Along with increased numbers of troops, warplanes, attack helicopters, and murderous CIA agents in Afghanistan, Washington is extending its military tentacles into other countries of Central Asia, and its UN-blessed puppet regime is preparing to take over in Kabul. Even writers for the big-business media have a hard time covering up the fact that this has all the trappings of just another war of imperial aggression.

As Washington drives ahead with its imperialist assault on working people, the U.S. rulers are running into more people who are standing up to their imperial dictates. The government of north Korea has rejected U.S. demands to let inspectors snoop around their country, allegedly looking for weapons of mass destruction, something Washington has plenty of. U.S. imperialism's real intention in regards to north Korea, where a mighty revolution threw out both the Japanese and American occupiers, can be seen in the weapons undergoing live testing in Afghanistan today. Military planners openly admit that the 3,000-pound cave-busting bombs now being dropped by B-52s were developed for use against north Korea.

Despite declarations by Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon and U.S. president George Bush, the Palestinian people refuse to accept that living under the boot of Israeli occupation has anything to do with self-determination. In the face of bombings and military assault, they persevere with their decades-long struggle against the imperialist state that is responsible for their dispossession.

At home, hundreds of young men in Detroit, among the 5,000 nationwide slated for FBI interviews, have refused to show up for their interrogation. To them and many others, Washington's so-called "war against terrorism" is looking more and more like the same old war against workers' rights. And, with September 11 receding, many workers are deciding they should continue their struggles to defend their unions, jobs, and livelihoods, even in wartime.

In spite of running into some opposition in bourgeois circles, the Bush administration still enjoys bipartisan backing for his anti-constitutional measures. Washington will continue to push forward the militarization of the United States, the whittling away of constitutional protections in the Bill of Rights, and the centralization of power in the hands of the executive branch of government. Hand-in-hand with the government's attacks, the employers, too, will attempt to use harsher methods.

Amid these attacks, the Cuban Revolution continues to provide an example for working people around the world. Taking the moral high ground against the escalating wars and barbaric acts of U.S. imperialism, Cuban president Fidel Castro told a rally of 100,000 on December 2 that in the face of imperialism's course of "plunder, exploitation, wars, and destruction of the conditions of life on the planet," the world "will be conquered by ideas, not by force."

Washington will never forgive the Cuban people for their action in showing the road forward in 1959 by toppling the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship, and opening the road to a government of workers and farmers and the first socialist revolution in the Americas.

Reading the article in this week's Militant describing the mobilizations of the Cuban people over the past week, one gets a sense of the confidence and human capacities that the revolution, through common struggle over four decades, has brought out in workers and farmers in the country. Fidel Castro's statements are not bravado, but accurate assessments of the fact that imperialism cannot defeat the Cuban Revolution by military force. His view that the Cuban people can prepare for "an all-encompassing and all-round culture on a mass scale--something no society has ever dreamed of" is also a reflection of the accomplishments of the revolution.

As Washington deepens yet another of its wars in Afghanistan that have left large parts of the country decimated (this is its threat to anyone else who dares stand up to the declining empire), Castro's statements help to show why the road of the Cuban Revolution remains the only alternative for working people around the world.
 
 
Related article:
Fidel Castro speaks to mass rally in Cuba  
 
 
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