BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS

HAVANA, Cuba - "Long live socialism" and "Down with Helms- Burton," chanted a dozen students from the pre-university school in La Lisa, a neighborhood in the western part of this city. They were referring to the new U.S. law escalating Washington's economic war against the Cuban people.

The students were part of an April 22 march here of 3,000, one of hundreds of actions throughout the country leading up to May Day - "the festival of the proletariat," as Trabajadores, the weekly newspaper of the Central Organization of Cuban Workers (CTC), described it.

Carrying hand-made signs and noisemakers, contingents of construction, pharmaceutical, and other workers, elementary and high school students, military academy trainees in uniform, and other baton-twirling youth marched, sang, and shouted loud and defiant slogans against the U.S. economic embargo of Cuba.

"We are celebrating our determination to defend the revolution and continue with the economic recovery of our country despite the criminal Yankee blockade," said construction worker Oscar Hernández.

Several signs around him read, "All Out for May Day" and "Long Live the 17th Congress of the CTC."

The convention of the country's nationwide trade union federation opens April 27. On the morning of April 25 dozens of the 1,900 union delegates elected for the congress began arriving in Havana. They will discuss, amend, and vote on the Theses for the convention - a document prepared by the CTC National Committee and discussed by more than 3 million workers in 81,000 assemblies between January 15 and March 15. (The Militant published the resolution in four installments in March and April.) The delegates will also elect a new National Committee and union officers.

The Cuban daily Granma reported April 23 that nearly 1,300 international guests from 124 unions in 46 countries had confirmed participation on the eve of the gathering. They will also take part in an international solidarity conference here May 2. Some 55 unionists from the United States were the first delegation to arrive from abroad. They included members of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees; International Association of Machinists; Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers; Service Employees International Union; and United Transportation Union.

A high point of the congress activities will be a May 1 march of hundreds of thousands of workers and students in Havana - the first national May Day demonstration in this country since 1993. In addition, tens of thousands of union members are expected to participate in simultaneous local rallies in municipalities throughout Cuba.

CTC general secretary Pedro Ross told Granma that the union federation "will dedicate the May Day parade to the new generations of Cubans as the epilogue of the 17th congress." At an April 22 press conference in Revolution Square, Victoria Velázquez, first secretary of the Union of Young Communists, said the organization will use the opportunity of the massive proletarian mobilization to issue a call for a world festival of students and youth to take place in Cuba in the summer of 1997.

Preparations for the CTC convention and the pre-May Day rallies are the major feature of news coverage by radio, television, and newspapers here every day.

Many workers, like Oscar Hernández at La Lisa, have pointed to the re-emergence of the May Day mobilization as a symbol of the palpable progress workers have made in putting the country on the road toward economic recovery.

According to government figures, Cuba's Gross Domestic Product grew 7 percent in the first quarter of this year, following a 2.5 percent growth in 1995. The GDP growth rates register the reversal of a rapid decline in industrial and agricultural production precipitated by the abrupt end in trade on favorable terms with the former Soviet bloc countries. The April 20 Granma reported that this year's potato harvest yielded 770,000 tons, higher than even the previous record set in 1985.

Four days later, Granma announced on its front page that the country's sugar mills had refined 4 million tons of sugar, exceeding last year's 50-year low of 3.3 million tons. The sugarcane harvest is on course to meet a national target of 4.5 million tons by the deadline of May 10. Achieving this goal will improve the country's capacity to import needed goods, since sugar remains Cuba's main export crop and a primary source of hard currency.

"This is like music to my ears," Ricardo Nocedo Cordero, a construction worker and CTC secretary at the Lenin construction contingent, told U.S. delegates to the CTC congress during a visit to Matanzas. "The decisive effort to increase sugar production was one of the main goals set in the CTC theses. We are making progress and we are more confident." Cordero participated in a voluntary mobilization to cut sugarcane in the province the day before.

According to Trabajadores, 1.1 million workers volunteered for sugarcane cutting and other tasks in agriculture the weekend of April 19-21. These mobilizations were part of other actions to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the defeat of the U.S.- orchestrated mercenary invasion of Cuba on April 19, 1961, at Playa Girón (often referred to as the Bay of Pigs in the United States).

At a special April 19 ceremony near the site of that battle, 1,000 students from Havana joined thousands of others in honoring Playa Girón combatants and veterans of the July 26 Movement and Rebel Army, which led the revolutionary war that overthrew the U.S.-backed dictatorship in 1959.

Minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces Raúl Castro spoke at another event at the military airbus in San Antonio de los Baños the same day. "In the last 29 months a greater U.S. aggressiveness toward us has become evident," Castro said. "It reminds us in some ways of the 1960s. They try to destabilize or provoke incidents that in one or another case can lead to an armed response that could end up in a military intervention." Castro said the U.S. assaults come as a result of Washington's frustration with the revolution's capacity to resist the economic war.

During their April 23-24 visit to Matanzas, U.S. trade unionists saw additional signs of the economic recovery. Underneath a banner reading, "Resist, struggle, win," CTC secretary Luis Romero Diago at the Antonio Guiteras Thermoelectric plant said that production of electricity has greatly improved over the last year. The plant, which generates 20 percent of the country's electric power, has operated for a record 125 days without a shutdown.

"I have yet to make up my mind about the revolution," said Detroit newspaper striker and Teamsters union member Rick Torres at the end of the trip to Matanzas. "But I do know that the U.S. government has no right to try to tell these people what to do." This is Torres's first trip to Cuba.

"I've always heard the other side about Cuba," he said. "But I've seen a lot on the picket line in Detroit. I decided I wanted to see Cuba for myself.

"After being here a few days, I respect the Cuban people and their confidence to run their country a hundred times more."  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home