LONDON--A meeting here to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Cubans' victory at the Bay of Pigs drew 300 people April 19. Featured speakers at the event were José Fernández de Cossio, the Cuban ambassador to Britain; Victoria Britain, a reporter for the national daily, the Guardian; and Labour Party Member of Parliament Jeremy Corbyn. The meeting was organized by the Cuba Solidarity Campaign (CSC).
In less than 72 hours of combat during April 1961 Cuba's revolutionary militia, police, and armed forces defeated an invasion by 1,500 mercenaries armed, trained, supported, and deployed by the U.S. government.
A feature of the April 19 program was a 30-minute film made by Cuban reporters and press photographers who were at Playa Girón (Girón beach) in 1961 to report on the battle. Girón is where the main force of mercenary invaders attempted to establish a beachhead, but were routed by tenacity of the Cuban revolutionary forces. The film also contains interviews with Cuban combatants who fought to defend their country in the historic conflict.
CSC national coordinator Steve Wilkinson, who chaired the event, welcomed the participants to the meeting and encouraged everyone to buy the two books displayed on the literature table in the foyer: Playa Girón/Bay of Pigs: Washington's First Military Defeat in the Americas, recently published by Pathfinder, and Bay of Pigs and the CIA, published by Ocean Press. Some 30 copies of each title were purchased by those attending the meeting.
A week later some 40 people attended a meeting to launch the new Playa Girón title at the Pathfinder Bookshop here. The book features excerpts of several speeches before and after the battle by Fidel Castro, commander of the Cuban military forces, and the 1999 testimony by José Ramón Fernández before a Havana court detailing the background to the April 1961 victory. Fernández, currently Cuba's vice president of the Council of Ministers, is a retired brigadier general in Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces. He commanded the main forces at Playa Girón that engaged and routed the mercenary invaders.
Manuel Rubido, first secretary of the Cuban Embassy, said in his remarks that although he had not been born in 1961, his generation hoped they too could have the opportunity to accomplish what their parents and grandparents did in defeating the U.S.-backed mercenaries.
Rubido pointed to the history of Washington's military intervention against Cuba since the rise of U.S. imperialism at the end of the 1800s, as well as its war against the people of Vietnam and its backing of the 1975 invasion of Angola by the apartheid regime in South Africa. The Cuban government responded to a request by the newly independent Angolan government for military assistance over the next decade to repel the invasions.
Rubido, who during this time was a young reserve officer, said the call by the Angolan government gave men and women of his generation in Cuba their chance to emulate what earlier generations achieved. "The struggle in Angola took longer than the battle at Playa Girón," he said, "but we were also victorious following the historic battle at Cuito Cuanavale. It made me appreciate better the revolutionary changes we have made in Cuba."
Jonathan Silberman, a car worker and a member of the Transport and General Workers' Union, spoke for Pathfinder. Silberman said the U.S. administration of John F. Kennedy in ordering the invasion in 1961 proceeded from the same reactionary class interests defended by successive administrations--their need of the superwealthy U.S. ruling class to overthrow the Cuban revolution and destroy the example it sets for working people around the world.
The book helps workers, farmers, and young people "learn from the revolutionary experiences of working people in Cuba and to see it's possible to take on the imperialist rulers and win," he said.
Mark Ladbrooke, from the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, told the meeting about the work the CSC is organizing, such as a Trade Unions for Cuba Solidarity Conference scheduled in London later this year. Ladbrooke encouraged participants in the meeting to purchase and study the new Pathfinder title. Four copies of Playa Girón were sold at the meeting along with two subscriptions to the Militant and one to Perspectiva Mundial. The Pathfinder Bookshop in London has now sold 44 copies of Playa Girón.