Unless we, all peoples of all nations, learn to live together,
accepting each others differences, Mankind will be nothing more than a
short footnote in the annals of who or whatever keeps such records.
Carl Jarvis
On 12/8/19, Roger Loran Bailey <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
https://themilitant.com/2019/12/07/peoples-of-cuba-and-the-us-are-fraternal-and-invincible/
‘Peoples of Cuba and the US are fraternal and invincible’
Vol. 83/No. 46
December 16, 2019
Cuban Five in Havana, Dec. 20, 2014, after up to 16 years in U.S.
prison. From right, Ramón Labañino, René González, Antonio Guerrero,
Fernando González and Gerardo Hernández. They won freedom with support
of the Cuban people and an international “jury of millions.”
AP/Ramón Espinosa
Cuban Five in Havana, Dec. 20, 2014, after up to 16 years in U.S.
prison. From right, Ramón Labañino, René González, Antonio Guerrero,
Fernando González and Gerardo Hernández. They won freedom with support
of the Cuban people and an international “jury of millions.”
Cuba and the Coming American Revolution by Jack Barnes, national
secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, is one of Pathfinder’s Books
of the Month for December. The book is about the struggles of working
people in the imperialist heartland, the youth who are attracted to them
and the example set by the people of Cuba that revolution is not only
necessary — it can be made. The excerpt is from the foreword by
Mary-Alice Waters, a leader of the SWP. She quotes Ramón Labañino, who
was freed along with his other Cuban Five compatriots in December 2014
after a decade and a half in U.S. prisons for efforts to defend the
Cuban Revolution. Copyright © 2001 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by
permission.
BY MARY-ALICE WATERS
This is the world in which the example set by the people of Cuba remains
as important as it was the day they took power, demonstrating in
practice what it takes to break the stranglehold of imperialist
exploitation and defend those conquests. Explaining that truth to
workers and farmers in the United States as they find themselves
propelled into struggles that lead them to rethink many long-held
prejudices in quite unexpected ways is not simply an act of
working-class solidarity, however important that may be. It is a
proletarian necessity, essential to the internationalist political
education and transformation of the working class itself. As the Cuban
people proudly say of their aid to the peoples of Africa, Latin America,
the Caribbean, and elsewhere around the world, “Those who are not ready
to fight for the freedom of others will never be ready to fight for
their own.”
Shortly before Cuba and the Coming American Revolution came off the
press in 2001, Colin Powell, the new secretary of state, explained
Washington’s uncompromising stance toward Cuba’s revolutionary
government. He did so more accurately than he perhaps intended.
Testifying April 26, 2001, before a congressional committee, he
responded to the question of why the U.S. government refuses to alter
its decades-long policy toward Cuba. Powell replied that in China,
Russia, and Vietnam “you can see leaders who the world is changing.” But
in Cuba, he said, Castro “hasn’t changed his views in any way.”
The secretary of state got it only partially right, of course. As with
each of his predecessors, his inability to fathom the human beings
driving the Cuban Revolution was above all a class blindness. It is not
only Fidel and the broad and deep revolutionary leadership of Cuba who
have not changed their revolutionary convictions. It is the people of
Cuba in their overwhelming majority who have never surrendered. Who
refuse to subordinate the interests of working people to the
prerogatives of capital. Who stand ready, as always, to aid
revolutionary struggles wherever they may occur, by any means necessary.
Whose message to would-be invaders remains the same as at Playa Girón:
If you come, you stay.
The most important response to Cuba and the Coming American Revolution
has been among new generations of readers who discovered something
unanticipated in its pages. Those new readers, we are honored to say,
included U.S. Federal Prisoner #58734-004, Ramón Labañino Salazar, one
of Pathfinder’s many readers behind bars, and one of five heroes of the
Cuban Revolution who has been imprisoned in the United States now for
nine years. Like his comrades-in-arms Gerardo Hernández, Antonio
Guerrero, Fernando González, and René González at the time of their
arrest in September 1998, Ramón was living and working in the United
States, tracking the activities of Cuban counterrevolutionary
organizations that operate with impunity here, and providing the Cuban
government with advance notice, when possible, of their murderous plans
for sabotage and armed actions against the Cuban people. He was framed
and convicted on charges of acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign
power and conspiring to commit espionage. In what can best be called an
act of political retribution aimed at punishing the Cuban people for
their continuing revolutionary defiance of Washington’s demands that
they “change,” he was handed a life sentence, which he is currently
serving in U.S. federal prison in Beaumont, Texas.
After reading the foreword by Jack Barnes to Playa Girón/Bay of Pigs:
Washington’s First Military Defeat in the Americas, reprinted here as
“1961: Year of Education,” Ramón wrote to express his appreciation.
While he had read numerous books and documents about Playa Girón, Ramón
said, in this one he had learned something he “had never read in any
other book on this subject.” For the first time, he noted, he had a feel
for “the direct influence of the Cuban Revolution, its example and
impact, on the people of the U.S., and on the education of the
revolutionary left movement and the movement in solidarity with our
country.” It gave evidence once again, Ramón added, “that our peoples
are fraternal and invincible.”
Many young readers in the U.S. reacted similarly to learning how a
previous generation of young socialists here in the United States had
waged an intense political battle in defense of the Cuban Revolution in
the weeks leading up to, during, and after the Washington-organized
invasion in 1961. This previously unrecorded chapter in the history of
the communist youth movement was to its continuators today not just an
interesting account of something long past. It has become a model of
mass work to be emulated, a guide for action today. …
When Fidel Castro defiantly announced to the world on March 13, 1961,
that “there will be a victorious revolution in the United States before
a victorious counterrevolution in Cuba,” he was not gazing in a crystal
ball, or engaging in verbal bravado. Nor did those of us whose political
lives began in those days of struggle think it was an exhortation. It
was a political course to guide a lifetime of action — one that remains
today as compelling and necessary to the future of humanity as it was then.
In This Issue
Front Page Articles •Copper strikers fight Asarco union busting
•All out in solidarity with striking copper workers!
•Democrats’ drive to oust Trump targets working class
•SWP drive expands reach of ‘Militant,’ books, fund
•Protests in Chile demand end to attacks by gov’t, capitalist rulers
•Communist League in UK: ‘Jew-hatred is deadly threat to the working class’
•CN rail workers ‘strike for safety’ won broad backing
Feature Articles •French rulers expand military intervention into West
Africa
Also In This Issue •Australia: Women make gains in right to choose abortion
•‘The making of a union bureaucrat’
•Over 10,000 farmers in Germany protest against gov’t restrictions
•Iraq upsurge continues, prime minister to resign
•Socialist Workers Party Fund Drive Oct. 5 - Dec. 10 (Week 8)
•Fall Campaign to sell Militant subscriptions and books Oct. 5 - Dec. 10
(Week 8)
On the Picket Line •New York labor rally supports Amazon warehouse workers
•Senior residence workers in Quebec strike for higher pay
Books of the Month •‘Peoples of Cuba and the US are fraternal and
invincible’
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York, NY 10018 - themilitant@xxxxxxx
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___
Carl Sagan
“Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open
mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says
everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind
the fallibility of all the human beings involved?”
― Carl Sagan
