Discussing these questions in relation to Cuba helps get right at this point.

The Cuban people, armed through militias, trade unions, and the revolutionary armed forces have kept the mightiest imperial power at bay for more than four decades.

Their revolution stands as a shining example of defense of sovereignty and independence for workers and peasants throughout the semicolonial world. There, a revolutionary leadership led the toilers to overturn a U.S.-backed dictatorship in 1959 and replaced it with a workers and farmers government. The new government deepened popular mobilizations that resulted in the expropriations of foreign and domestic capitalists and landlords.

The course followed by Cuba's revolutionary leadership incurred growing political, economic, and military hostility from Washington, which has pursued a policy of unrelenting enmity against the Cuban government, including slander campaigns, direct military intervention, and the threat of nuclear war.

Nearly 40 years ago the Cuban people soundly defeated a U.S.-backed mercenary attack through the mobilization of nearly the entire population. While the U.S. rulers have not abandoned the idea of another military assault if the opportunity arose, they are "well aware of the price of an invasion," Cuban Gen. Néstor López Cuba explained in a 1997 interview. His remarks are published in the new Pathfinder title Making History: Interviews with Four Generals of Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces.

Thus, "gun control" in Cuba means working people control the guns, tanks, warplanes, and all other weaponry in the country. Millions of working people are organized into Territorial Troops Militias throughout the island. In addition, the union movement helps organize workers into Production and Defense Brigades. The brigades are voluntary units organized to protect major industrial facilities and other vital sites. They were formed in the 1980s as part of the government's policy to help prepare the Cuban population in all aspects of military defense—a policy known as the "war of the entire people."

In 1997, a reporting team for the Militant witnessed coordinated rallies, demonstrations, and military training exercises as part of a national Day of Defense. They watched 100 workers at the Copacabana hotel in western Havana participating in grenade-throwing practice organized by the Production and Defense Brigade. Some 400,000 people took part in military exercises in the capital and the province of Havana.

Under this premise the basic mission of Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces is to guarantee that each Cuban has a rifle, land mine, and grenade to defend the country—"weapons that are the least expensive," López Cuba explained. A relatively poor country like Cuba cannot afford expensive and sophisticated weaponry, he stated, but this is not necessary since Cuba's military policy is strictly defensive and popular in character.

A similar approach can be taken on the issue of the death penalty. Again this is a class question. Under bourgeois society, capital punishment is used by the wealthy as a weapon of terror against working people, ultimately to intimidate working-class fighters who dare to stand up to the capitalist oppressors. In the United States almost all inmates sitting on death row are of working-class origin.

The death penalty has been used very sparingly in Cuba over the past two decades. This is done by a revolutionary leadership that uses state power to advance the interests of workers and farmers in the country and defend their conquests amidst unending imperialist hostilities.

Last year, Cuba's National Assembly enacted a new law that could impose the death penalty on government officials who produce, sell, distribute, or possess illegal drugs.

In 1989, Arnaldo Ochoa, a division general, and three other high-ranking officers were arrested, tried, convicted, and executed for hostile acts against a foreign state, drug trafficking, and abuse of office. Ochoa had organized a smuggling operation while heading Cuba's military mission in Angola.

This course of conduct—corruption, contempt for the revolutionary capacities of working people—is incompatible with the high moral standards and principles required to lead a revolution that is under constant threat by the world's mightiest imperial power.

—MAURICE WILLIAMS  
 
 
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