Socialist Workers Party leader Jack Willey, who had been part of a delegation of socialist workers from the United States and Canada at a meeting one week earlier of university students and young socialists in Haiti, was the speaker. The Port-au-Prince gathering, he said, showed the new possibilities for collaboration between revolutionary workers, farmers, and students in North America and Haiti.

Supporters of the two socialist periodicals hosted a dinner before the event and organized a fund pitch, explaining the goals of the drive and the need for funds to help finance the working-class publications. Participants in the meeting pledged a total of $1,295 to the fund, of which $930 was collected on the spot.

The international drive runs through to June 15. As indicated in the chart below, supporters in local areas have now pledged well over the initial $50,000 goal.

Willey’s presentation prompted a number of questions from the audience and a lively give-and-take at the post-meeting social. He noted that a number of students at the conference in Port-au-Prince asked whether it is possible to make a revolution in a country like Haiti, whose development has been stunted by brutal imperialist exploitation.

Willey said that in countries where there is currently a small working class it is just as necessary as it is in advanced capitalist countries to build socialist parties that aim to lead workers and peasants in struggle to defend their own class interests. Looking to bourgeois or petty bourgeois forces only leads to defeat for working people. Once workers and peasants set out to build such a party, how far the revolutionary struggle can go is an open question. In the case of Haiti, Willey said, advances in the struggles of working people will find a response of solidarity from workers in the Dominican Republic, Haitian immigrants in the United States, and the Cuban Revolution.

Two days after the Garment District event supporters organized a fund meeting in Chicago titled "Why Washington’s ‘Cold War’ against Revolutionary Cuba Doesn’t End." The speaker was Romina Green from New York, a leader of the Young Socialists who participated in events in Cuba organized to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the founding of the Union of Young Communists.

Earlier the same day, Green joined a YS class on the Pathfinder title Che Guevara Talks to Young People.

Participants in the Chicago fund event, Green told the Militant, included YS members and contacts, longtime readers of the socialist press, and a garment worker who received a flyer advertising the event from a co-worker. In the discussion period, she said, several people commented on the visit of former U.S. president James Carter to Cuba, and pointed out his record of hostility to the Cuban, Grenadian, Nicaraguan, and Iranian revolutions.

The schedule of fund events over the two-and-a-half weeks that remain in the campaign is rapidly filling up, from Australia, to Canada, to the United States. (Information on upcoming meetings is on page 12.)

Almost $4,000 has been received toward the fund over the past week. However, a number of areas have still not sent in anything. Partisans of the fund are encouraged to step up their efforts at bringing in the contributions that have been pledged and at soliciting new ones. Every worker, farmer, and young person who recognizes the value of the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial should be approached for a contribution. The fund drive should also benefit from the efforts of campaigners in the international circulation campaign to meet their goals.  
 
 
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