Saldaña, who died last June, headed the underground urban network of the National Liberation Army, a 1966–67 revolutionary front in Bolivia led by Ernesto Che Guevara and Bolivian revolutionary Inti Peredo.

The platform at the February 9 meeting, held as part of the Havana International Book Fair, is described in the news article on the front page.

Copyright © 2001 by Pathfinder, printed by permission.  
 

In his book Pombo: a Man of Che's Guerrilla, Compañero Villegas refers to the revolutionary campaign led by Che in Bolivia as "an epic chapter in the history of the Americas." Almost 35 years have passed since that epic unfolded, but the passage of time has not diminished its contribution to the struggles of the modern working-class movement that opened with the drafting of the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels for a small international workers organization more than a century and a half ago.

Like other great episodes in the history of the efforts by working people of city and countryside to open the road to a future with neither wars of imperial plunder nor inhuman exploitation and oppression in any of its guises--from the Paris Commune, to the October insurrection, to the assault on Moncada and the Granma landing--the Bolivian campaign led by Che stands as a testament to the revolutionary capacities of the toilers, in this case of the working men and women of our hemisphere.

As the Bolivian communist Rodolfo Saldaña documents in his account, the victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 was not an isolated event. It was part of a rising wave of anti-imperialist struggle throughout the Americas. The men and women of Cuba, and the leadership they forged in battle, proved "that revolution is possible," as the Second Declaration of Havana proclaimed. And their example accelerated already-unfolding battles from Tierra del Fuego to the Rio Bravo for land, national sovereignty, and against the brutal exploitation of labor. The wave of struggles opened by the revolutionary upsurge in Bolivia in 1952 was a concrete manifestation of this reality. And Rodolfo Saldaña was one of the many thousands of young people throughout both North and South America who responded to the deepening revolutionary struggles and possibilities opened by the Cuban victory.

Saldaña's contribution in the pages of Fertile Ground lies in two things. Most important is the historical perspective he offers, placing the initiative of Che and the revolutionary leadership of Cuba in the context of the unresolved battles of the tin miners, peasants, and indigenous peoples of his country that created "fertile ground" for the revolutionary course Saldaña joined Che in fighting for. In doing so he gives the lie to those who claim that Che's guerrilla failed because it was a political adventure, ignorant of and alien to the conditions of Bolivia, that drew only indifference, at best, from the country's workers, peasants, and youth. Saldaña shows the opposite to be true. The developments in the class struggle in Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, and Peru alone over just the half decade following Che's murder provide striking confirmation.

Second is the unique picture Rodolfo Saldaña provides of the political trajectory of cadres of the Bolivian Communist Party such as himself and Rosendo García Maismán, the leader of the mine workers federation at Siglo XX, Bolivia's largest tin mine. Saldaña's account of the political work he and a few others did in the mines--winning García Maismán and many others to the revolutionary movement--goes a long way towards explaining why they were among the small handful who joined with Che to chart a course toward revolutionary struggle to overthrow the military dictatorship, and who broke with the hesitations or outright opposition of the party leadership and helped found the ELN, the National Liberation Army.

Along the way, Saldaña dismisses--as utterly ignorant of the realities--those who to have sought to drive a wedge between Che and Fidel, between Che and the revolution he helped to lead, by slandering the Cuban leadership for supposedly failing to provide the necessary logistical support for Che and his comrades.

All this carries special weight, coming as it does from virtually the last remaining voice of the Bolivian revolutionaries who joined Che and whose entire life trajectory was true to his early convictions. Pombo's eloquent foreword to the book pays tribute to the revolutionary attributes and human qualities of Saldaña in a manner that could only be done by one of his comrades-in-arms, someone whose life was in Saldaña's hands in the most difficult and dangerous of days.

Fertile Ground, however, is not primarily about the past. It is about the present and the future. It is not only about Bolivia, but about the Americas that are once again being propelled toward sharpening class struggle by the intensifying wage slavery and debt slavery born of the lawful workings of the capitalist system worldwide. We need only to look at the headlines from Ecuador or Argentina to see storm clouds gathering on the horizons.

Fertile Ground is about the kind of men and women who will emerge from battles to come and transform themselves as they fight to transform the conditions of their lives.

To be prepared for the titanic battles that are coming, however, new generations will have to conquer the lessons and discover true examples of the revolutionary past. They will have to study and internalize the lessons of struggle that have been paid for in blood by those whose legacy we can inherit. That task in relation to the revolutionary campaign led by Che in Bolivia would be qualitatively more difficult without the testament Saldaña left us. As several revolutionary-minded young people in the United States who recently read portions of Saldaña's account in the pages of the Militant commented to me with surprise, they knew nothing of the history of struggle in Bolivia that was the foundation for Che's political course.

That is why Pathfinder decided to publish this important volume, something that could not have been done without the collaboration of Editora Política, and especially the determined efforts of Compañera Iraida Aguirrechu, to assure that this valuable contribution to our collective legacy would not be lost. The Spanish edition of Fertile Ground will be indispensable to us in the United States as well.

The support of Rodolfo's longtime companion Gladys Brizuela was also greatly appreciated, and the historic photos we were together able to rescue from crumbling newspaper clippings that she had carefully guarded over the years enriched the political quality of the book immeasurably.

Along with Che's Bolivian Diary and Pombo: A Man of Che's Guerrilla, as well as Inti Peredo's My Campaign With Che, English-language editions of which have all been published by Pathfinder in recent years, Fertile Ground makes the lessons of the revolutionary class struggle in Bolivia more accessible to us all.

I would also like to thank the more than 200 Pathfinder volunteers around the world whose collective efforts, working together through the Internet, allowed Pathfinder's small full-time staff to produce Fertile Ground in record time so we could have it here for the Havana International Book Fair.

I would like to end by underscoring one point about the importance of this book for those within the United States who chart a course to build a communist movement capable of emulating the revolutionary trajectory of the working people of Cuba and their leadership.

Perhaps the biggest change in the Americas and the world these last 35 years is registered by the increasing homogeneity from one country to the next in our conditions of life, work, and exploitation. Washington's brutal, imperial domination of our hemisphere has driven millions of toilers from every corner of the Americas across the borders, however fortified they may be, and into the imperialist heartland. This historic new wave of immigration has transformed the composition and increasingly affects the knowledge and social consciousness of working people inside the United States. It has strengthened, not weakened, the United States working class, injecting broader historical perspectives and fertilizing its legacy with new traditions of struggle.

It is Mexican and Central American workers in the U.S., to give but one small example, who are today helping to reestablish the first of May as a day of working-class solidarity and action in North America. Born as a workers holiday more than a century ago out of the struggles of labor in the U.S. for the eight-hour day, in recent years the tradition of May Day as a mass celebration of the working class had all but vanished into a ritual of little significance to most working people. Its rebirth is but one of the many small expressions of the long-gestating changes that have begun to mark the class struggle in the United States.

The dramatic photo on the front cover of the Pathfinder edition of Fertile Ground--of tin miners in Oruro, Bolivia, taking to the streets in 1964, sticks of dynamite in hand, to condemn the Bolivian regime for the murder of students demonstrating against the government--will not seem alien or exotic to workers and farmers in the United States today whose resistance to the capitalist economic and political pressures on them is intensifying. Nor will it seem foreign to revolutionary-minded youth attracted to these struggles. To the contrary, in that photo they will be able to see their own faces in the crowd. In the mines and factories and fields across the North American continent, Fertile Ground will be welcomed and read as part of our own history.

Therein lies the importance of Rodolfo Saldaña's account of the class struggle in Bolivia, which gave meaning to his life.

And there lies the future of our America that is fast approaching.
 
 
  Books for Cuba: a special appeal

Militant readers have for many years been contributing regularly to our "Books for Cuba" Fund. The fund makes it possible for Pathfinder Press to fill the frequent requests it receives from libraries, schools, political organizations, and others in Cuba for complimentary copies of a broad range of Pathfinder titles.

The fund also makes it possible for Pathfinder to sell a large selection of titles at the Havana International Book Fair in pesos at prices most Cubans can afford.

This year the Books for Cuba Fund is helping to make possible the donation of 300 copies of Haciendo historia for distribution by the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution to each of its municipal groups.

Since December more than $2,300 has been raised for the fund, but contributions of any size are still needed.

Checks can be made payable to the Militant, earmarked "Books for Cuba Fund," and mailed to the Militant, 410 West Street, New York, NY 10014.
 
 
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Havana meeting launches 'Fertile Ground'
Volunteers win Pathfinder orders in Canada  
 
 
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