The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.63/No.10           March 15, 1999 
 
 
Walfrido Moreno: A Tireless Partisan Of Cuban Revolution For Half A Century  

BY ERNIE MAILHOT AND RACHELE FRUIT
MIAMI - More than 125 people came together at the Airport Hilton hotel here February 21 to celebrate the life and political contributions of Walfrido Moreno, president of the Alliance of Workers of the Cuban Community (ATC) for two decades. Moreno died in Havana, Cuba, January 31. He was 83 years old.

"Moreno will always be present. Down with the blockade!" read a banner behind the speakers' platform, referring to Washington's economic war on Cuba.

Andrés Gómez, head of the Antonio Maceo Brigade, a Miami- based organization of Cubans who support the Cuban revolution, chaired the meeting. Daisy Moreno, Walfrido's wife and an activist in the Alliance of Workers in the Cuban Community; Oscar Ochotorena, who represented the leadership of the ATC; and Luis Miranda, president of Casa de las Américas in New York City, joined Gómez on the stage. The gathering was conducted in Spanish with simultaneous translation into English and Creole.

The majority of participants were Cubans. Others who collaborated with Moreno in the last 30 years in organizing opposition to Washington's cold war against the Cuban people came not only from Miami but from as far as Atlanta, Houston, and New York.

In a moving talk, Miranda described Moreno's early years. At a reception after the meeting he gave Militant reporters additional information. Moreno came from a working-class family that immigrated to the United States in the 1940s. He was a barber at a shop near New York's Lincoln Center. That's where Miranda met Moreno in 1949.

Leading anti-Batista movement
The shop became known as a place where supporters of the struggle to overthrow the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba assembled and organized to collect aid for the revolutionary movement. When they first met, Miranda said, Moreno was in the New York club of the Cuban People's Party - the Orthodox Party, or Ortodoxos, as it became known - which campaigned on a platform of opposition to Yankee domination and rampant government graft.

In 1952 Fidel Castro, a founding member of the Ortodoxos, was running as a candidate on the party's ticket for Cuba's house of representatives when Batista and his generals seized power on March 10 and scuttled the scheduled elections. Within weeks of the coup, Castro began putting together an armed movement to overthrow the dictatorship, an underground organization that grew in little more than a year to 1,200 men and women.

After the coup, "Down with Batista" became the main slogan painted on the walls of Moreno's barbershop, Miranda said. "Moreno later recruited me to the July 26 Movement, which he founded in New York City along with Fidel."

The Movement took its name after the July 26, 1953, simultaneous armed assaults on the army garrisons in the eastern Cuban cities of Bayamo and Santiago de Cuba by 160 combatants, under Castro's command. The rebels hoped to create the conditions for an armed popular uprising in Santiago, Cuba's second largest city and a historic center of anti-imperialist struggle. The attacks were crushed. Nearly half the revolutionaries were captured, brutally tortured, and murdered. Twenty-eight of those who escaped the slaughter, including Castro, were tried and sentenced to up to 15 years in prison. Castro's defense speech before the court, later reconstructed by him in jail and smuggled out, was published under the title History Will Absolve Me. It initially circulated 100,000 copies as part of a popular amnesty campaign in Cuba.

In May 1955, in response to this campaign, Castro and other veterans of the attacks on the Santiago and Bayamo garrisons were released from prison. Together with other groups moving in a revolutionary direction, they founded the July 26 Movement.

That year, Miranda said, Moreno was part of Castro's security team when the Cuban revolutionary leader came to New York. Working with Cuban patriots like Moreno, Castro helped found July 26 Movement groups in a number of cities, including New York, Miami, and Bridgeport, Connecticut.

Later in 1955, Moreno went to Mexico where he participated in the preparations for the Granma expedition. The yacht Granma transported 82 revolutionaries to Cuba the following year. While more than half were killed or captured and jailed upon the landing, 40 escaped Batista's troops. Most of them subsequently regrouped into the Rebel Army, which, along with the July 26 Movement, led the victorious struggle that overthrew Batista's tyranny three years later.

Moreno was among 23 Cubans who did not make it aboard Granma, because the yacht was too overcrowded, Miranda said. Moreno then returned to New York where he began raising funds for medicines and other supplies for the Rebel Army.

After the U.S. government sent arms to Batista to counter the insurgency, Moreno organized a picket line in front of the United Nations in 1958 and went on hunger strike to protest Washington's action, Miranda said.

At one point, U.S. authorities captured a group of July 26 Movement supporters, including Moreno, who were on the Orion, a ship transporting aid to the Rebel Army. Washington confiscated arms on board and impounded the vessel, even though it was intercepted in international waters, 17 miles off the Texas coast, according to Miranda. "We campaigned for the release of the ship and those arrested," the president of Casa de las Américas stated. "But we didn't succeed." Moreno did time in jail for that courageous act.

After the triumph of the Cuban revolution in 1959, Moreno moved back to the island, where he lived for a period of time and worked in the merchant marine. He returned to the United States in the late 1960s, resuming his lifelong activities in the belly of the beast to defend the revolution and to broaden opposition to U.S. government policies towards Cuba.

Founding, leading the ATC
In his remarks, Andrés Gómez focused on this part of Moreno's life.

For a long time after the revolution the Cuban community in the United States was dominated by the counterrevolution, Gómez said, by capitalists and landlords who fled Cuba after workers and peasants took power and begun transforming society and themselves. "The Cuban community was dominated completely by those who opposed our nation's struggle for independence, against U.S. domination." There were few exceptions among Cubans in the U.S. in the decade or two after 1959. One of the most important was Casa de Las Américas in New York, which has fought Washington's criminal policies towards Cuba for decades. In Miami, Gómez said, the Antonio Maceo Brigade was the main organization of Cubans defending the socialist revolution.

"But something broader was needed," he added, "an organization that could bring together all those who wanted to act to bring about normalization of relations between the two countries and an end to the U.S. blockade."

That's what the ATC accomplished with its founding in 1978. Moreno was one of its main founders and served as its president through the end of his life. The ATC's work has included helping Cuban-Americans travel to Cuba to visit their families, collecting material aid, and organizing and participating in protests against the U.S. embargo.

Under Moreno's leadership, the ATC succeeded in organizing a larger number of Cuban-Americans to get actively involved in opposing Washington's attempts to strangle the revolution. Many who joined the ATC over the years were primarily interested in questions such as travel to see their families on the island. The ATC not only helped facilitate travel to Cuba for Cuban-Americans but fought to change the U.S. laws that denied or greatly restricted this democratic right to U.S. residents and citizens. The ATC helped people understand that they should fight not only for their family but for all families in Cuba. "This was an important opening," stated Gómez, "because the major contradiction was not between Cuban-Americans and the revolution. It was between them and the U.S. authorities. It was between them and the counterrevolutionaries in Miami."

After the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries cut off trade with Cuba at the opening of the 1990s, triggering a severe economic crisis that Cubans refer to as the "Special Period," many in Miami and throughout the United States predicted the revolution's quick downfall. "It was in those worst years of the special period, 1992-93, when the ATC's membership jumped to nearly 2,000 members," Gómez said.

"It's also one thing to have members on paper and another to organize people to act," Gómez added. "The ATC often mobilized 300-400 Cubans in public demonstrations demanding an end to the blockade, despite threats and intimidation by the right wing." The ATC's headquarters were firebombed more than once. Gómez also pointed to growing divisions among right-wing Cubans in Miami over the last decade and more openness in winning new layers to pressing for normalization of relations with Cuba.

The ATC under Moreno made a fundamental contribution to facilitating travel to Cuba. Despite Washington's travel ban, including regulations prohibiting Cubans to visit their relatives on the island more than once per year, 80,000 Cuban- Americans went to Cuba in each of the last two years, Gómez said. "The ATC's work contributed to making this possible."

One of the reasons for the success of the ATC was the example Moreno set in leading the group, Gómez noted. Unlike others who tried to personally profit through organizing travel to Cuba, Moreno always took the moral high ground, lived by the principles he preached, and his words matched his deeds.

Many messages honor Moreno's life
Many messages were sent to the meeting. "Walfrido lived the life of a worker, of the men and women of little income, of fast-food and factories, of looking into store windows and convincing the children that their present would come next month; the life which adjusted your personal budget to aid your family on the island," said a message from Roberto Robaina, Cuba's Minister of Foreign Relations. "But he also lived the life of human solidarity, of the friendly hand, of the door to his home constantly open. For this Walfrido lived with honor and he died `with his face to the sun.' "

Sergio Corrieri, president of the Cuban Institute for Friendship with the People (ICAP), and Fernando Remírez, ambassador to Cuba's Interests Section in Washington, D.C., also sent greetings.

Messages of solidarity were also read from Raúl Alzaga of the Antonio Maceo Brigade in Puerto Rico; José Este'vez, president of Amerindia in Los Angeles; Lucius Walker of Pastors for Peace; Cuba Vive from Tampa; the coordinators of the National Network on Cuba, and Workers World Party.

A number of Cuban Americans addressed the meeting, including Cachita Moré from Rescate Cultural Afro-Cubano.

Xiomara Almaguer, a leader of the Cuban-American Defense League, spoke of the ultraright in Miami who try to cow those who disagree with them. She pointed to how Moreno refused to be silenced, remembering his intransigence at protest actions and his tireless efforts to organize other defenders of the Cuban revolution.

One of best working class has produced
Jack Barnes and Mary-Alice Waters sent a message on behalf of the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party. It was read at the meeting by Argiris Malapanis, who attended the event on behalf of the party's Political Committee.

"The importance of the example Moreno set - from the time he helped found the July 26 Movement in New York City in the 1950s, to his intransigent efforts as president of the ATC, working to his very last days to draw thousands of others into active opposition to Washington's economic war on Cuba - extends well beyond Florida and the United States," the message said.

"Above all, Moreno was one of the best examples of the kind of courageous men and women the working class, both here and in Cuba, has produced. We are confident that what he did so well will be continued by his fellow fighters and the organization he helped lead for decades."

Oscar Ochotorena from the leadership of the ATC read a poem dedicated to Moreno. "Like Martí, he gave himself to our land and never backed off," he said, referring to Cuba's national hero José Martí.

Other speakers at the meeting included Alberto Jones, an Afro-Cuban activist in northern Florida, Vivian Manerud of ABC Charters, Orlando Collado of the Miami Coalition to End the U.S. Embargo of Cuba, Jack Lieberman, a representative of the Communist Party USA, and Barbara Collins of Miami's Jewish Cultural Center.

Ernie Mailhot, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party in Miami who worked with Moreno for many years also addressed the gathering. He drew attention to Moreno's support for and identification with struggles of working people and youth inside the United States. He recalled Moreno's excitement after inviting striking coal miners from Indiana to speak before the ATC in 1994, for example.

"Moreno died before seeing the end of the blockade but with his attitude and work he planted seeds that showed how we can fight," stated Miranda in his closing remarks. "The big corporations and other interests are for the blockade but the U.S. people and many in Miami are against it. I believe the same exiles here in Florida will one day be an important factor in defeating the U.S. economic war on Cuba."

 
 
 
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