The Militant (logo) 
   Vol.65/No.13            April 2, 2001 
 
 
Seattle meeting celebrates Cuban victory at Bay of Pigs and its impact on U.S. workers
(front page)
 
BY MAGGIE TROWE
SEATTLE--A West Coast meeting of 170 people at the Garfield Community Center here celebrated the 40th anniversary of U.S. imperialism's first military defeat in the Americas, the victory of the Cuban people in defending their socialist revolution by routing a U.S.-backed counterrevolutionary invasion at the Bay of Pigsan event identified in Cuba as Playa Girón.

The meeting, held a week following an East Coast event attended by 270 people in New York City (see last week's Militant), also marked the 40th anniversary of the successful mass campaign to wipe out illiteracy in Cuba, which made 1961 the Year of Education in that Caribbean nation.

And, like the New York event, the Seattle gathering was an opportunity to celebrate the publication of Pathfinder's newest book, Playa Girón/Bay of Pigs: Washington's First Military Defeat in the Americas, in English and Spanish. The meetings launched a campaign to read, study, and sell the book, along with Making History: Interviews with Four Generals of Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces and Fertile Ground: Che Guevara and Bolivia.

The meeting was hosted by the Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles branches of the Socialist Workers Party and the Young Socialists. Participants came from up and down the West Coast, and from Arizona, Colorado, Minnesota, and Utah, including a good number of young people, some of whom were attending their first socialist meeting.

The branch of the Communist League and the Young Socialists from Vancouver, British Columbia, helped make the meeting a success and brought nearly 20 people to the event. Carlos García, a leader of the Young Socialists in Canada and a garment worker in Vancouver, welcomed participants to the event and introduced SWP leader Norton Sandler, who chaired the meeting.

Sandler explained that the Young Socialists had just completed a two-day National Leadership Council meeting in Seattle. He introduced Jason Alessio, Roberto Guerrero, Olympia Newton, and Jacob Perasso, the members of the newly elected YS National Executive Committee, who were seated on the platform, as well as international guests from Sweden, Iceland, and Canada who participated in the YS leadership meeting.

The first featured speaker was Mary-Alice Waters, Pathfinder president, editor of Making History and Fertile Ground, and coeditor of Playa Girón, together with Steve Clark.

Playa Girón features excerpts of several speeches by Cuban commander-in-chief Fidel Castro before and after the battle, and also the July 1999 testimony of José Ramón Fernández before a Havana court detailing the background to the April 1961 victory. Fernández, who is retired from active duty, holds the rank of brigadier general in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba. He is currently vice president of the Council of Ministers. He commanded the main column of the Cuban forces that defeated the U.S.-organized invasion.

Fernández explains in his testimony in the new book that "from a strategic and tactical point of view, the enemy's idea was well-conceived.... What they lacked was a just cause to defend."

In her presentation, Waters pointed to a similar assessment drawn by Cuban revolutionary leader Ernesto Che Guevara in a May 1961 speech shortly after the defeat of the invasion. Guevara cautioned that Cubans shouldn't exaggerate the scope of the military victory at the Bay of Pigs, Waters said, because it was the defeat of "nothing more than 1,000 or so gusanos" (see Guevara's speech on page 8). As proof, Guevara explained that the revolutionary forces captured almost the entire invading force.

Most of all, she said, the victory at the Bay of Pigs was a tremendous political victory, which proved the Cuban people were ready to fight, not just against that invasion, but against a larger one Washington was on a course to carry out. The U.S. rulers prepared well for the attack, but they did not and could not calculate the moral factors. "They weren't crazy or stupid," Waters explained, but "they couldn't see the men and women from nowhere who made the revolution."  
 
Book produced in eight time zones
Volunteers who worked to rapidly prepare Playa Girón for publication carried out their coordinating effort via the Internet and across eight different time zones, Waters noted. "We can say 'the sun never sets on the Pathfinder volunteers,' from the other side of the class line of those who claimed that 'the sun never sets on the British empire.'"

Volunteers hastened to produce Playa Girón simultaneously in Spanish and English to be available now, Waters said, so that supporters of Pathfinder can get copies of the book into bookstores, making them available as the publicity around the anniversary creates a heightened interest over the next months.

The collective effort that goes into every aspect of the production of books such as Playa Girón, Waters said, is one of the best examples of mass work that is being done by the socialist movement.

Jack Willey, organizer of the New York City Socialist Workers Party, encouraged those attending the meeting to help build participation in the 15th World Festival of Youth and Students in Algiers, Algeria, August 8-16. The last festival was held in Havana in 1997, Willey said, and drew more than 12,000 youth. The anti-imperialist conference in Algiers, while not of the same scope, will be large and provide an opportunity for thousands of revolutionary-minded youth from dozens of countriesfrom Ireland to Ecuador to imperialist countries such as the United Statesto meet and discuss how to build the struggle against imperialism. One of the victories over the past period, Willey said, is the formation of single preparatory committees in each country, bringing all the forces together to build the festival. In the United States, for example, the Young Socialists and the Young Communist League are working together to build participation in the event.

Jacob Perasso, organizer of the newly elected Young Socialists National Executive Committee, reported to applause that Cuban youth leaders Yanelis Martínez Herrera and Javier Dueñas Oquendo have received visas to come to the United States to begin a speaking tour the following week on campuses in Minneapolis/St. Paul, Chicago, and New England. The Young Socialists have been active in working with professors and student organizations who are hosting this academic tour.

The final speaker was Jack Barnes, author of the foreword to Playa Girón and SWP national secretary. One of the central lessons of the events described in the new book for revolutionaries in the United States who defend the Cuban revolution and are building a communist movement, Barnes said, "is a tendency for us to underestimate what we can accomplish and what we will be capable of doing."

During the 1961 Year of Education, Barnes said, the campaign to wipe out illiteracy was launched as one of the many conquests of the Cuban revolution. It drew thousands of youth, some as young as 14 years old, into the countryside, many for the first time. The unarmed literacy brigade members faced threats and some were murdered in the counterrevolutionary "battle for democracy" organized by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Photos of the bodies of slain 14-year-old brigadistas published in the United States had quite an impact on youth and workers here, he said. Barnes also noted that the fight for literacy was closely tied with the fight for women's rights.

In explaining the relationship between the cultural advances the revolution was making and the determination Cuban toilers showed in fighting the invasion, Barnes noted that the worker-peasant Rebel Army organized poetry readings, plays, and art exhibits for soldiers stationed in the la Cabaña fortress in Havana, which had been used before the Cuban revolution for torture and imprisonment of working people who resisted the repression of the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship.

The Kennedy administration made political decisions in their assault on the Cuban revolution, not military ones, Barnes said. Within eight days of the Bay of Pigs defeat, the White House began reformulating their counterrevolutionary efforts. Less than two years later, in the "missile crisis" of 1962, Kennedy took the United States to the brink of nuclear war in demanding that missiles from the Soviet Union be withdrawn from Cuba. When advisors told the president and his colleagues that a U.S. invasion of Cuba would cost the lives of as many as 18,000 GIs in the first 10 days, they decided against it. When Cuban veterans hear the figure of 18,000, Barnes added, they often respond that the real figure would be double or triple that number.  
 
'A stronger set of gravediggers'
Barnes said politics in the United States today is at a turning point. While what is called the American labor movement is based on traditions that make it utterly unprepared for responding to the deepening crisis of capitalism, he said, it is important to remember what is special about the United States. It is the only country in the imperialist world where the working class is not getting rapidly older, Barnes said. Figures from the 2000 census show the populations of New York, Chicago, and several other major U.S. cities increasing. This is a result of a wave of immigration from many countries that is transforming what "American worker" means and enriching what workers and farmers will gain from each other through common experiences in the class struggle.

This immigration flow is a perfect example of how the U.S. capitalist rulers attempt to draw in and use the creativity and productivity of the world in their own interests. But instead, Barnes said, they have created "a stronger set of gravediggers" of capitalism in the United States.

Barnes reviewed a number of aspects of the bipartisan offensive in the United States over the last decade. He noted the latest series of assaults by the Bush administration against working people at home and abroad, including against the Cuban revolution, are in every instance a continuation of, not a break from, what was prepared and carried out by the Clinton administration.

For example, in Clinton's final days in office, Barnes noted, he signed a bill creating an "intelligence czar" who will draw together all intelligence agencies and work with private business to define which "national assets" of industry need to be guarded by increased business and government secrecy and by intelligence efforts to pinpoint those guilty of supposed industrial espionage.

Few thought the Cuban revolution could last this long without a single socialist revolution anywhere else, but it has proven possible, Barnes said.

He added that the statement of Fidel Castro in 1961 that "a victorious revolution will be seen in the United States before a victorious counterrevolution in Cuba" remains true, with one amendment: the socialist revolution in the United States will take place when the revolutionaries of Castro's generation are no longer in active leadership.  
 
Learn to do mass work
A proletarian party in the United States can't consider meeting the openings before it today, Barnes continued, without a youth organization that is communist, that reaches out to young workers and farmers in both the United States and Cuba. Building the Young Socialists and the Socialist Workers Party as two independent organizations in one political movement is possible, Barnes said, but only "if we learn to do mass work and follow the natural lines of resistance."

A communist party can also face the challenges and opportunities ahead, Barnes said, "by learning to leverage the work of the volunteers" who produce and make it possible to keep in print the Pathfinder arsenal of revolutionary books. Leveraging that work means effectively organizing to get the books and pamphlets published by Pathfinder out to as wide an audience of working people as possible, both in the United States and around the world. Successfully carrying out this work transforms the possibilities for building a mass revolutionary workers party and leadership out of the struggles and class battles ahead.

Barnes recalled that several years ago a party supporter from California told him she and dozens of others could organize to digitize the books in order to keep them in print, and that if they didn't, the greater and greater demand for the books could not be met. His first response, he said, was that the proposal was not realistic. However, Barnes continued, "you learn to listen to what people want to do" and "trust each other with the patrimony of your struggle and existence."

Norton Sandler made an appeal for contributions to the $80,000 Pathfinder Fund, launched the previous week in New York. He explained that money is needed to make possible the expanded production and circulation of books and pamphlets published by Pathfinder.

"Volunteers in Pathfinder's printshop have produced 26 books since the beginning of the year," Sandler noted, "and the reprint volunteers are closing in on their goal of having 50 percent of all the books in digital form by May Day, 2001. All of this costs money." Participants in the meeting pledged a total of $14,166, of which $1,830 was collected. Combined with results of the March 11 New York City meeting, the Seattle fund-raising brings the total pledged nationally to $37,793.

The March 18 meeting was the culmination of a weekend of activities. A March 17 Militant Labor Forum on "The Crisis Facing Working Farmers" drew 115 people. And more than a dozen people participated in a class led by Bill Kalman, a meat packer from San Francisco, on the "Second Declaration of Havana," a document signed by more than 1 million workers and peasants in Cuba and presented to a mass rally by Fidel Castro in 1962. The document assesses the lessons of the Cuban revolution and calls for continent-wide revolutionary struggle. The class took place at the new Socialist Workers Party headquarters, where volunteers are completing renovation work.

A reception before the Sunday meeting provided an opportunity for people to talk, buy books , and partake in a buffet prepared by Seattle-area supporters. Participants purchased a total of 47 copies of Playa Girón by the end of the meeting.

One person decided to join the Young Socialists during the weekend and young people attending the events included a high school student from Los Angeles, a University of Washington student, and two young people from Vancouver, British Columbia. Rose Keurdian, 21, a student at the University of British Columbia who is part of a committee organizing a tour of Cuban youth to Canada, attended all the events. Keurdian said she had come to Seattle for the weekend to learn more and because "I'm very passionate about Cuba. It's the only country I know where communism is working, even under the pressure of the United States, the Helms-Burton and Torricelli acts, and more than 40 years of blockade and propaganda."
 
 
Related article:
'Our people showed their determination to fight'  
 
 
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