Vol. 75/No. 18      May 9, 2011

May 9, 1986
For nine months meatpackers in Austin, Minnesota, have been fighting a determined battle against the giant George A. Hormel & Co. The strikers are fighting for dignity and safety on the job—and to defend the union.

They are up against the company’s goons, union-busting lawyers, and scabs who are backed up by the cops, courts, National Guard, and state government.

In the course of this struggle, the meatpackers of United Food and Commercial Workers Local P-9 have won broad support from other unionists throughout the country, and from working farmers, students, and other progressive-minded individuals. Close to 6,000 of these supporters came to Austin April 12 to demonstrate their support for the struggle against Hormel.  
 
May 8, 1961
It is now clear that Washington is drafting plans for a direct attack on Cuba before the end of the year.

This is openly acknowledged by correspondents of major news publications who have been involved in an unprecedented series of “off-the-record” top-echelon Washington briefings.

The plan to attack Cuba is also the real reason for Kennedy’s demand that the press practice self-censorship. His claims that news accounts of the plans for the CIA-sponsored [Bay of Pigs] invasion was a factor in its defeat is so much hogwash. The Cubans (and most of the rest of the world) were fully aware of the invasion plans long before any news was trickled to the people of this country. The purpose of the censorship proposal is to catch the American people, not the Cubans, off guard.  
 
May 9, 1936
The action of the Cuban Supreme Court and of the Congress, calling for an investigation of recent murders of bourgeois opponents of the Batista dictatorship, signalizes an effort by Batista to broaden the base of his support.

Any investigation made will be a farce, for the murders were committed by Batista’s own gunmen. Batista hopes to make peace with his bourgeois opponents. Having outlawed all the labor organizations and imprisoned nearly five thousand workers, sharecroppers, and intellectuals, Batista wants to unite all the “respectable elements” of the population to maintain the status quo.

Batista’s conciliatory gestures toward the opposition bourgeoisie go hand in hand with systematic continuance of the white terror. No day passes without someone being murdered.  
 
 
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