BY JON HILLSON
MINNEAPOLIS - "I met the Young Socialists in Cuba last summer," said Gabe Siert, a high school freshman in Sioux City, Iowa. Even though not a member, he explained, "it's kind of neat to meet other young people with the same interests as me, who feel so strongly about what's going on in Cuba, South Africa, the people of the world." The 15-year-old activist showed books "about revolutionaries" he's read to a friend. "He liked the books, he wants to go to Cuba, and he's coming to the YS convention with me," Siert said.
One of the main projects YS delegates will discuss at the convention, which will be held here in Minneapolis April 6-7, will be joining with others to build the July 22-August 5 U.S.-Cuba Youth Exchange.
The trip, coordinated by the National Network on Cuba, builds on the success of the 1995 U.S. delegation to the "Cuba Lives!" international youth festival in Havana. Convention participants will also work out plans to encourage young unionists to be part of the U.S. delegation to the congress of the Central Organization of Cuban Workers (CTC) at the end of April.
YS members have been organizing convention-building teams across the country. That's how a young Swedish woman found the YS in Athens, Georgia, at a Pathfinder literature table at the University of Georgia campus.
"She's only been in the United States a couple of months," YS team member Verónica Póses from Miami said, "but she'd seen Pathfinder in Sweden, and she's been to Cuba. She wants to go back to Cuba and she likes the fact we're serious about defending the Cuban revolution."
Póses and fellow team member Chris Michalovic, a student at Alabama's Auburn University, met with the young woman, and later with a restaurant worker from Greensboro, North Carolina, who also wants to get on the U.S.-Cuba Youth Exchange delegation. "They're both coming to Minneapolis," Póses says.
New YS chapter in Detroit
Detroit YS member Mark Gilsdorf, a member of the United
Steelworkers of America, said participating in a protest
against ultrarightist candidate Patrick Buchanan at a campus
meeting at the University of Toledo helped two high school
students decide to join the Young Socialists in the Motor
City. Now, Gilsdorf says, the Detroit YS is one of the
organization's newest chapters. All of its members are coming
to Minneapolis, along with a college student who made the trip
to the Toledo protest.
Young Socialists in Boston are completing a swing of New England campus speaking engagements at Franklin Pierce College in New Hampshire, Simon's Rock College in central Massachusetts, and Bates College in Maine.
The YS has raised $200 from the presentations on topics ranging from the fight for women's liberation, to the character of the "Buchanan movement," and the function of the FBI, reports YS member Ryan Kelly. "Out of this," he says, "we've got a working list of students who want to go Minneapolis."
In the Twin Cities, Young Socialists are gearing up for the national gathering. The local Pathfinder Bookstore, where the convention-building office is located, has expanded its hours to attract activists interested in revolutionary literature. Distributors of Pathfinder books and pamphlets here report selling nearly $1,000 of their publications in March, much of it to Cuba solidarity activists, youth who've been attending Militant Labor Forums, to co-workers on the job, and at campus literature tables.
Take day off to build YS convention
Members of the Socialist Workers Party are taking days off
from work to help field convention-building teams to area
colleges, and have volunteered to help with a multitude of
tasks required to ensure a national gathering that runs
smoothly.
"In the next 12 days we will need to draw on the history and experience of our movement, in all of its generations to pitch together in the final preparations of the convention," YS convention coordinator Megan Arney told a special meeting here of Young Socialists, members of the SWP, and active supporters of the party. "We need to organize our energy to win every young fighter we know to come to Minneapolis April 6-7."