First of all, a thank you to compañera Iraida of Editora Política for her generous introduction. And a special thanks to both the national leadership of the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution and the provincial leadership here in Cienfuegos who have made this meeting possible.

For us, it is a real honor to be able to join you here today to present the books we have worked on together with compañeros of the Combatientes Association.

Compañera Iraida has already introduced you to some of these titles whose covers you see displayed around the room. Other compañeros will be talking about why these books are important to you here in Cuba. I want to concentrate on how—and why—they came to be edited, printed, and distributed by a publishing house in the United States. Something that many compañeros here in Cuba are at first surprised by.

For us, these books are not just about our shared history, however important that is. They are weapons in the hands of working people everywhere. As Engels once explained so clearly, communism has no preconceived schemas. It is not an ideology, a method, or a set of ideas. It is only the generalization of the lessons of the struggles of the working class on the road to its emancipation, enriched by every battle. That is a big “only.” And it is why an accurate account of our history is so necessary for us.  
 
Expanding collaboration
The collaboration between Pathfinder and compañeros who are today part of the national leadership of the Combatientes Association began more than a dozen years ago. I first met compañero Harry Villegas—Pombo—along with compañero Urbano in 1993, in the offices of Editora Política. Working with Editora Política, we were in the final stages of preparing a new English-language edition of the Bolivian Diary of Ernesto Che Guevara. The original edition, published less than a year after Che was killed in combat there, had long been out of print in the United States. We needed help identifying people in photos, preparing maps for the new edition, and understanding a few of the more obscure references and “cubanismos” in the text.

I remember well that back then I didn’t even know what “congri” was. [Congri is a popular term, in eastern Cuba especially, for a dish made of black beans and rice.]

Pombo came to our rescue, and from then on the collaboration grew. We began work on Pombo, a Man of Che’s ‘Guerrilla,’ first published by Editora Política, which appeared in Pathfinder's English edition a few years later.

In 1996, again working with Editora Política, we brought out a new edition in English of Che’s Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War, 1956-58, another of the most important documents of the history of the Cuban Revolution. It too had been long out of print in English. As we worked on that book, our collaboration with comrades in the leadership of the Combatientes expanded. More than a dozen compañeros, mobilized by compañera Iraida, worked to track down information needed for the extensive glossary containing almost every name that appears in the pages of Episodes. They helped us ensure the accuracy of maps, charts, order of battles, etc. They identified comrades in photos. And more. The work we did together on that Pathfinder edition was incorporated into the new edition in Spanish published by Editora Política soon afterward.

And so it went, one book leading to another—including more and more published simultaneously in English and Spanish.

Making History, interviews—almost conversations between revolutionaries—with four generals of Cuba's Revolutionary Armed Forces, the FAR—Néstor López Cuba, Enrique Carreras, José Ramón Fernández, and Harry Villegas.

Fertile Ground, an interview with Bolivian combatant Rodolfo Saldaña, who organized Che’s support apparatus in the cities.

Playa Girón/Bay of Pigs: Washington’s First Military Defeat in the Americas by Fidel Castro and José Ramón Fernández, a book that was provided to all participants in the international conference in Havana held on the 40th anniversary of that victory.

October 1962: The ‘Missile’ Crisis as Seen from Cuba by Tómas Diez, which was used in a similar way at the October 2002 international conference here in Havana.

From the Escambray to the Congo: In the Whirlwind of the Cuban Revolution, a book-length interview with Víctor Dreke.

Marianas in Combat, a similar interview with General Teté Puebla, the highest-ranking women in the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba.

Aldabonazo by Armando Hart.

We didn’t plan it in advance, but little by little the cumulative breadth of this publishing effort has become substantial. The books recount not only experiences of the Rebel Army in the Sierra Maestra, but those of the anti-Batista military officers like Fernández and Carreras; those of the March 13 National Directorate and the Escambray; those of the July 26 Movement cadres who led the struggle in the cities; the participation in the revolutionary war of some of the cadres who were women, like Teté; the struggle against the counterrevolutionary bands in the Escambray; Playa Girón; the October Crisis; and those who volunteered and helped lead some of the most important internationalist missions, from the Congo to Bolivia, from Syria to Nicaragua and Angola.

I want to share with you something that surprised even me when I added up the figures as I was preparing this presentation. In roughly the last decade, the total cumulative sales of these books, in both English and Spanish, now exceeds 50,000 copies! It’s a clear registration of the thirst for the truth about the Cuban Revolution among those who refuse to accept that there is something “natural” and unchangeable about the dog-eat-dog world we confront.

The book we are preparing now for publication later this year, Our History Is Still Being Written, continues to expand the range of experiences. It is an interview with three generals of the FAR of Chinese origin—Gustavo Chui Beltrán, Armando Choy, and Moisés Sío Wong. It tells their stories as part of the revolutionary war, especially, and Cuba’s internationalist combat in Angola. It also includes an entire section on the history and impact of Chinese immigration in Cuba, which was proportionally greater than anywhere else in the Americas, including the United States.  
 
Common characteristics
These books all share two common characteristics. They are by and about the ordinary men and women who—when each made a choice half a century ago about what to do next with their lives—were not setting out to change the course of history. Like many of you here this afternoon, they “only” wanted to live free of the brutal, U.S.-backed dictatorship of [Fulgencio] Batista and reassert the dignity and sovereignty of the Cuban people. They decided to do that “by any means necessary,” as Malcolm X—one of greatest leaders of the Black struggle and of American working people—often said. And they stubbornly refused to settle for anything less.

That is what led to the opening of the first socialist revolution in the Americas, which has indeed changed the course of human history. Along that road, those men and women themselves were transformed, accomplishing things they never even dreamed were possible.

The back cover copy for Making History says it well: Through the stories of these four generals “we can see the class dynamics that have shaped our entire epoch. We can understand how the people of Cuba, as they struggle to build a new society, have for more than 45 years held Washington at bay.”

These books share another distinction. They seek to tell the truth about the Cuban Revolution, warts and all—not a sanitized version that avoids all the complexities, uncertainties, errors, conflicts, and painful decisions. And this is important. As Armando Hart writes in his epilogue to Aldabonazo, “Revolutions are not a stroll through beautiful meadows and gardens, where men march without difficulty or anguish.”

The Cuban Revolution will never be copied, but it must be understood by those who seek to emulate it. Without truth and accuracy, what is sometimes presented as “history” only condemns us to repeat our errors, not build on lessons learned through enormous effort and sacrifice.  
 
Because these books are needed
As much as we enjoy participating in meetings such as yesterday’s in Matanzas and this one here in Cienfuegos, and as happy as we are that these books are useful to you in Cuba, Pathfinder does not publish them for that purpose. We publish these books because working people in the United States and elsewhere outside of Cuba need them as we prepare for the class battles ahead.

The driving force behind U.S. foreign policy—from the Middle East to Cuba to France—is not irrationality, nor is it stupidity. Just as with the course of the U.S. ruling families at home, the driving force is something far more deadly: the insatiable demands of capitalism itself. The imperial wars against the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan, which hundreds of millions the world over can see so clearly, are the external face of the sharpening offensive against the wages, job conditions, and rights of working people inside the United States. And the bosses’ unrelenting drive in the factories, mines, and mills to shift the relationship of forces to their favor vis-à-vis the working class and labor movement is generating resistance. It is giving rise to unionization drives, strikes, and other battles. Out of this process, the scattered forces of a vanguard are beginning to emerge—from the packinghouses, to the coal mines, to the garment factories.

The cellblocks at the Guantánamo Naval Station and in Iraq are the other face of the federal prisons where our five Cuban brothers are carrying out their political work today. Within those walls and bars, they act not as victims, but as revolutionary combatants, joining us on the front lines of the class struggle in the United States. The same books you have in front of you today are ones they use inside the prisons in the United States. They often ask for these books in English in order to share them more broadly with fellow inmates, but we send them in both English and Spanish whenever possible. The Spanish-speaking prison population increases daily.

Above all, we publish these books for the men and women who even today are finding each other among these vanguard forces, and for the youth attracted to their struggles—so they can understand the Cuban Revolution and make it their own, so they can know and gain confidence from the men and women like themselves whose actions made this revolution possible.  
 
Our program starts with the world
For the same reason, we publish books such as the two new titles Pathfinder presented here at the international book fair this year, copies of which are available on the table here at this meeting today. We Are Heirs of the World’s Revolutions is a selection of speeches by Thomas Sankara, who was the central leader of the popular revolutionary government in the West African country of Burkina Faso from 1983-87, before he was assassinated in a counter-revolutionary military coup. These are speeches that sparkle with the proletarian internationalism of that outstanding leader who spoke not only for the oppressed and exploited of Africa, but spoke as a leader of working people throughout the world.

Alongside the speeches of Sankara are copies of the most recent issue of Nueva Internacional, the magazine of Marxist politics and theory distributed by Pathfinder Press. From a different angle, the magazine addresses many of the same issues of the international class struggle as Sankara’s speeches do. If your eye falls on nothing but the photo of Earth at Night on the back cover of that magazine, you will know its contents. You will see the abyss between the countries of the imperialist and semicolonial worlds, and the class inequalities within them—the reality that drives the sharpening conflicts that will continue to deepen.  
 
Born with October Revolution
To end, I want to say a word about Pathfinder Press itself. I know it is new to many of you here today. We like to say that Pathfinder was born with the October Revolution. Because that is when our forerunners in the United States began publishing speeches and writings by Lenin and others who led the first socialist revolution, who remained true to its proletarian internationalist course, and who made it possible for a communist movement to be reborn. For close to 90 years we have had one single objective: to publish and distribute as broadly as possible the books, pamphlets, and magazines necessary to build a communist party in the bastion of world imperialism, a goal inseparable from organizing and advancing the struggle for national liberation and socialism worldwide.

Along this road, we strive to let revolutionary leaders the world over speak for themselves, in their own name, not through the interpretation of manuals, or of technocrats of either academic or political lineage. These books, each one of them marked by the work of combatants of the Cuban Revolution, do just that.

It is the reason why we deeply appreciate the opportunity you have given us to be with you here today.
 
 
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In Cuba, president of Pathfinder Press addresses meetings of revolutionary combatants  
 
 
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