The deliberations by the more than 1,600 elected union delegates, who met April 29 and 30, were informed by a five-month period of discussion by 2.5 million workers in factories and other workplaces around the island. The discussion centered on a resolution known as the Theses, submitted by the national union leadership, that took up some of the main questions facing working people.

The congress registered the progress in Cuba's recovery from what is known here as the Special Period--the economic crisis triggered a decade ago by the sudden loss of aid from and preferential terms of trade with the Soviet bloc countries, brutally compounded by Wash-ington's intensified economic war. In the battle for sheer economic survival, most projects to meet pressing social needs were halted.

As Cuban working people have successfully fought their way through the most difficult years of the Special Period, the revolutionary leadership has been able to devote more efforts to combating the resulting social inequalities, as well as political initiatives to win a new generation to communism--which in the CTC Theses is described as "the war of ideas."  
 
Training more schoolteachers
The congress took up a range of important questions, from workers' efforts to maximize the use of their labor and resources in industry and agriculture, to maintaining the military training and preparedness of working people in defense of the revolution in face of U.S. threats.

The delegates also made several decisions to address some of the major social questions facing working people. One of the main decisions was to extend paid maternity leave from six months to one year, effective immediately (see article in the May 14 issue of the Militant).

In his report to the union congress, CTC general secretary Pedro Ross highlighted several other broad initiatives to meet social needs. One of these is the effort to train more teachers and upgrade educational facilities throughout the island. This sparked considerable discussion by delegates.

Lázaro Martínez, a member of a contingent of volunteer teachers in the area of San Cristóbal, in the western province of Pinar del Río, explained efforts he and others were making to turn around a shortage of teachers and educational resources.

Martínez, the director of five elementary schools in that isolated mountainous area, said they have been carrying out a successful campaign to recruit 12th grade students to a teacher training program in their own communities. They have also been able to provide TVs, videocassette players, and computers--in some cases run on solar power--in every school, even those in small communities that have no more than five students.

"Next year 80 young people are joining" the teaching program, he said, "and we just completed the last of the solar panel systems, which means that 100 percent of the schools now have audiovisual equipment."

Joining in the discussion, Cuban president Fidel Castro asked Martínez why there was a shortage of teachers in the region. He pointed out that the problem also existed in more populated areas such as Matanzas and Havana provinces, where there are an average of 40 students per teacher. Castro said that in these areas "tourism has stolen away teachers" because workers in tourist-related jobs gain greater access to hard currency.

Martínez replied that the same had happened in his province. He said the solution he and others had found was to politically convince young people in the area to become teachers as a way to contribute to society. In addition, the government recently increased wages of teachers, and has given them prioritized access to housing as further incentives to remain in that rural area.

Castro said the goal is to make sure that even in the most remote mountainous areas there is no student without a teacher or lacking a television and computer. He reported that beginning in September, all teacher training schools will have courses in computer use.  
 
Student brigades in poor neighborhoods
Hassán Pérez, president of the Federation of University Students (FEU), also participated in the discussion. He spoke about a campaign, discussed at the union congress, that is being led by the FEU and the Union of Young Communists (UJC). It involves organizing brigades of university students and UJC cadres to go to some of the poorest working-class neighborhoods in Havana and other cities, talk with residents, find out about their most critical problems, and work together to propose solutions.

The students go to workers' homes and visit the local schools, pharmacies, and neighborhood committee organizations.

In one neighborhood, Pérez said, "we found a household of 23 people with only four beds. They were living on the income of three adults, and one older woman, who has cancer, cares for 12 children." He said the students helped organize to make more beds available, made sure the sick woman received medical care, and worked with the unemployed workers in the household to find jobs.

When the student volunteers find children who are underweight, they work to identify the problem, which in most cases is lack of proper nourishment or illness, he said.

"We work every day, and 10 hours on Saturdays," Pérez said of the student brigade movement. "We're in love with our work. We visit patients in the hospitals, we volunteer to tutor students--all things that wouldn't happen if we didn't have a socialist society." These experiences are deepening the revolutionary consciousness of thousands of young people, he noted.  
 
Renewed housing construction
Another major topic of discussion at the union gathering was the stepped-up efforts to build housing and repair existing houses and apartments.

Carlos Lage, secretary of the executive committee of the Council of Ministers, noted that before the Special Period, Cuba had been building about 100,000 housing units a year, but that the shortages had brought the program to a virtual halt. More resources are now available to begin to turn around the situation, he reported.

Delegates discussed how a movement of volunteer construction brigades, known as minibrigades, is being revived. These are made up primarily of workers and others who volunteer to be released from their regular jobs for a period of time in order to build housing and other social projects. A related project makes subsidized construction materials and credit available to families to build their own houses, where most of the construction work is done by family members, friends, and neighbors volunteering after work and on weekends.

After the CTC congress, when a group of visiting garment workers from the United States toured the Confecciones Gala clothing plant in Havana, Faustina Pedro, a leader of the light industry workers union in Havana province, said, "Last year our union helped three workers and their families get houses." Workers building a house with their family and friends are joined by union members "who pitch in on the big jobs like pouring the foundation," she said.

The union, Pedro said, also helps workers apply for home repair materials and organizes volunteers to help do repair work on weekends.

In 1999, Lage reported, eight construction minibrigades were organized in Havana, and today there are 70. Last year, residents of 309,000 apartments and houses received assistance for repairs, often in the form of construction materials.  
 
May Day celebration
The day after the congress, delegates joined 600,000 other Cuban working people in a May Day march and rally. It was a massive reaffirmation of support for the socialist course of the revolution and rejection of the economic warfare waged against revolutionary Cuba by Washington.

Officials of labor organizations in Argentina, Uruguay, Spain, and other countries brought greetings. Those from Spain and Argentina, among others, denounced their governments for having voted in favor of a U.S.-backed resolution condemning Cuba for "human rights violations" at a meeting of the United Nations Human Rights Commission, which met in Geneva at the end of April.

Students from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa, who are among the 3,000 students enrolled at the Latin American School of Medicine, were among those joining the celebration. One of them, William Aguilar, 22, from Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, noted that he was studying on a scholarship provided by Cuba and said, "It is my dream to return home after my training and practice medicine among the rural poor."

In his speech to the rally, Castro hailed the Cuban people's resistance to 42 years of U.S. aggression and economic warfare. This tenacious resistance, strengthened by the fact that Cuban working people have made a socialist revolution, he noted, is an example for others in the world facing the same imperialist enemy.

"Today," he said, "we confront an adversary who is powerful in every way except in ethics and ideas, who has no message or response to the serious political, economic, and social problems afflicting today's world.

The Cuban leader added, "Imperialism, on the edge of a deep political and economic crisis, cannot escape its own shadow. It is condemned to increasingly plunder the world--and to promote discontent and rebellion everywhere."

Castro condemned U.S. imperialism for promoting the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) in order to strengthen its economic domination over Latin America. He said that the effort to impose the interests of U.S. capital on these nations was tantamount to a move to annex them to the U.S. empire. Castro called on the workers movement in Latin America and the Caribbean to campaign for a plebiscite to reject their governments' decision to sign the FTAA.

The following day, the CTC hosted an International Meeting in Solidarity with Cuba and Against Neoliberal Globalization. Most of the more than 600 international guests to the congress, from 58 countries, took part in the meeting, which was also attended by Fidel Castro, Pedro Ross, Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque, and other Cuban leaders.

Osvaldo Martínez, director of the Cuban Center for the Study of the World Economy, gave a presentation on the world capitalist economic crisis. Noting the growing layoffs in the United States, he said the slowdown in the U.S. economy is the prelude to a greater international crisis. He cited similarities between the conditions before the 1929 stock market crash that announced the Great Depression and today's situation, pointing out the devastating impact the U.S. economic downturn has on countries of the semicolonial world. Today, Martínez said, the foreign debt owed by Third World countries to the imperialist banks is $2.5 trillion, up from $580 billion in 1980.

Many international delegates addressed the gathering, touching on some of the themes raised by Martínez. Among them were Ty Collander of the oil workers union of Trinidad and Tobago, Angel Rodríguez, a national leader of the Bolivarian Workers Force (FBT) of Venezuela, and Marta Bonilla, a member of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE) from Los Angeles, one of more than 700 UNITE members on strike against Hollander Home Fashions in three states (see article on page 13).

The U.S. delegation was the largest international group. Nearly 100 unionists and others were present, including groups of members of UNITE and Local 1199 of the Service Employees International Union.
 

HAVANA--Marta Bonilla, 62, a member of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees (UNITE) from Los Angeles, received enthusiastic applause from other participants in the International Meeting in Solidarity with Cuba and Against Neoliberal Globalization. Bonilla described the conditions that made her, along with 575 others at three plants, decide to go on strike against Hollander Home Fashions, a company that produces pillows, down comforters, and other household products across the United States and in Canada.

Bonilla said that in the strike "the police are on the side of the company." She and other workers were arrested for violating an injunction won by Hollander that restricts the number of pickets at the plant gate. "When I was in jail," she said, "I told the police, 'As soon as you let me out, I'm going back to the picket line.'"

"The company has done everything it can to defeat us," the UNITE member said. "They pay the scabs much more than they paid us. The supervisors tell us, 'You have a check waiting inside,' but we tell them, 'Outside the plant we have food. We are gaining weight!' "

The majority of the 450 Hollander workers in Los Angeles, who walked out March 8, are Mexican and Central American immigrants. Bonilla explained how inspired they were when the 100 workers in Tignall, Georgia, who are Anglo, honored their picket line, and when their fellow unionists in the Frackville, Pennsylvania, plant walked out May 1.

National leaders of the Cuban Union of Light Industry Workers, which organizes garment and textile workers, sent a message of solidarity to the Hollander strikers, and invited Bonilla and others from the U.S. delegation to visit the Confecciones Gala clothing plant in Havana, where 200 workers produce uniforms for workers in tourism.
--M.T. and R.C.
 

"The current generation carries in its hands, along the trail blazed by its forefathers, working America...the seeds of the new America!" --19th century Cuban revolutionary José Martí

Cuban youth are organizing an exchange that will give young people from Cuba and the United States time to join together in discussions and strengthen the solidarity between the people of both countries. The conference will challenge everything that keeps the youth of the two countries apart. It will be a way to stand together and show the world that unity is not a dream, and that if we fight with all our hearts to unite the divided peoples of the Americas, we can turn the dream of Martí into reality. -- Cuba-U.S. Youth Exchange Organizing Committee

For further information contact the Cuba-U.S. Youth Exchange Organizing Committee. Telfax: (537) 60 0225 or 67 0225. E-mail: ujcri@ujc.org.cu or ri@ujc.org.cu
 
 
Related articles:
Cuba and the Coming American Revolution
Cuban Revolution is irreversible, Guevara told Kennedy advisor  
 
 
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