Rodríguez was the keynote speaker at a July 26 celebration here of the 50th anniversary of the attack on the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba, the first battle in Cuba’s revolutionary war. Some 700 people took part. The Martin Luther King Labor Center auditorium, in the Midtown Manhattan offices of the Hospital Workers Union Local 1199, was filled to capacity for the event. Other featured speakers included Rafael Cancel Miranda, a well-known Puerto Rican independence fighter, and Luis Miranda, president of Casa de las Americas, the oldest organization in New York of Cubans who support the revolution.

The event was organized by the July 26 Coalition, a group comprised of over 60 organizations and individuals. It was a successful, united-front effort by Cuba solidarity groups, political organizations, and others in the area. Frank Velgara of the Vieques Support Campaign and Rosemari Mealy, who works for WBAI radio, co-chaired the meeting. Poets, musicians, and others joined the speakers on the platform for a fitting celebration of the act that opened the Cuban Revolution in 1953.

Rodríguez reviewed U.S. imperialism’s 44-year-long drive to overthrow the revolution. “From the proclamation of the agrarian reform on May 17, 1959, the United States decided to destroy the revolution,” he stated. Rodríguez said that the U.S. embargo had cost Cuba $72 billion, not including another $54 billion in losses caused by “terrorist acts against Cuba, promoted, organized and financed by Washington.” Rodríguez denounced the recent anti-Cuba campaign by the Bush administration, including moves to eliminate licenses for travel to Cuba for “people-to-people exchanges.”

The Cuban people, he continued, “are prepared to face the danger of U.S. military aggression. We know that the only way to avoid war is to be ready and determined to wage a fight to win…. As long as there is a Cuban, there will be resistance.”

Rafael Cancel Miranda, who served 25 years in U.S. prisons for his actions in opposition to U.S. colonial rule of Puerto Rico, paid homage to the Cuban people and their communist leadership. Cancel Miranda went to jail for two years when he was still a teenager for refusing to serve in the U.S. military during the Korean War. “If Washington had taught me how to use a rifle, I knew I was going to use it,” he said. “But not against the Koreans.”

Cancel Miranda lived in Cuba in the early l950s. “I personally know both Cubas,” he said. “I lived in the Cuba of the prostitution, gambling houses, and corruption and had the honor of being thrown out of Cuba by [dictator Fulgencio] Batista. So, you see, Batista put me in jail, while Fidel embraced me!” he said, referring to Cuban president Fidel Castro. Cancel Miranda saluted Luis Rosa, who was in the audience, another Puerto Rican independentista who spent many years in Washington’s jails. He also urged participants to fight for freedom of the Cuban Five. These are five Cuban militants serving draconian sentences in U.S. jails on frame-up charges brought by Washington that include conspiracy to commit espionage. “Washington cannot destroy the spirit of July 26, just as it cannot destroy those five men,” Cancel Miranda said. “As long as they’re in prison, we are all in prison.” He added, “One minute given in the fight for dignity is worth a lifetime.”

Teresa Gutierrez gave greetings on behalf of the National Committee to Free the Five. She outlined a campaign to press the U.S. government to grant entry visas to Olga Salanueva, wife of René González, and Adriana Pérez, wife of Gerardo Hernández, to visit their husbands—two of Cuban Five. The two women have been denied entry to the United States three times.

A taped message from jailed African-American journalist Mumia Abu Jamal was played at the meeting. Nellie Hester Bailey, co-chair of Cuba Solidarity New York, read a message from jailed Palestinian activist Farouk Abdel-Muhti (see “Palestinian in U.S. jail speaks from behind bars” in this issue).  
 
New York solidarity work
Luis Miranda also addressed the meeting. Miranda explained how Casa de las Americas got started. In 1955 a group of Cuban activists, who later formed Casa, organized a New York tour for a young Fidel Castro. The purpose of the tour was to win supporters for the July 26 Movement and for the revolutionary struggle underway in Cuba. “Fidel wasn’t yet a commander, but an individual just released from Batista’s jails,” Miranda said, after an international amnesty campaign to free those jailed for the assault on Moncada. “You could already see in him a leader with a vision, the long view, and ideas that some thought were crazy.”

The Cuban émigré community in New York, he said, was reluctant to get involved in politics at first, as most had come to New York escaping harsh conditions in Cuba and the brutality of the U.S.-backed dictatorship.

“The one who changed that, the one who instilled in us the confidence in victory was Fidel.” Castro, he continued, “was the only person to put forward an action program for the revolution contained in History Will Absolve Me,” his courtroom speech that was smuggled out of prison and published and distributed widely. Castro’s 1955 tour helped organize the July 26 Movement in New York and Connecticut, he stated.

Miranda said that local supporters of the July 26 Movement, which led the struggle to overthrow Batista along with the Rebel Army headed by Castro, got a lot of help at the time from Puerto Rican militants and others organized in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

He singled out Cuba’s proletarian internationalism as one of the revolution’s main accomplishments, including the 300,000 volunteers who went to Angola over two decades to help defeat invasions of that country by the racist apartheid regime of South Africa. “Cuba went to Africa to help, not to pillage,” he said.

“Washington imposed the blockade on Cuba,” he concluded, “because of its accomplishments, and because we achieved true independence. That is what we defend today.”  
 
 
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