The Militant (logo)  

Vol. 78/No. 38      October 27, 2014

 
Cuba’s aid to Africa helps
spur interest in ‘Militant’
(front page)
 
BY MAGGIE TROWE
Militant supporters have put Cuba’s volunteer medical mission to fight Ebola in Africa; the battle by Kurdish fighters in Kobani, Syria; examples of labor resistance; and the fight against police brutality at the center of their discussions as they knock on workers’ doors and join in labor and social protests.

The drive to win 2,400 new and renewing readers is doing well, with 1,769 subscriptions at the end of the fifth week of the seven-week drive. Workers behind bars who support the Militant have already surpassed their quota for the drive, with 23 subscriptions.

“Cuban doctors going to Africa are like the ones who staff the free clinics in Haiti,” Mirlande Jean-Baptiste, a Haitian-born school bus driver who is unemployed, told Militant supporters as they picked up a subscription after knocking on her door in Brooklyn.

Workers from across Illinois, Iowa and elsewhere joined a rally in Metropolis, Illinois, Oct. 11 to support uranium processing workers locked out by Honeywell. (See article on front page.) Eighteen people picked up subscriptions to the Militant from unionists there who brought the paper and helped build the action.

“I’ve been going from work to Ferguson to protest Michael Brown’s killing since the day he was killed,” Abrahama Keys, 30, a St. Louis office worker, told Ruth Robinett, one of several Militant supporters from Chicago and Omaha, Nebraska, who took part in a weekend of marches and rallies in St. Louis and Ferguson, Missouri. The actions demanded the arrest and prosecution of Darren Wilson, the Ferguson cop who killed Michael Brown Aug. 9, and protested the cop killing in St. Louis of 18-year-old Vonderrit Myers, Jr. Oct. 8. (See article on front page). Keys housed five people who came to protest.

“If you return to St. Louis I’ll put you up,” Keys told Robinett, as she subscribed to the Militant and purchased a copy of Voices From Prison: The Cuban Five, one of nine books on revolutionary working-class politics on discount for subscribers. A total of 26 subscriptions and several dozen single copies of the paper, as well as six Pathfinder books, were sold at actions in Missouri over the weekend.

“We took part in the ‘Kobani Is Not Alone’ pro-Kurdish rally in front of City Hall here Oct. 12,” wrote Katy LeRougetel from Calgary, Alberta. Noting the prominent role of women fighters on the front line in Kobani, LeRougetel said, “One woman told me, ‘I’m so proud to be a woman when I see the Kurds standing up!’” Two people at the rally subscribed to the Militant.

“I’m so glad I opened my door,” Henry Shaw Jr., a unionist who works at the Philadelphia Energy Solutions chemical plant, told Militant supporter Chris Hoeppner. Shaw bought a subscription to the paper and a copy of Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power. “Let me take some papers in to work for other guys to see,” he said.

If you would like to help get the Militant around, contact distributors near you listed on page 8.
 
 
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