BY ERNIE MAILHOT

MIAMI - Supporters of the Socialist Workers campaign here got a good start on their circulation drive October 5-6 when they attended the Common Ground conference in Orlando and a student conference in Tampa. Both meetings focused largely on the presidential elections.

The Common Ground conference sponsored by the Florida Coalition for Peace and Justice and other groups had about 150 people who attended some or all of the two day meeting. Most people at the event supported Clinton as a lesser evil or the Green Party candidate, Ralph Nader. However, a significant number of people, especially the young people in attendance, were attracted to the Socialist Workers campaign table and to a display of Pathfinder's Cuba books put out in a "Cuba room" next to the general display area.

Participants at the conference bought four Militant subscriptions, 1 PM subscription, 3 New Internationals, and 28 Pathfinder books and pamphlets. Several youth signed up for more information on the Socialist campaign and the Young Socialists.

At the Tampa student conference, representatives of the various presidential campaigns set up literature tables.

The campaign table for the socialist presidential ticket of James Harris and Laura Garza was very busy for the hour and a half that these tables were set up. Campaigners for the socialists candidates sold two Militant subscriptions and one subscription to Perspectiva Mundial, as well as pamphlets and single issues.

BY SARA LOBMAN

BROOKLYN - Socialist workers found tremendous interest in books and pamphlets published by Pathfinder Press among the thousands of people who came to see The Bolivian Diary, a film about the 1966-67 revolutionary struggle led by Ernesto Che Guevara in Bolivia. The film was directed and produced by Richard Dindo.

In just one Sunday in mid-September, when supporters organized to staff a table the entire day, talking with people attending all six showings of the film, 23 Pathfinder titles were purchased, as well as a dozen copies of the Militant with the headline demanding an end to the U.S. bombing of Iraq. Titles included nine copies of Guevara's Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War, two copies of his Bolivian Diary in English and one in Spanish, Art and Revolution by Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, and New International no. 7, which includes the article "Opening Guns of World War III: Washington's Assault on Iraq."

Nearly 5,000 people saw the movie, which played at least five times a day for 16 days. Supporters of the socialist campaign in Manhattan and Brooklyn organized to set up tables at about a quarter of the showings, selling a total of 36 books.

One young man from Japan bought a copy of Bolivian Diary. The following Friday he came to the Militant Labor Forum in Brooklyn, which was on "Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution Today." He purchased a copy of Out Now! A Participant's Account of the Movement against the Vietnam War to read on the plane ride home.

In addition to New York, The Bolivian Diary has already shown briefly in Minneapolis. It will be showing in other cities in the United States over the coming months.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home