I would also like to take this occasion to thank the many other compañeros and compañeras, both those of you who are here today and others who were unable to make it, who have generously given their time and energies in the last several years to help make Playa Girón as well as other titles published by Pathfinder--such as Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War, Pombo: a Man of Che's 'guerrilla', Making History, and From the Escambray to the Congo--the lasting and valuable contributions they are. Many of you have helped verify biographical data and other information for the glossaries and annotation, identified photos, reviewed maps, and contributed in countless other ways. These books are the product of a genuinely collective effort for which we thank you.
 

Richard Bissell, the Central Intelligence Agency's director of covert operations at the beginning of the 1960s, was the top-level government bureaucrat responsible for the concrete planning and implementation of Washington's mercenary invasion at the Bay of Pigs. Shortly before his death a few years ago, Bissell published an autobiographical memoir entitled Reflections of a Cold Warrior.

In that book he describes exchanges that took place in the White House strategy sessions leading up to the Bay of Pigs landing. Then Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Bissell writes, "used to ask (quite sensibly, I thought) whether something couldn't be done with 'silver bullets.'"

Rusk, Bissell continues, thought "that even in a well-run covert operation one should try to bribe one's enemies rather than fight them." Bissell's comment on Rusk's approach is brief, to the point, and despairing:

"Unfortunately, this would not have worked in Cuba."

For me, this little story, as told by the enemy many years later, captures the historic dilemma facing the U.S. rulers and underscores what is the heart and soul of this wonderful book, Playa Girón/ Bay of Pigs: Washington's First Military Defeat in the Americas.

The imperialist rulers never stopped to ask themselves: If the Revolutionary Armed Forces, the Revolutionary National Police, and popular militias of Cuba were so solid they could not be divided or bought, why did they think they would be able to defeat revolutionary Cuba with an invasion by some 1,500 Cuban counterrevolutionary mercenaries? The answer, I believe, is not that officials of the aging Eisenhower and callow Kennedy administrations were crazy, stupid, or incompetent. To the contrary. As Fernández notes in his testimony, their military plan was well conceived.

Their problem was a class problem. The old Eisenhower hands and the young New Frontiersmen alike so discounted the revolutionary capacities of the workers and farmers who would crush the mercenary invasion in fewer than 72 hours that they truly could not even recognize these compañeros' existence. They could not believe that a few thousand cane cutters, bricklayers, campesinos, and "niños héroes," with a leadership worthy of them, were more powerful than all the firepower Washington had supplied to the invaders.

As Fidel and Fernández, each in his own words, insist throughout the pages of Playa Girón, the U.S. rulers "failed to measure the moral relationship of forces."

"They did their mathematical calculations as if...they were coming to take a beachhead in Normandy," Che noted a few weeks after the victory. But they miscalculated the determination of the Cuban people to defend the society they were building on new foundations.

Pathfinder decided to publish this book to mark the 40th anniversary of the victory at Playa Girón because these are truths that need to be told today. Through the speeches by Fidel, Raúl, and Che; the testimony of compañero Fernández; the dozens of pages of photos, charts, and maps, young people in the United States and elsewhere, born many years after the historic events that are at the center of the book, can begin to absorb what happened at the Bay of Pigs and why. They can begin to understand what enabled the people of Cuba to inflict a defeat on the Yankee empire so total and ignominious that it remains an example today that inspires the oppressed and exploited the world over.

And it remains an example that can, and will, be emulated and repeated, including in the United States itself.
 

For us, Playa Girón is not only a book through which we learn about the Cuban Revolution. It is a book about the class struggle in the United States. Among the many elements it contains is a foreword that tells the story of what a generation of young communists-in-becoming were doing at the time on campuses and in workplaces across the United States to mobilize opposition to the U.S.-organized invasion, build the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, and recruit to a small but growing movement of revolutionary young socialists.

Only a few weeks prior to the invasion--in a March 13, 1961, speech marking the fourth anniversary of the attack on Batista's Presidential Palace in which a number of courageous young Cuban revolutionists had been killed--Fidel made what was to some the startling statement: "We will see a victorious revolution in the United States before we see a victorious counterrevolution in Cuba."

For our part, many of us in the United States who, under the impact of the Cuban Revolution and rising struggle for Black rights, were coming to revolutionary conclusions had fewer and fewer doubts that Fidel was right. We set out to do what we could to learn and understand what it was that could allow Fidel to come to such a judgment, with its far-reaching implications. We became more and more determined to discover the concrete dynamics of the politics of the class struggle in the United States and, even more importantly, how to accelerate making Fidel's judgment the historic reality.

In the process, through our own concrete experiences as revolutionists of action, we, like many of you here in Cuba, soon discovered we were communists.

This is a story that is amplified in another of Pathfinder's new titles available here at the book fair, Cuba and the Coming American Revolution. We hope many of you will have an opportunity to read it.
 

When the imperialist rulers go to war, the pace of politics accelerates among layers of young people and thinking workers. The broadening resistance to the effects of the lawful and brutal workings of finance capital sharpens its contradictions both at home and in its ceaseless attempts to impose itself around the world.

The devastating economic and social crisis that is rocking Argentina and foretells the future that capitalism has in store for us all; the mounting U.S. government-engineered efforts by the Venezuelan capitalists and landowners to organize a coup to overturn the Chávez government; the war of conquest in Afghanistan and expanding turmoil in South Asia; the assault on the democratic rights of working people inside the United States--all are having a politicizing impact on young people, especially.

That is when books like Playa Girón are needed more than ever, and this political fact has been registered in the sales figures for the first ten months. Since last April Pathfinder has shipped out more than 2,100 copies of Playa Girón in English and nearly 1,300 in Spanish.

If this book helps young readers understand that Washington's defeat flowed not from blunders by the CIA or vacillations by the administration of U.S. president John F. Kennedy, but from the strength, preparedness, and determination of the Cuban people to defend their newly conquered freedoms and social justice--and if it inspires them to become the same sort of people--then for us Playa Girón will have served its purpose.

We are also pleased if this book can be a weapon in the battle of ideas being waged here in Cuba as well. And for that reason, on behalf of the communist workers and socialist youth whose labor and support makes it possible to produce this book and others like it, we brought with us as a donation some 50 copies of the hardback edition of the book in Spanish that we know will be put to good use by its authors.

In Washington the imperialist political parties, Democrats and Republicans alike, today discount the revolutionary capacities of working people in the United States as thoroughly as they discounted those of the workers and farmers of Cuba on the eve of Playa Girón. And just as wrongly.

It is in that spirit that we hope these books will be accepted--as an expression of our conviction that Fidel's judgment that "we will see a victorious revolution in the United States before a victorious counterrevolution in Cuba" remains as true today as when he pronounced those words 40 years ago.
 
 
Related articles:
Book on U.S. defeat at Bay of Pigs is presented in Havana
'They fear ideas, they fear Cuba's example'
 
 
 
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