More than 100 people turned out for the event, which featured presentations by more than a dozen members of the delegation on why they are going to Cuba as well as greetings by representatives of Cuba solidarity groups in Los Angeles and a talk by Mary-Alice Waters, president of Pathfinder Press and editor of many books of speeches, writings, and interviews with leaders of the Cuban Revolution. The gathering was co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Coalition in Solidarity with Cuba and the Los Angeles Youth Exchange delegation.

Delegation members had been meeting together, fund-raising, reading books on Cuba, and holding educational classes for months in preparation for the trip.

The one-minute presentations by members of the delegation were interspersed throughout the evening’s program.

José Velasquez, a young construction worker who has been reading to prepare for the trip, said he is going to Cuba because “it’s important to learn about a people who decide to take power into their own hands, like the workers and farmers of Cuba.”

Another participant, Carlos Domínguez, who majored in music and political science at the University of Southern California (USC), said his interest in Cuba started with Cuban music. “There are a lot of different views on Cuba,” he said. “The best way to sort that out is to go to the source.”

Carlos Aguilar, who is active with the Central American Resource Center, where the meeting was held, co-chaired the event along with Leslie Simonds, a student at Los Angeles County High School for the Arts.  
 
Free the Cuban Five
Aguilar announced that the U.S. delegation to the Cuba-U.S. Youth Exchange will include some 250 people. He said the Los Angeles delegation includes young workers and students from 14 college campuses and two high schools. The overwhelming majority have grown up and gone to school in southern California, coming from families that have migrated there from around the world—including Brazil, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico, and Vietnam. Sixty percent of the delegates are women.

Adrián García, representing the National Committee to Free the Five, was the first speaker, talking about the campaign to free five Cuban militants serving draconian sentences in U.S. jails.

The five men—Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, René González, and Antonio Guerrero—were convicted in 2001 on frame-up charges brought by the U.S. government.

The Cuban Five, as they are known, were carrying out an internationalist mission to gather information on ultrarightist organizations with a record of violent attacks on Cuba carried out from U.S. soil with Washington’s complicity. They were arrested by the FBI in 1998, charged with “conspiracy to commit espionage” and “conspiracy to act as an unregistered foreign agent.” Hernández was also charged with “conspiracy to commit murder.” They were given sentences ranging from 15 years in prison to a double-life term, and locked up in five federal prisons spread out across the country.

García asked those at the meeting to sign a petition requesting that the U.S. government grant visas to the wives of two of the five, who have been repeatedly denied the right to visit their husbands in prison.

A large banner with painted portraits of the Cuban Five was brought to the front of the hall. Alicia Siu, a student at the University of California at Davis who had painted the banner, urged those present to sign it. The delegation will take the banner to present to the families of the five.

Other speakers at the event included José Estévez, a Cuban-American who works with Alianza Martiana, an anti-embargo organization in Miami. Estévez talked about the impact the assault on Moncada had on thousands of young people like himself at the time; Carole Frances Likens, of the Pastors for Peace Cuba Friendshipment Caravan, who reported on the progress of the current caravan; Laurence Shoobs, of the U.S.-Cuba Sister Cities Association; and Don White, of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador.  
 
Celebrate 50 years of road of Moncada
Mary-Alice Waters was the keynote speaker at the event. She began by saluting all those present for the “impressive job you’ve done to build the delegation from Los Angeles and to help coordinate the groups that will be travelling to Cuba from all over the United States.”

A week from tomorrow, she noted, “all of us, wherever we happen to find ourselves, will join our Cuban compañeros in celebrating the 50th anniversary of the assault on Moncada. To some people in the world, this will seem strange: to be celebrating an action 50 years ago that failed to achieve its primary objective. The goal was to seize the garrison of Moncada and spark an uprising throughout the territory of Cuba against the Batista dictatorship. In the end, the action cost the lives of some one-third of the combatants, almost all of them murdered in cold blood by the Batista dictatorship, many of them after being brutally tortured.

“But was this action a failure?” asked Waters. Placed in its broader historical context, the answer is a resounding “No,” she stated. “Whatever the miscalculations, in experience or in maturity of program, that action in its conception, composition, and execution embodied the popular revolutionary course that led three years later to the beginning of the revolutionary war—the landing of the Granma expedition and the first actions of the Rebel Army in the Sierra Maestra—and the intensified underground struggle in the cities throughout Cuba. “Within five and a half years the Batista dictatorship had been overthrown, opening the door to a new state of struggle and the first socialist revolution in the Americas.

“Moncada embodied the strategy of a different class,” Waters said, “the working class.” What changed in the ensuing years of struggle was not the Batista dictatorship or Washington, she noted, “but the consciousness and the capacities of the women and men who were transformed themselves as they lived that struggle, and as they forged a program and a revolutionary leadership that was truly worthy of the workers and farmers in Cuba and of the world vanguard they were heading.”  
 
Consistency of U.S. policy
For 45 years there’s been nothing more consistent in U.S. foreign relations than the policy towards Cuba, said Waters. Washington has, and will continue to hold, one single aim: to crush the revolutionary example of the Cuban people, to make them pay for the path they have blazed.

“What all of you will find in Cuba as you have the opportunity and privilege of traveling to Cuba is the reality of the Cuban Revolution today. You’ll be able to make up your own minds whether Cuba, as you have heard year after year, is a brutal dictatorship devoid of popular support, or whether it is genuinely a popular revolution that enjoys not just the support, but the active participation of a large majority of 11 million Cuban people.

“You will be able to see for yourselves that the Cuban Revolution is not the work of angels or devils but is genuinely made of human clay,” Waters said. “You will see a living, breathing, fighting revolution, with all its contradictions, complexities, weaknesses and strengths, and be able to place that social reality in the world today—a world in which capitalism is dominant, where that revolution comes face to face with the colossal force of Cuba’s mortal enemy: American imperialism. A world in which the Cuban people have been defending themselves, fighting against that stream for 50 years.”

The revolution’s future will be decided not only in Cuba—and not even primarily in Cuba—but by the struggles taking place worldwide, Waters noted, including in the United States. “What we do here, what you do here when you return from your trip to Cuba, is one of the decisive factors in the future of the Cuban Revolution—not to mention our own future.

“Cuba represents the most advanced outpost of a new world order that is fighting to be born,” Waters said. “You will have a chance to judge that for yourself, and then to return here to be part of that same battle inside the United States. That’s why the celebration of the 50th anniversary of Moncada is not about the past. It’s about the present and the future.”

“We look forward to reporting back to you,” Carlos Aguilar said in closing the celebration. He announced a meeting August 15 to hear from the youth upon their return. “And we urge you to organize other meetings for us, so we can spread what we have learned.”

“We will return to be more effective defenders of the Cuban revolution,” said Darryl Sheppard, a central organizer of the group here and a member of the Young Socialists, who chaired the event.

Sandy Waters, who has relatives in Cuba, said she is looking forward to her second trip there. Like others in the group, she used the last weeks to read and discuss documents on the Cuban Revolution, including Socialism and Man in Cuba by Ernesto Che Guevara and The Second Declaration of Havana.

“I’m going in order to see the truth for myself,” said Eric Biesecker. “Cuba has shown a tremendous effort to create a more just reality.”

“There were lots of books about Che, Fidel, and Cuba in my house as I grew up,” said Lily O’Brien. “I didn’t really pay much attention to them until this year.” O’Brien reported on the various activities of the group to raise funds for the trip. She said that enough funds had been raised to get all eight participants to Cuba.

Other speakers included Olga Fernández, first secretary of the Cuban Interests Section here, and Philip Brenner, chair of the Interdisciplinary Council on the Americas at American University.
 

Graciano Matos, one of the youth on the delegation, chaired the program. Luis Miranda, director of Casa de las Americas, was the featured speaker. Casa is the oldest organization of Cuban-Americans in the U.S. who support the Cuban Revolution. Miranda said that as a young student in New York he became involved in actively supporting the revolutionary movement in Cuba in the 1950s, and reviewed the rich history of efforts of Cubans in New York to weigh in on a victorious outcome for the revolution. To this day, he said, many Cuban-Americans continue to dedicate their lives to defense of the first socialist revolution in the Americas.

Miranda told the audience that on the eve of the attack on the Moncada barracks, he and others received a young Fidel Castro in New York. They worked tirelessly to organize speaking engagements and press interviews for Castro to get out the truth about the struggle against the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.

Casa de las Americas, he added, was initiated by those Cuban-Americans who supported the program of the July 26 Movement—the organization Castro led, which took its name from the date of the assault on Moncada—and saw as their principal contribution that of getting out the truth about and garnering solidarity for the revolution. They did this despite violence and thuggery by counterrevolutionaries, including bombings of Casa’s headquarters carried out by Batista’s henchmen in the mid-1950s, and later by groups like Alpha 66 and Omega 7, as well as constant harassment by the FBI and other federal cop agencies.

Miranda urged the youth going to Cuba to learn how the Cuban people advanced the revolution, while standing firm against U.S. imperialism.
 
 
Related articles:
Cuba marks revolution’s opening act at Moncada  
 
 
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