The meeting, sponsored by the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution (ACRC), was attended by some 50 people, including members of the association from several municipalities in East Havana as well as nearly a dozen youth from the same neighborhood who are completing their training as revolutionary social workers, one of the recently established programs being led by the Union of Young Communists. Also speaking were Iraida Aguirrechu, a senior editor at Editora Política, the publishing house of the Cuban Communist Party, and Manuel Pico Pérez, president of the Combatants Association in East Havana. Martín Koppel, editor of Perspectiva Mundial, was also asked to join the platform and helped answer questions from the audience during a lively discussion period following the presentations.

The ACRC, which has more than 330,000 members nationally, is made up of combatants spanning several generations, from the revolutionary war to Cuba’s missions of internationalist solidarity around the world.

Marianas in Combat was launched a year ago at the February 2003 Havana International Book Fair. Three other presentations of the book were held at that time in Havana, sponsored by the ACRC. Puebla was part of the speakers platform at all four meetings. In September she also took part in a presentation in eastern Cuba in the town of Yara, where Puebla grew up and joined the revolutionary movement as a teenager.

The remarks by Waters are copyright © 2004 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, it is safe to say, this book would not have been completed.

I would like to say a few words about why this book is important for us in North America and elsewhere beyond Cuba. And why over the last year it has had such a positive response among revolutionary-minded workers and youth in the United States—most of whom were not yet born when many of you were fighting in the Sierra, in the Escambray, at Playa Girón, or during the October Crisis.  
 
Needed by those on front lines
We are very happy that compañeros in Cuba have responded to Marianas in Combat so enthusiastically. I think this is the fifth presentation of the book we have done together with our compañeros of the Combatants Association. Pathfinder, however, did not publish this book in both Spanish and English in order to bring it to Cuba. We 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 there are growing legions of young people who, like the young Teté of this book, are unwilling to accept or to rationalize 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, forward to struggle for a socialism they can admire, embrace, and defend.

Most of them, however, still believe that it is possible to tame imperialism, pressure it into adopting a more benign posture. They 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 reform, no lasting concession to the rights and to the living and working conditions of the toilers, can be won other than as a by-product of revolutionary struggle. Imperialism can no more change its character than could the tsarist autocracy of the Russian empire, or the English masters of their North American colonies. Only an uncompromising struggle to destroy the state power of the capitalist rulers and replace it with the power of the workers and farmers, as you did here in Cuba, can open the door to the “other world” that is so often wished for.

It is in this world—today—that 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 made by gods or devils but are a work of human clay. They are made 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, could be awakened to their own worth and dignity. Who could then 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 while they transform their world.

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

Over the past year, we’ve had the opportunity to discover how young women everywhere who are fighting for their emancipation, for the right to live and work as equals, appreciate this book. They see themselves in the Marianas who overcame the initial prejudices held even by many 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—not ahead of or behind the men, but side by side with them.

Nothing could better confirm the attractive power of the example of the Marianas than the fact only a few weeks ago this book came off the presses in Iran—edited in Farsi by a publisher who specializes in titles relating to women. A very attractive edition, with photos and all. What an omen!  
 
Advancing rights of women
In learning about the Mariana Grajales platoon, moreover, we come to appreciate even more fully the caliber and class consciousness of the leadership of the Cuban Revolution from its earliest days—the understanding of the place of the fight for women’s emancipation in the historic line of march of working people the world over, and above all in the socialist revolution. We can see 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 some 45 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. They remain a distant dream for hundreds of millions of women throughout the rest of 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 understanding of the millennia-long oppression of women, nor any place in its practice for eradicating that condition.  
 
U.S. and world politics
To finish I want to return to the beginning.

The importance of this book, for us, lies above all in what is already happening in the United States and—even more so—in what is coming in the class struggle. The driving force behind U.S. foreign policy is neither irrationality nor stupidity. From increasingly aggressive protectionist offensives under the banner of “free trade,” to wars of imperial conquest under the banner of combating terrorism, they are driven by something far more deadly: the insatiable demands of capitalism itself. The economic and social conditions that mark today’s international reality bear increasing resemblance to those that gave rise to the Great Depression and struggles of the 1930s, and culminated in the second imperialist slaughter of the 20th century.

We can all see with some clarity what the U.S. rulers are doing in Afghanistan and at their Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, in Iraq and Korea, at their forward bases from Eastern Europe to Central Asia’s Silk Road, and with their military buildup in Colombia—on the doorstep of our brothers and sisters in Venezuela, who face Washington’s mounting arrogance and threats.

It is harder, however, for those outside the United States to see the concrete consequences of the exact same policies inside the U.S. Yet the brutal offensive of the bosses and their government against the rights, working conditions, and standard of living of working people in the U.S.—even the norm, so valuable to workers, of civil discourse—began long before September 11, long before the election of George W. Bush. It is driven by their increasingly desperate need to boost their rate of profit enough to stabilize the bloated dollar—in the vain hope of holding off the consequences of their monetary overextension, of flooding the world with a national paper currency to a degree never before seen in history, of the sharpest interimperialist conflicts since the first half of the last century.

Under these conditions, the pressures on the working class and its defensive organizations, the trade unions, the drive to cut costs and intensify the exploitation of labor, are unremitting and accelerating. But all this is precisely what is also generating a new kind of resistance, new attitudes of solidarity, new examples of increasing stature, determination, and mutual respect among the toilers and our allies.

This resistance can be seen not only in the strike by some 70,000 workers at giant supermarket chains in Southern California, but in other sharp struggles. One example is a strike at a union garment shop in Miami where the workforce—largely immigrants from Haiti and many other countries of the Americas, including Cubans who have recently arrived—has been in the streets time and again over the past year and a half. They are refusing to accept conditions such as the bosses’ attempt to impose a limit of one glass of water per workday for each employee—in Miami, no less!—in order to reduce labor time “lost” to bathroom breaks.

The most inspiring example is the union-organizing drive now in its fifth month being waged by 75 coal miners in the western state of Utah, almost all of them immigrants from Mexico who are rejecting the extreme dangers of working with defective equipment, in mine shafts with only one exit, flooded with water, for which they were being paid a third to a quarter of what other miners in the region earn.

This is the world in which acts of resistance, courage, and self-affirmation such as those we learn about in the pages of Marianas in Combat resound. Where the example of our five Cuban compañeros—who are today carrying out their revolutionary work alongside some two million of their brothers and sisters in the prisons of the United States—speaks to a growing vanguard.

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. And that is why we are so grateful to all of you whose revolutionary deeds wrote in life what this book recounts, and then made it possible many years later for us to capture part of that experience in this book.

Gracias. Adelante. Venceremos.  
 
 
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