The world youth festival was attended by some 6,500 young workers and students from 160 countries. Forums, speakouts, and informal get-togethers were held during the nine-day event.

Hawkins said that the conference in Algiers helped young people to see the need to begin with an international working-class perspective. The participation in the festival by thousands of youth, mainly from countries oppressed by the imperialist powers, helped bring home this point. They described the battle for national liberation and the struggles of workers, peasants, and students in their countries.

Jack Willey, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party who attended both conferences, said the world youth festival registered that while still in its infancy, "the anti-imperialist youth movement is the beginning of putting together a worldwide anti-imperialist movement--for all toilers, not just youth."

Organizers of the Algiers festival invited a wide range of groups which supported the anti-imperialist aims of the gathering to attend. This encouraged discussion and debate by participants with a wide range of views on a host of central political questions facing working people today.

Members of the Cuban delegation, about 750 in number, described in a number of forums how the Cuban Revolution triumphed in 1959, and why the country's independence, sovereignty, and social accomplishments would be impossible without having made a socialist revolution. Delegation members raised the point of view that the way forward for humanity was to not only overthrow pro-imperialist governments but for workers and peasants to take power in order to end capitalism and build a different kind of society.

Bobbi Negrón, Young Socialists member from St. Paul and a meat packer, reported that delegates from around the world in Algiers were surprised to learn that there are socialists in the United States and that there are workers and youth who study Marxism here. "Others said that we have a democracy in the United States and wondered why we would be opposed to the government. This would lead to discussions about the resistance of workers and farmers to the assaults by the employers and their government in the United States and the fact that it is the tiny minority of superwealthy rulers that run the country," Negrón said.

A month earlier, 158 young people from the United States traveled to Havana, to participate in the Cuba-U.S. Youth Exchange. Holly Santiago, a student from St. Cloud University, and Lawrence Mikesh, a meat packer and member of the Young Socialists, were both part of the Minnesota delegation and spoke on the panel at the forum.

Mikesh spoke about how the "battle for ideas" in Cuba today -- political initiatives by the communist leadership -- aimed at young people who were not part of the generations who carried out the revolutionary war, nor of internationalist missions in Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere through the 1980s.

Santiago said she went to Cuba with an open mind. She explained how, just months earlier, she had thought Cuba was an undemocratic and repressive country. "Like with many misconceptions we're taught, I questioned this and decided to go to Cuba to see for myself." she told the forum. At St. Cloud University she has been part of a fight against anti-Semitic and racist acts by the administration toward instructors.

Santiago said, like many students, she works long hours to support herself while attending school. She pointed to the solidarity among the Cuban people, especially the attention to education of the youth and care for the old. "I want to bring all of this information to the fights that we are involved in here," Santiago told the meeting.

Becky Ellis is a sewing machine operator.
 
 
Related article:
Cuba-U.S. exchange part of 'battle of ideas'  
 
 
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