Today we are celebrating the fortieth anniversary of that historic conquest.

On April 15, 1961, when the Yankee-organized mercenaries announced their imminent invasion by simultaneously bombing three Cuban airfields, the revolutionary government mobilized the people's militias and other military units. In the declaration announcing that state of alert, Fidel Castro called on all Cubans to "occupy their assigned posts, whether in a military unit or a workplace"--and he added, in the same sentence, "with no interruption in production, the literacy campaign, or a single revolutionary task."

Four days later, when the counterrevolutionary forces had been defeated, the communiqué signed by Fidel reporting that victory to the Cuban people was demonstratively dated: "April 19, 1961, Year of Education."

You can find both documents in the new Pathfinder book, Playa Girón/Bay of Pigs: Washington's First Military Defeat in the Americas, whose publication in English and Spanish we are also celebrating here today.

Nineteen sixty-one in Cuba was the Year of Education in all the meanings of that word--the capacity to learn, to produce, to become a more disciplined revolutionary soldier, to create, to develop. The Year of Education meant making culture more accessible. It meant bravery in serving the highest human goals. It meant extending a hand of solidarity to anyone fighting against injustice and oppression anywhere in the world. It meant offering your life to achieve these goals.

Fidel Castro, Ernesto Che Guevara, and other leaders of the Cuban Revolution were very much aware that the greatest obstacle to the line of march of the toilers is the tendency, promoted and perpetuated by the exploiting classes, for working people to underestimate ourselves, to underestimate what we can accomplish, to doubt our own worth. That's why revolutionists in Cuba were so proud that the literacy effort had continued with minimal disruption as the battle against the invaders--a battle for the very life of the revolution--was fought and won. "The literacy campaign has not stopped even during these days," announced Fidel Castro in his April 23 report on the victory to the Cuban people.

Whatever any particular individual was doing over those three days, April 17–19--whether deployed at the front, working in the fields or factories, or helping someone learn to read and write--the Cuban people felt the bond of a common battle waged by equals. A common bond that provided a basis for discipline, a basis for the shared joy of construction, the joy of creation, and the joy of victory in battle over those who sought to destroy everything their revolution was making possible.

What a moment for the people of Cuba to announce to the world the socialist character of the revolution!

A little more than a year later Che Guevara told the congress of the Union of Young Communists (UJC)--in a speech you can find in Pathfinder's Che Guevara Talks to Young People--that young communists had the responsibility to be "the first in work, the first in study, the first in defense of the country." And he congratulated them for the three words they had put on the emblem of their organization--study, work, and the rifle.

These are the emblems of all Cubans, Che said, permanent emblems, not just momentary ones.

The rifle, because no progress toward the liberation of toiling humanity is secure unless the exploiting classes know we are ready to defend those gains by any means necessary. That was the truth confirmed once again at Playa Girón.

Work, often depicted by a shovel or a machete, because the transformation of nature by human labor, social labor, is not only the source of all wealth but the foundation for all culture. Without the shovel and machete, there's nothing for the rifle to defend.

And study, depicted by a pencil, a symbol of the literacy campaign, because the capacity to read and write gives access to the cumulative conquests of all previous human endeavor and opens the doors to workers and farmers to participate as equals in every aspect of social and political life. It makes them better able to transform production and the conditions of life and work, better able to take control of their own destiny.

The literacy campaign was central to strengthening the worker-peasant alliance on which revolutionary Cuba was founded; it was central to narrowing the gulf between toilers in city and country- side. Peasants and their families in pre-revolutionary Cuba had virtually no educational opportunities. Nor did women, especially in rural areas. So the literacy campaign struck a mighty blow for the emancipation of women, too.

A central part of the education of every revolutionary-minded person is coming to recognize the terror, violence, and degradation on which the landlords and capitalists base their rule. That's one of the lessons underlined by José Ramón Fernández, commander of the main column that repelled the invaders at Playa Girón, in his July 1999 testimony before a Havana court during the trial of a lawsuit brought by the people of Cuba against the U.S. government for the thousands of deaths and massive physical destruction caused by Washington's decades-long effort to destroy the Cuban Revolution.

In 1961 the literacy campaign volunteers were among those in Cuba against whom the U.S. government unleashed its counterrevolutionary assassins and torturers. As we explained in the foreword to Playa Girón, for young people in the United States during those opening years of the revolution, the press dispatches and photographs depicting "Cuban teenagers lynched for the crime of teaching peasant families to read and write" offered a graphic representation of the motives, the real character of the contending class forces confronting each other not just in Cuba but the world over.

Such images confirmed what young people in the United States in the early 1960s were learning here at home about the lynchings, night-riding terror, and police violence, both local and federal, against Blacks and civil rights fighters. It helped us understand the class reality that cop beatings, frame-ups, humiliations, and, yes, executions on the streets are part of the everyday life of millions of workers--daily horrors that bear down disproportionately on Blacks, Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, and other oppressed nationalities. And it opened our eyes over time to recognizing that the capitalist rulers will organize and unleash fascist terror in face of a challenge to their rule by workers and farmers.
 

The victory at Playa Girón reminds us of the price toilers must be ready to pay to win our freedom from exploitation and oppression and then to defend it. We can't help but be affected by the fearlessness displayed by tens of thousands of Cuban workers and peasants, many of them very young--by their courage and determination in face of death. That's one of the qualities of a people engaged in a profound revolutionary transformation of their circumstances and themselves.

What's so striking about Cuban revolutionists, however, is not their courage and determination in face of death. It's their attitude toward life. That, above all, is what the élan, the discipline, the bravery that ensured the triumph at Playa Girón were all about.

That's why, as José Ramón Fernández says in his testimony, there was such surprise in Washington in April 1961 "at the scope of the Cuban people's victory." The outcome, he says, "can be explained only by the courage of a people who saw the January 1 [1959] triumph as the genuine opportunity to determine their own future. This is why they proudly wore the militia uniforms and were on alert, and willing to fight, with the firm conviction they would win."

That's what the U.S. rulers did not understand--and even more importantly, can never understand. They do not and cannot understand the scope of the capacities of workers and farmers engaged in struggle, revolutionary struggle above all. They cannot understand human beings like the militia members in that wonderful photograph the Militant newspaper ran this week of the First Company of the 134th Battalion celebrating their victory at Playa Girón.

If this weren't true--if the ruling class could understand what propels workers and farmers into revolutionary action; if they understood what we are ready to fight and die for, or could learn to understand it--then socialist revolution would be an illusion. But they do not and cannot.

In order to rationalize the legitimacy of their exploitative system before the eyes of society as a whole, the rulers rely on ideology. Contrary to the bourgeoisie's pretensions to civilization and culture, there are no "great ideas" or scientific social theories whose inexorable conclusion is that a handful of property-holding families must forever grow wealthy off the labor of the majority of humanity, maintaining their class dictatorship by whatever force and violence is necessary. That's not a law of nature.

The capitalists in the United States are particularly pragmatic. They have no theories or ideas. They just do what they must to maintain their class rule, and then promote ideological justifications for it. They market these as buzzwords, hack phrases, and coarse Americanism, through "news" shows, "news" analyses, "newspapers," and talk radio and TV.

But bourgeois ideology is not a conspiracy. It's not some clever plot they hatch up. The closer the rulers' rationalizations come to something with a family resemblance to social thought, the more impossible it becomes for them and their children to disentangle what they, as a class, want and claim to be true from the truth itself. The same ideological illusions hold sway among the middle-class and professional layers who look to the bourgeois rulers and act on their behalf.

In Capital, in the chapter called "The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret," Karl Marx observes that the very foundation of capitalist social relations--the fact that all profits originate from the exchange of commodities whose value is solely the creation of human labor--is camouflaged behind what goes by the name of "economics," but is in fact vulgar apologetics for bourgeois rule. But these ideological self-rationalizations are believed by the capitalists and those they hire to propagate them, Marx says.

"These formulas," Marx writes, "which bear the unmistakable stamp of belonging to a social formation in which the process of production has mastery over man, instead of the opposite, appear to the political economists' bourgeois consciousness to be as much a self-evident and nature-imposed necessity as productive labour itself."

Because the bourgeoisie and their servants believe their own ideology, they end up making political misjudgments about the capacities of working people--about the toilers whose courageous actions allow them to begin escaping the domination of these ghosts. At decisive moments, the rulers make big miscalculations. That's why, in the end, they will lose.

Over the years, I've frequently heard the question: "Didn't most top CIA and White House officials really know there would be no uprising by the Cuban people in response to the Bay of Pigs invasion?" The answer is, no. It's not that simple. And it's worth taking a few minutes to discuss why.

A good place to start is the judgment by José Ramón Fernández that "from a strategic and tactical point of view, the enemy's idea was well-conceived." We should take that assessment as dead serious. But it contradicts all the most common evaluations promoted for forty years by the U.S. rulers and their propagandists to rationalize Cuba's stunning victory. They point to the CIA's supposed blunders, or to Kennedy's claimed vacillations, or to a combination of both.

Fernández rejects this. "The mercenaries came well organized, well armed, and well supported," he says. "What they lacked was a just cause to defend. That is why they did not fight with the same passion, courage, conviction, valor, firmness, bravery, and spirit of victory as did the revolutionary forces."

Che Guevara made the same point just a few weeks after the victory at Playa Girón. It's in a talk he gave on May 8 to a gathering of electrical workers and militia members in Havana. I read it on the plane flying out here from New York. The Militant is planning to run the talk as a feature in the April 2 issue. Don't miss it; it's pure pleasure.

The U.S. government's "operation was well conceived from a military point of view," Che said. "They did their mathematical calculations as if they were confronting the German army and coming to take a beachhead at Normandy." They organized the invasion at the Bay of Pigs "with the efficiency they display in such matters.

"But they failed to measure the moral relationship of forces," Che added. "First, they mismeasured our ability to react, including not only our ability to react in face of aggression, our ability to react in the face of a danger, and to mobilize our forces and send them to the site of the battle--they mismeasured that. But they were also wrong in measuring the capacity for struggle of each one of the groups [of combatants]."

The U.S. rulers, Che said, figured they needed only 1,000 men to carry out a successful invasion and hold a beachhead in Cuba. "But they needed 1,000 men there who would fight to the death," he emphasized, and that they did not have. "Someone whose daddy had 30,000 acres of land, and who comes here solely to show his presence so the 30,000 acres of land will be returned to him--you can't ask him, simply because his acreage was taken away, to die at the hand of a peasant who had nothing and who has a ferocious desire to kill him....

"They have always been wrong about us," Che concluded. "They have always arrived late. And they have never done anything that did not serve instead to strengthen the trust of the people in their government, to make the revolution more militant: in short, to strengthen us more."

The U.S. rulers were wrong about the workers and farmers of Cuba. Officials in the CIA and White House expected the invasion force, after a few days, to spark some uprisings against the revolutionary government. They anticipated some divisions among the officers of Cuba's armed forces, too. By analogy, the imperialists saw the government in Cuba as some tropical variety of a Stalinist regime, with the same inherent brittleness. And they saw the cadres of the Revolutionary Armed Forces as some sort of Latin American officer corps, comparable to those they had been used to dealing with for decades.

Up until just five weeks before the invasion, the CIA's plan had been for the mercenary brigade to land near the city of Trinidad. Trinidad lies at the foot of the Escambray mountains, where counterrevolutionary bands had been most active. A CIA memo assured the Kennedy administration that a relatively large and determined invasion force in that area would, "it is hoped, demoralize the militia and induce defections ... impair the morale of the Castro regime, and induce widespread rebellion. If the initial actions proved to be unsuccessful in thus detonating a major revolt, the assault force would retreat to the contiguous mountain area and continue operations as a powerful guerrilla force."

But Kennedy scotched the Trinidad plan on March 11 and insisted that the CIA come up with an alternative. An invasion near a city with a substantial population was too risky politically. The hopes for a rapid uprising were offset by the possibility of an even more stunning defeat. What's more, 40,000 members of Cuba's revolutionary militia had recently completed a successful "cleanup" operation in the Escambray that had greatly diminished the numbers and latitude of the counterrevolutionary bands that might otherwise have been called on by the mercenaries for help.

That's when the invasion site was switched to the Zapata Swamp area near the Bay of Pigs. The plan then became to land on a sparsely populated stretch of beach, win the initial battles, start making some progress in gaining popular support, foment divisions, and declare a provisional government. If that proved unsuccessful, then the invasion force was expected to at least hold the beachhead and small airfield long enough to call for support from the Organization of American States, under cover of which the U.S. government and its closest Latin American allies could directly intervene.

Meanwhile, the urgency in the Kennedy administration to take action was being ratcheted up by CIA reports that Cuba's revolutionary government and armed people were growing stronger. As one agency memorandum put it, time was not on Washington's side. So with each passing day the White House pressed forward its plans, making constant alterations.

Kennedy was counting on the brigade to hold the beachhead long enough to breed hoped-for resistance in Cuba and buy the U.S. government some time. Washington itself was not yet prepared militarily for an invasion. In October 1962, when the Pentagon was ready, it had begun assembling a 90,000-strong force to do the job. The mobilization then was so extensive that journalists began asking about the convoys and troop concentrations across the South, which couldn't be kept entirely under wraps. But in April 1961 Washington had only some 2,000 combat-ready U.S. marines on ships off Cuba--far from enough to carry out an invasion.

The U.S. rulers displayed a class blindness to the revolutionary capacities of ordinary workers and farmers in Cuba (and still do). But small groups of young people in a number of U.S. cities and on college campuses didn't. From the moment we learned of the invasion, we confidently asserted that, CIA-planted press dispatches to the contrary, the U.S.-organized mercenaries would be defeated. And we were reinforced in that conviction by the experienced communist workers, members of the Socialist Workers Party we had begun working alongside and had come to know and trust.

This confidence in the victory of the Cuban toilers was not just a matter of youthful enthusiasm for a revolution we deeply identified with. It was based in fact. And even if we couldn't explain it at the time, we acted on the recognition that the Kennedy administration was operating on the basis of ideology, not fact.

Understanding this reality of class politics is something that comes only through struggle, and then studying, absorbing, and generalizing the lessons of many struggles that came before. As working people begin to recognize the degree to which we ourselves are victims of bourgeois ideology, we also take strides toward greater class consciousness.
 

One sentence in the foreword to Playa Girón, more than any other, captures politically what I hope each of us takes away from this meeting today. It's from a March 13, 1961, speech by Fidel Castro, given as Washington was accelerating its campaign of terror aimed at overturning the Cuban revolution. The talk marked the fourth anniversary of the armed assault organized by the Revolutionary Directorate on the Presidential Palace of the U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista in which student leader José Antonio Echeverría was killed.

There is one thing the Cuban people "can tell Mr. Kennedy," Castro said to the cheering crowd. "A victorious revolution will be seen in the United States before a victorious counterrevolution in Cuba."

We're convinced that sentence remains as accurate today as it was in 1961. It's not a prediction: it's not an encouraging clap on the back. It's the recognition of how capitalism works, of the line of march of working people, and of the communist caliber of the revolutionary movement in Cuba. For revolutionists in the United States, in Cuba, and around the world, it sharply poses Lenin's famous question: What is to be done?

Fidel's assertion makes quite a statement about the Cuban Revolution--even more so forty years later, if you think about it, than it did at the time. And it was quite a statement in 1961! Today we know that the revolution in the United States will take place after Fidel and the generation that organized and led the Cuban Revolution are no longer part of the leadership in Cuba. So when we say the statement remains true today, we're saying something about the continuity of revolutionary leadership not only in Cuba but its interconnection with the continuity and renewal of communist leadership in the United States and around the world.

In Richard Bissell's memoirs [Bissell was the CIA official in charge of the Bay of Pigs operation], he reports that during top-level White House discussions of the invasion plans in 1961, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, drawing on much experience, used to ask "whether something couldn't be done with 'silver bullets'"--in plainer words, wasn't it possible to buy off a substantial number of Cuban leaders? "His impression was that even in a well-run covert operation one should try to bribe one's enemies rather than fight them."

Bissell then comments, with no explanation, that "unfortunately, this would not have worked in Cuba."

He was correct, but why wouldn't it have worked? The reason has everything to do with Yankee imperialism's misestimation of the workers and peasants of Cuba. The U.S. rulers were functioning on the basis of false analogies at every level. They were acting based on the distortions viewed through the lens of their class. That fact helps us understand why the course of the Cuban Revolution and prospects for the coming American revolution have been hitched together so closely for more than four decades. It underlines the indispensable continuity of the revolutionary workers movement going back to the October 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia and, even further back, to the founding of modern communism and the work of an internationalist communist party in the time of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels 150 years ago.

Above all, if the "silver bullets" could have worked in Cuba, then we'd have to conclude that Fidel's March 1961 declaration to Mr. Kennedy was not a statement of fact but an article of faith, not a course of revolutionary action but an exhortation, just bravado. Just bidding up the price.
 

Given the capitalist class's unchallenged domination of politics, the mass media, and education, together with the nationalist perspectives of the union officialdom, it's very easy for workers and farmers to think and function entirely within the framework of the legislation, court rulings, and executive orders of the twin bourgeois parties, the Democrats and Republicans.

Right now, for example, you can't turn on the television or open a newspaper without being barraged with Bush's tax cut proposal and modified versions of it promoted by various Republican and Democratic members of Congress. Given all the red tape in which the income tax has become increasingly wound up over the past half century--the instruction booklet for the simplest federal income tax form, the very simplest, is 33 pages!--it's no wonder many workers and farmers are attracted to the idea of a "flat tax."

Working people know the tax brackets for the wealthy are officially set at higher percentages--but we also know the law is intentionally crafted to resemble a piece of Swiss cheese. High-priced accountants and lawyers happily offer their services to those with wealth and readily utilize all the hidey-holes and shelters purposely written into the fine print throughout thousands and thousands of pages of tax code. The result, just as millions of workers suspect, is that no one with capital pays taxes at anywhere close to the rates we read about in the big-business dailies or hear about on TV. Many pay nothing.

Farrell Dobbs taught us that one of the high crimes of the labor officialdom is their collusion with the employing class in tangling up workers in red tape instead of mobilizing union power to protect workers' interests. Wage rates, hours, and conditions should be straightforward and transparent, Farrell said. No contract worth a damn needs to be more than a page long, two at most. Then organize the ranks to enforce it.

It's a similar story with taxes. Whenever the capitalist politicians start talking about "income tax reform," workers know they always end up with the short end of the stick. So the bourgeois nostrum that everyone should pay at the same rate, whether your income is ten thousand dollars or ten billion--with no deductions, no exemptions--gets a hearing among working people. The simplification and transparency alone make it seem appealing, even if working people pay at the same rate as those better off.

The illusion, of course, is that there is some way--be it a "flat tax" or some other "tax reform"--to make the owners of capital pay without taking state power out of their hands through a revolution and establishing a workers and farmers government. Short of that, the capitalists will always find ways to shift the tax burden onto our shoulders.

Communist workers are for a heavily progressive or graduated income tax, as we have been ever since that demand first appeared in the Communist Manifesto more than 150 years ago. But under capitalism the concept of a graduated income tax has become so corrupted that nobody except a small number of class-conscious workers recalls that the bold, revolutionary demand raised by the modern workers movement was never meant to apply to wages or the modest earnings of working farmers, fishermen, or other toilers. To the contrary. The graduated or progressive tax, as raised in the Communist Manifesto, is a levy not on wages but on income from profits, dividends, interest, or rents, including the elevated salaries of middle-class professionals, supervisors, and managers. Workers and working farmers were to pay no taxes; the "graduation" was to begin at the lower end of those who live differently from the proletariat as a result of capital's exploitation of the labor of the great majority.

The truth is that between the time the federal income tax was first introduced in 1913 and the beginning of World War II, 95 percent of the U.S. population paid no income taxes. Working people were exempt. But all that changed nearly overnight with legislation introduced at the opening of the war by the Democratic administration of Franklin Roosevelt and adopted by the bipartisan Congress. By 1943 income tax withholding--to finance "our" war--was showing up for the first time on our wage stubs, and the rulers never looked back from there.

Working people under capitalism always appear to be confronted with the dilemma of choosing between two (or sometimes more) bourgeois candidates, two or more bourgeois solutions. Lesser-evilism is what the rulers, backed up by the labor fakers and middle-class misleaders of civil rights and women's organizations, present as the be-all and end-all of politics.

That's why it's important that communist workers right now find ways to present some very basic, immediate demands to defend the conditions and solidarity of the working class and other toilers in face of rising joblessness, deepening indebtedness, and the ever-present danger of ruinous bursts of inflation or financial panic. These are what worker-bolsheviks can offer our class as a proletarian alternative to being whipsawed between choices presented by the Democrats and Republicans as a matter of "take it or leave it."

Workers should demand a massive program of government-funded public works to ensure jobs for all at union-scale. In addition to providing productive work to the jobless, such a program is needed to build housing, schools, hospitals and clinics, daycare centers, public transportation, libraries, gyms, pools, parks, and other social infrastructure the capitalists are allowing to crumble rather than fund out of their profits.

Labor must demand a shorter workweek with no cut in pay, binding on all employers as federal law. This would spread the available work around and allow workers, not just the capitalists, to enjoy the benefits of any advances in the productivity of our labor.

The working class must fight to increase the minimum wage. Even with the increase in 1996, the buying power of the minimum wage today is still lower than it was in 1960--and a full $2.25 below its high point in 1968. Given the competition for jobs under capitalism, wage levels are set from the bottom up, not from the top down.

Moreover, this minimum wage must be universal, one that no worker is denied, whether in a factory or in a prison. Everyone must be guaranteed full health, disability, and pension benefits. That--not demanding a halt to "prison work programs that unfairly compete with free labor," as the AFL-CIO bureaucracy raises today--is the only way to fight the bosses' abuse of prison labor. That is the only way to promote working-class unity and solidarity, not sabotage it.

Labor must demand, once again as federal legislation, that all wages be covered by full and automatic cost-of-living protection. The capitalists' efforts to pull themselves out of a downturn in sales and profits can spark sudden and unexpected inflationary explosions that devastate the living standards and any small savings of working people. The same automatic adjustments must be guaranteed for all pension, health, workers comp, welfare, and unemployment benefits.

Labor must reach out for allies among working farmers, as well. We must join with farmers to demand a halt to all foreclosures. Instead of being driven more deeply into debt slavery, small farmers must have access to government-funded cheap credit. They must receive price supports from Washington large enough to cover their full production costs and guarantee a decent and secure living for themselves and their families.

The working class and labor movement in the United States must demand that Washington and other imperialist government and financial institutions immediately cancel the foreign debt that has been imposed on the semicolonial countries. Total Third World debt today is over $2 trillion, much higher than at the worst point of the debt crisis of the 1980s.

As international finance capital has squeezed more and more wealth from the toilers of Asia, Africa, and Latin America to bolster their sagging profit rates, one hundred countries--a quarter of the world's population--have experienced a decline in per capita income over the past fifteen years; in sub-Saharan Africa per capita consumption is 20 percent lower than it was in 1980! More than 45 percent of the population of the earth survives on less than $2 a day, and 20 percent on less than $1 a day.

Workers and farmers in the United States should demand that Washington lift all tariffs and other obstacles to trade and travel erected by the U.S. rulers. This includes the elimination of all "anti-dumping," "fair labor," "environmental protection," and other trade weapons wielded with often devastating consequences by the U.S. government under the banner of "free trade." This must be labor's demand, not support for the protectionist policies of finance capital and ever more onerous trade restrictions aimed at semicolonial countries and imperialist rivals, as proposed today by U.S. union officials and the middle-class leaderships of various environ-–mentalist and so-called anti-sweatshop organizations.

The elimination of all tariff and nontariff barriers erected by the U.S. government has nothing in common with the rulers' demagogy about guaranteeing a "level playing field for all"--exploiters and exploited alike. Instead, by demanding cancellation of the Third World debt and opposing all measures used by the propertied classes to magnify the unequal terms of trade intrinsic to the world capitalist market, working people in the United States can strengthen our unity with the toilers of these countries in the international battle against our common enemy, the imperialist ruling families who exploit us all to maintain their wealth and power. We can deepen the effort to transform our unions into revolutionary organizations of the working class that will inscribe these internationalist demands on our battle flag.
 

It's appropriate that this public celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the victory at Playa Girón and the victory of Cuba's literacy campaign coincided here in Seattle with a two-day working meeting of the national leadership of the Young Socialists. The members of that revolutionary youth organization look to the program and traditions of the communist party in this country, the Socialist Workers Party, as their guide. And the worker-bolsheviks in our party keep reaching out to these new generations with communist politics and with common activity as equals--just as V.R. Dunne and others reached out to those of us who first came to revolutionary conclusions at the opening of the 1960s.

And it's also important that joining us here in organizing this celebration are members of our organized supporters movement. As volunteers for the Pathfinder Reprint Project, they shouldered decisive responsibilities over the past month in producing Playa Girón/Bay of Pigs: Washington's First Military Defeat in the Americas--translating material from Spanish to English and from English to Spanish; scanning items to be run in the book; preparing the graphics; and formatting and proofreading the pages.

From locations in cities and towns across North America and around the world, some 200 supporters are now taking on the digital preparation of new Pathfinder titles, in addition to the work they've been doing for more than two years to help keep the communist movement's entire arsenal of some 350 titles in print. And they are joining SWP and YS members in the effort to get these titles onto the shelves of bookstores, other retail outlets, and public libraries, as well.

These revolutionary books and pamphlets--the lessons earned with struggle and blood by working people the world over during the past century and a half--give the communist movement tremendous political leverage. With the sea change in working-class politics, and the historic weakening of Stalinism worldwide, we can take communist ideas to people in struggle virtually anywhere in the world and gain a hearing.

This is what's changing. A vanguard layer of workers and farmers in this country is becoming more confident from their common fighting experience and thus more open to considering radical ideas, including the program and strategy of the modern communist movement. Whether they know it yet or not, their own experience in life and struggle is bringing them closer to that of the workers and peasants of revolutionary Cuba.

As growing numbers reject in practice what the bosses have so long sought to convince us of--that it's futile to struggle, we'll only be weakened and crushed--more and more members of a workforce in ongoing transformation will take a lead from the example set by Cuban workers and peasants forty years ago. As the back cover of the new book puts it, they taught us that with "political consciousness, class solidarity, unflinching courage, and a revolutionary leadership that displays an impeccable sense of timing, it is possible to stand up to enormous might and seemingly insurmountable odds--and win."

Those who have fought for, defended, and advanced the Cuban Revolution for more than four decades, are ordinary working men and women. Likewise there was nothing special about the young people in this country who in April 1961 stood up to bourgeois public opinion and said with courage and confidence: "The Cuban people will win!"

What is special is never the human material, but the times we live in and our degree of preparation. If we've worked together beforehand to build a disciplined, centralized workers party--with a program and strategy that advances the historic line of march of our class worldwide--then we'll be ready for new opportunities in the class struggle when they explode in totally unanticipated ways. We'll be prepared to build a mass proletarian party that can take on the capitalist rulers in revolutionary struggle and defeat them.

That is the most important lesson that every one of us can draw. That is the reason to become part of the communist movement, to join the Young Socialists and Socialist Workers Party.
 

Cuba and the Coming American Revolution will roll off the presses in a few days. An international campaign to get this latest Pathfinder Press title into the hands of workers, farmers, and youth will be launched at the May 20 public meeting in New York City, "In Defense of Leninism: Expanding Opportunities for Communists Today."

The author of the new book is Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, who is a featured speaker at the May 20 meeting. The preface is by Mary-Alice Waters, a member of the SWP National Committee, who will also be speaking at the New York event.

The first of two items by Barnes in the book, entitled "1961: Year of Education," was initially published in the March 19 issue of the Militant and served as the foreword to Pathfinder's recent title, Playa Girón/Bay of Pigs: Washington's First Military Defeat in the Americas by Fidel Castro and José Ramón Fernández.

It is largely based on the activity of members of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee at Carleton College in Minnesota in the months leading up to, during, and after the Cuban people's lightning victory over a U.S.-organized invasion at Playa Girón near the Bay of Pigs in April 1961.

As a result of those events four decades ago, many students at Carleton were won to the communist movement in the United States; Barnes and Waters are among the dozen who remain active in that effort to this day, or did so for the rest of their lives.

The new book itself will be a powerful instrument in meeting the expanding opportunities today to recruit to the Young Socialists and Socialist Workers Party. It is part of expanding the reach of communist ideas--essential to forging the kind of party that can lead the coming American revolution--as widely as possible in working-class communities, in factories and at plant-gates, on picket lines, in rural areas, on campuses, at social protests, and elsewhere.

Above we are printing excerpts from the concluding item in the book. It is based on talks presented by Barnes March 18 in Seattle and March 11 in New York City to some 450 participants in meetings celebrating the 40th anniversary of Cuba's successful campaign to wipe out illiteracy and the victory at Playa Girón.

The title of that talk, taken from a statement by Fidel Castro just a few weeks prior to the Bay of Pigs invasion, is: "There Will Be a Victorious Revolution in the United States before a Victorious Counterrevolution in Cuba." The excerpts above, selected from several different portions of the talk, bear on both aspects of that revolutionary judgment, which are of pressing interest to working people not only in the United States and Cuba but the world over. We're convinced that readers' interest will be whetted in the remaining two-thirds of Barnes's talk, as well as the other material in Cuba and the Coming American Revolution.

The 128-page book contains an index, plus a 16-page photo insert. For the duration of the spring and summer campaign to sell it, Cuba and the Coming American Revolution can be bought for $10.

The excerpts above are copyright © Pathfinder Press 2001 and are reprinted by permission. --STEVE CLARK
 
 
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