BY HARRY RING
LOS ANGELES - José Luis Ponce, one of Cuba's principal U.S. diplomatic spokespeople in the United States, conducted a six-day, morning-to-night speaking tour of southern California in early February.
He spoke at a series of campus meetings in the Los Angeles area, San Diego, and Santa Barbara. At Pasadena City Hall, Mayor William Paparian presented Ponce with the key to the city on February 5. In all, the Cuban diplomat addressed more than 500 people during his visit, which received considerable press coverage.
The windup of the tour was a February 10 public forum at Loyola Law School, which was part of the proceedings of the National Network on Cuba (NNOC) meeting (see article above). Thabo Ntweng and Paula Solomon, leaders of the Los Angeles Coalition in Solidarity with Cuba that sponsored the event, chaired the forum. Andrés Gómez and Leslie Cagan, national cochairs of the NNOC, joined Ponce on the platform.
Angela Sanbrano of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES) also gave greetings. Sanbrano introduced herself as the U.S. national coordinator of the Sao Paulo Forum, which is comprised of political parties throughout Latin America and the Caribbean that function in the workers movement. The forum has organized five continent- wide gatherings - the first in Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1990 and the most recent in Montevideo, Uruguay, last year. Sanbrano announced that CISPES and the National Network on Cuba will be making efforts to build the sixth meeting of the Sao Paulo Forum in July in San Salvador, El Salvador.
The audience of 125 contributed more than $2,000 toward the work of the Los Angeles Coalition.
Ponce is the first secretary of the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, D.C. Because Cuba is denied normal relations by Washington, the interests section, which functions out of the Swiss embassy, substitutes for a regular diplomatic mission. The U.S. government has its own interests section in Havana.
Ponce is a veteran Cuban revolutionary. Before entering the diplomatic service, he was a journalist for the Cuban news agency Prensa Latina.
The tour was organized by the Los Angeles Coalition in Solidarity with Cuba. Activists in the group said a noteworthy feature was the extent to which various campus organizations took the initiative in organizing and publicizing the half dozen college meetings.
In the past 18 months, the coalition has sponsored or promoted four speaking tours for representatives of the Cuban revolution. This has led to increased ties with campus activists. Several leaders of the Los Angeles coalition said they saw the success of this tour as a stepping stone for renewed activity to defend Cuba.
At the February 5 Pasadena City Hall gathering of media representatives, community activists, and local business people, Mayor Paparian told Ponce of his opposition to the embargo. "While it may be dangerous for a city mayor to sail the murky waters of international politics," Paparian said, "and while I cannot change the foreign policy of the United States as it applies to your country, let me say that as an individual I have the freedom to say that I do not approve of it."
The next morning, the Pasadena Star News featured a front- page account of the event. The Star said Paparian, an Armenian American, "recalled that many Armenians who fled their country during Turkish oppression in World War I found refuge in Cuba and flourished there." The Herald Tribune, another local newspaper, attacked the Pasadena mayor for his stance on Cuba in an editorial three days later.
There was other media coverage as well, including a two- part feature interview with Ponce in La Opinión, the largest Spanish-language daily in the Los Angeles area, headlined "J. Ponce: Cuba changed but remains socialist."
At his public meetings, Ponce sketched the enormous social gains of the Cuban revolution - in education, health care, the fight to eradicate racism and women's oppression, and above all the internationalism of the workers and farmers in Cuba.
`A truly sovereign government'
It took a revolution to achieve these gains, he explained
at Cal State Los Angeles, because of the legacy of U.S.
domination - a legacy of unemployment, absence of health care
for millions especially in the countryside, illiteracy,
racism and the superexploitation of women. To tackle these
problems, he stated, demanded "a truly sovereign government,
which is what we won in 1959."
At Santa Barbara City College, and elsewhere, he cited the revolution's gains in uprooting racist discrimination. He likened the situation of Afro-Cubans prior to the revolution to that of U.S. Blacks who lived under the Jim Crow system of segregation.
He added that while Cuba has made great advances in the fight to eradicate racism, "We're not satisfied. We want to go further."
After the meeting a student commented on how impressed he was by this response. Here in this country, he observed, "people feel we've done enough" and there's a drive to take back gains like affirmative action.
A highpoint of Poncés busy day in Santa Barbara was a meeting at Casa de la Raza, where he received a warm welcome from some 40 young Latino activists. At the University of California, San Diego, a well attended meeting was sponsored and built by the Latino campus paper, Voz Fronteriza (Voice from the border).
Measures to deal with harsh necessities
In his various appearances, Ponce described the economic
difficulties confronting Cuba since the collapse of aid and
trade at preferential prices with the former Soviet Union and
countries of eastern Europe.
Responding to a frequent question, he explained Cuba's need to win investments from abroad and to promote tourism. He underlined that Cuba was taking these steps out of harsh necessity, not out of any desire or intention to move toward a capitalist economy.
To the contrary, he declared, the income derived from capitalist investments in Cuba is needed precisely in order to help preserve many of the social programs of the revolution.
"We're simply trying to regroup our forces so after a while we can continue our socialist development," Ponce said at the February 10 forum. The measures adopted by the revolutionary government so far have begun to pay off, Ponce said, pointing to a 2.5 percent growth in Cuba's gross domestic product in 1995 after four consecutive years of decline. The main reason for these results, Ponce noted, is not the economic measures in and of themselves, but the reality that "the Cuban leadership looks at, and is part of, workers and farmers for constructing a new society, their own society."
At the University of California, San Diego meeting Ponce pointed to the growing resistance in the former Soviet Union to the drive toward privatization and integration into the world capitalist market. He predicted that a fight for socialism will re-emerge in that country.
At each meeting, the Coalition in Solidarity with Cuba had a table for those seeking more information about the Cuban revolution and, invariably, there was great interest.
There was also a good response to activists building next July's Youth Exchange trip to Cuba. In the course of the tour, one activist said, more than 20 young people signed up for more information about the NNOC-sponsored trip.
Laura Anderson and Craig Honts, members of the United Transportation Union; and Carole Lesnick, a member of the United Auto Workers, contributed to this article.
BY TAMI PETERSON
SAN FRANCISCO - Sergio Martínez, third secretary of the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, D.C., toured the San Francisco Bay Area February 5-8 before continuing on to Los Angeles to participate in activities there connected with the conference of the National Network on Cuba.
Martínez spoke to over 150 students at Sonoma State University, Laney College, and University of California- Berkeley in the course of the visit. The discussion covered a broad range of topics. They included the conversion of state farms into agricultural cooperatives, the new tax system in Cuba, women's rights, prostitution, and the role of workers in shaping fiscal and other measures adopted by the government in an effort to reverse the economic decline that followed the end of trade at preferential prices with the former Soviet bloc countries.
Martínez attended a breakfast with the Central Labor Council on the morning of February 6. He also brought greetings of solidarity to a meeting of 75 members of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union Local 1-5 organized to discuss national oil bargaining contract issues.
At a pot luck dinner held next the day, Martínez had a discussion with 20 activists involved in defending Cuba.
The Cuban diplomat spoke to a crowd of over 80 people at the Mission Cultural Center on the evening of November 7. His talk was preceded by a report from members of the US-Cuba Friendshipment Caravan who were bringing computers to Cuba. The caravan was stopped at the U.S.-Mexico border near San Diego January 31. Federal agents arrested 11 of its members, beat up several caravanistas, and confiscated the computers.