"Neoliberalism is nothing but the latest phase of the assault by capitalism," Castro continued. He was addressing more than 6,000 youth at the conclusion of the 12th Congress of Latin American and Caribbean Students here April 5. "Neoliberalism can be replaced only by socialism," the Cuban leader said, bringing the bulk of the students present at the Karl Marx Theater to their feet for a several-minute standing ovation.

The response to this remark, the most enthusiastic during Castro's three-hour speech, showed an inclination by a majority in the audience towards anticapitalist struggle. A good percentage of the delegates came to the congress fresh from fights to defend public education, resist government austerity, or oppose imperialist intervention. What they described during the work sessions and informal discussions showed a new mood of working-class resistance spreading, unevenly, throughout the Americas.

Confronting "the process of globalization" and "the application of neoliberal policies" were at the center of the delegates' deliberations, said the final declaration adopted by the student congress. The terms neoliberalism and globalization were often used at the gathering, and are commonly used in Latin America, to describe the imperial arrogance and brutal assaults on human dignity by Washington and other imperialist powers around the world.

They are also used by social democratic and other bourgeois forces to obfuscate reality and reinforce any tendencies among young people to see the basic problem as specific government policies that need to be reformed, rather than the entire market system and the capitalist government itself, which must be overthrown.  
 

Broad participation

Just over 6,000 delegates from 38 countries attended the April 1-5 congress. They included youth from 29 nations in Latin America and the Caribbean--virtually all the countries in the region. Nearly 3,300 traveled to the gathering from outside Cuba. About 1,700 were delegates from Cuba. Another 700 came from the Latin American School of Medical Sciences in Havana, which offers courses to students from around the continent free of charge; and 300 were students from semicolonial countries who have other scholarships in Cuba.

For the first time in the history of these congresses, large contingents from North America took part. More than 250 came from Canada, including 90 from Quebec, and more than 80 from the United States. Smaller delegations came from western Europe.

It was the largest congress ever sponsored by the Continental Latin America and Caribbean Students Organization (OCLAE). Student conferences in Latin America began in Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1908, said OCLAE president Yosvani Díaz Romero in his remarks at the opening of the gathering.

The second continental student conference did not materialize until 1957, Díaz said, describing briefly the events in the class struggle that intervened. The third took place in Havana two years later, and was deeply marked by the victory earlier that year of the workers and peasants of Cuba who overthrew the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista and established a government that defended their interests.

Inspired by the example of the Cuban revolution, 900 young people converged in Havana in the summer of 1960 for the First Latin American Youth Congress. This event took place at a decisive turning point for the revolution. Between June and October of that year, in response to Washington's mounting hostility, Cuban workers and peasants expropriated all imperialist banks and industries, as well as the largest holdings of Cuba's capitalist class, opening the first socialist revolution in the Americas.

Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the Argentine-born leader of the Cuban revolution, addressed the first plenary session of the 1960 youth gathering. OCLAE was founded in Havana three years later, at the fourth continental student congress, building on this continuity and attempting to give the student movement in the Americas an anti-imperialist and anticapitalist direction.

Today, the combined membership of OCLAE's affiliates exceeds 100 million students, making it one of the largest youth organizations in the world.

"Unity of the students with the people of Latin America will be the central theme of this congress," Díaz said. "The framework of our deliberations will be the statement of [Cuban national hero José] Martí that 'Our country is the Americas'."  
 

Struggles spread in Latin America

Following the opening plenary session on the evening of April 1, delegates worked in six commissions for three days. They discussed and adopted resolutions, among others, extending their solidarity to revolutionary Cuba and demanding an end to Washington's economic war, defending public education and opposing race and sex discrimination in school admissions, condemning destruction of the environment, and supporting struggles to advance equality for women.

Throughout the conference sessions, a number of delegates graphically described struggles they've been involved in.

"For the last two weeks, Costa Rica has been shaken by the largest antigovernment mobilizations in three decades," said Kaytor Soto, from the National Federation of University Students of Costa Rica (FEUNA). The revolt erupted in response to a bill the government introduced in Costa Rica's parliament March 20 seeking authorization to sell off the power and telecommunications companies that have been state owned for more than half a century.

"FEUNA organized a hunger strike and occupation of the universities," Soto said. "Labor unions went on strike across the country. Peasants took over highways and organized other protests in the rural areas. Demonstrations have swept the country demanding the regime withdraw the privatization bill from parliament." In one such action, 100,000 people shut down the streets of the country's capital, San José, March 23.

Soto and other delegates from Costa Rica said youth and working people in that country expect dramatic rises in electricity and telephone rates if the bill goes through, and, as a result, a rapid deterioration in the standard of living. "The police and the army initially used violent repression," Soto said. "Clubs, tear gas, and bullets in some cases. We know of at least three peasants who have been killed. But people are determined to fight. The 'labor peace' the ruling oligarchy had imposed for decades is broken."

Drawing conclusions from an even more deep-going popular rebellion in Ecuador only two months earlier was the subject of a number of presentations by delegates and of informal discussion.

"The only way to solve the problems we are talking about here is to unite with the people of our countries, those who work for a living, and take popular power," said Maria, a university student from Ecuador who asked that only her first name be used. She pointed to the establishment of a popular assembly for a few hours on January 21 in Guayaquil, the capital of Guayas province, as an example of what could be done. "With the proper leadership we could have swept not only Mahuad from the government but the entire ruling class."

"We can't put our trust in the military of the rulers," said Mario Zuniga, another delegate from Ecuador, on April 4. He was introducing a resolution, which was adopted by the congress, extending solidarity with ongoing efforts by students and others in Ecuador to form popular assemblies in various parts of the country and stop the government from carrying through its dollarization plan.

Leaders of the 10-month-long student strike and occupation of the Autonomous National University of Mexico (UNAM)--the largest university in Latin America--were received with loud applause every time they spoke at the sessions. The strike began April 20, 1999, after two months of protests against the university administration's unilateral announcement of tuition and other fee increases. It ended in February of this year, after police forcibly evicted strikers from the Mexico City campus following divisions that evolved in the student leadership.

The General Council of the Strike at UNAM, the most militant wing of the student leadership, is continuing to push for the six main demands the students pressed for during their struggle and campaign for the freedom of several students arrested by the police during the cop raids in February.

"We are struggling against the owners of big capital," Virginia Sánchez, a student at UNAM, said in one of the workshops. "We learned important lessons during the strike. We felt the brutality of the state and we are clearer on the class character of the police and paramilitary forces, the high clergy, and the dominant political parties."

Thousands of students became disillusioned with the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and other "progressive" bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forces they looked to for leadership before. None of these parties backed the students' struggle.

The OCLAE congress endorsed the call by the General Council of the Strike for participation in an international student conference "In Defense of Public and Free Education" at UNAM in Mexico City, April 20-24, which Sánchez and Alberto Torres, one of the central leaders of the strike, presented.

The guerrilla struggle in Colombia, and organizing opposition to growing U.S. government intervention and military aid to the regime in Bogotá, were also addressed by a number of students.

Delegates from Bolivia and Peru spoke about growing instability in their countries and uneasiness of the rulers in each country--as well as Washington--because of popular unrest. Days after the OCLAE conference concluded, Peru's president Alberto Fujimori failed to win an absolute majority in his third bid for reelection and conceded a runoff to his main opponent.

Mass indignation and protests arose when it appeared Fujimori might try to steal the election in the first round.

In Bolivia, president Hugo Banzer declared a nationwide state of siege April 8, curtailing constitutional guarantees, after widespread protests by working people demanding a living wage and opposing cutbacks in social programs.

Many delegates were keen to learn more about the new militancy among wide layers of workers and farmers in North America. After members of the Young Socialists from the United States and Canada, as well as other delegates, spoke at commissions and other meetings about battles such as the marches to bring down the confederate flag from South Carolina's state Capitol, and its interconnection with dockworkers strikes and protests by small farmers for land, many students from Cuba and other countries sought more informal discussion.  
 

Recognition of Puerto Rican struggle

The struggle to end U.S. colonial rule of Puerto Rico and prevent the U.S. Navy from resuming bombing practice in Vieques had a resonance unparalleled at any previous international gathering in decades. More than 100 students came from Puerto Rico, the bulk of them organized by the University Federation for the Independence of Puerto Rico (FUPI). Ramón Cuadra, representing FUPI, was one of the three main speakers at the opening of the congress. Every commission adopted resolutions calling for solidarity actions with the Vieques campaign and the pro-independence struggle.

Fidel Castro expressed the sentiments of the big majority of the delegates when he said in his concluding speech that the people of Puerto Rico may be close to scoring an important victory against the most powerful empire in the history of humanity. "Puerto Rico is a small nation at the doorstep of U.S. imperialism, under its colonial boot. The people of Puerto Rico don't have nuclear weapons. But they may be on the verge of forcing the hated U.S. Navy to stop bombing Vieques. That's not a small feat!" Castro said, bringing the audience to its feet. The U.S. government is not as powerful as it seems, the Cuban leader said, it is in fact weaker than ever.

The final declaration adopted by the congress pointed to the underlying debt bondage that squeezes all countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. "The foreign debt in Latin America now exceeds $706 billion, and is ever increasing despite the fact that our countries have paid $739 billion to service it in the last 14 years," the resolution said.

During the 1990s, a decade that bourgeois politicians and pundits touted as an economic success for the continent, the gap between rich and poor widened in Latin America and poverty rates grew or persisted. According to the Inter-American Development Bank, 150 million people in Latin America today live on $2 a day or less. All this worries the U.S. rulers, who know that more social instability is in the offing.  
 

Attempts to advance anti-imperialism

Given these realities, the efforts by the leadership of the Federation of University Students (FEU) and Union of Young Communists (UJC) of Cuba--the two main host organizations--to put forward a revolutionary, anti-imperialist perspective found many receptive ears.

Editora Abril, the publishing house of the UJC, made a special effort to promote and make widely available to delegates the Spanish-language edition of Che Guevara Talks to Young People. The book was sold at the special price of $6 at Editora Abril booths and UJC literature tables during all conference sessions and on the premises of the three schools where delegates were housed.

This book was published by Pathfinder Press in collaboration with Editora Abril and contains speeches by Che Guevara. Its opening chapter is Che's talk to the 1960 First Latin American Youth Congress.

On April 2, Armando Hart Dávalos, who wrote the preface to this title and is one of the founders of the July 26 Movement and a leader of the Cuban revolution, spoke about Che Guevara Talks to Young People. About 1,200 delegates attended that session, held after lunch before the resumption of the commission on "Neoliberalism and the Role of Students." The event had been advertised in an Editora Abril brochure featuring the book. Hundreds of copies were sold to delegates.

In his speech at the end of the congress, Fidel Castro pointed to the internationalism of the Cuban revolution as exemplified by Che's leadership of the guerrilla campaigns in the Congo and Bolivia in the mid 1960s, with the full backing of the revolutionary government in Havana, to aid struggles for national liberation.

He contrasted the proletarian internationalism of the Cuban revolution to the backing by Washington "of the most repressive, brutal, dictatorial regimes"--from Batista in Cuba to Somoza in Nicaragua, Duvalier in Haiti, and Pinochet in Chile.

It was notable that most times when Pinochet's name was mentioned by someone at the congress sessions, a chant went up by many delegates demanding that the former dictator be put on trial in Chile for the crimes he was responsible for during his rule. This was a very different and progressive demand in contrast to the earlier effort to support London's imperial campaign to extradite Pinochet to Spain.

Castro found a largely receptive audience as he explained how a people, the workers and peasants of Cuba, who were largely illiterate before 1959 could lead a successful revolution against the "cultured high bourgeoisie." He walked through some of the turning points of the revolution, from the agrarian reforms to the nationalizations of industry and the land, to the quick victory by the militias and the Revolutionary Armed Forces against the U.S.-organized mercenary invasion at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, to the October "missile" crisis the next year.

Castro also elicited loud laughter and applause when he asked, "How was it possible for Cuba to increase the value of our currency from 150 to the dollar to 20 to the dollar in the last four-and-a-half years? While others go from devaluation to devaluation and even speak of dollarization, which means direct enslavement to the U.S. Federal Reserve?" The reason is that Cuba has no ties to the IMF, the Cuban leader said. "Instead of the IMF and the World Bank we turn to the wonderful collective called the Cuban people. That's how we've been able to withstand the tremendous pressures of the Special Period."

This is a term widely used in Cuba to describe the period, triggered at the opening of the 1990s by the cutoff of trade in preferential prices with the former Soviet bloc countries, during which Cuba has had to face more directly the ravages of the world capitalist market and has experienced a drop in industrial and agricultural production.  
 

Diverging class perspectives

The attraction to a clearly anticapitalist course was not unanimous by far, however. Where students had gone through protracted struggles, differentiation along diverging class lines was clear.

This was evident among those who led the UNAM strike, for example. Quite a few students did not share the revolutionary conclusions that Alberto Torres and Virginia Sánchez were inclined towards. While this was not palpable during the commissions, it became clearer at a roundtable discussion on the UNAM strike. Students from Mexico organized the activity one evening at the Polytechnic School José Antonio Echevarría where they were housed, along with delegates from North America and others.

A number of UNAM students who spoke at that session were clearly influenced by the policies of the bourgeois PRD and put forward social democratic views. They presented the underlying problem in Mexico that led the ruling class to attempt the tuition hikes and partial privatization of UNAM--and that has resulted in over 30 percent unemployment and more than 40 percent of the population of Mexico living under the poverty level--as "neoliberal" policies that need to be shelved and replaced by a "regulated capitalism, with state intervention."

Student leaders who espoused such views had a heavier weight on the panels of the commissions that ultimately played a larger role on what is presented as consensus agreements. They are well to the right of most rank-and-file students attracted to the proletariat. The final declaration adopted by the congress does not mention the word socialism and states that students "struggle for the sovereignty of our countries and for real democracies with freedom...and an economy in the service of men and women living in harmony with nature."

A few delegates tried to take these points on. "There is only one alternative to capitalism," said Ernesto Fernando Sánchez of FEU from Cuba. "Here in Cuba we call it socialism. We look to José Martí and our own history on how to achieve this. But we must also learn from Che and Marx, Engels, and Lenin."  
 

Firsthand look of Cuban revolution

While most of the work of the congress was conducted at the commissions and plenary sessions, most delegates had several chances to also get a firsthand glance at the reality of Cuba today.

Those who came prior to the congress visited the Museum of the Revolution and a number of neighborhoods in Havana on their own. During the conference, all delegates were asked to take one day for an alternative program that included visits to schools, hospitals, the pioneer palace, Expo Cuba, and other sites. By all accounts, the activity along these lines that aroused the most interest was spending an evening with Cuban families at a variety of neighborhoods. These were organized at 400 different locations in Havana by the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution.

Substantial time during the congress was also dedicated to two Open Tribunals and other discussions on the fight to return Elián González to Cuba. The six-year-old Cuban boy was rescued off the Florida coast last November after his mother and others on board a vessel drowned when it capsized after leaving Cuba.

The Cuban government has supported the demand of the boy's father, Juan Miguel González, and other relatives in Cuba that Elián be repatriated immediately. The boy is still in Miami where distant relatives are trying to keep him with the support of many among the U.S. rulers.

Castro devoted a major portion of his April 5 speech on the details of this case, including the announcement that Juan Miguel González would be leaving for Washington, D.C., in pursuit of his son the next morning. The congress passed a resolution demanding Elián's return to Cuba and calling for open tribunals in front of U.S. embassies around the world to press this case.  
 

'For a world without borders'

The final plenary session of the congress was largely devoted to reading the resolutions adopted by the commissions, as well as the final declaration that the delegates approved.

The results of the election for OCLAE's leadership body, the executive secretariat, were also announced. The election was held the previous day by representatives of the organization's member groups. FEU of Cuba was reelected to the presidency, and Yosvani Díaz Romero remains in that post. The executive secretariat includes representatives of the National Union of Students of Nicaragua, the Union of High School Students of Brazil, the Federation of University Students of Argentina, National Student Association of Colombia, FUPI of Puerto Rico, and the Federation of University Students of Ecuador.

During the last session, Iraklis Tsaldaridis, president of the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY), announced that the 15th world youth festival will take place in the summer of 2001. The first international preparatory meeting to begin building this gathering will take place in Havana June 20-22. The WFDY leadership will propose the festival be held in Algeria. The last one was held in Cuba in the summer of 1997. Tsaldaridis invited all those present to take part in building these meetings.

In concluding his speech to the delegates, Fidel Castro reminded them of the theme of Latin American unity that ran through the congress. You must go beyond that, the Cuban president said. "Struggle for a world without borders. A world where 'our country' will become humanity."

Samantha Kern, organizer of the National Executive Committee of the Young Socialists, contributed to this article.  
 
 
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