BY JACK BARNES
Last month many of us watched television specials marking the thirtieth anniversary of what is called the "Cuban missile crisis" in the United States. In Cuba it is called the October Crisis, since it was not really about missiles; it was about Washington's unsuccessful effort in October 1962 to destroy the socialist revolution in Cuba. I think there were five network specials on the crisis last month. The three I saw were extremely interesting. It would be useful for communist workers to get the videotapes of a couple and play them for fellow workers; many productive political discussions would result.

The interviews, documents, and other materials used in these programs confirm things that many of us have long believed to be true, things that have generally been covered up or denied by the U.S. rulers and their bipartisan political spokespersons. Above all, they establish once and for all that an invasion to crush the socialist revolution in Cuba was being prepared by Washington, by the Kennedy administration. Previously secret government documents that have been recently released bear out what communists in Cuba and in the United States have explained for three decades--and what has been obvious to any objective observer of what the U.S. government has done, no matter what it has said. Using these records, the TV documentaries reported on the rising economic sabotage against Cuba in the early 1960s; the campaign of U.S.-organized terror and attempted assassinations carried out under the code name Operation Mongoose; and the large-scale preparations for a U.S. military assault aimed at doing what the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion had miserably failed to accomplish--crushing the revolution.¹

But I was struck in watching all of these documentaries by an inaccuracy that gave me a new insight into the importance of the political leverage communists have today through the use of our propaganda arsenal. Each of them portrayed what was happening in the United States at the time as universal mass hysteria. But if you lived through the missile crisis as a political person, as a revolutionist, you know that was not true.

The TV specials showed residents of the United States running into grocery stores to buy canned goods, taking them home, putting them in shelters, and carrying out air raid drills in schools and workplaces. The idea that everybody in the United States in 1962 joined together as "we Americans" and just waited in a patriotic panic for the Kennedys to incinerate the world is utterly inaccurate.

I lived through those days as a young person and as a relatively new member of the Young Socialist Alliance and Socialist Workers Party. I know from my own experience that there were thousands of people in the United States who worked round the clock to stop Washington from invading Cuba. We did not stock up on canned goods. In fact, we did not buy much of anything. We were too busy--we hardly had time to eat. We were organizing people to come down to the picket lines. I remember marching in downtown Chicago across the street from a Woolworth store, for example, where we had picketed earlier in support of civil rights sit-in fighters. Some people who worked at the store came out and supported the picket line.  
 
Response by communist movement
This single-minded effort was the response of the overwhelming majority of Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialist Alliance members of all generations. They responded to Washington's heightened war threats against Cuba with the immediacy of a revolutionary fighting instinct. This political course was discussed and decided by the party's Political Committee and the Young Socialist Alliance National Executive Committee and was carried in the news coverage, analysis, and editorial line in the pages of the Militant.

Pressures originating in bourgeois public opinion get translated into petty-bourgeois hysteria at such times, however, and these pressures are never without an echo inside the communist movement. The organizer of the Berkeley YSA, for example, literally jumped on his Kawasaki motorbike and rode off into the hills for several days in October 1962. The rest of the cadres noticed he was gone, but they didn't miss a beat. In the tense days following the assassination of U.S. President John Kennedy a year later, as the media was playing up reports that Lee Harvey Oswald was a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the same comrade went jelly-bellied again. Late one night he knocked on the apartment door of two other members of the chapter's executive committee and in a panicky voice informed them that, "as the new, young secondary leadership," they should be prepared to take charge.

But by then the Berkeley YSA was qualitatively stronger than a year before. The self-styled "primary leadership" was soon removed by decisive vote of the chapter's members and the "secondary leadership" became the new executive committee. The former organizer and the rest of the first string rapidly decided they had joined the wrong movement and went on their way.

The party went through a similar experience--and registered similar accomplishments--at the time of the near meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in 1979.

A bolshevik party is not and does not try to be monolithic. It does, however, strive for political homogeneity and common struggle experience to prepare for our inevitable responsibilities. In the crunch, it has had a helluva batting average.  
 
Political space inside working class
One of the most difficult things for capitalism's propagandists to understand and portray accurately is how a political vanguard of the working class reaches out to others to use and defend political space--as we did during the October missile crisis. Communists have no schemas or timetables. But we do know that the tensions inevitably rising from world capitalism's depression conditions and its inexorable march toward fascism and war keep leading not only to unanticipated crises, but also to resistance out of which vanguard workers can build a movement. Right now, we can anticipate that growing interest among working people and youth in radical ideas ignored by them in the past--or rejected without serious study--will keep ahead of the pace of mass popular struggles.

But these political realities cannot even be seen, much less understood, unless we recognize the space that exists inside the working class and the unions--space that can be used by revolutionary-minded workers to practice politics. This space is not seen or registered by anything in bourgeois public opinion. It can only be seen from inside the working class and the unions. It can best be seen by workers who are communists who are using that space to talk politics with other workers, to promote revolutionary literature, to bring co-workers and their unions into fights around social and political issues, and to participate in guerrilla skirmishes around conditions on the job. Without using this political space, the tensions just seem like tensions, the openings are missed, and the space will be diminished over time.  
 
Working-class vanguard, political space
As I was watching those television specials last month, I realized that as a young revolutionist during the missile crisis I had learned a little bit about using political space. I was not fully conscious at the time of everything I was learning, but it turned out to be very useful. That is why I was so struck by the inaccuracy of that aspect of the documentaries. There are people at this meeting tonight--not a whole lot, but not just two or three either--who became different people during those ten days in October 1962, and not because they went out and bought canned goods. They developed a deeper political relationship with others in the YSA and SWP who were working together unflinchingly along the same lines.

During the crisis, I never thought there was going to be a nuclear war. I am not misremembering--I genuinely never thought so. I did know that the U.S. rulers were driving to start a war to crush the socialist revolution in Cuba, and I knew that they would put the future of the world in stupendous danger if they did so. So, like thousands of others, I spent day and night trying to stop that from happening. We saw there was space to do this, and we used it. What is more, as we did so we won some new, young fighters to the communist movement who were strengthened and given greater staying power by the test of fire.

Today there are opportunities to win a new generation of revolutionists to the Socialist Workers Party. Many of them right now will not initially come out of a revitalized labor movement. Through the proletarian party, however, they can be won to join in building a leadership that can organize the working class to make a popular revolution and prevent the fascist devastation and world war that capitalism is dragging humanity toward. Fighters from this generation will reach out to find parties of revolutionists who are workers, revolutionists who have some experience in the class struggle. They will want to emulate communist workers who have learned to defend and use space within the organizations of the working class, and who can show them how to do politics--how to do working-class politics, a differentiation most of these fighters will not have thought about beforehand.

This is the kind of working-class experience that nobody will ever get through election campaigns. This is the kind of politics that for bourgeois public opinion does not exist.
 
 
1. On April 17, 1961, 1,500 Cuban-born mercenaries invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs on the southern coast. The action, organized by Washington, aimed to establish a "provisional government" to appeal for direct U.S. intervention. The invaders, however, were defeated within seventy-two hours by Cuba's militia and its Revolutionary Armed Forces. On April 19 the last invaders surrendered at Playa Girón (Girón Beach), which is the name Cubans use to designate the battle. The day before the abortive invasion, at a mass rally called to honor those killed or wounded in U.S.-organized attacks on airfields in Havana, Santiago de Cuba, and San Antonio de los Baños, Fidel Castro had proclaimed the socialist character of the revolution in Cuba and called the people of Cuba to arms in its defense.
 
 
Related articles:
'Cuban revolution is the achievement of millions'
Defense at Miami trial exposes anti-Cuba lies
Build Cuba-U.S. youth exchange
'We knew we were defending the gains of the revolution'
Conference event presents books on Playa Girón
Cuban groups invite U.S. youth to Havana for summer exchange
 
 
 
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