Dreke fought in the Cuban revolutionary war, led by the Rebel Army, that overthrew the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship in January 1959. In the early 1960s, he was a commander of the volunteer battalions that fought the U.S-organized counterrevolutionary bands in the Escambray mountains of central Cuba. In 1965 he was second in command of the column of Cuban internationalist volunteers, headed by Ernesto Che Guevara, that joined with national liberation fighters in the Congo. He subsequently carried out numerous internationalist missions in Africa.

Mary-Alice Waters, president of Pathfinder Press, and Luis Madrid, a Pathfinder editor, conducted the first session of the interview with Dreke in Havana on Oct. 26, 1999. Pathfinder editor Michael Taber and Perspectiva Mundial editor Martín Koppel, together with Waters, conducted a second interview session on Dec. 2, 2001.

This book is scheduled to be released in February, with simultaneous editions in English and Spanish. Copyright © 2002 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.
 

"My father wasn't for Batista, he was against Batista. But he didn't believe in anyone. 'Don't join anything,' he'd say. 'Things will always stay the same. One side wins now, the other side wins later, and the ones with money will always be in power. Study and get an education and don't mess with strikes or any of that. It won't get you anywhere. Besides, that stuff's not for blacks.'

"That was my father's way of looking at things. And I think this was how many blacks in Cuba looked at things. Until the victory of the revolution.

"Fortunately, I didn't listen."

The whirlwind events of the early years of the Cuban Revolution, along with men and women whose actions changed the course of history, come alive in these pages through the rich detail of Dreke's account, providing evidence that sí se puede. Things need not "always stay the same."

Rebel-minded young people the world over will find it easy to identify with Víctor Dreke and the way he responded to conditions around him. He tells how he and thousands of men and women like him--workers, farmers, students, shopkeepers and street vendors, most still in their teens and early twenties--simply began fighting for a more just world following the March 10, 1952, military coup that installed the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.

Batista's regime quickly became one of the most brutal tyrannies Latin America had yet seen. "We were ready to die" to bring down Batista, Dreke says, "but we didn't know the first thing about revolution."

In his account of how easy it became after the 1959 victory of the Cuban Revolution to "take down the rope" that for decades had segregated blacks from whites at dances in the town squares, yet how enormous was the battle to transform the social relations underlying this and all the other "ropes"--inherited from colonialism, capitalism, and Yankee domination--Dreke captures the historical challenge of our epoch. At the heart of this book lies the willingness, determination, and creative joy with which Cuba's working people, for over forty years, have defended their revolutionary course when confronted by the imperialist empire to the north, a power whose vital interests the world over are threatened by the outreaching dynamic and ongoing example of the new class order in Cuba.

As the Batista dictatorship crumbled on January 1, 1959, in face of a rising tide of mass popular resistance and the military advances of the small Rebel Army commanded by Fidel Castro, the U.S. government accelerated efforts to defend the property and privileges of Cuba's ruling class along with the vast landed estates and industrial monopolies held by American corporations and wealthy families. To Washington's amazement, the young revolutionary government could neither be intimidated nor bought off. Every act of Yankee aggression was met by growing millions of determined toilers of city and countryside who swelled the ranks of the revolution and pushed it forward, transforming themselves in the process.

The first free territory of the Americas was born.

Decades later, Washington can still neither forgive nor forget. It continues to turn every effort to destroy the living example of Cuba's workers and farmers. It looks for every opportunity to punish them for the audacity of having thrown off the imperialist boot and making a socialist revolution on Washington's doorstep. For the audacity of neither bowing to the empire nor accepting its rules and definitions.

On July 26, 1953, when 160 mostly young, determined opponents of the Batista dictatorship simultaneously attacked the Moncada garrison in Santiago de Cuba and the Carlos Manuel de Céspedes garrison in nearby Bayamo, they were, like Víctor Dreke, still far from being the conscious communists they became in the course of struggles to come. "We learned Marxism from books, but above all we learned it from life," Cuban President Fidel Castro said twelve years later at a mass rally in Santa Clara.

What were we on July 26, he asked? "Among the books they seized from us after the attack on the Moncada barracks were books of Martí and Lenin," Castro noted, but he and his compañeros were not Marxists or Leninists. "We still had much to learn, much to understand. We understood some of the essential principles of Marxism, the reality of class society divided into exploited and exploiters. We understood the role of the masses in history. But we had not yet deepened our consciousness and our revolutionary education enough to understand, in all its profundity and magnitude, the phenomenon of imperialism....That we learned about in our own flesh."

Through Dreke's eyes and experiences we see the history-shaping class battles unfold. Following the lines of his story, we come to understand how millions like him were transformed from inexperienced if unflinchingly courageous revolutionary youth into seasoned proletarian leaders of a people who have proven themselves capable of defying the demands and multifaceted aggressions of the Yankee rulers for nearly half a century.

And we see both the shape and the scope of the revolutionary class battles still to come across the Americas and around the globe.
 

From the Escambray to the Congo: In the Whirlwind of the Cuban Revolution opens a window on one of the chapters of the revolutionary struggle in Cuba that is neither well known nor understood outside that country. It tells a piece of the story of the more than six-year-long battle to eliminate the CIA-backed counterrevolutionary bands--"bandits," as Cubans across the island came to call them. Although the bandits operated from one end of the country to the other, their actions were concentrated in the Escambray mountains of Las Villas province in central Cuba.

During the opening years of the Cuban Revolution, nearly 4,000 bandits organized in 299 groups were armed, trained, supported, and financed by the U.S. government. They were instruments of a policy of sabotage and terror designed to drain the resources and demoralize the supporters of the revolution.

The first counterrevolutionary band appeared in 1959 in the westernmost province of Pinar del Río. The last group of bandits was eliminated in the central province of Camagüey in 1965. But more than half of those counterrevolutionary forces operated in the Escambray, where over 2,000 were killed or captured, and 295 defenders of the revolution--nearly double the number of those who fell at Playa Girón--lost their lives in the struggle against them.

Víctor Dreke was commander in the Escambray region of the special Lucha Contra Bandidos (LCB) [struggle against the bandits] battalions of workers and peasants established in mid-1962 by the Revolutionary Armed Forces. He was second in command of the LCB overall.

Located in the middle of the island, the Escambray is a large mountainous region in which communications are difficult. More decisive than geographical considerations, however, were the political factors that led Washington to choose the Escambray as the base for counterrevolutionary operations.

As Dreke describes, the revolutionary struggle against the Batista dictatorship came late to the Escambray, a region long scarred by petty tyranny, corruption, and banditry. The guerrilla column established by the student-based March 13 Revolutionary Directorate began operations in February 1958, more than a year after the revolutionary war against the Batista dictatorship was already under way in the eastern Sierra Maestra mountains. The Rebel Army column headed by Ernesto Che Guevara arrived in Las Villas in mid-October, barely ten weeks before the fall of the tyranny, and unified, under Guevara's command, the revolutionary forces in the area. In the rebel-held territories, Guevara's November 8 Military Order no. 1 initiated agrarian reform in Las Villas, but there was little time to extend it, or to broaden revolutionary political work with the peasants of the region prior to the January 1 victory.

Complicating the political challenges in the Escambray was the existence of another armed group that presented itself as part of the forces fighting the dictatorship. Initially set up by the Revolutionary Directorate, and known as the Second National Front of the Escambray, it became an assortment largely of self-serving adventurers and ambitious power-seekers who turned the peasants against them by confiscating animals and crops, robbing families of supplies, raping women, and terrorizing those who resisted. After being expelled by the Revolutionary Directorate, the Second National Front continued operations in the region.

Revolutions develop unevenly. Inequalities between city and countryside, as well as social, economic, and other historically established differentiations from one region to another--and unique combinations of all these inheritances--are a legacy of capitalist relations and imperialist exploitation. How well a leadership wields state power to begin redressing such unevenness is a decisive test. As Cuban President Fidel Castro explained in a speech in Matanzas on the thirty-fifth anniversary of the 1961 defeat of the U.S.-organized invasion at the Bay of Pigs, the enemy picked the Escambray because "the Escambray was politically weak."

The counterrevolutionary bands there "had some help from the campesinos," from the peasants and rural toilers, Castro noted--"a minority of them, but support nevertheless--10, 15, or 20 percent, nobody could say exactly. But the war had developed in a different way there than in the Sierra Maestra. There was never the intense political work that had been done in the eastern provinces, and some of the groups in those areas had even committed abuses."

At the high point prior to the victory at Playa Girón, Castro pointed out, the counterrevolution "had 1,000 armed men in the Escambray who were experts in evading our forces. I won't call them cowards. There can be people who are mistaken and even very mistaken who are personally brave but not personally moral. One must never underestimate the enemy.

"But they were the opposite of us in the Sierra Maestra. In the Sierra Maestra we were always on the offensive, organizing ambushes, organizing strikes, and those people in the Escambray were always running away from the revolutionary troops." They were "waiting for the U.S. invasion," Castro said.

In late 1960, as Dreke relates, the whole world knew a landing of U.S.-trained forces was coming sooner rather than later. The revolutionary leadership decided to carry out what became known as the first limpia, the first cleanup operation to eliminate the counterrevolutionary bands that were being prepared as a fifth column.

"The revolutionary army mobilized the militias, encircled the entire Escambray and stationed a squad of militiamen in each house," Castro told an April 19, 1965, rally. The militiamen "went there with primers to teach the peasants to read and write. And they went there not only with the willingness to fight, but many of them put themselves to work there to help the peasants. The revolution mobilized 50,000 men.... We eliminated [the centers of the counterrevolution] before the invasion at Girón."

After the crushing defeat of the mercenary invasion at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961, the Kennedy administration organized once again to build up the counterrevolutionary bands in the Escambray. The bandits were able to win support from a layer of peasants because in that region actions carried out in the name of the revolution were in fact contrary to national policies being implemented elsewhere, a reflection of a broader political challenge within the revolution. Under the guise of carrying out the agrarian reform and eliminating support to the counterrevolution by a layer of rich farmers in the region, some leaders of the new government and Rebel Army in areas of Las Villas and neighboring Matanzas province confiscated crops and illegally expropriated farms.

These actions were "completely at variance with revolutionary law," said Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, at that time head of the National Institute of Agrarian Reform, known as INRA, in a report published in the May 1963 issue of Cuba Socialista. Rodríguez explained that resistance to these policies by small and middle farmers in 1961 led to a "perceptible drop in the planting and marketing of farm produce that was felt throughout 1962." After Playa Girón, he noted, "the CIA and its agents tried to strengthen the counterrevolutionary bands that had already been dealt a decisive blow by the beating they took in the Escambray." In response, he said, the revolutionary government "decreed the expropriation of the land of all farmers giving direct aid to the counterrevolution and of those holding land areas of 15 to 30 caballerías [500-1,000 acres] who gave them indirect aid or in some manner promoted counterrevolutionary positions." Rodríguez continued:

But when Fidel laid out this policy adopted by the National Leadership, he made it very clear that all those measures had to be taken with the participation and consideration of the small and middle farmers, in meetings of ANAP [National Association of Small Farmers], and without harming that section, encompassing a substantial percentage of the farmers.

Nevertheless, it is well known that serious errors were committed, particularly in Matanzas province. Revolutionary law was not respected. Poor and rich were hit indiscriminately, without taking into consideration all the circumstances in each case. Instead of discussing with the farmers themselves in order to decide what measures to take, in many places it was primarily agricultural workers who were called together. Carried only by their class feelings, they always tended towards expropriation.

Until the leading cadres responsible for the policy abuses were removed in early 1962, and the policies of the revolutionary government aimed at strengthening the worker-farmer alliance reinstituted, the disaffection among sizable layers of the peasantry gave political space to the counterrevolutionary bands.

"The enemy takes advantage of our weaknesses," Castro told an April 1962 leadership meeting, in a speech published the following month in Cuba Socialista. "But no enemy radio, no enemy campaign will prosper where it does not have a base to prosper, where there are not many people aggrieved, discontented, disgusted--no longer with the injustice that has been done to them, but with the injustice they've seen done to someone else, and that they think tomorrow could be done to them."

The revolutionary leadership corrected course and strengthened political work throughout the Escambray, as Dreke describes in some detail in these pages. On the military front, Castro explained at an April 19, 1965, rally, "we adopted another tactic" after the victory at Playa Girón. Instead of mobilizing tens of thousands of militia troops from across the country as was done for the first cleanup operation--which had to be done rapidly because of the impending invasion--the revolution organized the Lucha Contra Bandidos battalions. Made up of peasants and workers from the area, the LCB battalions "practically swept [the bandits] off the map. They hunted them in the caves where they hid themselves, in camouflaged areas, in holes. And they put them out of action."

With the successful conclusion of the battle to eradicate the counterrevolutionary bands in Cuba, "imperialism received a lesson no less important than it received at Playa Girón," Castro told a cheering throng a few months later in Santa Clara on July 26, 1965, celebrating the capture of the last groups of bandits. Washington learned that counterrevolutionary guerrilla forces could not prevail against the workers and peasants of Cuba, mobilized to defend a revolutionary course that strengthened the worker-farmer alliance, and with a communist leadership who by its actions had won the confidence of the masses of toilers. It was not primarily a question of military tactics, but of revolutionary class politics in the imperialist epoch. "The imperialists probably ask themselves," Castro said,

How is this possible with the millions of dollars that were spent, with the thousands and thousands of weapons they sent and brought into the country? How can it be possible that without mobilizing any more fighters than those from the mountainous regions of Las Villas, their counterrevolutionary bands were annihilated?

Guerrilla warfare is a formidable weapon, but it's a revolutionary weapon. Guerrilla warfare is a formidable weapon when fighting against exploitation, against colonialism, against imperialism. But guerrilla warfare will never be an adequate or useful instrument for counterrevolution, for the imperialists to fight against the exploited, to fight against the people. We hope they have learned this lesson well....

In case they have not learned the lesson, however, we are keeping our Lucha Contra Bandidos battalions organized!... And the peasants in the Escambray are organized into mountain companies just like the peasants of Oriente province. They are trained and armed. So for the enemy our mountains now constitute impenetrable bastions of the revolution.

From the Escambray to the Congo also opens a window on another chapter of the Cuban Revolution about which little has been written until recently--the 1965 internationalist mission of 128 Cuban volunteers, headed by Argentine-born Cuban revolutionary leader Ernesto Che Guevara, to aid the national liberation struggle in the Congo.

In April 1999 Guevara's assessment of that mission, written some thirty-three years earlier, was published for the first time. In writing Episodes of the Revolutionary War: Congo, Che drew on the campaign diary he had maintained throughout the mission. Che "subjected his notes on the struggle to a deep critical analysis," Aleida Guevara March wrote in the 1998 foreword to her father's book. She emphasized that "Che is critical and direct in the hope that his document will make it possible to analyze the errors and ensure that they are not made again."

Release of the full text as edited by Che involved "a major obligation to history" for another reason, Aleida Guevara said, since major excerpts of other versions "corresponding to Che's first transcriptions" had already appeared in print in Mexico and France.

The column of Cuban volunteers went to the Congo in 1965 at the request of leaders of that country's national liberation movement and with the agreement of numerous African governments. Its aim was to provide military training to, and to fight alongside, the uneasy alliance of forces who were part of the movement that had supported slain Congolese independence leader Patrice Lumumba. They were struggling to prevent the consolidation of a semicolonial regime supported by the country's murderous former colonial master, Belgium, and the U.S. imperialist government. White mercenary forces from South Africa and Rhodesia had been brought in to do much of the fighting.

Víctor Dreke was the deputy commander of Che's column in the Congo. As he says in this interview, which took place in Havana a few months after publication of Guevara's book, "helping to tell this story is a responsibility I have, a historic duty." Unlike Che, who died in Bolivia less than two years after the Congo mission, Víctor Dreke is able to place the experience in a much longer historical perspective.

Guevara's preface to Episodes of the Revolutionary War: Congo (published in English under the inaccurate title, The African Dream: The Diaries of the Revolutionary War in the Congo) begins with the statement, "This is the history of a failure." Any importance the story might have, Che wrote, "lies in the fact that it allows the experiences to be extracted for the use of other revolutionary movements."

Guevara was unflinching and unambiguous in his judgment, Dreke notes. And it's not that Che was wrong at the time. "Every word Che wrote, absolutely every letter, without changing so much as a comma, happened the way Che said." But "he left the door open so that later others could give their opinion, and it could be analyzed with the passage of time and events."

Che "would make a different assessment if he were doing it now," Dreke insists. "I'm absolutely sure of that. He'd continue to say we should've won, that we were fighting to win and didn't. But there are things you'll see in the book that Che blames himself for, and when you analyze the situation you'll see they weren't Che's fault at all.... One hundred and twenty-eight men can't change the characteristics of an African country."

Simultaneous with the volunteer mission led by Guevara, another column of Cuban internationalists--led by Jorge Risquet and Rolando Kindelán--was hundreds of miles to the west in Congo-Brazzaville aiding popular militia units in that country and helping to train and equip combatants of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola. The MPLA, as it was known, had recently opened a new front against the Portuguese colonizers, who still ruled vast stretches of southern Africa. Dreke, like Aleida Guevara in her foreword to Episodes of the Revolutionary War: Congo, explains that the lessons learned from these initial internationalist missions in sub-Saharan Africa laid the foundations on which successful volunteer efforts were carried out over the next twenty-five years in Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, and elsewhere.

Most decisive of all was the mission to Angola that began ten years later, in November 1975, when the white-supremacist regime in South Africa, with de facto backing from Washington, invaded that country in an attempt to block the Angolan people from realizing the fruits of their hard-won independence from Portugal, the last European power maintaining colonies on the continent. The operation ended some thirteen years later--after more than 300,000 Cuban volunteers had participated in the struggle--when the South African government was forced to withdraw its troops. That withdrawal followed a crushing defeat of the armed forces of the apartheid regime at the southern Angolan city of Cuito Cuanavale by the combined forces of the Cuban volunteers, the Angolan army, and Namibia's SWAPO (South West Africa People's Organisation). In subsequent negotiations, South Africa ceded independence to Namibia as well, and the death knell of apartheid itself was sounded in February 1990 by the unbanning of the African National Congress and release of Nelson Mandela after twenty-seven years of imprisonment.

As Mandela told a mass rally in Cuba's Matanzas province in July 1991, "The defeat of the apartheid army was an inspiration to the struggling people inside South Africa! Without the defeat of Cuito Cuanavale our organizations would not have been unbanned! The defeat of the racist army at Cuito Cuanavale has made it possible for me to be here today!... Cuito Cuanavale has been a turning point in the struggle to free the continent and our country from the scourge of apartheid!"

In November 1985, in a ceremony marking the twentieth anniversary of the two columns that served in the Congo and Congo-Brazzaville, Cuban Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces Raúl Castro told the assembled volunteers that the participation of hundreds of thousands of Cubans in internationalist missions to Angola over the preceding decade

is highly revealing, not only about the historical significance of the mission entrusted to you twenty years ago, but also about how much the relationship of forces on a world scale has evolved in favor of the causes of national liberation and social progress, and how much our internationalist consciousness has matured.

Two decades ago more than three hundred men made up the two columns we are honoring. The highest praise we can pay to that campaign, which was a precursor, is to be able to say that every one of you has been multiplied a thousandfold in your noble pledge to pay back with your very lives, if necessary, our debt of gratitude to humanity.

Today, responding not as suffering victims but as a fighting humanity determined to resist the rapidly accelerating ravages of imperialist domination, new winds of struggle are stirring throughout Africa. This was registered in Algiers in the summer of 2001 at the 15th World Festival of Youth and Students, where young people from across broad stretches of the continent came searching hungrily for speeches and writings by African Marxist leaders such as Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso, proletarian internationalists such as Ernesto Che Guevara, and other leaders of the modern working-class movement from its founding by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels 150 years ago to today.

Surprisingly large crowds, young and old, are pressing into theaters in the United States and elsewhere around the world to see the film Lumumba, trying to learn the truth about such deliberately distorted chapters in the history of our common struggles.

It is a world in which the internationalism of the Cuban Revolution, as represented by people such as Che Guevara and Víctor Dreke, will be studied and learned from with growing interest and in which the true historic measure of the Congo mission they took part in will be taken.

"Our country, the only socialist bastion at the gates of Yankee imperialism, sends its soldiers to fight and die in a foreign land, on a distant continent, and assumes full public responsibility for its actions," wrote Che Guevara in his account of the Congo mission. "This challenge, this clear position with regard to the great contemporary issue of relentless struggle against Yankee imperialism, defines the heroic significance of our participation in the struggle of the Congo."

For more than forty years, the working people of Cuba and their leadership have remained an unbending source of clarity--and decisive action--"with regard to the great contemporary issue of relentless struggle against Yankee imperialism."

In September 1990, when Washington sought cover from the fifteen-member United Nations Security Council for the murderous bombardment and invasion of Iraq being prepared by the imperialist powers, the Cuban delegation--which held one of the ten revolving seats on the Council at that time--voted against the U.S.-initiated resolution. "Cuba voted against it, the only country to do so!" said Fidel Castro in a speech to the Cuban people soon afterwards. "We had the honor and glory of being the only country to vote 'No'!"

A decade later, in November 2001, Cuban foreign minister Felipe Pérez Roque began his remarks to the opening session of the United Nations General Assembly, declaring, "The war in Afghanistan must be stopped." The U.S. government must halt its "unjustifiable bombing campaign against that people," which "has targeted children, the civilian population and International Red Cross hospitals and facilities as enemies. As to its methods, no honest voice would rise in this hall to defend an endless slaughter--with the most sophisticated weaponry--of a dispossessed, starving, helpless people.... Those responsible for it will one day be judged by history." Pérez Roque went on, in the name of the Cuban government, to strongly condemn the terrorist attacks of September 11.

Attempting to blunt the force of Cuba's unequivocal stand, John Negroponte, chief U.S. representative to the United Nations, told the New York Times that he welcomed the "almost universal" condemnation of terrorism and support for Washington's murderous course expressed by the representatives of governments who had spoken from the General Assembly's marble rostrum. The Cuban declaration, however, was "outlandish" and "totally unwarranted," he said. Even Iraq's "negative statement," Negroponte proclaimed, "was not as strident and vitriolic" as Cuba's.

Cuba's decades-long internationalism and revolutionary intransigence, however, are neither "strident" nor "vitriolic," let alone "unwarranted." To the contrary, for politically conscious workers, farmers, and youth the world over, the Cuban Revolution's course--as related in these pages by Víctor Dreke--remains living proof that in the tumultuous anti-imperialist battles and revolutionary class struggles to come in the twenty-first century, there are very good reasons today to "join something" and "take sides." Things will not always stay the same.
 

The interview with Víctor Dreke took place in Havana, October 26, 1999, with a second session on December 2, 2001. The interview was arranged with the encouragement and support of the leadership of the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution, especially Division General Néstor López Cuba, vice president of its Executive Secretariat at the time of his death on October 15, 1999.

Víctor Dreke himself, with great good humor, devoted many hours to reviewing the manuscript, explaining details, and securing maps, photos, and documents.

Ana Morales Varela and Iraida Aguir-rechu helped clarify and expand the contents of the interview; their knowledge and animated interest kept us all going. Each of them also provided considerable editorial help through a close read of the manuscript and assistance in locating photos, maps, biographical information, and other materials that make the book more accurate, accessible, and enjoyable to all.

Special thanks for assistance in preparing the glossary is due to Commander Faure Chomón, member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, who commanded the forces of the March 13 Revolutionary Directorate in the Escambray in 1958, and to Col. Armando Martínez, a combatant of the July 26 Movement's urban underground, a veteran of internationalist missions, and former deputy head of the Political Directorate of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba.

Aleida March, director of Che's Personal Archive, provided several photos, including the one of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Víctor Dreke that appears on the back cover, taken on the eve of Guevara's and Dreke's departure for the 1965 internationalist mission to the Congo.

The Antonio Núñez Jiménez Foundation for Nature and Humanity authorized use of a number of the historic photos in its collection. Carmen Ibáñez of Granma, Manuel Martínez of Bohemia, and Dixie López of Verdo Olivo searched the archives of those publications to locate many of the other photos that appear in these pages, and offered other assistance.

Hermes Caballero, veteran of the November 30, 1956, uprising in Santiago de Cuba, assumed responsibility for innumerable research tasks.

Luis Madrid, a staff editor of Pathfinder Press, participated in the first interview session with Víctor Dreke and was responsible for editing the text in Spanish. He was assisted by Martín Koppel, editor of Perspectiva Mundial, who took part in the second session.

Editing of the English translation as well as preparation of the annotation and glossary were the work of Pathfinder editor Michael Taber, who also participated in the second interview session.

A large team of volunteers around the world made possible the production of the book, which is being published simultaneously in both English and Spanish. Transcription and translation of the interview were the work of Marty Anderson, Eva Chertov, Paul Coltrin, Carlos Cornejo, Sabás Herrera, Ruth Nebbia, Andrés Pérez, Alejandra Rincón, Aaron Ruby, Mirta Vidal, and Matilde Zimmermann.

Eric Simpson designed the photo pages, and together with Mike Shur, prepared the maps. Eva Braiman designed the cover and text.

The Pathfinder Reprint Project volunteers copyedited, formatted, and proofread the text, assuring that it is was print-ready and substantially free of typographical errors.

The combined labors of all made possible this contribution to our knowledge and understanding of the Cuban Revolution and its place in the modern history of working people the world over who are fighting against exploitation and racism and for national liberation and socialist revolution--the only future for humanity.

December 2001  
 
 
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