Dreke was addressing a public meeting held February 18 in the city of Sagua la Grande. It was the first of more than half a dozen similar events across central Cuba in mid-February launching Pathfinder Press's newly released title From the Escambray to the Congo: In the Whirlwind of the Cuban Revolution.

In the book, Dreke recounts how as a teenager he joined the revolutionary movement that led Cuba's workers and farmers to overthrow the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship in January 1959. The book also tells the story of the struggle to wipe out the U.S.-directed counterrevolutionary bands operating in the Escambray mountains in the first half of the 1960s, in which Dreke played a leading role; and of the internationalist mission to the Congo in 1965 led by Ernesto Che Guevara. Dreke was second in command of that effort to aid anti-imperialist forces there.

Hosted by the Communist Party of Cuba, the provincial governments of Villa Clara and Sancti Spíritus, and the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution, book presentations were also held in Santa Clara, Placetas, Sancti Spíritus, Trinidad, and Manicaragua. Each of these cities was the scene of important events recounted in the book.

At each stop the local hosts went out of their way to welcome their Cuban and international guests, including Mary-Alice Waters, Pathfinder president and editor of the book, and Iraida Aguirrechu, who organized editorial collaboration on the book in Cuba. Leaders of the party, government, and Combatants Association joined the speakers on the platform at every event.

The meeting in Sagua had particular significance because it is Dreke's home town and he is a well-known, much respected figure there. As a 15-year-old rebel, he became involved in political activity in Sagua when he and other youth took to the streets to oppose the March 1952 U.S.-backed coup of Fulgencio Batista.

One of those who joined Dreke on the tour through Villa Clara was Roberto Sacerio, a lifelong comrade-in-arms who like Dreke began his political activity in March 1952 in the streets of Sagua, fighting the Batista dictatorship.

There are 30,000 members of the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution in Villa Clara, Sacerio reported. It is the highest number of any province because of the large participation of working people both in the battle of Santa Clara in the final days of 1958--which under the leadership of Rebel Army commander Che Guevara dealt a mortal blow to the Batista dictatorship--and in the fight against the counterrevolutionary bands between 1960 and 1965. The Association's membership is made up of several generations of Cubans who have taken part in revolutionary battles in Cuba and internationalist missions abroad.

Accompanying Dreke at the speakers platform under a banner that declared "To read is to grow"--the theme of this year's expanded Cuba-wide book fair--were Waters and Aguirrechu as well as Angel Sorís, first secretary of the Cuban Communist Party in Sagua; Ernesto Rodríguez, president of the local Combatants Association; and Israel Perera, president of the municipal assembly, People's Power.

The atmosphere in the meeting hall was electric as Dreke spoke about the importance of publishing a book that tells the story of the ordinary men and women who made the Cuban Revolution and referred to some of the high points and leading participants in Sagua's rich revolutionary history.

Addressing his fellow combatants who had turned out in force, Dreke said, "There are those here who can write about the history of revolutionary struggle in Sagua." Some, like himself, find it difficult to write, he noted, especially about themselves. But they had an obligation to the new generations taking on leadership responsibilities in Cuba today to record the lessons they had learned.

When the program ended, dozens lined up to buy the book from the international team of Young Socialists and communist workers from the United States, Britain, and Sweden who were part of the group accompanying Dreke on the tour. Most then joined a long line to get their books autographed by the author, chatting with Militant reporters as they patiently waited. Among them were Angel Delgado, who had led rail workers in revolutionary activities against the Batista dictatorship, and Wilfredo Casanova Alfonso, who as a 17-year-old high school student had joined the April 9, 1958, revolutionary strike called by the July 26 Movement, patrolling the streets in a jeep.

"Here we are never going back to the exploitation of the past," Ciro Morales, president of a neighborhood branch of the Combatants Association, told the Militant. "And, please, put that in your newspaper."  
 
Struggle against the Bandits
The book presentations were of a similar character everywhere. At the meeting in Trinidad, for example, Dreke focused on some of the experiences and lessons of the fight to crush the counterrevolutionary bands, commonly known in Cuba as the Lucha Contra Bandidos, or Struggle against the Bandits. (Dreke's talk will be published in next week's issue of the Militant.)

As the Cuban Revolution deepened in the early years, the former capitalists and landlords organized counterrevolutionary gangs--armed, supplied, and directed by Washington--as part of their drive to overthrow the revolution. Centered in the Escambray mountains, over a period of some six years nearly 4,000 bandits, organized in 299 bands, murdered literacy volunteers, burned villages and sugarcane fields, and terrorized the population. The revolutionary leadership organized tens of thousands of workers and farmers into volunteer militias, which by 1965 had wiped out the last groups of bandits.

The Trinidad presentation of From the Escambray to the Congo was held February 21 in the auditorium of the National Museum of the Lucha Contra Bandidos. The well-organized displays there depict that decisive chapter of Cuba's history with an abundance of rare photos, maps, charts, and explanatory material. In the morning, museum workers enthusiastically volunteered to help prepare an attractive display in the hallways and courtyard, using blowups of book covers and a sizable spread of Pathfinder books and pamphlets to publicize the event all day.

The audience of 120 at the evening meeting included both combatants and their relatives as well as dozens of junior high school students. A number of TV and radio reporters taking part in a regional conference in the city were also present.

Joining the speakers who were on tour was Félix Pérez Zúñiga, first secretary of the Cuban Communist Party in the city of Trinidad. Also on the platform were Manuel Albolay, president of the local Combatants Association; museum director Héctor Manuel Vieras, who had personally given the visitors a tour of the city; Aurelio Gutiérrez, author of La defensa de Polo Viejo (The defense of Polo Viejo), an account of a 1963 battle against a counterrevolutionary assault in the Escambray, and Golbán Marín Valdivia, known by his nom de guerre Wasiri. Marín had fought in the revolutionary war, in the Lucha Contra Bandidos, and had joined with Guevara and Dreke in the 1965 internationalist mission to the Congo, as well as serving later in the Republic of Guinea and Angola.

Dreke, responding with enthusiasm to the presence of many young people in the audience, described how he had become involved in the revolutionary movement, initially as a teenager rebelling against injustice, then as a combatant in the revolutionary war.

"When we began the guerrilla struggle, we had never been guerrillas before," he pointed out. "No one is born with that. It's learned. How is it learned? Not in a school for cadets.... It's learned in struggle."

Like the revolutionary war, the struggle to wipe out the counterrevolutionary bandits was also a source of political lessons, Dreke noted.

The bandits and their imperialist backers thought that by launching guerrilla warfare in the Escambray mountains, they could spark enough opposition that the revolutionary government could be overthrown, just as the Batista dictatorship had been brought down, Dreke said. But they were wrong because of the caliber of the leadership and the fact that workers and farmers were in power. "First," he said, "Fidel Castro was not Batista, and second, the Rebel Army was not Batista's army. Thirdly, a counterrevolution can never be successfully carried out against the people."

He explained how working people were able to organize themselves to crush the counterrevolutionary bands. Sometimes, to flush out groups of bandits that remained hidden in the difficult terrain of the Escambray, the militias would carry out what they called a "proletarian combing operation, where the combatants were shoulder to shoulder"--despite the risk of accidentally shooting a fellow combatant when advancing in such close formation.

Key to their success, Dreke added, was the fact that the leadership was always in the front lines together with the ranks. "When those combing operations were carried out, almost all of us who held positions of command accompanied our comrades," he emphasized.

Iraida Aguirrechu, current affairs editor of Editora Política, the publishing house of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, who chaired the meeting, spoke about the collective efforts of many in Cuba to assure the accuracy and quality of the book. She introduced Waters, noting that she is not only the president of Pathfinder Press but a member of the Political Committee of the Socialist Workers Party, "a revolutionary party in the United States that supports our revolution."

"With a leadership worthy of them, men and women whose existence is often not even recognized by the rich and arrogant are capable of taking on the most powerful empire the world has ever known. And winning," Waters noted in her remarks. That is the main lesson of the Cuban Revolution, evident throughout the pages of From the Escambray to the Congo, she emphasized. That is why the book is a political weapon for working people in the United States and around the world.

Dreke's story underlines an additional fact, she noted. "Whatever its imperfections, only socialist Cuba provides an example of how the legacy of centuries of African slavery and the racist discrimination that still permeates all aspects of social and economic relations in the United States--and elsewhere in the Americas--can be eliminated."

Waters pointed out that "in the economic, social, and political crisis exploding in Argentina today, we see the future capitalism has in store for us all." She explained some of the changes taking place within the United States itself, including the sharpening offensive against working people by the employers--who have used the September 11 events to accelerate their long-planned assaults. She described concrete examples of the resistance by working people to them, facts about the class struggle in the United States that are generally little known in Cuba.

Waters explained how communists and young socialists in the United States and other countries are using books such as From the Escambray to the Congo to reach workers, farmers, and youth on picket lines, in plants, in working-class communities, and on high school and college campuses, and to win them to the communist movement. (The full text of Waters's remarks at the February 9 launching of this title at the Havana International Book Fair appeared in the February 25 Militant.)  
 
Winning youth to revolution
Addressing the meeting at the conclusion of Dreke's remarks, Pérez Zúñiga pointed to the political impact that leaders such as Víctor Dreke have had on him and others of the generations born after the victory of the Cuban Revolution. The example of Dreke's life as a revolutionary fighter is especially important today in the political education of young people, he said.

It is part of the "Battle of Ideas," he noted, referring to the campaign by the Cuban leadership to advance the proletarian course of the revolution. This is a political battle to win new generations of youth to help lead the struggle to deepen the revolution and to confront the imperialist ideological drive that promotes capitalism and its individualistic, dog-eat-dog values.

Speaking about Cuba's place in today's world, Pérez Zúñiga referred to some of the points made by Waters and expanded on them.

"Our country today is prepared for what's coming, because the Special Period has taught us a lot," he said, referring to the economic and political crisis Cuba faced as the regimes and ruling parties of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union crumbled. "When many were advising our country's leadership to lower our socialist banners, to submit to policies that had nothing to do with our principles," Cuba refused, declaring that "it would never return to capitalism."

Today the disastrous alternative can be seen in Argentina, Pérez Zúñiga said, and in the imperialist moves to establish the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) as a trade bloc to allow the U.S. rulers to plunder more freely Latin America's wealth and labor.

He added that "the September 11 events accelerated the world economic crisis. They didn't spark the crisis; it had been developing for several years. But those events handed the imperialist enemy a pretext on a silver platter to launch their war."

After the meeting, many in the audience rushed to the tables in the museum hallway to purchase From the Escambray to the Congo and other Pathfinder literature. Many of the high school youth, lacking money for the book, grabbed copies of the Spanish-language socialist magazine Perspectiva Mundial, which reprinted a chapter of Dreke's account, and eagerly asked him to autograph them.  
 
'Need to tell full history'
As he spoke to audiences throughout the tour, Dreke elaborated on several themes. One thread that ran throughout his talks was the need to present historical events accurately, without trying to simplify or evade the contradictions and complexities.

"Other countries, including those that previously aided us, have cut off the roots of their real history," he said at a community meeting held in a working-class neighborhood of Placetas. "But we have to tell the full history, not just part of it."

In a number of meetings Dreke described what youth like himself rebelled against as they became involved in political activity. Some older people, including his father, he noted, advised him not to get involved in politics because to challenge the status quo was not only dangerous but futile. That was the attitude of many Blacks, especially among Cubans who were Black, he noted at the meeting in Manicaragua, "while the big majority were not supporters of the dictatorship, a few even defended Batista arguing that he was Black" and was discriminated against by the white ruling-class families who wouldn't let him into their private social clubs. Under his regime, therefore, Black people would be better off, some argued. When they were picked up and harassed by cops who were dark-skinned, Dreke noted, "They would taunt us, 'Who ever heard of Black revolutionaries?'"

Dreke pointed out that while the revolutionary war was launched by the July 26 Movement and Rebel Army, there were several organizations and currents in the anti-Batista movement, including the March 13 Revolutionary Directorate, the Popular Socialist Party, and others. As a high school student, Dreke joined the Youth Movement of the Third Regional Workers Federation. After the July 26 Movement was formed in 1955, he joined an underground cell in Sagua.

Within the workers youth movement in that city, "there were two tendencies," he said at the meeting in Santa Clara. "One favored the electoral road. The other, in which Roberto Sacerio was among the leaders, was more radical--it was for armed struggle. I was among those who believed Batista had to be overthrown."

Forced to leave Sagua after being targeted by the dictatorship's repressive forces, he joined the guerrilla front of the March 13 Revolutionary Directorate in the Escambray mountains in early 1958.

Speaking in Sagua, Dreke described how the revolutionary leadership helped forge unity among all revolutionary forces--a process that began during the fight to overthrow the Batista dictatorship and continued after the January 1959 victory. In Sagua, he reminded his audience, "in the early days we had difficulties because there were divisions among the revolutionaries." These came to a head when complaints erupted that certain officers at the local Rebel Army garrison were being abusive and no action was being taken. Rebel Army commander Camilo Cienfuegos came to Sagua, where he gave a speech taking to task the local leadership for their factionalism and decisively changing the command of the garrison.

Dreke also explained how workers and farmers had organized to crush the U.S.-backed bandits in the Escambray. He noted that the counterrevolutionaries did not all come from the big landlords and supporters of the former Batista regime. Some came out of the groups that had been part of a struggle against the dictatorship. This included the armed group that claimed the name Second National Front of the Escambray, led by power-seeking adventurers who had been expelled from the March 13 Revolutionary Directorate for abusive conduct against the local population.

In several cities Dreke pointed to the example set by revolutionary fighters widely known in Cuba for their courage and integrity--such as Tony Santiago in Placetas and Alberto Delgado in the Trinidad area, both of whom worked for Cuba's counterintelligence service in the early 1960s and died in the line of duty. "Tony Santiago is a hero of the revolution," he said at a meeting held in the main cultural center in Placetas. "He was killed while carrying out a mission infiltrating counterrevolutionary bands."  
 
New generation of revolutionary youth
One of Dreke's main themes was the role of the new generation in leading the Cuban Revolution forward. "We combatants consolidated the victory of the revolution," he said in Manicaragua. "Today we need to consolidate socialism." He reminded those who sometimes "think the youth today are 'too young to be leaders' of how young the leaders of the struggle against Batista and the counterrevolutionary bands had been. "We as combatants must support the youth--to help them be better than us."

He added, "I was very happy in Trinidad yesterday to see how many youth were at the meeting, and how many of them, when they couldn't afford to buy the book, bought the magazine [Perspectiva Mundial]. That fact was more important than all the books that other people bought."

While the book presentations were the main reason for the five-day tour in central Cuba, the hosts in each city organized numerous other activities in response to the interest expressed by the international team of Pathfinder volunteers and Militant correspondents in learning more about Cuba's revolutionary history and about conditions today. Equally important, the activities were an opportunity for many Cubans to meet and talk, often for the first time, with communists who are on the front lines of the class struggle in the United States and other imperialist countries.

One visit, near Sagua la Grande, was to the Héctor Rodríguez sugar mill, where, with the sugar harvest in full swing, the 600 workers were working three shifts around the clock as they strove to reach their production goals.

Workers proudly pointed out that in Villa Clara province the directors of two sugar production enterprises are women. They also noted that three of the five presidents of the municipal People's Power assemblies in the major cities in the province are women, underscoring the steady progress Cuba has made since the worst years of the economic crisis of the 1990s, when many women were so overwhelmed with the material difficulties of everyday life and meeting the needs of their families that they pulled back from broader leadership responsibilities for a while.  
 
Expansion of education programs
Among the places the international team was able to visit in Santa Clara were not only the monument and museum dedicated to revolutionary leader Ernesto Che Guevara, the big "Landing of the Granma" textile plant (see article in the March 25 Militant), and the school for revolutionary social workers, but also one of the new "popular libraries." These small but well equipped neighborhood libraries--part of a pilot project in 12 cities that will soon be extended nationwide--are but one of the programs that are part of the Battle of Ideas campaign to expand working-class access to culture in the broadest sense of the term, including the classics of Cuban and world literature.

After the public meeting in nearby Placetas, party first secretary René Peña Carrazana and People's Power president Marisol García Cabrera, both former teachers, responded to the visitors' questions about the transformation of the educational system that is part of the Battle of Ideas by organizing two additional gatherings in a matter of hours.

One was a meeting, held at the history museum, with a group of students and teachers from a "school for rounded education," who explained enthusiastically how this was part of a program launched last October for getting high school dropouts--including many who are teenage single mothers or young people who have served time for various infractions--back to school and work by paying them to study. The other was a community meeting of about 50 local residents, many of them retirees, who engaged in a lively exchange with Dreke and the international guests well into the night.

From a public library in Sancti Spíritus, to a nature reserve and physical therapy center in Topes de Collantes--in the heights of the Escambray mountains--to a meeting with famous Cuban outfielder Víctor Mesa at the Santa Clara baseball stadium, it was an intensely packed educational tour.

In almost every city there were valuable visits to museums depicting the revolutionary history of that area. At the Museum of the Revolution in his hometown of Sagua, Dreke took advantage of the occasion to contribute one of his uniforms from the early days of the struggle, as well as the 9 mm pistol he had used during the 1965 Congo mission. The pistol was given to him by Fidel Castro as the contingent of revolutionary combatants was preparing to depart for Africa.

Throughout the five-day tour of central Cuba, hundreds of people purchased copies of From the Escambray to the Congo, as well as dozens of copies of other Pathfinder titles, and of Perspectiva Mundial, all of which were on sale in Cuban pesos. In addition, several libraries, museums, and other institutions received book donations. Altogether, from the opening of the Havana International Book Fair through the eight other presentations that took place in the city of Havana, Villa Clara, and Sancti Spíritus provinces, some 1,010 copies of From the Escambray to the Congo were sold and distributed in Cuba as part of this revolutionary endeavor.
 
 

BY GREG MCCARTAN  
Generous contributions by hundreds of working people are helping the communist movement in the United States make available to workers and youth in Cuba hundreds of books and pamphlets published by Pathfinder Press.

From the first of this year when the Militant began making appeals for the Books for Cuba Fund, supporters of the revolutionary publishing house have contributed $3,802. At meetings over the past two months in New York, Atlanta, and Chicago, thousands more have been pledged to the fund. At the Midwest Socialist Conference held in Chicago April 6–7, nearly $2,500 was pledged or contributed by the 146 participants.

The Militant is encouraging everyone who made a pledge to send in the funds as soon as possible, or to send in a contribution if you haven't already had a chance to do so.

The Militant sponsors the Books for Cuba Fund, which makes it possible for books and pamphlets published by Pathfinder Press to be sent to organizations and institutions in revolutionary Cuba, and to be sold at affordable prices at book fairs and other book-related events.

The meetings described in the article above were part of a month-long series of events in Cuba that included the Havana International Book Fair. On the final day of the fair Pathfinder made every title in its booth available to fairgoers in Cuban pesos. The table, reported Pathfinder supporters, was virtually picked clean by noon.

Over the course of 10 days more than 225 different Pathfinder titles were sold at the fair, including nearly every one in French to Haitian students and other French-speaking visitors to the fair.

Dozens of copies of From the Escambray to the Congo; Making History: Interviews with Four Generals of Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces; Cuba and the Coming American Revolution; Thomas Sankara's Women's Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle; and Playa Giron/Bay of Pigs: Washington's First Military Defeat in the Americas were donated to various organizations in Cuba for use in libraries and elsewhere across the island.

Please send in your pledge or contribution, earmarked "Books for Cuba Fund," to the Militant at 410 West St., New York, NY 10014.  
 
 
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