Just as last year’s celebrations in Holguín had been, this one too was, as Cuban President Fidel Castro put it in his speech, a “Sandinista event.”

Castro had returned to Cuba only one day earlier after a week’s stay in Nicaragua. While there he not only addressed a rally of half a million in Managua July 19—the first anniversary of the Sandinista revolution—but also visited workplaces and farms, spoke to thousands at impromptu rallies at several cities, and held meetings with trade-union activists, militants of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), and with a large group of Catholic priests and nuns who support the revolution.  
 
August 8, 1955
“It’s a project for peace,” the Eisenhower administration said in announcing plans July 30 for sending a man-made satellite cruising around the earth. At a press conference attended by prominent scientists, James C. Hagerty, White House press secretary, said the satellite would be launched “entirely for scientific purposes.”

In reality the fanfare about “purely scientific purposes” conceals quite other aims. According to Hanson W. Baldwin, well-informed military expert of the N.Y. Times, the satellite project grows out of military research and development with rocket missiles whose end product is “the so-called ‘I.B.M.’—or intercontinental ballistic missile.”

The advantage of such a weapon, says Baldwin, is that “it would nullify all known systems of detection, interception and defense, and would expose—literally—virtually all the cities on earth to almost instantaneous destruction from these giant rockets.”  
 
August 15, 1930
The advance of Fascism has alarmed the proletariat. The results of the Saxony elections are thoroughly discussed in all the factories, at the registry offices, wherever workers gather.

But it is not the Saxony elections alone that have refuted the blinded leadership of our Party.

In the days that Fascism utilized to prepare a mighty advance, the period of the coalition government, in this period the Central Committee of our Party did not see the growth of Fascism at all, but intoxicated itself with its own, slowly crumbling strength. On January 21, 1930, the Rote Fahne proclaimed:

“The German proletariat is marching to the attack with the slogan: Dictatorship of the Proletariat!”

This reckless self-intoxication, combined with the block-headed theory of “social fascism,” crippled the Party.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home