Calero, a Militant staff writer and associate editor of the Spanish-language magazine Perspectiva Mundial, spoke at the Lenin school as part of several meetings organized for him by Cuban youth organizations. They invited Calero to talk about his successful fight against the U.S. government’s attempt to deport him and what his experience illustrates about U.S. politics today.
At the Lenin school, a boarding school for pre-university students in science in grades 10-12, Calero was welcomed by vice director Ramón Alvarez, Mario Baeza, a teacher who is the secretary of the Cuban Communist Party at the school, and Dany Ocel, secretary of the Union of Young Communists (UJC) at the campus.
Nancy Coro, from the international relations department of the UJC, introduced Calero to the meeting. She explained some of the facts of his case, and Calero gave more details.
In late November 2002 Calero went on a reporting trip to Havana to cover an international conference on the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), and then to Guadalajara, Mexico, to cover a congress of the Continental Organization of Latin American and Caribbean Students (OCLAE). On his return home, immigration cops arrested him at the Houston airport, threw him in jail, and began proceedings to deport him to Nicaragua, his country of birth.
Through a broad international campaign in defense of Calero, immigration authorities were flooded with protest messages, and they released him from jail after 10 days. Although Calero has been a permanent resident of the United States for more than a decade, immigration officials sought to deport him on the pretext of a 1988 conviction in which, while still in high school in Los Angeles, he had copped a plea on a charge of selling an ounce of marijuana to an undercover cop at school. Immigration officials had waived this conviction both when they first granted him legal residency and when they later renewed it.
As part of the defense campaign, Calero spoke at public meetings in more than 20 cities, explaining his fight and winning support. On May 22 of last year an immigration judge declared him “not deportable” and the government threw in the towel.
Calero’s case won substantial international support, including in Cuba. Members of Cuban youth organizations that participated in the OCLAE conference in Guadalajara, which Calero had covered for the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial, took special interest in the defense campaign.
When Calero returned to Havana to cover this year’s January 26-29 international conference on the FTAA and then the Havana International Book Fair, leaders of the UJC and of the Federation of University Students (FEU) here arranged speaking engagements for him at the Lenin School of Science and the University of Havana. He also spoke at a meeting organized by the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution. Calero was interviewed by the UJC newspaper Juventud Rebelde, the weekly Granma International, and a popular evening television news program.
“What I faced when the government arrested me after a trip abroad and tried to deport me was something that thousands of immigrant workers in the United States face every year,” Calero told the students at the Lenin high school. “It’s an example of how the U.S. employers and their government seek to keep an entire, expanding layer of the working class intimidated and deprive them of basic rights in order to increase the rate of profit and promote divisions among our class.
“Many working people—both immigrants as well as U.S.-born workers—identified with my case,” Calero said. “The support won in the fight against my deportation is an expression of the resistance among working people in the United States to the attacks by the employer class—their offensive to speed up production at the expense of safety and health, eliminate jobs, slash wages, and cut health care and other social benefits.” He gave examples of recent working-class struggles, from demonstrations in California demanding the right to a driver’s license for immigrants, to protests in several cities against police violence, as well as strikes and union-organizing drives among meat packers in the Midwest, construction workers in New York, miners at the Co-Op coal mine in Utah, and garment workers in Miami.
Interest in U.S. working-class struggles
Some students had heard about the strike by 70,000 grocery workers in Southern California. Few had heard about the union-organizing battle by coal miners in Huntington, Utah, or other struggles. “I found your presentation very helpful. We didn’t know much about how workers in the United States have fought for their rights,” said Luz Marlis Saramé, 17.
In reply to Eric González’s question, Calero said the estimated 8 million to 12 million undocumented workers in the United States were part of a historic wave of immigration from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. “The millions coming from other countries have strengthened the working class in the United States, broadening the horizons of our class and breaking down prejudices the employers use to keep us divided,” he said.
Campus UJC leader Ocel said the image he’d had of the labor movement in the United States was one of mafia-run company unions under conditions similar to those of the 1950s witch-hunt. He said he had been unaware of the character of working-class resistance that Calero had described.
The students asked Calero about his views on a range of questions, from the FTAA to the nature of the current Peronist government in Argentina.
Calero also spoke briefly to a second group of students at the school, where the discussion focused on the class nature of the education system under capitalism and, in contrast, on the efforts in revolutionary Cuba today, under the banner of the Battle of Ideas, to expand access to education and culture.
UJC leaders later explained to Calero that they are now organizing political meetings such as this one in the high schools as part of an effort to deepen the UJC’s political work among young people.
The same day, at the University of Havana, some 40 students came to hear Calero. Most were leaders of the FEU and UJC in the philosophy, law, math, and other university departments. Students asked questions not only about Calero’s fight but also about U.S. politics. A couple of students asked about the state of the trade unions in the United States. They had recently read in the Cuban press that fewer than 13 percent of workers in the United States belong to trade unions.
Calero explained that the unions in the United States continue to be weakened by the employer offensive and the unwillingness of the union officialdom to lead the kind of fights necessary to effectively take on the bosses and their government. What don’t appear in government statistics and the news media, he noted, are the changes in attitudes among working people, the growing hunger for solidarity as more workers and farmers seek ways to fight and search for allies in struggle.
Meeting with revolutionary combatants
Calero elaborated on this point at a February 9 meeting of nearly 80 sponsored by the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution, the Combatientes. He described how workers at the Co-Op coal mine in Utah, mostly Mexican-born miners, had surprised the bosses by going on strike and fighting for recognition of a local of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA). “A delegation of miners from Co-Op was invited to attend the national convention of the miners union,” Calero said. “A leader of the strike addressed the delegates in Spanish, with simultaneous translation—possibly the first time that has happened at a UMWA convention.”
People in the audience at the Combatientes meeting intently followed Calero’s description of conditions facing workers in the United States and the spreading proletarian resistance. Many of them had experienced firsthand the brutality of capitalist exploitation in Cuba before the 1959 revolutionary victory here. They had fought in the Cuban revolutionary war as members of the Rebel Army and July 26 Movement, which led Cuban workers and farmers to overthrow the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship and take power themselves.
The Combatants Association organizes Cubans who have taken part in revolutionary struggles and internationalist missions, from the revolutionary war of the 1950s to the fight against U.S.-organized counterrevolutionary attacks in the Escambray mountains of Cuba in the early 1960s, to the mobilization of 300,000 Cuban volunteer combatants in Angola in the 1970s and 1980s to defeat the South African apartheid army.
After the presentation, the discussion continued informally. One member of the Combatants Association said he was stunned to hear that more than 2 million people were behind bars in the U.S. prison system and wanted more information on how the police, courts, and prisons are used against working people there.
This militant and others were interested to find some of this information in the pamphlet The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning by Jack Barnes. After the meeting many purchased titles on a range of topics from a table displaying Pathfinder books and pamphlets.
Later that evening, Calero was interviewed on the Lente Mundial (World Lens) television program. That night’s show focused on conditions facing immigrants in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. Calero, who appeared live on the program, was asked by host Daisy Gómez to comment on the U.S. government’s immigration policy, including the new White House “guest worker” proposal, and on recent struggles for the rights of immigrants.
At the various meetings where Róger Calero spoke, many expressed appreciation for the facts he presented. Their response was captured by the comment of a student at the Lenin School of Science. “We often hold seminars here to discuss different aspects of the situation in the world,” she said. “But they are sometimes very theoretical and abstract. What we heard from you about the situation in the United States was very concrete and real.”
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