Carter is sending warships into the Caribbean, establishing a military command center at Key West, and beefing up “Rapid Deployment Forces” for military interventions in other countries.

Carter has also ordered a landing of 1,600 to 1,800 Marines at Guantánamo Naval Base in Cuba, complete with assault ships and heavy artillery. This provocative “exercise”—carried out on Cuban soil occupied against the wishes of the Cuban people—is an outrageous violation of Cuban sovereignty.

These moves constitute a clear threat to use U.S. military might against Cuba and against other countries of the Caribbean and Central America.

Carter’s threats are especially aimed at the people of Nicaragua, who recently toppled the murderous dictatorship of the Somoza family, imposed on them forty-five years ago by Washington. And the threats are directed at the people of El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, where tens of thousands of workers, peasants, and young people are trying to get rid of brutal U.S.-backed military regimes.

Why is Carter undertaking these aggressive actions? Because of the presence of a few thousand Soviet troops in Cuba? Carter admits these have been in place for years and could not possibly attack this country.

No, the “threat” Carter is mobilizing against is the workers and peasants of Latin America, who want to determine for themselves the kind of social system they live under, without U.S. interference.  
 
October 11, 1954
The main battle-line of human freedom is not on the Rhine or in the China Sea. It’s right here in the good old U.S.A. It’s the line where the battle is joined against discrimination and segregation imposed on 15,000,000 Negro Americans.

The white supremacist bosses have unleashed terror against young Negroes who have dared to exercise their right to non-segregated schools—a right upheld even by the conservative Supreme Court. Those who would draw the iron curtain of inequality between the Negro child and full free educational opportunity are openly engaged in force and violence.

These evil elements are the very ones who would go to any lengths to keep organized labor down. They oppress the white workers in the South especially, smash unions, break strikes. They keep alive the flames of race hatred to destroy the unity of black and white workers.

This is American labor’s battle. The challenge to the rights of Negro school children is a challenge to the freedom of all American workers. It must be met by the mighty resistance of the whole labor movement. Let every union throw its full moral and material strength into this fight.  
 
 
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