Waters edited and wrote the introduction to Marianas in Combat. The book contains an interview with Delsa Esther "Teté" Puebla, a brigadier general in Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR) who was second in command of the Mariana Grajales Women’s Platoon of the Rebel Army--"the Marianas"--during the 1956-58 revolutionary war that toppled the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. A foreword to the book was written by Juan Almeida, one of the three Commanders of the Revolution in Cuba and president of the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution.

Speaking about the book at the launching, held as part of the annual Havana International Book Fair, were Teté Puebla and Brig. Gen. Harry Villegas. Villegas, currently a leader of the Combatants Association, was a fighter in the revolutionary war who later served with Ernesto Che Guevara as part of internationalist missions in the Congo (where he took the nom de guerre "Pombo") and in Bolivia.

The Feb. 3 book launching also celebrated the publication by Pathfinder earlier this year of October 1962: The ‘Missile Crisis’ As Seen from Cuba by Tomás Diez Acosta. Speaking on that book was Carlos Lechuga, who served as Cuba’s ambassador to the United Nations during much of the U.S. government-instigated crisis 40 years ago.

An article on the book launching appears in this issue. The remarks by Waters are copyright © 2003 by Pathfinder Press, and are reprinted by permission.
 

It is also in order here to extend a special thank you to compañera Iraida [Aguirrechu], without whose editorial capacities and unflagging collaboration neither this book nor the fine work by compañero Tomás Diez on the October Crisis, which we are also presenting the English translation of this afternoon, would have been completed. We are especially pleased that compañero Lechuga is also here with us today to talk about that work.

Others will be speaking of what Marianas in Combat means for you here in Cuba. For my part, I only want to say a few words about why this book is important for us in the United States and elsewhere beyond Cuba.  
 
Needed on front lines
We are very happy that Marianas in Combat is being presented not only here in Havana, but elsewhere in Cuba too. Pathfinder, however, a communist publishing house located in New York, has not published this book in both Spanish and English in order to bring it to Cuba. That would be not only presumptuous but something far beyond our meager resources. We have published the story of Teté Puebla and the Mariana Grajales Platoon because it is needed by those who find themselves in the front lines of the struggle for national liberation and socialism the world over--including by those of us who live and engage in working-class political activity in the United States.

Already today--and in the future that is fast coming upon us in country after country--there are growing legions of young people who, like the young Teté of this book, are unwilling to accept the brutal realities of the capitalist world in which they live. Among them there is a small but growing vanguard that is beginning to search ever more insistently in the experiences of past revolutionary struggles for the lessons that can help point a way forward in today’s world.

The tens of thousands of young people protesting in Washington and London against the war, or making their way to the campgrounds of Porto Alegre in Brazil, still believe in their large majority that it is possible to tame imperialism, to cajole and pressure it, to shame it into adopting a more benign posture. There are many who believe that their own imperialist masters speaking French or German or Swedish with an anti-American accent offer a kinder, more humane alternative behind which they can take refuge.

Most of these youth have not yet concluded from their own painful experiences, aided by a study of history--as many of you began to realize some 50 years ago--that no lasting reform is possible except as a byproduct of revolutionary struggle. The leopard cannot change its spots. Only an uncompromising struggle to destroy the state power of the capitalist rulers and replace it with the power of the toilers, as you did here in Cuba, can open the door to the "other world" that is so frequently demanded.  
 
Confidence to fight and win
This is the world--today--in which the concrete example of Teté is so important. Knowledge of her story increases our confidence in our ability to fight and win. Through it we come to recognize that revolutions are not the work of gods or devils but are made of human clay, by ordinary human beings like the men and women we meet in these pages. They are the work of men and women who, as the great American revolutionary leader Malcolm X said, awake to their own worth and dignity and who take the future of humanity in their own hands, accomplishing the impossible because they have not yet "learned" it can’t be done. And in doing so they transform themselves as they transform their world.

Young women, especially, will respond to the example of the Marianas. They will identify with the portrait of Teté that emerges from these pages--with her growing audacity and courage in combat, with her competence, firmness, and humanity in the battles of life.

Women everywhere who are fighting for their emancipation, for the right to live and work as equals, see themselves reflected in the Marianas, who overcame the prejudices of even some of their most revolutionary compañeros. The Marianas proved in combat that the women of the Rebel Army, having already assumed all the other duties of the revolution, were also able to fight arms in hand, side by side--not ahead of or behind--the men.

Through this history, moreover, we come to appreciate even more fully the caliber and class consciousness of the leadership of the Cuban Revolution from its earliest days. We come to understand how and why that leadership has been able to unify and mobilize the people of Cuba to hold at bay the imperial might of the North American colossus for more than 40 years.

In a few short decades, the Cuban revolution has brought the kind of advances in the economic and social status of women that it took well over a century of struggle to partially achieve in the imperialist world and are still a distant dream for hundreds of millions of women throughout the so-called third world. The achievements of the Cuban Revolution stand as a powerful refutation of those who light-mindedly claim that Marxism, communism, has no adequate place in its theory for the millennia-long oppression of women, nor any place in its practice for eradicating that condition.  
 
Depression and war
To finish I want to return to the beginning. Finance capital’s feverish speculative bubble of the 1990s was built not on an expansion of productive capacity, but on the inflation of fictitious paper capital, of mammoth debt imposed on the poor countries of the world as well as the people of the imperialist centers. That bubble is now collapsing, as we knew it must.

What’s more, the audience here today does not need to be reminded that we are within weeks of the opening of a full-scale, Washington-organized assault on the peoples of Iraq. This war will go forward as the imperialist rivals fight among themselves over a new division of the world--over domination of oil and other raw materials and strategic installations vital not only to their continued exploitation of the earth’s toilers but of even to their own economic and social equilibrium.

The world depression that will mark the opening decades of the 21st century is unfolding at an accelerating pace. In this world, we must not act on the assumption that Bush or Blair, that Schroeder or Chirac is driven by irrationality or whatever else their individual personality disorders may be. They are acting as the responsible and competent representatives of the classes for which they speak. What we are seeing and experiencing is simply the lawful development of capital--with the devastating consequences it will continue to produce for working people everywhere, until the day we are strong enough to put an end to that system altogether.

But this is precisely the world in which acts of resistance, courage, and self-affirmation such as those we learn about in the pages of Marianas in Combat are also accelerating. From Palestine, to Korea--south, as well as north; from the Battle of Ideas in the factories, fields and classrooms of Cuba; to the packing plants of Minnesota, and the prisons of the empire where our five Cuban compañeros are incarcerated today alongside some two million of their brothers and sisters.

Marianas in Combat will be sold not only in book stores and read in libraries around the world. It will be carried by thinking workers and youth into the streets of workers neighborhoods, onto the university campuses, to the gates and into the locker rooms of factories and mines, into the fields--wherever there is work to be done today to sow revolutionary consciousness, to sow ideas, to prepare the future.

That is why we--in the United States--need this book in both English and in Spanish. It is why we are so proud to be presenting Marianas in Combat here with you today.
 
 
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Women’s platoon is saluted at bookfair in Havana  
 
 
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