BY ROLLANDE GIRARD
MIAMI - Socialist workers and young socialists from throughout the South are organizing and publicizing a one- day regional educational conference in Miami on May 3. Titled "Reports from Kosovo, Cairo, and Havana," the Southern Regional Socialist Conference will feature talks highlighting some of the historic changes unfolding in world politics today and the resulting opportunities to build revolutionary working-class parties in countries around the world.

Two of the keynote speakers, Militant staff writer Argiris Malapanis and Jack Willey, organizer of the National Executive Committee of the Young Socialists, reported for the Militant in March on the revolt by working people in Kosovo, Yugoslavia, who are fighting for the self- determination of Albanians in that region, and other developments in the Balkans. They were also in Cairo, Egypt, where they took part in a March 5-8 meeting of the World Federation of Democratic Youth and reported on large student demonstrations against Washington's attacks on Iraq.

Mary-Alice Waters, the other featured speaker, led a Militant reporting team to Cuba in February that covered the International Book Fair in Havana and other political developments in that country. Waters is the president of Pathfinder Press and the editor of Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War: 1956-58 by Ernesto Che Guevara.

The meeting will bring together workers and young people who have been active in a range of political activities, from support for union struggles in the Midwest by workers at Caterpillar and Case Corp. to participation in the recent convention of the Federation of Pro-Independence University Students (FUPI) in Puerto Rico. It will include many who are active in Miami and other cities in the defense of Cuba's socialist revolution.

A Young Socialists leader will be touring the region to win new members to the revolutionary organization and to build the conference, which will be an opportunity to learn more about the socialist movement.

Organizers of the regional conference are urging participants to come to Miami early to attend an important political event taking place there the day before, on May 2. The meeting, titled "100 Years of Resistance - The Struggle of the Puerto Rican and Cuban People Against U.S. Imperialism," will feature the well-known Puerto Rican independence fighter and former political prisoner Rafael Cancel Miranda, Andrés Gómez of the Antonio Maceo Brigade, and Mary-Alice Waters. A representative of Cuba is also expected to speak (see ad on page 8).

The May 2 event is being publicized more widely than most of the previous events in this city that have featured speakers who support the Cuban revolution. Besides members of the main sponsoring organizations -the Miami Coalition Against the U.S. Embargo of Cuba, the Antonio Maceo Brigade, and the Alliance of Workers in the Cuban Community - some of the activists from the group "Cuba Vive" in Tampa, Florida, are actively building this event. Participants are expected from other cities in Florida as well.  
 
 
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