I’m also pleased that we’re presenting these issues of Nueva Internacional here today in the midst of the book fair, in what was once Che’s command post at La Cabaña—where he met with his compañeros and left his mark.¹

This is a magazine written and promoted, without a doubt, by communists. And I’m glad they say it loud and clear. They are entitled to do so, because of all the struggles they have come out of. In one part of the excellent essay entitled “Capitalism’s Long Hot Winter Has Begun,” Jack Barnes correctly says: We have absolutely no fear of the U.S. ruling class. We’re communists and we’re here to do away with capitalism, to do away with imperialism. We know that capitalism is by definition the enemy of humanity.

To be a communist in the United States, in the most complicated part of the world, is clearly not the same thing as being a communist in Cuba, although being a communist in Cuba also requires having a heart in one’s chest. But their problems are different from those confronting us as Cuban communists.

So I think the international communist movement owes special recognition to the American communists who have come here and, as is natural, have met with their Cuban communist compañeros, just as in other parts of the world, to engage in these dialogues. Because they have not allowed themselves to be bought off or diverted, they have not lowered the banners of struggle, despite adverse conditions.

In issue no. 6 of Nueva Internacional, the report and summary by Jack Barnes, discussed and adopted by the delegates to the 41st Constitutional Convention of the Socialist Workers Party held in 2002 in Ohio, presents the situation in the country in the wake of September 11. And it is an accurate assessment, as real life several years later demonstrates, of the deep structural—not conjunctural—crisis of capitalism and imperialism, both in the United States and worldwide.

It is an accurate assessment of the opportunities a crisis of this kind offers the international communist movement. It states accurately that imperialism cannot resolve the crisis by creating a worldwide superimperialism, or a hegemonic center that imposes agreement on the various local imperialist powers, or by trying to conjure away the crisis through the countless ploys the system uses.

It presents the assessment that the system has exhausted its final kind and gentle, glamorous, deceitful mask. Since September 11 the true, festering, and horrible face of capital has been out in the open for all to see.

The fashionable labels are gone, the siesta is finished, the party is over. What we are living is capitalism as it really is. This is the real face of imperialism. That’s what Abu Ghraib is, nothing more. That’s what Fallujah is, what the tortures in Guantánamo are.

That’s what Northcom is, the Northern Command of the U.S. armed forces. Communists in the United States are very correct to call this to our attention, and that it began under Clinton. The establishment of the Northern Command, which includes the United States, provides for the deployment of the U.S. military forces in cases of civil unrest, in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which bars the use of the federal armed forces in domestic police matters.

Recently the term “the long war” began to be used. It was coined by Rumsfeld and appears in the Quadrennial Defense Review, the Pentagon’s projection for the next four years and beyond.

What does “the long war” mean? They say it clearly in their guiding documents. The United States is in a war that will last no less than 20 years, waged against many countries, not only Iraq. It will continue until what they call “the definitive victory” of the Western capitalist way of life.

That long war will include air strikes, commando attacks, open warfare, military bases, naval action, covert action, and all types of operations all over the globe. As the Pentagon’s guiding document states, the long war will be waged against many countries that are not enemies of the United States today, or not yet considered open enemies of the United States.

Before the term was in vogue, Barnes and the communists in the United States called attention to this, providing an accurate analysis. A long period is opening before us, they write, the final stage of decay and crisis of the system. Where politeness is gone and repression takes its place.

But out of great crises come great solutions.

I should say here that I was very happy to find in these pages a precise definition of Zionism by Trotsky. Because it’s also worth mentioning that the neoconservative group has such close ties to Zionism that it makes you wonder whether this plan of universal expansion is really North American or Zionist. This is an important question for theoreticians and politicians to investigate. And here comes Trotsky in the 1930s, saying that the creation of the state of Israel by the Zionists is a bloody trap for the Jewish people. That has been proven in a most dramatic and terrible way.

I was also very happy to see that when the U.S. Socialist Workers Party assesses the political situation, it’s not just on the basis of books by Marx, Engels, and Lenin, however brilliant these thinkers may be. They also take the pulse of the street. They know that an anecdote can capture a greater reality.

In “Capitalism’s Long Hot Winter,” Barnes tells the story, for example, of going to a meeting a few days after September 11—I think it coincided with Mexico’s independence day, September 16—and on a street corner a Mexican woman was selling little American flags. Suddenly a Mexican man passes, driving a truck decked out with some patriotic U.S. flags in support of “our boys” in the war—obviously these were placed by the driver’s boss, not by him. As the truck passes the corner where the Mexican woman is selling U.S. flags, he leans out the window and shouts, “Viva Zapata!”

And Jack Barnes adds: I wasn’t the only one who saw it, others did too.

Those are the signs of the street, which tell the truth, whether it’s the streets of Cuba or the U.S. streets. And keeping your ear to the ground is a virtue in a political party, even more so if this party wants to transform the world.

“Capitalism’s Long Hot Winter” talks about the left. And it says something that is very accurate: The only left is the one that aims to transform the world through revolution. That is the defining criterion. All the rest can be called many other things.

The document also has a very interesting criticism of Noam Chomsky. It makes one think because, in fact, Chomsky is the public intellectual most cited in the U.S. media, according to the book Public Intellectuals by Richard Posner.

Why are the ideas of Chomsky acceptable? Why are the ideas of other social fighters not considered acceptable? It’s something to think about. Sometimes we’re dazzled by names, labels, reputation.

The U.S. Socialist Workers Party is very radical, very correct on this question: make alliances with everyone, but they must want to make a revolution. Alliances with anyone who wants to transform the world without concession, without cowardice.

Nueva Internacional talks about Cuba in relation to the United States: Cuba’s importance for strengthening the struggle within the United States. This is something we really knew little about. The article tells a story about Ramón Labañino, one of our five heroes, who sent a letter to Mary-Alice. Ramón wrote: I read the Pathfinder book on Playa Girón, and learned something “I had never read in any other book on this subject.” Cubans weren’t aware that this victory and Cuba’s resistance had such an influence inside the United States, especially among young revolutionaries and fighters.

The magazine talks about how a party needs disciplined, conscious, educated cadres—but fighters, who will not surrender or make concessions.

The magazine foresees that the economic crisis, fueled by the growing financial bubble, will be joined by a collapse of the housing market in the United States, which will perhaps be a detonator of the kind of world depression that, as the author says, those attending the convention in Ohio had no experience with, except for those older than 80.

The magazine talks about the coming ground war in Iraq that, unfortunately, would inflict many casualties among U.S. forces. And it points out that many militants in the United States today have not known that kind of war either.

And the magazine talks about the need to make alliances with all the world’s revolutionary forces to meet and take advantage of the opportunity of the system’s decay and to deal the final blows against it.

I’ll end by saying that when the German Democratic Republic fell, in the midst of tremendous demoralization and all else, someone wrote a statement on the wall. When everyone was tearing down walls that never should have been built, at a time when ideas, struggles, sacrifice, heroism, and politics were also falling, someone had the clear-sightedness to write on the wall: “The next time will be better.”

That is, we will return and do it better, because we’ve been freed from the dead weight of Stalinism, dogmatism, and human misery. We’ve understood that there is a single struggle that is different in each place. We’ve learned from Marx that it’s a necessary struggle. It’s not the product of anyone’s whim or conspiracy.

I’ve not had the pleasure to meet Jack Barnes, but reading this article I hope some day we’ll have him here with us, and we can say to him:

Yes, capitalism’s long hot winter has begun. But their winter is our spring.

1. The Havana International Book Fair takes place on the grounds of the historic fortress overlooking Havana Bay that is known as La Cabaña. After the 1959 revolutionary victory in Cuba, Ernesto Che Guevara was the commander of that military post. The room where the presentation of Nueva Internacional was held was the one Guevara used as his command post.
 
 
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