BY MARY-ALICE WATERS  
More than forty years have passed since the last victorious socialist revolution. That is a long time, not on the historical scale, but in political time. A great deal has changed in the world.

We don’t have to look far or delve that deeply, however, to see within the United States social forces being propelled into motion that are capable of transforming themselves as they come to realize in struggle that we need the same kind of revolution that the workers and peasants of Cuba carried to victory. From the streets of Cincinnati to the coal mines on the Navajo Nation, from the farm cooperatives of southern Georgia to the dairy farms of Wisconsin, from the port of Charleston to the packinghouses of Omaha, from the fields of California’s Imperial Valley to the garment shops of Los Angeles and New York, as the pages that follow explain, “a vanguard layer of workers and farmers in this country is becoming more confident from their common fighting experience and thus more open to considering radical ideas, including the program and strategy of the modern communist movement. Whether they know it yet or not, their own experience in life and struggle is bringing them closer to that of the workers and peasants of revolutionary Cuba.”

This is not an ideological question but a practical one, a question of proletarian integrity, habits of discipline, and morality of Marxism.

We’ve been reminded of that in recent weeks by the profound class divide that has opened once again in the United States following the acknowledgment by former Democratic U.S. senator Robert Kerrey of the civilian massacre he was responsible for more than thirty years ago in Vietnam. (He was moved to “bare his soul” just days before the story was to be printed in the New York Times and broadcast nationwide on CBS’s Sixty Minutes!) Liberals are wailing about the personal agony Kerrey has been obliged to live with ’lo these many decades—“the bad war made him do it.” Meanwhile conservatives intone phrases about the “realities” of battle, defending the “free-fire zones” where every Vietnamese man, woman, and child was assumed to be “the enemy.” Kerrey’s only betrayal, as far as they are concerned, was later becoming a Democratic Party officeholder.

The bipartisan sanctimonious posturing should serve to remind us not only of the enormous price paid in blood by the people of Vietnam to gain their independence, but also of the example of the Rebel Army during the battle at Playa Girón, where not one prisoner, by the invaders’ own testimony, was mistreated or abused, denied food, water, or medical treatment equivalent to that available to the Cuban troops. The same was true throughout the entire two years of the revolutionary war in Cuba where, despite the record of the Batista regime’s brutal killers and torturers, no captured government soldier was treated by the Rebel Army with anything but humanity and respect.

What determined the outcome at Playa Girón, as in Vietnam and Algeria, was ultimately not which side had the superior armaments, but the class character of the contending forces and what they were fighting for. That’s what the U.S. rulers did not and can never understand. They did their mathematical calculations, as Che Guevara is quoted saying here, but they failed to measure the moral relationship of forces. “They have always been wrong about us,” Guevara concluded. “They always arrive late.”

They still are wrong about the capacities of the toilers, and they still always arrive late. And always will.

That class line is what hundreds of workers and farmers, and young people on dozens of campuses in the United States, were responding to during the recent speaking engagements by two Cuban youth leaders, Javier Dueñas and Yanelis Martínez. Their month-long visit to the United States took place as this book was being prepared. In talking about the opportunities and challenges facing working people and youth in Cuba today, in responding to what they saw and learned of the U.S. class struggle, and in answering the questions put to them everywhere about the world and the future ahead of us all, these young Cubans kept shifting the focus to the ordinary workers, farmers, and young people just awakening to political life in both Cuba and the United States. Above all, the two Cubans pointed to the capacities of working people and youth attracted to their struggles to rise to the level of consciousness, discipline, courage, and class solidarity necessary to take their own future in hand. This is what the people of Cuba have done, the example they’ve set, for the last forty-odd years.

“What is special is never the human material,” says the author in the pages that follow, “but the times we live in and our degree of preparation. If we’ve worked together beforehand to build a disciplined, centralized workers party—with a program and strategy that advances the historic line of march of our class worldwide—then we’ll be ready for new opportunities in the class struggle when they explode in totally unanticipated ways. We’ll be prepared to build a mass proletarian combat party that can take on the capitalist rulers in revolutionary struggle and defeat them. That is the most important lesson that every one of us can draw.”

If the victory of the people of Cuba at Playa Girón is still stuck in Washington’s craw some forty years later, it is not because of something that happened long ago or miles away. It is because of the present and the future right here in the United States, where, as Jack Barnes concludes in the opening chapter of this book, the revolutionary capacities of the workers and farmers are “as utterly discounted by the ruling powers as were those of the peasant and proletarian masses of Cuba. And just as wrongly.”

That is what Cuba and the Coming American Revolution is about.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home