These included Playa Girón/Bay of Pigs: Washington's First Military Defeat in the Americas by Fidel Castro and José Ramón Fernández, just published in English and Spanish by Pathfinder Press, as well as The U.S. War Against Cuba, by José Ramón Fernández and José Pérez Fernández, and a collection of excerpts from speeches about Playa Girón by Fidel Castro, both newly published by Ocean Press. All conference participants were given copies of these new titles, as well as books by U.S. organizers of the conference: Bay of Pigs Declassified, edited by Peter Kornbluh, and Politics of Illusion: The Bay of Pigs Invasion Reexamined, edited by Kornbluh and James Blight, both published in 1998.

José Ramón Fernández, vice president of Cuba's Council of State and chair of the conference organizing committee, presented the books. In his closing remarks, he said the new titles were contributions to the effort to explain the facts about the victory at Playa Girón, letting leading Cuban participants in those events speak in their own words.

Fernández pointed to the value of the efforts of those in the United States who get out the truth about the Cuban Revolution. These books, he said, contain "lessons for the new generations, both in Cuba and the United States who--40 years after these events--still look to us."

Brief remarks were also made by Mary-Alice Waters, Pathfinder president and coeditor of Playa Girón, and David Deutsch-mann of Ocean Press.

As part of their daily coverage of the conference, Cuban television news and the newspaper Granma reported on the book presentation. TV cameras zoomed in on the striking cover of Pathfinder's Playa Girón.

Reprinted below are the remarks by Mary-Alice Waters. Her talk is copyright © 2001 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission.
--MARTÍN KOPPEL
 
 
BY MARY-ALICE WATERS
The strength of Playa Girón / Bay of Pigs: Washington's First Military Defeat in the Americas lies in its unique combination of speeches and documents by leaders of the Cuban Revolution, leaders deeply involved in the events of the time and whose actions were decisive in the victory of the Cuban people on the sands of Girón. Above all, Pathfinder hopes it will be a source of information and orientation for young people, in the United States and elsewhere around the world, born many years after the historic events that are at the center of this conference.

It is addressed to these new generations who are trying to understand what happened at the Bay of Pigs. Why, even 40 years later, do the U.S. rulers remain so ferocious in their determination to crush the Cuban Revolution? Why and how were the people of Cuba able to inflict a defeat on the Yankee empire so total and ignominious that it remains an example today that continues to inspire the oppressed and exploited the world over?

Playa Girón contains major excerpts from the speeches of Commander in Chief Fidel Castro immediately before and after the battle. In the heat of the moment, he explains what was happening in Cuba and the world, and the stakes for us all in "the inevitable battle."

In these pages we can read the war communiqués of the revolutionary government and its armed forces. We read the calls to battle issued by Commanders Raúl Castro to the people of Oriente province and Ernesto Che Guevara to the people of Pinar del Rio on April 15, 1961, each within hours of the deadly sneak attacks on the Havana and Santiago de Cuba airfields that signaled the imminent invasion.

Those pieces of the historic record give readers a feel for the passion, intensity, and determination of the moment--for the confidence of the Cuban people in their socialist revolution and their leadership. Truth, justice, history, and the vast majority of toiling humanity were on their side. They did not know what the cost would be, but they knew they would win.

Complementing the documents of the time is the second major component of Playa Girón, the testimony given before a Havana court nearly 40 years later by José Ramón Fernández, the captain who commanded the main column of revolutionary forces that defeated the U.S.-backed invading troops at Playa Girón. From the vantage point of his own responsibilities, Fernández's account, amplified with nearly two dozen maps and charts, provides a clear and concise picture of the battle as it actually unfolded.

But the power of this testimony is also rooted in the fact that Fernández draws extensively on the major accounts, memoirs, and evaluations written by those within the U.S. government and its agencies, including members of Brigade 2506, who organized, deployed, and participated in the invasion that was designed to be the opening wedge of direct U.S. military aggression against Cuba. Their assessments provide stark confirmation of the truths explained many times over by the revolutionary leadership of Cuba.

Playa Girón is a book whose major audience in the coming months and years will be young readers, especially in the United States. Addressed to them above all is the book's foreword describing the impact of the Cuban Revolution on a generation of young people within the United States at the time of Washington's first great defeat in the Americas.

That was a generation whose consciousness had already been forged in action supporting the rising mass proletarian struggle for Black rights that was sweeping from South to North. They were young people imbued with growing contempt and hatred for government anticommunist witch-hunting agencies such as HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee, which had dampened political expression for more than a decade.

Written by Jack Barnes, who at the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion was the organizer of one of the largest campus chapters of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, the foreword describes the political battle that groups of young people across the United States waged, together with veteran communists, trade unionists, and farmers, as we reached out to the broadest possible forces with the truth about the Cuban Revolution. We explained not only why Cuban working people would never surrender their conquests, but why we inside the United States--if we were to win our inevitable battles--would have to organize to emulate their revolutionary course.

Pathfinder's editors hope that readers will also find the extensive photo pages and other graphics that are part of this volume to be of special value. Many of the photos reproduced as part of the book are the product of joint efforts by compañeros in Cuba and the United States to rescue from the crumbling pages of magazines and newspapers historic photos that would otherwise be lost because the corresponding negatives and other reproductions have long ago disappeared.

It is important for new generations not only to read the speeches and documents that are part of the real history of our Americas, but to see with their own eyes the changes wrought by the revolution along with the faces and actions of those who were willing to give their lives to defend it.

This is a book that will be promoted, distributed, and read around the world--not only in North America, but from Asia to Latin America, from Europe to Africa. It will be sold not only through bookstores and web sites, but from tables at factory gates, farm protests, university campuses, community centers, workers neighborhoods, and political events.

If it helps young readers to understand that Washington's defeat at the Bay of Pigs flowed not from blunders by the CIA or vacillations by the administration of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, but from the strength, preparedness, and determination of the Cuban people to defend their newly conquered freedoms and social justice--and if it inspires them to become the same sort of people--Playa Girón will have served its purpose.

Pathfinder's editors will be all the more pleased if it is a book that also proves useful for those of you here participating in this signal conference, Playa Girón: Forty Years After.
 
 
Yankee reporters get bad case of the crabs

HAVANA--On the last day of the conference "Girón: 40 Years Later," participants and press, all together, were taken on a day-long visit to Playa Girón, scene of the April 1961 Cuban victory over the U.S.-directed invading forces.

Conference host José Ramón Fernández warned us the evening before that our return trip would have to begin no later than 4:00 p.m. From that point on, he said, the coastal road would be covered by "literally millions of crabs" crossing from the Zapata Swamp where they live to the shores of the Bay of Pigs. The land crabs, indigenous to Cuba, migrate every evening in the spring months to mate in the waters. At dawn they return to the swamp. The small hard-shelled natives of the Zapata Swamp will shred the tires of travelers who aren't careful, Fernández said.

One Mexican journalist chimed in to alert her colleagues: "I drove to Playa Girón the other day and had to fix flat tires 15 times. Watch out!"

Some U.S. members of the press corps, however, chose not to heed the warning.

When the visitors left Playa Girón at the end of the day's event, it was already 4:30 p.m. Most participants and reporters rode on buses provided by conference organizers. At first we noticed only a few crabs crossing the road. As the trip continued, however, the numbers kept growing, and within minutes Fernández's description materialized in living color and sound--an orange-pink sea of crabs covered the road for miles, as we listened to the crunching and cracking of the shells under the wheels. The highway was already littered with thousands of bodies of the little critters, crushed by vehicles that came before us.

The large tires on the buses rode over the sharp shells without undue damage, as our experienced Cuban drivers navigated the terrain. Some journalists, however, mostly from the U.S. media, drove their own private cars and "did not do so well," according to an article by Washington Post reporter Kevin Sullivan. But they did keep Santiago Acosta, a local tire-fixer or ponchero, busy and happy.

"Acosta had to fix more than 20 tires from conference-goers alone," Sullivan reported. "Along one short stretch of road near the beach, at least five cars were pulled over with flats--some of them with more than one tire punctured, making a single spare useless. Journalists had to abandon crippled cars and hitch a ride in the back of a passing flatbed truck."

The impatient journalists, loaded with their sophisticated phone and camera equipment, paid for not listening to the local farmers and other residents. Two Playa Girón natives, Eberto Anca and Luis Acosta, sitting in an old truck near the beach, laughed. "Anca said locals know, from hard experience, that driving slowly is the best defense," the Post article reported.

"Indeed, conference participants speeding down the road passed many local cars poking along. Later, those same cars crawled past as foreigners changed their shredded tires--wily tortoises in rusted-out Soviet-era antiques passing hard-luck hares carrying laptops and satellite phones."

Militant reporters, who traveled in the bus provided by conference organizers and returned to Havana without incident, enjoyed both the scenic drive and the marvelous highway replay 40 years later of the character of the contending forces of the battle of Playa Girón. Plus ça change.... --M.K. AND M-A. W.
 
 
Related articles:
'Cuban revolution is the achievement of millions'
Defense at Miami trial exposes anti-Cuba lies
Build Cuba-U.S. youth exchange
'We knew we were defending the gains of the revolution'
Cuban groups invite U.S. youth to Havana for summer exchange
October Crisis and the U.S. class struggle
 
 
 
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