"A majority of areas," said subscription drive director Maurice Williams, "requested the campaign be extended for one week, through Memorial Day weekend, to continue to deepen their involvement with unionists involved in labor battles, farm protest actions, and other class-struggle activity." The drive now ends May 28, Williams said. All subscriptions received in the Militant business office by noon on Wednesday May 31 will be counted toward the final chart, which will be printed in the Militant the next day.

From reports around the country, getting out during the target week, and especially through using the past two issues of the Militant, a lot of politics has been put into the sales of the socialist press, and a real campaign spirit has been established in the drive.

"Socialist workers and Young Socialists are building and will join a range of important actions in the coming weeks," Williams said. These include events like the May 11 National Day of Actions demanding Washington establish normal diplomatic relations with Cuba, let Elián González and his family go home to Cuba, and repeal of the Cuban Adjustment Act.

"Two teams to coal mining regions are planned prior to the May 17 mine workers march in Washington, and socialists in the unions are also building several rallies of Steelworkers in Houston and Ohio in the coming weeks," he said. "Sales on the job, by going door-to-door, and to strikers and workers and farmers at other actions also feature in plans sent in by a number of areas this week."

From Miami, Mary Ann Schmidt said their results from the target week "included eight Militant subscriptions and three to PM. Five of those subs were from a sales team to Plant City, Florida. A meat packer at the Lykes packing plant bought one of the subscriptions and the team sold 10 copies of the paper at the plant."

Schmidt said the majority of workers in the area, including those in the Black community, did not agree with the INS assault ordered by the Clinton administration. "This was a little different from our experience in Miami, where most people we talked to were influenced by the propaganda against 'the Cubans' and supported the government assault. We sold out all of our bundles--12 copies of the May issue of PM, 30 of the PM special edition, and 81 copies of the Militant."

Since the April 22 assault, socialist activists across the United States have begun to step up sales activities with street tables armed with Pathfinder titles as well as the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial. They are taking the socialist press door-to-door in working-class neighborhoods where they live and work, and reaching out to broader regions for fighters and other workers who are becoming more receptive to revolutionary ideas.

"In the final weeks of the drive we want to step up our efforts to reach coal miners," wrote Candace Wagner, a supporter in eastern Pennsylvania confident of reaching their goals in the drive. "We have tentative meetings with a couple of miners we met through a strike last year."

Communist workers in Seattle are planning a regional sales team to Boise, Idaho, to meet farmers who will be participating in hearings conducted by the U.S. House Committee on Agriculture. The team will also participate in a rally in Spokane called by members of the United Steelworkers union locked out by Kaiser Aluminum, visit the picket line of Sunnyside carpenters, and talk to workers at the Boise-Cascade lumber mill plant, whose contract is expiring soon.

"We had a very good target week--sold out our bundle," said Chris Rayson, a rail worker in Seattle. "I sold a couple of subs to co-workers. I arranged to visit one of them on a Sunday evening. The other one was sold to an extra-board engineer who had bought the paper in the past. I've had a hard time catching up with him but when I saw him at the union meeting he paid for the sub there.

"Both of the co-workers initially supported the INS raid," said Rayson. "But one of them told me I convinced him that the assault was an attack on the working class. Since then we have begun a dialog discussing politics. He has e-mailed me an article from the New York Times that points out how Arabs are smeared as terrorists. Sometimes things seem to be going slow with selling subscriptions but we are making progress."

Chuck Guerra, from Detroit, writes that supporters there plan to "organize a team to visit some of the rubber and tire plants in our region and organize door-to-door teams and tables in working-class communities in Detroit two evenings a week." Guerra plans to join a team to a coal mining area during several days that he is off from work.

Mary Martin in Washington, D.C., says socialists there are confident they can meet their goals by the original target date by joining a number of protests in the nation's capital and "organizing a regional team to Richmond, Virginia, to hook up with the Overnite strikers there."

In Houston, Dave Ferguson writes that by the end of the month socialists there will "celebrate three victories: finding a new headquarters for the Socialist Workers Party and a new location of the Pathfinder bookstore, getting the socialist candidates on the ballot in Texas, and making our sales drive goals!"

Subscription drive director Williams said, "With that kind of spirit and drive, we are confident that with a day-by-day effort we can have a victory in the drive--increasing the readership of the socialist press and introducing hundreds of people to socialism as Militant supporters join the ongoing resistance and struggles by working people today."  
 
 
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