The Militant (logo) 
   Vol.65/No.11            March 19, 2001 
 
 
Washington's Bay of Pigs invasion and the U.S. class struggle
Foreword to new book tells how advancing Cuban revolution won new generation in U.S. to communist movement
(Cuban Revolution: Celebrate 40th Anniversary of Bay of Pigs Victory and Literacy Campaign)
 
Reprinted below is the foreword by Jack Barnes to Playa Girón/Bay of Pigs: Washington's First Military Defeat in the Americas, which Pathfinder Press is releasing this month in both English and Spanish editions. The new title includes the July 1999 testimony of Brig. Gen. José Ramón Fernández before a Havana, Cuba, court, detailing the background to the Cuban people's victory over a U.S.-organized counterrevolutionary invasion near the Bay of Pigs on April 17-19, 1961. Fernández was the commander of the main column of Cuban combatants that fought and crushed the invading force. The book also includes excerpts of three speeches by Cuban commander-in-chief Fidel Castro, given immediately before and after Cuba's revolutionary victory at Playa Girón.

Barnes is the national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. Copyright © 2001 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.  
 

*****
 
"The October Crisis was a continuation of the U.S. fiasco at Girón. The defeat they suffered there led them to risk an atomic war. Girón was like a bone sticking in their throats, something they don't accept to this day. In war one either wins or loses. But they can't admit having lost in their efforts to dominate such a small country."

Division General Enrique Carreras Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba October 1997
 
 
BY JACK BARNES  
On the morning of April 18, 1961, readers of daily newspapers across the United States woke up to front-page headlines proclaiming, "Rebels Near Havana, Invade Four Provinces." An Associated Press news dispatch reported that "Cuban rebel forces" had landed within thirty-eight miles of Havana and at numerous other points on the island. Citing a press release from the "Cuban Revolutionary Council," the dispatch said that much of the Cuban militia had already defected to the invading forces and "in the next few hours" the deciding battle for the country would be fought. "Rebel" forces were "in control of the Isle of Pines and had freed some 10,000 political prisoners held there."

Most Americans took the story as good coin, expecting to soon hear that the "pro-Communist dictator" Fidel Castro had been ousted.

Around the country, however, in dozens of cities and on a number of college campuses, there were pockets of individuals who knew from the beginning that every word of the AP story was a lie. We had been carrying out an intensive educational campaign for weeks. We had been getting ready for the invasion we knew was coming, preparing to act here in the Yankee heartland, side by side with the Cuban people the moment it happened. Between April 17 and April 19, as the battle was being fought in Cuba, we confidently took to the streets, organized speak-outs, posted marked-up newspaper clippings, and went on the radio asserting that, all press reports to the contrary, the U.S.-government-organized and -financed invasion was being defeated, not winning.

As we had been doing for months, we pointed to the immense popularity of the revolution among the Cuban people in response to the measures the new government was organizing them to take. The mafia-run gambling dens and brothels, a national shame, had been shut down. Land had been distributed to more than 100,000 tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and squatters. House and apartment rents, as well as electricity and telephone rates, had been slashed. Racial discrimination was outlawed and equal access not only made law but enforced. Public beaches, previously off limits to Blacks, had been opened to all. A nationwide campaign to eliminate illiteracy had been launched--part of a broader extension of public education to the countryside, among the poor, and for women. Popular militias had formed in factories, other workplaces, schools, neighborhoods, and towns across the island, as Cubans demanded arms and military training to defend their new conquests. The huge money-gouging U.S. monopolies had been nationalized, as well as the major landed, commercial, and industrial property holdings of the wealthy Cuban families who had been the social and political base of the Batista dictatorship.

Through more than two years of popular mobilization, the workers and farmers of Cuba had begun transforming not only their country but themselves, we explained. It was precisely for this reason that Cubans could, and would, fight to the death to defend their revolution--and do so successfully.

Only thirty-six hours after the initial AP stories made headlines across the United States, the counterrevolutionary "rebel forces"--who had landed not thirty-eight miles from Havana or on the Isle of Pines, but near the Bay of Pigs on the southern coast of the island--had been ignominiously routed at Playa Girón by Cuba's popular militias, Revolutionary National Police, and Rebel Army. Not only the decisiveness, but also the speed of the April 19 defeat was crucial. The strategic plan authorized by President John F. Kennedy called for the 1,500-man mercenary force to establish and hold a beachhead on an isolated slice of Cuban territory long enough to declare a provisional government and appeal for direct military intervention by Washington and its closest allies in Latin America.

The shock of this very first military defeat of U.S. imperialism in the Americas began to register in Washington, and among its defenders in pressrooms, factories, and schools across the country. In the weeks that followed, as bitter and self-serving recriminations among organizers of the invasion spilled out, more and more information about the U.S.-run military operation and the background of the individual Cuban "freedom fighters" began to make its way into the mainstream press in the United States.

As these facts became known, supporters of the Cuban Revolution took full advantage to spread the truth, point to the accuracy of what we had been arguing for months, and underline the sober exactitude of the speeches and statements of leaders of the Cuban Revolution over the previous two years.

The first issue of Time magazine to appear after the Cuban victory, for example, revealed that the purported authors of the Cuban Revolutionary Council press release cited so authoritatively by AP, including "prestigious" figures such as José Miró Cardona, not only had nothing to do with the invasion plans but had actually been held as quasi-prisoners by the U.S. government while the operation was under way. The press release issued in their name had in fact been written by the CIA men in charge of the invasion, while the members of the CIA-created Cuban government-in-exile were held incommunicado under military guard in a barracks at the deserted Opa-Locka airfield near Miami.

Both the AP wire story and Time magazine article, and the use we made of them, were part of the intense argument that raged on a number of campuses, as well as in factories, rail yards, and other workplaces throughout the United States during the opening years of the Cuban Revolution. It was a propaganda battle that, from one end of the country to the other, became a confrontation in the streets both during the days surrounding the U.S.-organized invasion at the Bay of Pigs and a year and a half later during the October "missile" crisis.

This political battle that began more than forty years ago was one that changed the lives of a not-insignificant number of young people in the United States. It transformed the communist movement here in a way that paralleled the profound changes taking place in Cuba and elsewhere around the world. Nothing since the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia has had such an impact.

There are moments in history when everything ceases to be "normal." Suddenly the speed of events and stakes involved intensify every word and action. Neutral ground seems to disappear. Alignments shift and new forces come together. The polite conventions of civil discourse that normally reign in bourgeois circles evaporate, including within the "academic community."

April 1961, when the bombing and invasion of Cuba by mercenaries organized, financed, and deployed by Washington met the fearless resistance and lightning victory of the Cuban people, was such a moment.  
 

*****

At the time I was the organizer of the campus Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) at Carleton College, a small, very respectable liberal arts school in Northfield, Minnesota, a few miles south of the twin cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul. The billboard at the Northfield city limits welcomed visitors to "Cows, Colleges, and Contentment." The contentment was sorely tried by the rise of the Cuban Revolution, and by the historic and irreconcilable conflict of class forces reflected at the Bay of Pigs. The cows continued to fare well.

The experiences we went through at Carleton were not unique. To one degree or another they were repeated at several dozen colleges and universities across the United States.

The January 1959 victory of the Cuban Revolution, combined with Washington's intense hostility to the economic and social transformation being wrought so close to U.S. shores, led three Carleton students to decide to visit Cuba in 1960 to see for themselves. I was one of those students, spending the summer in Cuba on a Ford Foundation grant to study the economic changes taking place there. I was deeply affected by these ten weeks of daily participation together with other young people and with the workers and farmers of Cuba in actions that constituted one of the most important turning points of the revolution. Returning for my senior year, I was determined to find those in the United States whose response to what was happening in Cuba was similar to mine. I had two intertwined goals: to work together with whomever possible to oppose Washington's attempts to crush the Cuban Revolution, and to find among them those who wanted to organize their lives to emulate here the example set by the Rebel Army and Cuba's working people.

From the spring of 1960 on, every political person in the world knew an invasion of Cuba was imminent. Reports on the CIA recruitment and training facilities in Florida, Louisiana, and Guatemala circulated for months. Despite heavy government pressure on mostly pliant journalists and publishers alike, bits and pieces of news found their way into print. Cuba's foreign minister, Raúl Roa, speaking before United Nations bodies, at least three times publicly detailed the scope of the preparations under way. He made it clear beyond challenge that the only question was exactly when and where the invasion would occur, not whether.

Under the impact of experiences in Cuba, we organized a Socialist Study Group on campus to read and discuss Marxist theory--from The German Ideology and other early works by Karl Marx that had recently been published in English translation for the first time, to the Communist Manifesto, to works by communist leaders in the United States. We organized other students to subscribe to the Militant newsweekly--which we had begun reading in Cuba and was our most thorough, regular, and reliable source of information about the revolution.

Early in 1961, convinced the invasion could not be more than weeks away, we organized a campus chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and began to carry out virtually nonstop political education activities to lay the groundwork for deepening and broadening opposition to Washington's plans.

The bulletin board in the student union became a battleground. Every day we posted clippings with the latest news reports from the big-business dailies and weeklies, from the Minneapolis Tribune to Newsweek--marked up and annotated to underscore Washington's acts of aggression against Cuba and to expose the fabrications and self-contradictory information emanating from U.S. government sources. We also tacked up speeches by Cuban leaders that we clipped out of the Militant, and we made the unqualified assertion that their assessment of the U.S. rulers' response to the advance of the revolution would soon be proven correct. Opponents of the revolution, from liberals to ultra-right-wingers, would reply by posting articles they thought bolstered their views; we would answer the next day, often using the very same sources to expose their arguments. We were learning a valuable lesson about the existence, and effectiveness, of imperialist disinformation campaigns.

No one tried to tear down clippings or halt the debate, however, which we counted as our first victory. We had done what communists in plants and mills across the country were simultaneously doing: we had taken the moral high ground, proving that defenders of Cuba, not our opponents, were the ones pressing for debate, for openness, for reading the press critically and discussing the facts.

In February 1961 we initiated a series of public meetings on Cuba. These programs were sponsored by Challenge, a public lecture series we had established earlier in the school year after winning support from the student government for the initiative. The campus newspaper, The Carletonian, described the program as designed to "challenge the underlying beliefs and assumptions of the student body by bringing to the campus 'numerous intelligent and committed individuals who hold dissenting views which are not heard by the Carleton student body.'"

Challenge had already had a broad impact on campus. It organized debates on U.S. covert operations in Laos. Marxist literary critic Annette Rubinstein, an editor of Science and Society magazine, had lectured on Shakespeare. Challenge sponsored a debate on the May 1960 San Francisco "riots" against the so-called House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). We held a showing and discussion of Salt of the Earth, the blacklisted movie about the battle to organize zinc miners in the Southwest, and a member of the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelters Workers spoke after the film about their 1950 strike and ongoing battle against the mine operators. Another program on the unions--an "unknown institution" at Carleton in those years--featured Mark Starr, the longtime education director of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union.

All these events were controversial on campus. But nothing compared to what broke out around programs on Cuba.

In March 1961 a Mr. Dupree, a representative of the American University Field Service who had spent one and a half years in Latin America, spoke at a Challenge meeting. A letter to the editor in the next Carletonian complained of the "rude treatment" he allegedly received from several students who had sharply challenged him on the facts in response to statements he made about Cuba. Dupree acknowledged at the meeting that he wasn't an authority on the subject and later had to admit to the student paper he had never even been to Cuba.

The following week two members of the National Fair Play for Cuba Committee spoke on campus about the Cuban Revolution and the deepening struggle for Black rights throughout the United States. One was Robert F. Williams, a founding member of Fair Play who two years earlier had been removed by top NAACP officials as president of the Monroe, North Carolina, chapter for organizing fellow Black war veterans into armed self-defense of their community against racist thugs and nightriders The other speaker was Ed Shaw, Midwest organizer of Fair Play, who was a typesetter and member of the International Typographical Union from Detroit, as well as a leader of the Socialist Workers Party. That meeting had a powerful impact on campus. What impressed us above all was that Williams and Shaw each talked about both the struggle for Black rights and the Cuban Revolution with similar ease and insight.

The next week, four Carleton students who had visited or lived in Cuba--three of them organizers of the campus Fair Play for Cuba Committee--presented a slide show and debated the issues.

We organized to make sure that every issue of The Carletonian carried articles, letters, cartoons, and other commentary that was part of the deepening discussion about the Cuban Revolution among students and faculty. Jim Gilbert, a supporter of Fair Play who had visited Cuba during the Christmas break at the end of 1960, wrote an extensive article describing his experiences and observations about the social and political gains of the Cuban people. By chance Gilbert had visited Playa Girón, where the revolutionary government was focusing development efforts that had already begun transforming conditions of life and work for the impoverished residents of the Zapata Swamp, previously one of the most isolated and backward regions of the country. Little did we know at the time the special significance Playa Girón would have in a matter of weeks, not only for the Cuban people but for the work of supporters of the Cuban Revolution.

The unfolding debate at Carleton, as elsewhere, was deeply affected by hearing accounts in early 1961 of the murder of young literacy campaign workers in Cuba by CIA-financed and -armed counterrevolutionary bands in remote areas. Homilies from liberal opponents of the revolution about the need to see both sides of the story seemed brutally hypocritical beside photos of Cuban teenagers lynched for the crime of teaching peasant families to read and write. Or for the crime of having on a militia uniform as they walked home at night, unarmed.

Supporters of the revolution also put a spotlight on the unjust and brutal treatment of prorevolutionary Cubans in the United States. Only days before the Bay of Pigs invasion, Francisco Molina, an unemployed Cuban worker who supported the revolution, was convicted in New York City on second-degree murder charges. The Carletonian carried the story. Molina had been framed and found guilty of murder for the accidental death of a young Venezuelan girl during a fight, provoked by an assault by Cuban counterrevolutionaries, that broke out in a New York restaurant during Prime Minister Fidel Castro's September 1960 visit to speak before the United Nations General Assembly. On grounds of "national security," the judge prevented Molina's defense attorneys from pursuing the identity and other relevant information about the counterrevolutionary Cubans involved in the incident. As the respectable press howled about the lack of justice in Cuba, the class character of "justice" in the United States could not have been more clearly demonstrated for us.

During these same weeks, a major fight involving much greater forces than those at Carleton alone broke out over campus recognition of the student Fair Play for Cuba Committee. In early February the student government association, by a two-thirds majority, approved an application for recognition from the campus chapter of the FPCC. A very vocal minority objected, arguing that a group avowedly dedicated to "dissemination of material both of fact and opinion on contemporary U.S.-Cuba affairs" and establishing "broader understanding of U.S.-Cuba relations" could not be a legitimate campus organization since, they charged, the FPCC was "vulnerable to communist influence." A cartoon in the following issue of the campus paper depicted Nikita Khrushchev, Mao Zedong, and Fidel Castro standing behind Carletonian editor John Miller, who had run an editorial supporting recognition of Fair Play, and chortling, "Well, boys, what'll we put in next week's Carletonian?"

The large majority vote by the student government association didn't settle the matter, however. A faculty meeting also had to approve the charters of all student organizations before they could be recognized, normally a formality following a favorable student government recommendation After stalling for a month on technicalities, in mid-March the faculty assembly took up the FPCC application, along with a letter from three students objecting to recognition of the campus chapter. Appended to the letter were excerpts from the records of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, chaired by Democratic Party senators James Eastland of Mississippi and Thomas Dodd of Connecticut, which was at that time conducting a congressional witch-hunt hearing on "communist influence" in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

Dean of the College Richard Gilman told a closed faculty meeting "he had information saying that the Socialist Workers Party have a special and partisan interest in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee--that they are using it for their own purposes." According to The Carletonian, "Gilman admitted that this information presented was not documented evidence but rather was the 'opinion' of two sources," whose identity he refused to reveal because of the "nature of the information and the sources."

The campus paper reported that a request from the campus Fair Play organizers that they be given even "one documented incident to indicate use of the FPCC by another political group for purposes other than those enumerated in its charter" was denied. Also refused was a request that they be provided with the identities of even one of the purported "sources" so they could "confront Fair Play's accusers" and either refute or corroborate their "opinions."

A few days before the faculty vote on recognition, Gilman asked me to drop by his office. He handed me copies of expurgated pages from an FBI file on the Fair Play for Cuba Committee containing informers' reports on meetings of the committee in Minneapolis-St. Paul, including garbled comments attributed to individuals identified as members of the Socialist Workers Party. When the dean asked me if I recognized any of the names, I assured him I did, and considered a number of them my comrades. They were members of the party I was soon to join. I also protested that I knew them well enough to assure him they could not have made the kinds of remarks attributed to them by the FBI's apolitical stooges.

"That really makes no difference, does it Jack?" was Gilman's only reply. It was a very short meeting.

It wasn't the facts or content that mattered, it was the accusation, or rather the threat behind the accusation. That was the message. This was the tried-and-true witch-hunting method machined during the war administration of Franklin Roosevelt, broadened in use by Harry Truman, then honed over more than half a decade in the late 1940s and early 1950s by Richard Nixon, Joseph McCarthy, and their ilk. It was a method still very much in use in 1961. "X" and "Y" were known members of the Socialist Workers Party, a communist organization, and the Socialist Workers Party was on the Attorney General's List of Communist or Subversive Organizations--in those days that was often sufficient to end further discussion.

Even with all this, Gilman wasn't sure enough of a majority to allow a faculty vote on recognition of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. On March 11 the faculty accepted the dean's recommendation not to act on the student government proposal, pending clarification of some matters about which he was awaiting "further information." Everyone got the point. The school year would soon be over, and the central leaders of the committee were seniors. The dean and others hoped their "problem" would be eliminated before the next academic year began.

But wars register sharpening not diminishing class struggle. Far from disappearing, their "problem" was about to get worse.  
 

*****

With the bombing of the Cuban airports on April 15; the April 16 mass mobilization that registered the socialist character of the revolution, politically preparing the Cuban people for the impending invasion; and the April 17 landing of the mercenary forces at the Bay of Pigs followed by their crushing defeat fewer than three days later--all documented by Fidel Castro and José Ramón Fernández in the pages that follow--everything ceased being normal.

One of the routines of campus life at Carleton was the lunchtime reading of the day's news dispatches. In each dormitory dining room, as a sit-down lunch was being served by student waiters working for their scholarship funds, the head waiter would read a handful of the morning's press dispatches from United Press International. UPI's teletype service was provided free of charge by Lucky Strike cigarettes to the campus radio station on condition that Lucky Strike be acknowledged as the sponsor of all news programs. Which it was. Except when "The Sleepy Fox," who hosted the morning wake-up music and news program, sometimes announced the sponsor was a popular brand of Havana cigar. He also prepared students for the day by opening with the "July 26 Hymn," an antidote to "The Star-Spangled Banner" with which radio and TV stations in the United States signed on and off each broadcast session.

On Monday, April 17, the dry, slightly cynical style of the lunchtime news readings changed. Initial reports of the assault on Cuba were suddenly greeted by slightly flushed right-wingers leading rhythmic chants of "War! War! War!" The rapidity of the transformation, and the incipient violence that lay so close to the surface beneath the "political debate," was something none of us had seen before.

Three days later, for those who had led the chants, the unimaginable had happened. You could almost see the ranks of supporters of Fair Play for Cuba expanding as the news readers flatly intoned UPI dispatches announcing the utter rout of the mercenary forces at "Cochinos Bay." We were surprised as some campus workers, instructors, and students we barely knew--who had remained poker-faced during the previous three days--came up with a handshake or smile to say something friendly, even if not openly mentioning Cuba.

The year 1961 in Cuba was "The Year of Education," when more than 100,000 young people, the big majority of them teenagers, left their homes and spread out across the country to eradicate illiteracy from Cuba before the year was up. In unexpected ways, 1961 was the year of education for us as well.

One of our biggest lessons was what happens in an imperialist country when war begins.

In a matter of hours on April 17, the broad undecided center had shrunk to a voiceless kernel. Months of concentrated political action preparing for the war fell into place in a few decisive days. Committed builders of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee at Carleton in early 1961 had been fewer than half a dozen. But now came the payoff for the weeks of education, propaganda work, writing, talking, pushing for and organizing open political debate, and taking up the challenges of every opponent on every issue. As the workers and peasants of Cuba inflicted a crushing defeat on U.S. imperialism, support for the political positions we had been defending exploded overnight. But only because we were there, we were prepared, and we were ready to respond.

The sharp and violent polarization that erupted as the first shots were fired taught us another big lesson. As opponents of the U.S.-sponsored invasion, we were in the streets within hours. But so too were the ultra-right-wing cadres of the Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), who mobilized to try to physically prevent Fair Play for Cuba Committee actions from taking place.

On the steps of the University of Minnesota student union on April 18, where the campus FPCC had called a protest speak-out, a largely hostile crowd of several hundred swelled to well over a thousand as right-wingers pelted the speakers with snowballs and milk cartons, while the cops smiled. With the predominantly liberal and pacifist rally organizers unprepared to defend the meeting, John Greenagle, state chairman of the YAF, forced his way onto the platform to deplore the defeat of Batista, while a few other students appealed for tolerance and dialogue. Even one of those who had been lined up to speak as an opponent of the invasion rushed to take his distance from the Cuban Revolution, bleating out, "We don't support Castro. Once again the Cuban people are under the heel of a dictator, but is an American-supported invasion the way to help them? Is this armed force any better than Batista or Castro?"

An effigy of the "commie" Fair Play for Cuba Committee was hung in front of the chemistry building the next morning.

Similar confrontations took place at other schools across the United States, from Madison, Wisconsin, to Providence, Rhode Island.

We learned in practice what Batista and the Cuban Revolution had already taught us from afar: that in the United States, too, we would have to defeat the reactionary thugs in the streets even to have the right to make our positions known.

We got an education in liberalism, too, as our faculty friends went silent or absented themselves, rather than take on a dean (a supposedly reserved and tolerant one, of course) waving the Attorney General's list and FBI informer reports in their faces. We saw student allies who had previously been staunch defenders of the Cuban Revolution, or at least of Fair Play's right to function like other campus organizations, suddenly develop cold feet; they were discovering that future career plans were incompatible with continued association with friends who were becoming communists.

Others made the opposite life decisions in a matter of days.

Our understanding of these class questions was accelerated immeasurably by the fact we were sharing our day-by-day experiences, talking about them into the wee hours of the night with communist workers in the Twin Cities. They were people like V.R. Dunne, who had been a member of the Communist International at its founding, a leader of the Teamsters strikes and organizing drives in the Upper Midwest during the 1930s, and one of the first victims railroaded to prison by the federal government under the infamous Smith "Gag" Act for opposition to U.S. imperialism leading up to and during World War II.

These workers pointed us to the history of the class struggle in the United States, to the lessons we needed to learn from the workers and farmers whose fighting legacy we inherited. They drew on this rich history to help us understand what we had to be prepared for as we went up against the most violent and brutal ruling class in the world.

Above all, they taught those of us who, like themselves, were so strongly and passionately attracted to the example being set by the fighting workers and peasants of Cuba that the challenge--for us--was not there. Cuba's workers and farmers had proven they could take care of themselves. They helped us see that our fight was in the United States. That Washington, to paraphrase Cuban Division General Enrique Carreras, would never be able to get that bone out of its throat.

Those workers like Dunne and others helped us see that the contest would end only with the defeat of the revolution in Cuba or a victorious socialist revolution in the United States.

"There is one thing we can most certainly tell Mr. Kennedy," Fidel Castro told a cheering crowd in Cuba on March 13 of that year. "A victorious revolution will be seen in the United States before a victorious counterrevolution in Cuba."

That had become our conviction too. As beyond belief as this appeared to the average American, it seemed the only realistic perspective to us, and we set out to speed the day.

The continual interchange between new, young activists, mostly on the campuses, and communist workers whose experiences on the job and in the unions paralleled ours as we all went through the same rapid political shifts and changes, helped deepen our understanding of what we were living through. Our rail worker comrades reported receiving a friendly nod from fellow workers for telling the truth about Cuba in the same way that we were being encouraged in many indirect ways by those on campus we had not previously realized were following so closely what we were saying and doing.

We came to appreciate that everything depended on the political work done beforehand. We learned firsthand how dangerously wrong and class-biased were the fears and semihysterical reactions of many of our campus-based colleagues. The source of reaction was not "backward American workers" but the U.S. ruling class. And the danger came also from those who, whether they owned up to it or not, had set out on a life course to camouflage, help divert attention from, and politically rationalize the rapacious and brutal actions of that ruling class. The battle before us was first of all a political battle inside the working class, as part of the working class.  
 

*****

As Cuban workers and farmers pressed forward their socialist revolution and U.S. aggression mounted in reaction to their gains, the lessons transformed the way we looked at the battle for Black rights in the United States as well. The mass proletarian struggle to bring down the Jim Crow system of legal segregation throughout the South, with its various forms of discrimination extending throughout the country, was marching toward bloody victories at the same time that the Cuban Revolution was advancing. We could see in practice that there were powerful social forces within the United States capable of carrying out a revolutionary social transformation like the working people of Cuba were bringing into being.

The core of the activists defending the Cuban Revolution were young people who had cut their political eyeteeth as part of the civil rights battles, supporting the Woolworth lunch counter sit-ins and joining or supporting marches and other protests in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and elsewhere in the South.

The many faces of reaction, some in Ku Klux Klan hoods, others with sheriff's uniforms and FBI jackets protecting them; the lynchings and murders on isolated country roads; the dogs and water cannons unleashed on protesters--all were burned in our consciousness, as part of the lessons we were learning about the violence and brutality of the U.S. ruling class and the lengths to which it will go to defend its property and prerogatives.

And we were learning lessons, too, from the armed self-defense organized by Black veterans in Monroe, North Carolina, and elsewhere in the South. Immediately following the U.S. defeat at the Bay of Pigs, during a debate in the Political Committee of the United Nations General Assembly, Cuban Foreign Minister Raúl Roa read a message that former Monroe NAACP president Robert F. Williams had asked him to convey to the U.S. government.

"Now that the United States has proclaimed military support for people willing to rebel against oppression," Williams wrote, "oppressed Negroes in the South urgently request tanks, artillery, bombs, money, use of American air fields and white mercenaries to crush racist tyrants who have betrayed the American Revolution and Civil War."

We rapidly came to see that the legal and extralegal violence directed against those fighting for their rights and dignity as human beings here in the United States was one and the same as the mounting overt and covert aggression against the people of Cuba. We placed the struggle for Black rights in the world. It became totally intertwined for us with the stakes in defending the Cuban Revolution.

This was exemplified above all by the convergence of the Cuban Revolution and Malcolm X, whose voice of uncompromising revolutionary struggle--by any means necessary--was then increasingly making itself heard. Fidel Castro met with Malcolm at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem during the Cuban delegation's trip to the United Nations in 1960. Malcolm invited Che Guevara to address a meeting of the Organization of Afro-American Unity during Che's trip to New York in 1964.

For us, these and other expressions of the growing mutual respect and solidarity that marked relations between Malcolm X and the Cuban leadership were further confirmation of our own developing world view.  
 

*****

The April 1961 actions condemning the U.S.-organized invasion of Cuba--held in a score of cities across the United States, as well as a number of small college towns--registered an important moment in U.S. politics in another regard.

In many cities, for the first time in decades, these were united front actions, called under the banner of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and organized both by those identified with the Militant newspaper and by those who looked for leadership to the Daily Worker, newspaper of the Communist Party. Representatives of each of these historic currents in the broad working-class movement joined July 26 Movement speakers and prominent individuals not affiliated with any current on speakers' platforms from New York to Detroit, from Minneapolis to San Francisco. The actions were testimony to the impact of the Cuban Revolution as well as the leadership of the July 26 Movement.

The potential for unified actions had received a boost during the summer of 1960 when scores of young people from the United States, affiliated and unaffiliated, traveled to Cuba, many of us participating in the July 26 celebration in the Sierra Maestra mountains and attending the First Latin American Youth Congress in Havana. We took part in the wide-ranging political debate among young people from all over the Americas and the world, trying to understand the onrushing struggle we were part of and thinking through the questions addressed by Che Guevara in his opening speech to the youth congress, where he asked: "Is this revolution communist?"

The answer Guevara gave posed the issues we were all discussing. "After the usual explanation as to what communism is (I leave aside the hackneyed accusations by imperialism and the colonial powers, who confuse everything)," Guevara responded, "I would answer that if this revolution is Marxist--and listen well that I say 'Marxist'--it is because it discovered, by its own methods, the road pointed out by Marx."

Guevara's explanation coincided well with the conclusions I was groping toward during that decisive summer when all the major imperialist-owned industries in Cuba were nationalized by massive mobilizations of working people from one end of the island to the other. Guevara's view was far from a unanimous one, however, and we spent many long hours debating among ourselves the political and theoretical issues that were posed.

Despite sharp political differences over the dynamic of the revolution in Cuba and class politics in the United States, the fact that different currents were able to come together in action against the U.S. government, even if briefly, registered the weight of the Cuban Revolution in the Americas, and the degree to which it opened up a historical potential to shatter old molds and alter the relationship of class forces that had for years dominated what was broadly considered the "left."  
 

*****

The campus Fair Play for Cuba Committees and the actions in response to the U.S.-sponsored invasion at the Bay of Pigs also dealt one of the first blows to the anticommunist witch-hunt and red-baiting. As the Carleton example illustrated, the hearings of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee aimed at dividing and destroying the effectiveness of Fair Play simply failed to have the same effect on students they would have had several years earlier.

Throughout these same months of intense political action in defense of Cuba, Committees to Abolish HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee, had been mushrooming on campuses across the country. On April 21, one day after a Union Square demonstration of 5,000 in New York City condemning the U.S. invasion, nearly the same number turned out for an anti-HUAC rally in the city to protest the imminent jailing of several prominent civil liberties and civil rights activists for refusing to cooperate with the House committee.

Among students, especially, conviction that the U.S. rulers were lying about Washington's total control of the invasion and other actions against Cuba went hand in hand with rejection of the government's witch-hunt methods. Openness to searching for the truth about Cuba was incompatible with a belief that the opinions of some should not be heard because they were communists or were labeled communists.

In a prelude to what happened during the opening years of the anti-Vietnam War movement in the mid- and late 1960s, the witch-hunting moves of right-wing students and faculty, far from paralyzing organizing efforts, became targets of derision and scorn. The majority of students awakening to political life simply refused to support attempts to exclude members and supporters of the Socialist Workers Party and Communist Party, or any other group, from the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.  
 

*****

The victory at Playa Girón punctured the myth of U.S. imperialism's invincibility. It left us with the conviction that the Cuban Revolution would be at the center of the class struggle inside the United States as long as the working class was in power in Cuba, and we had become convinced that such would be the case for the rest of our political lives. The U.S. rulers could never accept revolutionary Cuba and would never stop trying to get rid of it and the example it set. Their most vital class interests were at stake. That was the truth we had to bring to working people in the United States and prepare to act on.

Within a matter of days of the Bay of Pigs defeat, President Kennedy stepped up covert operations against Cuba and began organizing directly from the White House even more extensive military preparations for a U.S. invasion. We didn't know the scope of those operations at the time, nor that the administration only a year and a half later would push them to the brink of unleashing a nuclear war. But we did know that Fidel Castro was speaking the truth to the people of Cuba and the world in his April 23 report on the victory at Playa Girón when he emphasized that the victory "does not mean that the danger is past. Quite the contrary. We believe that the danger is now great, above all, the danger of direct aggression by the United States."

The victory of Cuban working people at Playa Girón, together with the concentrated class-struggle experience we had gained over a few months of intense action, had in a matter of a few days transformed a group of young people for the rest of our lives. Before the Bay of Pigs there had been only one member of the Young Socialist Alliance at Carleton College, myself, and one at the University of Minnesota, John Chelstrom, an eighteen-year-old freshman who, when everyone else froze in front of the rabidly hostile crowd, stepped forward and led off the April 18 speak-out on the steps of the student union, not only opposing the invasion but openly identifying himself with the Cuban Revolution.

Between those days of concentrated politics, and similar experiences lived through during the October 1962 "missile" crisis, we recruited scores of young people who were won to the communist movement not for months or years, but for life. At Carleton College alone during that brief span, these recruits included over a dozen who later became leaders of the communist movement--national officers of the Young Socialist Alliance, national officers and National Committee members of the Socialist Workers Party, editors of the Young Socialist, the Militant, the New International, leaders of the movement's industrial trade union work, and of countless defense committees and coalitions, editors of Pathfinder Press--individuals who to this day remain committed to the political current and active along the political course they became convinced of in those decisive days. In fact, forty years later, a large majority of them were involved in bringing this book into print!

Through those experiences four decades ago, we were won not just to an ideological position or a moral stance, but to a course of political conduct and, most importantly, to the habits consistent with it. With a sense of history, we signed on for the duration, recognizing that the revolutionary fight for power is a struggle that can only be waged country by country, and possibly the most satisfying victory of all will be the United States. For us, what Cuban workers and peasants had accomplished was the example in our own political lifetime of the necessity and the possibility of revolution, of how to fight to win, of the capacity of ordinary human beings to transform themselves as they confront challenges and take on responsibilities they would have previously deemed impossible. We and millions like us were the only ones who could "remove the bone"--by following the example the revolutionary militias, police, and army had set in smashing the invasion at Playa Girón.  
 

*****

The pages that follow are not primarily a celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the victory at the Bay of Pigs. Rather, in clear and unambiguous words, these pages register accurately the historical accomplishment achieved there.

The July 1999 testimony offered by José Ramón Fernández draws its unusual power not only from being the firsthand account of the field commander of the main column that fought and defeated the U.S.-organized invasion, but also from his use of the major accounts published by those who recruited, trained, and commanded the enemy forces. He points not only to what the revolutionary leadership of Cuba knew and did at the time, guaranteeing the decisive victory at Playa Girón. Fernández also cites the judgments and opinions rendered in the maps and charts the mercenary forces later drew for themselves, as well as the balance sheets of top CIA officials during the months and years that followed their totally unexpected defeat.

The three speeches by Cuban commander in chief Fidel Castro excerpted here capture the intensity of the moment, the stakes for the people of Cuba, and their confidence in ultimate victory. The same is true of the April 15 calls to battle by Raúl Castro and Che Guevara, as well as the war communiqués issued by the revolutionary government between April 17 and the victory on April 19. The confidence marking each of them is born not of some unfounded belief in military invincibility, but of the recognition that history and justice are on their side, and that the price the empire will have to pay to conquer them is one no capitalist politician will be capable of doing or willing to try.

The U.S. rulers, and those who follow their lead, still to this day cannot grasp what Fidel Castro stressed in his April 23 report to the Cuban people on the victory at Playa Girón, and what José Ramón Fernández underlines in his testimony: that the military strategy and tactics of those who planned the invasion at the Bay of Pigs were sound; the defeat was rooted in their class blindness to what the men and women of Cuba had wrought, to the objective power of a just cause and of an armed and revolutionary people committed to defend it and acting with the decisiveness and speed necessary to shape the course of history.

The invading forces lost their will to fight before they ran out of bullets. During three days of battle, they could never even get off the beaches, and additional U.S. air or naval support would have made no difference to the ultimate outcome.

Most importantly, for those of us living and working in the United States, this is a book about the future of the class struggle here. It is about the workers and farmers in the imperialist heartland, and the youth who are attracted to the line of march of these toilers--workers and farmers whose revolutionary capacities are today as utterly discounted by the ruling powers as were those of the peasant and proletarian masses of Cuba. And just as wrongly.

The Bay of Pigs was the first great defeat of U.S. imperialism in the Americas. It will not be the last. That will occur right here.
 
 
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