The victory at Playa Girón punctured the myth of U.S. imperialism's invincibility. It left us with the conviction that the Cuban Revolution would be at the center of the class struggle inside the United States as long as the working class was in power in Cuba, and we had become convinced that such would be the case for the rest of our political lives.
 
Jack Barnes
March 2001
 
BY MARY-ALICE WATERS  
In less than seventy-two hours of combat in April 1961 near the Bay of Pigs, Cuba's Revolutionary Air Force, militias, police, and Rebel Army defeated an invasion by 1,500 Cuban counterrevolutionaries armed, trained, supported, and deployed by Washington. The stunning victory, Yankee imperialism's first military defeat in the Americas, had repercussions around the world--not least of all within the United States itself.

Jack Barnes takes that historic moment as his starting point for Cuba and the Coming American Revolution. It was the moment when Cuba no longer appeared as yet another victim of the most powerful country in history, but emerged as its equal. This is, at the same time, a book about the struggles of working people in the imperialist heartland, the youth who are attracted to them, and the example set by the people of Cuba, who taught us that revolution is not only necessary--it can be made. It is a book about the unshakable confidence the workers and farmers of Cuba gave us in what working people are capable of.

"The greatest obstacle to the line of march of the toilers," notes the author in the pages that follow, "is the tendency, promoted and perpetuated by the exploiting classes, for working people to underestimate ourselves, to underestimate what we can accomplish, to doubt our own worth." What the workers and farmers of Cuba showed us is that with class solidarity, political consciousness, courage, focused and persistent efforts at education, and a revolutionary leadership of high caliber like that in Cuba, tested and forged in battle over the years, it is possible to stand up to enormous might and seemingly insurmountable odds and win.

That was the lesson internalized in the early 1960s by a vanguard of young people inside the United States aided, encouraged, and educated by veteran workers and farmers of the Socialist Workers Party. Their story is told here in "1961: Year of Education." Written as the foreword to the recently released Pathfinder book, Playa Girón/Bay of Pigs: Washington's First Military Defeat in the Americas, it describes the impact of the Cuban Revolution on youth who were already being radicalized by the deepening mass struggle to bring down the "Jim Crow" system of segregation in the U.S. South and roll back other forms of racist discrimination throughout the country. It recounts the work of the students who established a campus chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee at Carleton College in Minnesota in the decisive few months culminating in the April 19 victory at Playa Girón, a committee that in the heat of events briefly became the largest campus chapter in the country. It describes the class-struggle lessons young people learned as they went through these experiences and tells how they began building the Young Socialist Alliance in the course of this work.

The second piece published here, "There Will Be a Victorious Revolution in the United States before a Victorious Counterrevolution in Cuba," is based on talks given by Barnes in both New York City and Seattle in March 2001 at meetings to celebrate the publication of Playa Girón/Bay of Pigs. Among the 450 participants in these gatherings were dozens of volunteers from one end of the country to the other whose labor made possible the rapid, quality production of the book. The audiences spanned the generations from those who were already active partisans of the Cuban Revolution at the time of the Bay of Pigs to socialist youth who are today, forty years after the events, making this chapter of history their own.

Playa Girón/Bay of Pigs came off the presses in both Spanish and English just in time to be launched at a March 22–24 conference in Havana on "Girón: 40 Years Later." During that event the central political and military leaders of revolutionary Cuba whose guidance had assured the victory, including commander in chief Fidel Castro, joined to discuss the events that occurred four decades earlier with a U.S. delegation some of whose members either fought as part of the U.S.-trained and -financed Brigade 2506, helped prepare the CIA invasion plans, or acted as apologists and advisers for the administration of President John F. Kennedy.

Other activities marking the Cuban victory at the Bay of Pigs took place in numerous U.S. cities, from Miami to New York, from Seattle to Minneapolis to Boston. At each of them the focus was not only to tell the story of what happened many years ago, but to use that knowledge to understand the world today and prepare for coming battles.

Why do the U.S. rulers remain as ferociously determined to try to crush the Cuban Revolution as they were in 1961? It isn't complicated. The first free territory of the Americas still stands as a revolutionary and a socialist example for the oppressed and exploited the world over.

U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell explained it more accurately than he perhaps intended before an April 26 House Appropriations subcommittee hearing in Washington, responding to a congressman who questioned him about why the United States government maintains diplomatic relations with China and Vietnam, and had them for decades with the former Soviet Union, but not Cuba. In China, Russia, and Vietnam, Powell replied, "you can see leaders who the world is changing." But in Cuba, he said, Castro "hasn't changed his views in any way."

Mr. Secretary got it right, just as each of his predecessors has. The people of Cuba have never surrendered. They stand ready, as always, to aid revolutionary struggles wherever they may occur, by any means necessary. Their message to would-be invaders remains the same: If you come, you stay.
 

The most important response to the publication of Playa Girón/Bay of Pigs came from new generations of readers who discovered something unanticipated in its pages. They had expected a clear and readable account of the historic battle from José Ramón Fernández, who led the main column of troops that defeated the invasion forces in April 1961. They had expected the truth and class clarity of the political leadership given the people of Cuba and the world in the speeches by Fidel Castro, Ernesto Che Guevara, and Raúl Castro. They had expected to find expressed in the pages of the book the determination and courage of the workers and peasants, overwhelmingly young, who fought and died on the road to Playa Girón to defend the first socialist revolution in our hemisphere.

The surprise was learning how a previous generation of young socialists inside the United States had waged an intense political battle in defense of the Cuban Revolution right here in the weeks leading up to, during, and after the U.S.-organized invasion. This previously unrecorded chapter in the history of the communist youth movement was to its continuators today not just an interesting account of something long past, however, but a model of mass work to be emulated now.

After reading "1961: Year of Education," several young socialists in Pittsburgh even decided to rent the video and organize a gathering to watch Salt of the Earth--the famous blacklisted movie about the unionization battle of largely Mexican zinc miners in the U.S. Southwest in the 1950s. Showing the movie and discussing it with one of the union organizers was among the activities organized in the months preceding the Bay of Pigs invasion by Carleton College students who were meeting weekly in a socialist discussion club, building a campus Fair Play for Cuba chapter, and rapidly becoming young communists. It was part of the broad education campaign that helped to politicize a layer of young people and prepare the ground for the response to U.S. aggression against Cuba. If the movie in 1961 stimulated the kind of political controversy and education indicated, the Pittsburgh young socialists surmised, then it must still be worth seeing. The movie, they thought, might be timely, and ring especially true, given the growing vanguard contributions of immigrant workers throughout the U.S. labor movement and the militancy today of union coal miners in that same part of the country, many of whom are Navajo, Mexican, or Chicano.

Most important, these young socialists acted on their conclusions.
 

I was one of the students at Carleton College for whom the defeat of U.S. imperialism at the Bay of Pigs was a watershed, and whose life course was changed by the activities of the people described in the opening chapter of this book. Before that sophomore year in college I had virtually no interest in politics. Had eighteen-year-olds been allowed to vote in the 1960 U.S. presidential elections, I would probably have cast a ballot for Richard Nixon. (Lowering the voting age to eighteen was an extension of the franchise only conceded a decade after that by the U.S. rulers, as they vainly sought to defuse the growing mass outrage among young people against being used as cannon fodder in the Vietnam War.)

Six months later I called myself a socialist, even though as yet I only vaguely understood what that might be.

In the months leading up to the Bay of Pigs invasion, I attended few of the programs organized by the student government-sponsored Challenge program described by Jack Barnes in "1961: Year of Education." I missed the meeting at which national Fair Play for Cuba Committee organizers Robert Williams and Ed Shaw spoke, for example, because I had a paper to write or an exam to prepare for. I enjoyed the study of English literature and took it seriously! But the next day the entire campus was discussing that electrifying meeting. Like others who had not been there, it had an impact on me nonetheless.

As did hundreds of students at Carleton, I avidly followed the political propaganda war being fought out on the bulletin board in the Student Union, reading the daily newspaper and magazine clippings posted by the Fair Play for Cuba Committee as well as those put up by critics or enemies of the revolution. One of the Fair Play supporters gave me a copy of C. Wright Mills's Listen, Yankee, which I devoured in one sitting. That slim paperback--written by a radical, socialist-minded, motorcycle-riding, heart-attack-prone, pure-product-of-America professor who staunchly opposed Washington's policy toward Cuba--was not only my introduction to the history of Cuba's anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggle. It also opened my eyes to the arrogance and brutality of U.S. imperialist domination of Latin America. I began to think about and discuss with others what we in the United States who opposed that reality needed to do.

Like millions in Cuba before me, in the spring of 1961 I became a "Fidelista" before I was yet knowingly a "socialista." I was a bit like the teenage antiaircraft artillery gunners in Cuba quoted in an article in the April 23 issue of the Militant newspaper. They described their reactions after listening to the speech by Fidel Castro hours before the battle of Playa Girón began, when he talked for the first time about the socialist character of the revolution in Cuba. "We didn't understand well what socialism was," one said, but "someone declared that if Fidel was a socialist, then we were socialists too, and everyone there agreed with that."

The night of April 19, 1961, as word spread across campus of Washington's crushing defeat at what we knew back then as Cochinos Bay, I joined in the celebration of our victory and never turned back.

The deepening revolution in Cuba was not isolated in the world of the early 1960s. Other powerful anti-imperialist struggles were advancing too, from Indochina to the Congo to Panama. Mass battles to bring down Jim Crow segregation in the United States were a form of the same struggles internationally and, at the same time, drew strength from them. And the reawakening struggles by Mexican-Americans and Chicanos were beginning to find echoes as well. In my own case it was the Algerian Revolution that had the deepest impact.

A few months after the Bay of Pigs, I found myself in France for the new academic year. The Algerian independence struggle, paid for in blood by some one million Algerians, was rapidly approaching victory. The great movie depiction of this struggle, Battle of Algiers, captures much of the courage and determination of the Algerian people, as well as the immeasurable brutality of the French imperialist forces. No one should miss it.

Paris resembled a city under siege during the closing months of the war. In the wake of a failed coup attempt, the Secret Army Organization (OAS), a clandestine fascist group based in the officer corps of the French army, had unleashed a campaign of bombings and assassinations in the capital aimed at bringing down the French government before it recognized Algerian independence. Paratroops armed with submachine guns stood guard twenty-four hours a day on every street corner, and plastic bombs exploded nightly in mailboxes and other public locations throughout the city.

Student antifascist committees were active in every faculty. They regularly organized demonstrations challenging the prohibition on street actions. Facing off against the much-hated special police force, the CRS, they inevitably sustained injuries and arrests. In February 1962 eight demonstrators were trampled and suffocated to death as those escaping a CRS attack fled into an abandoned metro station from which there was no exit. More than a million people poured into Paris streets to join the funeral cortege to the Père Lachaise cemetery, where the martyrs of the Paris Commune are also buried.

Despite the casualties still to come, the war was over. The people of Algeria had won. A few months later the Evian Accords were signed, ceding independence to Algeria after more than 130 years of French colonial rule. A workers and farmers government soon came to power, with National Liberation Front leader Ahmed Ben Bella at its head.

Joining these student demonstrations was my first direct experience with the terror of police brutality and the reality of fascist violence. It was a political education that left an indelible impression. Unbeknown to me at the time, the student antifascist committees, whose actions in the streets of Paris were so indispensable to mobilizing support for Algerian independence, were led by my own comrades, young people in the leadership of the left wing of the Union des Etudiants Communistes (UEC--Communist Students Union). These youth were soon to be expelled from the UEC at the insistence of the leadership of the French Communist Party, in part for leading these actions, and they founded the Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire (JCR--Revolutionary Communist Youth), the sister organization of the Young Socialist Alliance.

When I returned to Carleton for my senior year, I immediately joined the Young Socialist Alliance without the slightest doubt that a disciplined communist organization was necessary to meet similar conditions that were sure to be produced by capitalism in the United States.

The liberation struggle in Algeria had an impact on layers of young people and fighters against oppression far beyond North Africa and France, of course, including in the United States. Malcolm X was one of them. At a May 1964 meeting of the Militant Labor Forum in New York City, Malcolm pointed out that while only a few years earlier Ben Bella had been in the prisons of French imperialism, "today they have to negotiate with him because he knew that the one thing he had on his side was truth and time. Time is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor. Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it's against the oppressor." During both of his trips to Africa and the Middle East in 1964, Malcolm traveled to Algeria to meet with fellow revolutionaries.

There were strong ties connecting the Algerian and Cuban revolutions. The years immediately following independence from France saw close and growing collaboration between Havana and Algiers to aid anti-imperialist struggles from the Congo to Argentina to apartheid South Africa, and to defend the Algerian and Cuban revolutions.

In the fall of 1962 Ben Bella came to New York City to address the United Nations General Assembly on the occasion of Algeria being admitted to that body as an independent nation.

From there Ben Bella traveled to Washington for a brief state visit with President John F. Kennedy, and then, despite the open threats of his hosts, demonstratively flew straight on to Havana, where he joined his comrades-in-arms. In an account written thirty-five years later, Ben Bella recalled that he arrived in Havana on October 16, the very eve of the Cuban "Missile" Crisis, "amid indescribable scenes of popular enthusiasm" for the revolution and its solidarity with Algeria.

The first large-scale internationalist mission of Cuban volunteers was the dispatch of tanks and a column of troops under the command of Efigenio Ameijeiras, the head of the Revolutionary National Police battalion that had fought so tenaciously at Playa Girón; they went to Algeria in October 1963 to help the revolutionary government repel a U.S.-backed invasion by Moroccan troops.

With the overthrow of the Ben Bella–led workers and farmers government in June 1965, the defeat of the anti-imperialist forces in the Congo later that same year, and the withdrawal from the Congo of the Cuban volunteer troops headed by Che Guevara, the era of that type of close collaboration between Havana and Algiers came to an end.
 

More than forty years have passed since the last victorious socialist revolution. That is a long time, not on the historical scale, but in political time. A great deal has changed in the world.

We don't have to look far or delve that deeply, however, to see within the United States social forces being propelled into motion that are capable of transforming themselves as they come to realize in struggle that we need the same kind of revolution that the workers and peasants of Cuba carried to victory. From the streets of Cincinnati to the coal mines on the Navajo Nation, from the farm cooperatives of southern Georgia to the dairy farms of Wisconsin, from the port of Charleston to the packinghouses of Omaha, from the fields of California's Imperial Valley to the garment shops of Los Angeles and New York, as the pages that follow explain, "a vanguard layer of workers and farmers in this country is becoming more confident from their common fighting experience and thus more open to considering radical ideas, including the program and strategy of the modern communist movement. Whether they know it yet or not, their own experience in life and struggle is bringing them closer to that of the workers and peasants of revolutionary Cuba."

This is not an ideological question but a practical one, a question of proletarian integrity, habits of discipline, and morality--of Marxism.

We've been reminded of that in recent weeks by the profound class divide that has opened once again in the United States following the acknowledgment by former Democratic U.S. senator Robert Kerrey of the civilian massacre he was responsible for more than thirty years ago in Vietnam. (He was moved to "bare his soul" just days before the story was to be printed in the New York Times and broadcast nationwide on CBS's Sixty Minutes!) Liberals are wailing about the personal agony Kerrey has been obliged to live with lo these many decades--"the bad war made him do it." Meanwhile conservatives intone phrases about the "realities" of battle, defending the "free-fire zones" where every Vietnamese man, woman, and child was assumed to be "the enemy." Kerrey's only betrayal, as far as they are concerned, was later becoming a Democratic Party officeholder.

The bipartisan sanctimonious posturing should serve to remind us not only of the enormous price paid in blood by the people of Vietnam to gain their independence, but also of the example of the Rebel Army during the battle at Playa Girón, where not one prisoner, by the invaders' own testimony, was mistreated or abused, denied food, water, or medical treatment equivalent to that available to the Cuban troops. The same was true throughout the entire two years of the revolutionary war in Cuba where, despite the record of the Batista regime's brutal killers and torturers, no captured government soldier was treated by the Rebel Army in any way but with humanity and respect.

What determined the outcome at Playa Girón, as in Vietnam and Algeria, was ultimately not which side had the superior armaments, but the class character of the contending forces and what they were fighting for. That's what the U.S. rulers did not and can never understand. They did their mathematical calculations, as Che Guevara is quoted saying here, but they failed to measure the moral relationship of forces. "They have always been wrong about us," Guevara concluded. "They always arrive late."

They still are wrong about the capacities of the toilers, and they still always arrive late. And always will.

That class line is what hundreds of workers and farmers, and young people on dozens of campuses in the United States, were responding to during the recent speaking engagements by two Cuban youth leaders, Javier Dueñas and Yanelis Martínez. Their month-long visit to the United States took place as this book was being prepared. In talking about the opportunities and challenges facing working people and youth in Cuba today, in responding to what they saw and learned of the U.S. class struggle, and in answering the questions put to them everywhere about the world and the future ahead of us all, these young Cubans kept shifting the focus to the ordinary workers, farmers, and young people just awakening to political life in both Cuba and the United States.

Above all, the two Cubans pointed to the capacities of working people and youth attracted to their struggles to rise to the level of consciousness, discipline, courage, and class solidarity necessary to take their own future in hand. This is what the people of Cuba have done, the example they've set, for the last forty-odd years.

"What is special is never the human material," says the author in the pages that follow, "but the times we live in and our degree of preparation. If we've worked together beforehand to build a disciplined, centralized workers party--with a program and strategy that advances the historic line of march of our class worldwide--then we'll be ready for new opportunities in the class struggle when they explode in totally unanticipated ways. We'll be prepared to build a mass proletarian combat party that can take on the capitalist rulers in revolutionary struggle and defeat them. That is the most important lesson that every one of us can draw."

If the victory of the people of Cuba at Playa Girón is still stuck in Washington's craw some forty years later, it is not because of something that happened long ago or miles away. It is because of the present and the future right here in the United States, where, as Jack Barnes concludes in the opening chapter of this book, the revolutionary capacities of the workers and farmers are "as utterly discounted by the ruling powers as were those of the peasant and proletarian masses of Cuba. And just as wrongly."

That is what Cuba and the Coming American Revolution is about.  
 
 
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