The September 21 meeting, co-sponsored by the Australia-Cuba Friendship Society, was held at the Cuban Sport Exhibition Centre set up during the Olympic Games. Fernández was in Sydney as president of the Cuban Olympic Committee.

Bonny Briggs, an Aboriginal activist originally from northern New South Wales, welcomed Fernández and other Cuban visitors to Australia. Briggs is a member of the Gamilaraay people and a media liaison representative for the Aboriginal Tent Embassy at Victoria Park in Sydney, which was set up in July to put an international spotlight during the Olympics on the Aboriginal struggle against racist oppression.

Briggs told the audience, "I became aware of Cuba in 1988 when I was part of the first brigade of indigenous people to go to Nicaragua" during the revolution in that Central American country. "It changed my life. I could never lay down and be silent about the fact that there is injustice and what America and the world have done and continue to do to Cuba. It makes me realize that the fight is never just here--it is so much bigger."

Benjamin Chand, a student at Wollongong University who had been involved in protests against the overthrow of the Labour Party--led government in Fiji, explained how he had come across Pathfinder books on Cuba on a stall at one of these actions. "This was the first time I was introduced to the Cuban revolution. I was aware of some of the achievements of the Cuban revolution but I also thought Fidel Castro was a dictator," he said. "Making History is an important contribution to correcting misconceptions people may have about Cuba and certain events in Cuba's history. It allows the truth to be told about these."

Michael McGrath, a member of the Australian Manufacturing Workers' Union on strike for the past six months at Joy Mining Machinery in Moss Vale, explained that Making History was a book that took him by surprise. "It told a story that was reinforced page after page how one people's belief can make a difference," he said.

"As I read each page the message became clearer to me," McGrath said. "It's the people who win the battle. The struggle of the Cuban people is not one that is much different than so many other struggles in the world at the present time. Take the struggle at Joy in Moss Vale. It won't be the money or the vast amount of weapons at the company's disposal. It will be the people who win this battle."

"Having read the book Making History makes me all the more stronger," he concluded, encouraging everyone to read the book.

Felicity Coggan, a supporter of Pathfinder from New Zealand, then introduced Fernández. She explained how as a young military officer in the army of the Batista regime in the 1950s, Fernández had been one of a number of officers who worked secretly to depose the U.S. backed-dictatorship and who were eventually arrested. In prison on Cuba's Isle of Pines, he got to know a number of other political prisoners, including members of the July 26 Movement, and was won to their revolutionary perspective.

After the triumph of the revolution in 1959, Fernández directed the school for cadets to train Cuba's new revolutionary armed forces. In April 1961, working directly under Fidel Castro, he was the field commander at the Bay of Pigs, where the Revolutionary Armed Forces and popular militias defeated the U.S.-organized invasion force within 72 hours. For two decades he served as Cuba's minister of education.

Fernández explained that before the revolution, the Cuban people, under the U.S. boot, "were not masters of our destiny." With the victory of the Cuban revolution, "not only was Batista defeated, but the energy of the people was liberated. Every man and woman gained the possibility of developing themselves."

"Among the men and women who fought in the Sierra Maestra and the cities were people of humble origin--peasants, young students, and some from the middle classes who were politically conscious," Fernández explained.

"The four of us who had the opportunity to tell some of our story in Making History are ordinary members of this people, of the millions of men and women who today are in struggle against the laws of the U.S. administration that is trying to suffocate us." He added, "Today we are struggling to defend what we've already won."

Ron Poulsen, director of Pathfinder Books in Australia, pointed to "the struggles of working people here and around the world that make the example of the Cuban revolution through the pages of this book even more important today. As a wharfie and member of the Maritime Union of Australia, I can attest to the impact of the momentous battle, over two years ago, when tens of thousands of people, a truly social movement, rallied to mass picket lines at docks around the country and prevented the capitalist rulers from smashing one of the most important industrial unions in the country."

More recently, he noted, "hundreds of thousands of ordinary people marched symbolically across major city bridges around the country in support of Aboriginal rights."

Poulsen pointed to the growing worker and farmer resistance in the United States today. In a number of these fights, where Spanish-speaking immigrants from Latin America are involved, "the same battle cry as Fernández cites from inside Cuba is also heard: '¡Sí se puede!'--Yes we can!

"That is why the spirit of resistance demonstrated more so than ever today by the Cuban revolution is so important in this world," he said.

At the conclusion of the meeting people lined up to buy the book and have it signed by Fernández. Seven copies of Making History and two of the Spanish edition, Haciendo Historia, were sold that evening. McGrath obtained a signed copy to use as a raffle prize to raise money for the fight by workers at Joy.

Linda Harris is a member of the Textile, Clothing and Footwear Union of Australia. Ron Poulsen is a member of the Maritime Union of Australia.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home