MINNEAPOLIS - "The Young Socialists demand the immediate arrest, prosecution, conviction, and jailing of the two Riverside, California, cops who brutally beat immigrant workers from Mexico on April 1," said a statement released April 3 by the revolutionary youth group. The statement pointed to demonstrations against the beating as "an example for all those who fight for justice. We call on all youth and workers around the world to join these actions! Open the borders! Close the INS! Protest police brutality! Defend immigrant rights!"
"We've been calling young people who are active around Cuba, immigrant rights, and Black rights to build a meeting tonight to organize a protest," Megan Arney explained. She was in the Young Socialists organizing center at the Pathfinder bookstore here April 3, where YS members are making the final preparations for the group's national convention.
Arney, a convention coordinator and member of the United Steelworkers of America, said that in addition to the planning meeting, called by La Raza, the Young Socialists, and local Cuba activists, the YS is calling a news conference the first day of their convention, April 6, to speak out against the beatings. Leaders of the socialist youth group and the Socialist Workers Party candidates for U.S. president and vice president, James Harris and Laura Garza, will be among the speakers. The press conference will precede a "meet the socialist candidates" event already scheduled as part of the weekend's activities.
YS members in Los Angeles were unavailable for comment because they were out demonstrating in Riverside against the cops' immigrant bashing.
Participating in protests like this is what building the YS is all about.
In the process, chapters have come into contact with more young militants, and "recruitment has begun to happen," said New York City YS leader Joshua Carroll, a graduate student at the City University of New York.
Carroll has come to the Twin Cities to be part of the convention organizing team.
Convention outreach activities have won three new members to the YS chapter here in the last four weeks, and two to Montreal's Young Socialists.
Half of the eight-person contingent organized by the YS in Pittsburgh to drive 20 hours to Minneapolis are not yet members of the revolutionary youth organization, Carroll noted.
Among high school students planning to attend are two from Denver, who read about the convention in the Militant, and two from Sioux City, Iowa, where there are no YS chapters. These four young fighters, like others from Galesburg, Illinois, and Houston, Texas, are coming to learn more about the YS.
Arney said the convention would be welcoming Young Socialists and their guests from Australia, Canada, France, and the United Kingdom.
Defense of the Cuban revolution will be squarely at the center of the convention, YS leaders here state. "Cuba is our revolution," Arney said, "and the YS was born in its defense."
"We want to organize ourselves to reach out and get as many young people as we can to go to Cuba and see a living revolution for themselves," Carroll explained, referring to the July 22-August 5 U.S.-Cuba Youth Exchange, sponsored by the National Network on Cuba.
More immediately, YS members who are unionists are making a final push to bring co-workers to the upcoming congress of the Central Organization of Cuban Workers at the end of April, in Havana.
Young Socialists will also discuss how, with other activists, to protest the refusal of the U.S. State Department to grant visas to Cuban youth leaders Maika Guerrero and Iroel Sánchez.
The young revolutionaries were scheduled to be in Minneapolis during the convention as part of their U.S. campus tour, sponsored by the Boston-based Faculty-Student Cuban Youth Lectures Committee.