. 10
March 11, 2019
Feb. 14 panel at Havana book fair. From left, Róger Calero, chair; Yoel
Cordoví, vice president of Cuban History Institute; Mary-Alice Waters,
Socialist Workers Party and president of Pathfinder Press; Silvio Jova,
member of editorial board of Cuban trade union magazine.
Militant/Jonathan Silberman
Feb. 14 panel at Havana book fair. From left, Róger Calero, chair; Yoel
Cordoví, vice president of Cuban History Institute; Mary-Alice Waters,
Socialist Workers Party and president of Pathfinder Press; Silvio Jova,
member of editorial board of Cuban trade union magazine.
HAVANA — “When I read these four volumes on the struggles of the
Teamsters, I discovered things I didn’t know,” said Silvio Jova. The
most important was, “I learned that U.S. President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt was no saint. I didn’t know he had a record of repression”
against the U.S. labor movement.
Jova, a member of the editorial board of CTC, the magazine of the
Central Organization of Cuban Workers (CTC), was speaking at a Feb. 14
event that launched the Spanish-language edition of Teamster
Bureaucracy. The book is the last of the four-volume series by Farrell
Dobbs on the 1930s Teamsters union organizing drive, of which the author
was a central leader. The entire set is now available in Spanish for the
first time.
Yoel Cordoví, vice president of the Cuban History Institute, struck a
similar note at the event, which was part of the Havana International
Book Fair. He presented In Defense of the US Working Class, by
Mary-Alice Waters, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party and president
of Pathfinder Press.
“Given the world we’re living in,” Cordoví said, “this book is very
timely. It gives us a perspective we don’t often hear — a firsthand view
of struggles by workers, by farmers within the empire, within the United
States.”
Róger Calero, who chaired the Feb. 14 event, told the audience of 50
that In Defense of the US Working Class, published by Pathfinder Press,
is based on a program that featured presentations by Waters and a panel
of four workers and a farmer from the United States, who described
concretely the economic and social conditions U.S. working people face
today and the struggles they are waging. It was part of last year’s May
Day International Conference in Havana, sponsored by the Cuban History
Institute and the CTC.
Cordoví recalled that when Waters was first invited by Cuban History
Institute President René González Barrios to organize a session of the
2018 conference, she had said, “Well, we’re not professional historians
or researchers but workers, trade unionists, communists.” González
Barrios had replied that this was exactly what they needed.
Top, Griselda Aguilera speaks from the floor at Havana meeting. On a
recent U.S. tour speaking about the Cuban Revolution, she said she
learned that “working people in the U.S. defend their rights.” Bottom,
school workers rally in Charleston, West Virginia, during 2018 strike.
Top, Militant/Hilda Cuzco; bottom, AP/Tyler Evert
Top, Griselda Aguilera speaks from the floor at Havana meeting. On a
recent U.S. tour speaking about the Cuban Revolution, she said she
learned that “working people in the U.S. defend their rights.” Bottom,
school workers rally in Charleston, West Virginia, during 2018 strike.
“What better panel than one made up of workers involved in the
day-to-day problems” and struggles within the United States, said Cordoví.
Waters, he said, posed three questions in the book that really made him
think. The first was, “Did the 2016 electoral victory of Donald Trump
register a rise in racism, xenophobia, misogyny and every other form of
ideological reaction among working people in the U.S.?”
“I would’ve answered that question in the affirmative,” Cordoví said.
“But then it becomes harder to answer the other two.”
Waters had also asked, “Is that why tens of millions of workers of all
races voted for Trump?” And thirdly, “Is a socialist revolution in the
U.S. really possible? Or are those like ourselves who answer with an
unhesitating ‘Yes’ a new variety of utopian socialist fools, however
well-meaning?”
Cordoví pointed to the 2018 strike by teachers and other school workers
in West Virginia that Waters describes in the book, emphasizing what it
showed about the dignity, solidarity and fighting capacity of working
people. He urged everyone present to read In Defense of the US Working
Class, stating, “There’s more to the picture than many might have thought.”
1930s Teamsters struggles
“The four books on the history of the Teamsters struggles in the 1930s
and ’40s give us lessons that everyone needs to study,” Jova said in his
remarks.
The Teamsters series chronicles the 1930s battles that led to the
unionization of a quarter million workers in the trucking industry
across 11 states in the Midwest. Dobbs and other members of the
Communist League of America, forerunner of the Socialist Workers Party,
became leaders of that fighting Teamster organizing drive.
The union forged an alliance with working farmers, organized the
unemployed as a section of the union, launched a union defense guard
that prevented an employer-backed fascist recruitment effort from
gaining a foothold in Minneapolis, and led working-class opposition to
Washington’s preparations for entry into the second imperialist world
war. For this, the U.S. government framed up and imprisoned 18 leaders
of the SWP and the Teamsters under the infamous Smith Act on charges of
advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.
Jova said Dobbs’ books shattered his view of U.S. government policy
under the Roosevelt administration. Previously he had simply accepted
the position held by many in the Cuban labor movement that Roosevelt’s
so-called Good Neighbor policy — supposedly ending a long history of
U.S. military intervention in Latin America — was beneficial to working
people in general and particularly in Cuba. Jova said it had never
occurred to him that Roosevelt’s New Deal policies might not have
benefited working people in the United States.
He said he had accepted the view that Roosevelt’s pressure on Cuban
strongman Fulgencio Batista for greater democracy made it possible to
establish the Confederation of Cuban Workers in 1939.
In fact, this political stance toward the Roosevelt presidency was
promoted not only in Cuba and the United States but worldwide by the
Stalin-led Communist International. Adopted at the international’s 1935
congress, this Popular Front line of class collaboration with
“democratic” imperialism was imposed on Communist Parties, which
everywhere were ordered to support “progressive” capitalist parties and
governments.
In Cuba the CP (later renamed Popular Socialist Party) backed Batista,
campaigning for his election as president in 1940, and two CP leaders
joined his cabinet in 1943–44.
The powerful union organizing drives of the 1930s, and the gains wrested
from the capitalist rulers as a result, were not due to any “democratic
tendencies” among them, however. They were won in the course of pitched
class battles against the capitalist class and their governments, in
the United States and Cuba alike.
Jova said Dobbs’ account gave him a more accurate understanding of the
class struggle in the United States, and “I will never again view
Roosevelt as a saint.” But he still saw Roosevelt’s policies toward the
Cuban government as helpful.
History of Cuban workers movement
“Another question these books by Pathfinder make us rethink is Trotsky
and Trotskyism,” Jova said, adding that Trotskyism is not viewed
favorably in Cuba. According to the accounts he had read in history
books, he said, those known as Trotskyists promoted “disunity” in the
Cuban labor movement in the decades before the revolution.
Moreover, Jova said, Eusebio Mujal, the gangster-like union chief who in
the 1950s became the Batista dictatorship’s enforcer in the CTC, with a
hand in the torture and murder of untold numbers of workers, “had been a
Trotskyist.”
Jova was echoing longtime Stalinist slanders against Russian communist
leader Leon Trotsky and the international movement he led. During the
1930s, as the counterrevolutionary caste in Moscow consolidated its
rule, not only were many millions arrested and sent to work and die in
Siberian labor camps, but hundreds of thousands of communist workers
were imprisoned and executed. In the international workers movement,
opponents of the Stalinist course were branded “Trotskyite splitters”
and “fascists.”
In Cuba, the pro-Moscow Popular Socialist Party (PSP) sought to
discredit workers known as Trotskyists by labeling the hated Batista
henchman Mujal a “Trotskyist.” They pointed to the fact that Mujal at
one point had been part of a group identified with the international
forces led by Trotsky that fought for a return to the political course
led by Lenin.
Jova went on to say that while he knew Mujal was called a Trotskyist, he
also knew that in December 1958, only weeks before the triumph of the
revolutionary war, Rebel Army commander Raúl Castro gave responsibility
for organizing the Congress of Workers in Arms in the liberated
territory of the Second Eastern Front to Antonio “Ñico” Torres, a rail
worker in Guantánamo and leader of the July 26 Movement in the region,
“who came out of the Trotskyist movement.” And that gave him pause for
thought, Jova said.
Torres was “a fighter for the unity of the July 26 Movement,” Jova
noted. He opposed efforts by other July 26 Movement members who wanted
to exclude elected delegates who were PSP members from the Congress.
Jova said reading Dobbs’ account and learning about the course of the
Socialist Workers Party in the United States reinforced what he already
knew about “Ñico” Torres. He concluded that there was much more to the
question of Trotskyism than he had realized.
Later, during the discussion period, Waters answered Jova. “To imply
that Mujal was a “Trotskyist,” she said, is as slanderous as it would be
“to call fascist dictator Mussolini a communist because he had once been
a leader of the left wing of the Italian Socialist Party out of which
the communist movement there was founded.”
Concluding his remarks, Jova said that above all, the Teamsters books
“help us understand that it’s among working people that there are forces
that can lead a change of course in the United States,” and urged
everyone to read them.
Political weapons for coming battles
“What is unfolding around us is the greatest crisis of the capitalist
‘world order’ any of us have known,” said Mary-Alice Waters, the final
panelist. “All the treaties, alliances, ‘agreements’ and fictitious
structures imposed on us by the victors of the two world imperialist
slaughters of the 20th century are being pulled apart at their seams by
the diverging interests and sharpening conflicts between rival
capitalist classes and their states.”
Waters said the two books being discussed “are part of the weaponry we
need to arm ourselves for the class battles ahead.” Communists in the
United States and other countries use these political weapons as they
discuss with fellow workers with whom they are engaged in common struggles.
She reported that volunteers headed by Steve Clark, editorial director
of Pathfinder, were simultaneously participating for the first time in
the Baghdad International Book Fair. And she described how in that
war-torn part of the world — from the Mideast to Central Asia — they
were finding a thirst for books that offer a revolutionary working-class
perspective.
Quoting Dobbs in his “Afterword” to Teamster Bureaucracy, Waters said
the main lesson from the Teamsters’ course of struggle “is not that,
under an adverse relationship of forces, workers can be overcome.” The
lesson for fighting workers is the opposite, she said. “With the honest
and truly revolutionary leadership they deserve, it is the oppressed and
exploited toilers who can triumph.” (Waters’ presentation is reprinted
on page 7.)
‘U.S. workers are not source of racism’
First to take the floor during the discussion period was José Ángel
Maury de Toro, international relations secretary of the Union of Young
Communists. He noted that the real conditions facing working people in
the United States “are not well-known among young people in Cuba.” And
new generations “are further and further away from the big social
transformations of the early years of the revolution.”
He said this makes books published by Pathfinder “valuable tools for
Cuban youth” to learn about the lessons of struggles against capitalist
exploitation — and to answer those who “argue that the only way for us
to develop is capitalism.”
Fernando García Bielsa, who for many years served in Cuba’s diplomatic
offices at the United Nations and in Washington, D.C., said most Cubans
“don’t really know the United States” and the impact of the economic
crisis on working people there. “We need opportunities like this to get
out the truth even more broadly to the Cuban people,” he said.
Griselda Aguilera, who when she was only 7 years old joined Cuba’s 1961
literacy campaign, spoke about what she has learned on visits to the
United States, where she has spoken to audiences about the Cuban
Revolution and her experiences in the massive drive that wiped out
illiteracy here in one year.
The image presented in the international media “that working people in
the United States are racist, violent, opposed to solidarity is not
true,” Aguilera insisted. “I’ve met construction workers, teachers,
members of unions and churches. Racism in the U.S. doesn’t come from
ordinary people — it comes from the governing elite that benefits from
sowing divisions. Working people in the U.S. defend their rights.”
When the meeting concluded, audience members bought more than 140
Pathfinder books, including seven sets of Dobbs’ four-volume Teamster
series.
Following the book fair in Havana, communist workers from the United
States and the United Kingdom were invited to three other events to
present these books. One was a meeting, organized by the Cuban Institute
for Friendship with the Peoples, at the University of Santa Clara in
central Cuba. Another was an exchange with workers and mechanical
engineering students at the Antillana de Acero steel plant in Havana.
A third event was held at the Cigar Workers Palace, a CTC-affiliated
community center and museum of the Cuban workers movement that is being
established in the working-class Havana neighborhood of Cayo Hueso. The
Cigar Workers Palace was the site of the 1939 founding congress of the CTC.
Related Articles
‘Sharing our histories and experiences is indispensable’
Below are the remarks by Mary-Alice Waters at the presentations of
Teamster Bureaucracy and In Defense of the US Working Class at the
Havana International Book Fair Feb. 14. Copyright © by Pathfinder Press.
Reprinted by permission. BY MARY-ALICE WATERS…
In This Issue
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teachers strike
•Trump, Kim meet for talks to denuclearize Korea peninsula
•Social crisis continues in Venezuela — US hands off!
•UK out of EU is better for workers to struggle against British rulers
•Liberals champion FBI role in hysteria to oust Donald Trump
Feature Articles •‘These books give a perspective we don’t often hear’
•‘Sharing our histories and experiences is indispensable’
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attacks
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