The table was the scene of nearly continuous, lively discussion in English, Spanish, French, and Swedish. Many people visited more than once, not only to read and consider what to buy, but to discuss with the workers and students from the United States and other countries who were staffing the table.

A young Puerto Rican opposed to the colonial bondage in which his country is held by the U.S. rulers, bought Che Guevara Talks to Young People in Spanish and was interested to learn about the extent of the protests that have taken place in the United States against Washington's naval base on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques. Puerto Rico: Independence is a Necessity, a pamphlet containing interviews with Puerto Rican independence fighter Rafael Cancel Miranda, sold well in both Spanish and English. Cancel Miranda, a strong supporter of the Cuban revolution who was attending the conference, stopped by the Pathfinder table to talk for a while as well.

Nicolás, a Colombian student, said he supported the Cuban revolution and thought Colombia needed to follow the same road, but he didn't think a revolutionary leadership adequate to the task existed yet in his country. "I would be dishonest if I joined one of the political organizations in Colombia today," he said.

He stressed that for working people to confront the onslaught of the capitalist crisis in his country, building a revolutionary organization was at the top of the agenda. He spent some time browsing through and reading books on the U.S. class struggle.

A Bolivian woman born in France, together with her daughter, a medical student in Guadalajara, Mexico, came to the table twice. They were particularly interested in the fight for women's rights. After extended discussion in three languages they decided to purchase the three-part Education for Socialists bulletin Communist Continuity and the Fight for Women's Liberation and a copy of Capitalism's World Disorder in French.

Many discussions on women's liberation took place around the table, and most titles on the topic were sold before the conference ended.

Titles on the Palestinian struggle and the Jewish question attracted substantial attention from many participants throughout the conference. An Israeli delegate who has been a reader of Pathfinder books for a good number of years came by to talk. A supporter of the Palestinian struggle for national self-determination, he said Zionism and the Israeli state have nothing good to offer Jews or Palestinians. On a recent visit to New York, he recounted, he bought some books from Pathfinder's new Garment District outlet.

A group of Palestinians participating in the conference came by to talk. One, who had been a political prisoner, said his group wants to work with anyone who is interested in fighting for self-determination for the Palestinian people, including Israeli Jews who have been part of the fight. "What is posed is a fight for a democratic, secular state," said Walid Ahmed of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. "It could be called Palestine or some other name."

At the Convention Center, where two large workshops were held, two Cubans staffing a souvenir table, Roberto and Alberto Quijano, came by. As they looked over the books, Alberto told about being part of the mass mobilization in response to the U.S.-backed assault at Playa Girón (or Bay of Pigs) in 1961. They were especially interested in Lenin's Final Fight, "U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War" in Nueva Internacional No. 5, and The Revolution Betrayed by Leon Trotsky, and were pleased to learn they could buy books in pesos at the end of the conference.  
 
'Books help draw necessary lessons'
A worker from South Africa, wanted to talk about how the fight for socialism could be strengthened in his country. He said he was frustrated with the South African Communist Party because he thought it was not following a working-class course, and bought New International No. 5, which includes the article "The Coming Revolution in South Africa" by Jack Barnes, and Capitalism's World Disorder.

Holding a copy of Ernesto Che Guevara's Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War, Corazon Fabros, who is active in Amistad, a Cuba solidarity organization in the Philippines, said, "If you are an activist today, you need to prepare. And these books help you draw the necessary lessons."

"As soon as I finish reading one, I will pass it around," said Sayma Nanyeni, a Namibian journalist, who carefully considered numerous titles, and walked away with James P. Cannon's The Struggle for a Proletarian Party, as well as several issues of the magazine New International.

All told, the political work of the volunteers at the Pathfinder booth netted more than $2,100 in sales of books, pamphlets, and periodicals. The four best-sellers were Che Guevara Talks to Young People, with 24 sold in English and Spanish; The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning by Jack Barnes, with 20 sold in English and Spanish; Capitalism's World Disorder, also by Barnes, with 14 sold in English, Spanish, and French; and 12 copies in three languages of the issue of New International with the article "U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War."  
 

At 3:30 p.m. every Tuesday and Thursday, students at the Olof Palme high school in Havana crowd into three classrooms, each with a new TV set, to watch a program teaching English. So do many other students at high schools all over Cuba.

"We don't have enough English teachers," explains Luis, a student teacher at the high school. The TV programs with classes taught by some of Cuba's best educators will help overcome that shortfall--including training the students to understand and use the language more, he tells us, as opposed to knowing just the vocabulary and grammar.

The school has recently been provided with new television sets, one for every 50 students. The same are being provided to every school in Cuba. In remote mountain areas where there are still schools without electricity, solar electric panels are being installed to generate power, reported Luis Ernesto Morejón, a young Cuban who is involved in the planning of the new education programs.

The English classes are also broadcast at 7:00 a.m. and at 11:00 p.m., two days a week, for all Cubans who want to study. The remaining three days of the week, a Spanish class is broadcast.The high school students get the accompanying textbook free, as they do all school books, but they are available in tabloid format for others to buy at a price of 2.5 pesos, about one-tenth of the price of most books.

The Cuban daily Granma recently reported that a total of 1 million television sets would be purchased from China. Some 700,000 of the color TVs will be sold in Cuban pesos with interest-free loans provided on installment plans of up to five years, allowing many Cubans to replace their old black-and-white sets. In addition, 100,000 TVs will be provided to schools and other institutions, according to the report, and 200,000 will be sold in the dollar stores.

"We want to create a society with full opportunities for all," Castro explained in his closing remarks to the world solidarity conference. In capitalist countries, "human beings are a surplus," he noted. "That can not happen under socialism--a human being can never be a surplus. You can call us utopians, but if we had not studied, there would never have been a revolution of the humble and for the humble."  
 
Computer clubs for youth
Rafael Tamayo is part of the national leadership of the Joven Clubs de Computación, a national effort to expand computer clubs for young people in every municipality in the country, making computers more widely accessible and advancing computer literacy, including among preschool and primary school students. There are now 174 clubs in 168 municipalities, with plans to increase the number to 300 clubs by April 2001. This initiative too, Tamayo said, is a national priority.

"Our country will transform itself into a gigantic university," Castro said at the September 13 celebration of the 13th anniversary of the Youth Clubs. "The heroic resistance of these last 10 years is what has given us the right to fulfill many dreams."

There is widespread enthusiasm for these educational measures in Cuba. One of the many places these steps are being discussed is among workers preparing the May 2001 congress of the Central Organization of Cuban Workers (CTC). One section of the resolution being discussed in every workplace prior to the election of delegates states, "Our union movement decisively embraces Fidel's idea of transforming our people into one of the most educated in the world, and we commit all our cadres, leaders, and members to the sustained effort that this implies....

"Cuban workers, through higher levels of education, have acquired an elevated political culture. This must now be integrated into a higher culture of the general type, which includes work culture, economics, history, science, art, and literature, with a full understanding of Martí's profound statement that without education no freedom is possible."  
 

"That is when we start, in order to be there before 8:00 a.m. when the market opens every day," says Molina. He shows some visitors from Sweden, delegates at the Second World Conference of Friendship and Solidarity with Cuba, how he and others prepare the next day's shipment, speeding up the ripening of the bananas by putting them in water for a couple of hours.

In the CPAs, farmers pool their land and work it together. The 232 cooperative members here farm 600 acres, quite a change from the 14 farmers who originally pooled 80 acres of land to found the cooperative in 1981. The main crops are bananas, potatoes, sweet potatoes, taro, and sugar. They also grow beans and rice for their own consumption, as well as tomatoes, cucumbers, and chickens for tourist restaurants, which helps the cooperative earn hard currency to pay for supplies that would otherwise be unavailable. Most of their products are sold to the state for distribution to hospitals, day care centers, and other institutions.

"The cooperative produces a surplus, although our machinery is old and outdated," says Carlos Marces, president of the cooperative. He and the six other board members are elected at an assembly where all the members of the cooperative have decisive vote. The monthly assembly is where all decisions concerning the cooperative are taken, including admitting new members.  
 
'We have to invent things all the time'
"Our irrigation equipment and our 32 tractors are all from the Soviet Union," says Marces. Tractor drivers later explain that spare parts are impossible to find for these machines. Despite this they are well kept, with shining symbols on top of them. "We have to invent things all the time," says one driver, who is resting during the lunch hour while his son plays at the wheel of the tractor.

Two brigades of 60 work in the fields weeding and harvesting. Today they are weeding soybeans. The tractors and other machines are driven by 25 members. Fourteen do the repair work and maintenance on the machines, and 15 work in transport and services. Fifty workers tend the pigs, chickens, and calves, and milk the cows. All milking has been done by hand in Cuba since the Special Period began.

The average wage for the members is 350 pesos a month. That is a fairly high wage--the average income in Cuba is 225 pesos a month. "The members who work in the fields are paid more than those of us who work inside, because the work in the fields is heavy and hard," says Alfredo Capote, the accountant of the cooperative.

The yearly surplus of the cooperative is divided each July. Fifty percent of the surplus goes to new investments for the cooperative; the rest is divided among the members according to the amount and kind of work done by each individual member. Cooperative members also benefit from a plentiful supply of food.

"We learned a lot and gained politically from going through the Special Period," says Marces. With chemical fertilizers unavailable or unaffordable, farmers learned how to use biological fertilizers, he explains. And, he tells us, the spread of Thrips palmi--an insect that evidence suggests was deliberately introduced into Cuba in 1996 by a plane flying to the United States and that had devastating effects on all kinds of crops such as potatoes, beans, corn, and tomatoes, both in 1996 and the following year--has now been brought under control, although it will never be entirely eliminated.  
 

From the earliest days of the Cuban Revolution more than 40 years ago, the revolutionary leadership has taken initiatives to expand the participation of women in society.

"Women who used to be behind doors in their homes became active in the FMC. They came out to do voluntary work in agriculture and in the construction of schools in the mountains," Espín said.

In the 1961 literacy campaign, which in one year virtually eliminated illiteracy throughout the island, Espín noted, both a majority of the teachers--who were high school students--and those learning to read, a majority of them peasants, were women. The land reform also gave women the right to own land.  
 
Increased workload for women
Espín described the challenges that the difficult decade of the 1990s, which Cubans call the Special Period, has posed for women. After the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries, and the abrupt drop in aid and favorable trade relations that followed, accompanied by a tightening of the U.S. embargo against the country, Cuba suffered widespread shortages of food, fuel, and parts. The gross domestic product plunged by some 35 percent between 1989 and 1994.

A massive effort drawing on the energy and creativity of Cuban working people to restructure agricultural and industrial production, as well as measures to win foreign capital investments and establish new trade relations, have made progress. But the standard of living today remains substantially below what it was a decade ago, as Cuba, a country underdeveloped by centuries of colonial and imperialist domination, has abruptly been forced into the world capitalist market. Shortages of food, detergent, electricity, gas for cooking, and problems in transportation, have meant an increased workload in the home for women especially.

In confronting these challenges in recent years, Espín said, the FMC has come out stronger, with a larger and more active membership. Nieves Alemany, a full-time member of the FMC National Secretariat, who was a farmer until recently, described how the FMC is now financed by its own members.

While according to law there are no restrictions on women taking any kind of job, explained Yolanda Ferrer, general secretary of the FMC, "the FMC wants to encourage women to take on nontraditional jobs. There are women who drive trucks, trains, and sugar combines. We have women leaders in the sugar industry, in laboratories, and in scientific work," she told the group. "It is a long process to develop women who are leaders, but it has been something we and Fidel have encouraged throughout the revolution," Ferrer said.

Women make up 27 percent of the National Assembly of People's Power, Cuba's legislature, according to Julio Espinosa, general coordinator of the Commission for Foreign Affairs of the National Assembly.

"This is a very high figure, although lower than in the Nordic countries," he said, "but there they have quotas, and we don't. Quotas would undermine the authority of the delegates who are female," he said. "We are waging a battle for women."

The Special Period has also meant extra hardships for women because of the lack of contraceptives. "Abortions have always been available on demand for women, from the beginning of the revolution, and despite opinions from some that there were too many abortions," Espín explained. But of course, she said, it was never intended that abortion be a general method of contraception.

Cuba always had to import contraceptives, Espín said, which was difficult because many of the companies producing contraceptives were U.S.-owned. Recently a factory in Cuba has started production of birth control pills, she noted. But even with donations from China and Germany, except for condoms there is still not a sufficient supply of contraceptives.

During the Special Period many day-care centers were obliged to cut back hours and services.

Centers no longer care for infants less than one year old, for example. Before the Special Period, day care was available starting with infants 45 days old.

The trade union resolution addresses these challenges. "The union movement will continue fighting every case of discrimination against women in the distribution of available resources and in the reorganization of labor," states the theses being discussed throughout the country. "The reduced capacity of day-care centers has forced many female workers to pay high rates to individuals to care for their children. In addition to being an economic burden, this also confers the education and health care of the child on people who do not always have the training or the material resources to do it." In addition, the theses commit the union movement to promoting the creation of day-care centers in workplaces where working mothers need them.  
 

We met with Adolfo Díaz Suárez, Cuban vice president of the enterprise. The factory is modern and well-equipped.

Díaz told us, "This enterprise was created five years ago with British capital. Our objectives were to guarantee a certain level of exports for Cuban cigarettes, to obtain modern equipment, and to learn new techniques of production, marketing, and quality control. We began with 17 workers. Now we have 270. Most cigarettes produced in this plant are sold in dollars in Cuba, but we have progressively increased exports to 40 percent of production as we reduced costs and improved quality and appearance," he said.

"The surplus generated by workers in this plant made it possible for us to finance the opening of a second plant in Holguín in the eastern part of the island that is 100 percent Cuban-owned," Díaz told us. "This has resulted in a significant reduction in production costs and increased quality of cigarettes sold in Cuban pesos." The Holguín factory will sell the cigarettes it produces in Cuban pesos.

The plant was clean and well-lighted. Workers were wearing clean blue uniforms. As in factories throughout Cuba, the cafeteria provides meals at subsidized prices, Díaz told us, and the company provides transportation to and from several points in the city.

"Workers who achieve targets for quality and quantity," Díaz told us, "receive bonus pay in hard currency." The basic wage is 160 Cuban pesos a month, he said, but a worker who meets the targets receives another $16 in U.S. dollars (336 pesos at the current exchange rate of 21 pesos to the dollar), and often more. The average here, Díaz told us, is $26 a month above the wages.

Workers work Monday through Friday, and receive 30 days of vacation a year.

Díaz told us that joint ventures in Cuba account for employment of a little more than 1 percent of workers. "But they represent a high percentage of exports," he added.

There are monthly meetings of all personnel where the managers, three of whom are Brazilian, report on production. "The meetings are chaired by the union," Díaz said. "This is a joint venture with capitalists, but not a capitalist enterprise. This revolution is for workers."

Rebecca Arenson, Luis Madrid, and Mary-Alice Waters contributed to this article.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home