The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.61/No.27           August 11, 1997 
 
 
Protest Bombings Against Cuba  
 Working people in the United States and around the world should join our brothers and sisters in Cuba in denouncing the latest terrorist bombings of tourist hotels in Havana. The Cuban government says it has evidence that the explosives used and individuals involved came from the United States. Whether the U.S. government has a direct hand in the blasts or not, these attacks are the product of Washington's policy of economic war aimed at starving the Cuban people into submission.

We urge all our readers to join forums and other protest and educational actions to tell the truth about Cuba and demand the repeal of the Helms-Burton law and all other U.S. sanctions against the Cuban people.

Forty-four years ago, young rebels led by Fidel Castro organized the historic assault on the Moncada barracks and the nearby Bayamo garrison. Even though they didn't succeed in taking the garrisons, July 26, 1953, marked the insurrectionary start of the popular movement that a few years later overthrew the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista and opened the socialist revolution in the Americas. It's an anniversary worthy of celebration by working people and young fighters the world over.

Washington responded with a wave of sanctions, a failed invasion, and countless terrorist attacks, as the Cuban people carried through a thorough land reform, eliminated illiteracy, nationalized industry and banking, and began building a new society free of class exploitation, racism, and the subjugation of women as a second sex.

The U.S. empire has never forgiven the Cuban people for steadfastly defending their national independence and the socialism they chose and for refusing to bend their knees ever since. The imperialists to the north have never forgiven the Cuban people for their selfless internationalism as they joined national liberation struggles - from Angola to Vietnam and Palestine.

As the Second Declaration of Havana, Cuba's 1962 manifesto of revolutionary struggle, aptly put it, behind the U.S. rulers' hatred lies their "fear that the plundered people of the continent will seize the arms from their oppressors and, like Cuba, declare themselves free people of the Americas."

It's this revolutionary example that Washington tries to prevent young people from getting a glimpse of by denying travel licenses to those who made plans to go to Cuba for an international youth conference that's just about to open.

Working people and youth should demand granting the licenses for the youth festival, no harassment of young people returning from Cuba, ending the undemocratic travel ban altogether, lifting the U.S. economic and trade embargo, and halting the fostering of terrorist attacks against the Cuban people.  
 
 
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