BY GREG McCARTAN
NEW YORK - Pathfinder Press announced this week that two new titles in Spanish will be released at the end of February: a pamphlet, La segunda declaración de La Habana (The Second Declaration of Havana), and a book, La última lucha de Lenin (Lenin's Final Fight).

"The new titles, drawing on the lessons of the Russian and Cuban revolutions, will be an important addition to the Spanish-language books and pamphlets published and distributed by Pathfinder," said Luis Madrid, who edited both. "They make available writings and speeches that are central to the living continuity of the communist workers movement." Both titles are also available from Pathfinder in English. The pamphlet can also be obtained in French.

La segunda declaración de La Habana is available for $4.50 and La última lucha de Lenin is priced at $21.95. Pathfinder Readers Club members, however, can take advantage of a special pre-publication offer through the end of March: a 30 percent discount on La última lucha de Lenin, for $14.95. During the same period, the same special $14.95 price will apply to Lenin's Final Fight.

La última lucha de Lenin is the record of Lenin's last political struggle. Through it the communist leader fought to win the leadership of the Bolshevik Party to maintain the political course that had enabled the workers and peasants in Russia to overthrow the old tsarist empire, carry out the first successful socialist revolution, and begin building a world communist movement. The issues posed in that political battle remain at the heart of world politics today.

La segunda declaración de La Habana was read and ratified at a mass rally of a million people in Havana's Plaza of the Revolution in Cuba on Feb. 4, 1962. Three years earlier, workers and farmers had carried out a revolution in that country and refused to back down in the face of military, economic, and political aggression by Washington. Instead, they pointed to the powerful example of their revolution as the way forward for the oppressed and exploited throughout Latin America.

"Three and half decades later, this historic document's unwavering dissection and condemnation of imperialism remains as sound as ever," Madrid stressed. Previously unavailable in pamphlet form, it also includes the First Declaration of Havana, issued in September 1960 in response to the U.S. government-engineered censure of the Cuba government for refusing to reject aid from the Soviet Union and China. "It helps explain not only the character and power of the revolution made by workers and peasants Cuba," Madrid said. "It also explains the class character of society, the revolutionary potential of the working class, and why working people will wage massive anti-imperialist and anticapitalist battles as they fight for political power in country after country around the world."

In the preface to La última lucha de Lenin Madrid writes, "The growth of a receptive audience in the United States for revolutionary literature in Spanish has been demonstrated in recent years by the tens of thousands of Mexicans, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and other Latinos who mobilized in street protests against the anti-immigrant Proposition 187 in California in 1994 and who marched on Washington in October 1996 to tell the U.S. ruling families that 'No human being is illegal!' The increasing numbers of accelerating social and political weight in the United States of immigrants from Mexico and elsewhere throughout the Americas guarantees they will be heavily represented in the leading battalions of U.S. labor as the class struggle unfolds in the years to come."

Until Pathfinder prepared and published this collection in English in 1995, Madrid noted, the articles, letters, speeches, resolutions, and memos by Lenin that were at the heart of his final fight had never before been presented in any language in full, or in chronological order as the battle actually unfolded.

Madrid says La última lucha de Lenin and other books published by Pathfinder in Spanish "are the product of the enthusiasm, attention to detail, and hard work of many translators and volunteers across the United States, throughout the Americas, and around the world."

In June, Pathfinder will publish for the first time in Spanish, The Changing Face of U.S. Politics: Working-Class Politics and the Trade Unions, by Jack Barnes.  
 
 
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