The exchange was part of a lively give-and-take following a presentation by Waters, the president of Pathfinder Press, on “U.S.-Cuba Relations: Why Washington’s Cold War Doesn’t End.”

The initiative to invite Waters to speak as part of the Student Government Association (SGA) sponsored lecture series had come from students who in July had participated in the Cuba-U.S. Youth Exchange trip to the Caribbean island, four of whom go to school at Rutgers. In preparation for that trip, a number had bought Pathfinder titles on the Cuban Revolution.

SGA president Ikramud Wadud opened the meeting and introduced Waters, explaining that she is the editor of more than a dozen Pathfinder titles on Cuba. Attended by some 50 people, the meeting attracted both Rutgers students and others from the area who had heard about the event held at the Paul Robeson Student Center. It was chaired by Ryan-Katherine Sisco, who participated in the Exchange trip to Cuba.

“To understand the Cuban Revolution,” Waters emphasized, “you always have to place it within the world.” You need to start with the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan; with the millions in Africa who face the ravages of AIDS but are denied access to medicine by the profit-driven drug monopolies; with the smoldering volcano of struggles erupting in Latin America; with the spreading depression conditions and attacks on the rights and standard of living of working people in the United States.

“Most important,” Waters said, “is the increased resistance to these real consequences of capitalist exploitation both here and internationally. This is the world in which Cuba’s example shows a different road forward for humanity.”

Why does Washington target Cuba with such ferocity? “Because it is a deep-going popular revolution,” Waters said. “The example of working people taking power into their own hands, transforming themselves in the process, as well as Cuba’s record of internationalist solidarity, are a threat to U.S. imperialist domination of the Americas and worldwide.”

Waters’s talk described the social measures initiated by the new revolutionary government from 1959 on as Cuban workers and farmers mobilized in their millions to carry out a literacy drive and land reform, to provide health care for all, and to implement other far-reaching measures. In the process they discovered they couldn’t advance without breaking the chains of imperialist economic control; without challenging the property rights and social privileges of the Cuban capitalists and foreign owners; without nationalizing land, factories, and mines to thwart the economic sabotage orchestrated by Washington; without workers and farmers taking greater and greater control of every aspect of their workplaces, lives, and future. In short, without making a socialist revolution.

“This is what Washington seeks to crush, needs to crush, because of its example,” she said.

Talking about that example in the world today, Waters pointed to the impact of the world capitalist economic crisis on Cuba over the past decade as the island faced the loss of preferential trade agreements and aid from the former Soviet Union. Confronting this crisis, working people in Cuba have emerged stronger and more self-confident, and leaders of new generations have taken on growing responsibilities, Waters explained. She pointed to the hundreds of thousands of young people who have been drawn into a massive campaign to expand educational, medical, and cultural opportunities in Cuba today, as well as the thousands of internationalist volunteers who selflessly have taken, and are taking medical care and literacy training around the world, from the nations of Africa to the poorest urban and rural areas of Venezuela.

Waters also pointed to the example of the five Cubans living in the United States who have been framed by the U.S. government on charges of conspiracy to commit espionage and sentenced to draconian terms in U.S. prisons. “Our Cuban brothers are in prison,” she said, “because they were successfully collecting information, and exposing plans by ultraright-wing paramilitary groups in Miami to attack targets in Cuba. For that they themselves became special targets of the U.S. rulers. For that, they deserve our respect and solidarity.”  
 
Who dictates U.S. policy toward Cuba?
The presentation sparked a variety of questions and comments from the audience. In response to a question about the influence of counterrevolutionary Cuban-American groups in the United States, Waters replied, “Cubans in Florida and New Jersey don’t dictate anything about U.S. foreign policy.” They are the puppets, not the puppeteers, although the U.S. rulers try to make you believe the opposite. Through every Democratic and Republican administration since 1959, she said, Washington’s hostility to Cuba has been the most consistent aspect of U.S. foreign policy.

“Did the fact that the Cuban leadership paid more attention to the ideological aspects of the struggle for socialism than the leaders of the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic, and other countries of Eastern Europe, help it survive, in spite of the imperialist onslaught?” asked another.

The differences between the Cuban leadership and the leadership of the Soviet Union were not ideological, Waters replied—they represented different classes. “The strength of Cuba and its leadership is the strength of Cuba’s workers and farmers who made—and continue to make—the revolution,” she noted. “Cuba is not a tropical variant of Stalinism,” Waters added. “The Cuban Revolution is not something similar to what existed for decades in the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe. It’s the antithesis. There is no mass privileged bureaucratic caste dominating party and state that defends its own interests against those of workers and farmers in Cuba and around the world,” she explained. That is why the Cuban Revolution survived when the Stalinist regimes and parties of Eastern Europe and the USSR collapsed. Those who predicted Cuba would follow in their wake simply didn’t understand the Cuban Revolution.

One participant asked whether there could ever be a socialist revolution in the United States given the divisions among working people. “A revolution here is not only possible, it is necessary,” Waters replied. As long as the U.S. capitalist rulers remain in power, working people around the world will face a catastrophic future.

Workers and farmers can overcome the divisions fostered by capitalism as they fight shoulder to shoulder, she said, pointing to the current fight by Utah coal miners—most of whom are Mexican-born—to organize a union. “Their example is bringing miners across the country together, not dividing them,” she noted, bringing workers and their allies in the West together in solidarity.

Is the U.S.-Cuba conflict rooted in the conflict between capitalism and socialism? asked another. Yes, Waters replied. The confrontation between Washington and Havana is a concretization of the two roads facing the toilers of the world—the barbarism offered by the capitalist system in its death agony, or the future of progress, development, and human solidarity that is only possible if working people take power as they did in Cuba and make a socialist revolution.

A number of people stayed after the program for more than an hour to continue the discussion informally. They pored over a display of Pathfinder literature, purchasing more than a dozen books and pamphlets on the Cuban Revolution as well as on broader U.S. and world politics.  
 
 
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