Waters, editor of the New International, which is also published in Spanish as Nueva Internacional, chaired the event, opening with the remarks below.

Eliades Acosta is the director of the José Martí National Library. Mario Rodríguez is a member of the national leadership of the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution. Between 1994 and 2001 Rodríguez served as Cuba’s ambassador to Czechoslovakia, Italy, and Mexico.

The Combatants Association is made up of Cubans who have taken part in revolutionary struggles and internationalist missions over more than half a century.

The translation of the remarks by Acosta and Rodríguez, major excerpts of which are published here, is by the Militant. The translations and remarks by Waters are copyright © 2006 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY MARY-ALICE WATERS  
On behalf of Pathfinder Press and Nueva Internacional, I want to thank all of you who are here with us this afternoon. My name is Mary-Alice Waters, and I’m the editor of the magazine we are presenting, a magazine published in several languages, including English, Spanish, and French, that is distributed by Pathfinder Press.

I want to begin by welcoming and introducing the other members of the panel.

· Carlos Rodríguez Almaguer, president of the José Martí National Youth Movement.

· Mario Rodríguez Martínez, speaking on behalf of the national leadership of the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution. Mayito, as he is known to his compañeros, was involved in the clandestine struggle here in Havana against the Batista dictatorship in the 1950s, and has served as Cuba’s ambassador to Czechoslovakia, Italy, and Mexico.

· Fernando Rojas, vice president of the Federation of University Students (FEU) in the city of Havana.

· Darío Machado, member of the editorial board of Cuba Socialista, and of the executive leadership of the Ministry of Science, Technology, and the Environment.

· Eliades Acosta, director of the José Martí National Library. Eliades also is a member of the Combatants Association, having served in Cuba’s internationalist mission in Angola.

And we are especially honored to have with us Armando Hart, director of the Office of the José Martí Program and a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba—a compañero whose distinguished place in the history of the Cuban Revolution is well known to all.

To initiate our discussion, let me say a few words about Nueva Internacional and the character of today’s presentation.

As our masthead says, Nueva Internacional is “A Magazine of Marxist Politics and Theory.” It is not the organ of a party, but the members of the editorial board are leaders of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States, all formerly leaders of the Young Socialists. They include SWP national secretary Jack Barnes, who is the author of the lead articles in these two issues of the magazine. We also benefit from the collaboration of supporters in other countries.

Nueva Internacional is not a magazine written by or for philosophers, economists, or academics. Its purpose is not abstract debate. It is a tool to arm and to be used by workers and youth actively involved in the practical work of building a communist party and youth organization, in the United States above all.

We believe that building such a proletarian movement is a historical necessity, and, in all modesty, we think that success or failure in reaching that objective will play no small role in the future of humanity. It is an objective that is inseparable from the tasks of proletarian internationalism and can only be reached working together with others fighting for the same objectives around the world. That is one of the reasons we value so greatly our collaboration and opportunities to discuss these questions with communists here in Cuba, as we are doing today.

This is the face of Nueva Internacional that we want to present this afternoon. The magazine is above all directed to the new generations coming to political consciousness and entering into struggles along this working-class line of march. It is they who must absorb and internalize the communist way of doing politics. And we know from experience that there is a real hunger among young people—students, workers, and others—for the kind of political depth the material in Nueva Internacional allows them to reach for and debate. They are not afraid of the political work it requires or the revolutionary consequences it implies.

The single largest sales of Nueva Internacional in its various languages have been to young people from around the world at events such as last August’s World Festival of Youth and Students in Caracas, and at the previous one held in Algiers, or during the recently concluded World Social Forum in Caracas. That is one reason we are so pleased to welcome comrades representing the leaderships of the Union of Young Communists and the Federation of University Students here today.

We also know that without continuity, without the braiding of experiences among generations of revolutionary fighters, without each new generation making the lessons of the modern working-class movement its own, victory is much less certain, and will come at a much higher price than necessary, if at all. Those lessons have been paid for in blood by those who have gone before us. That’s why having compañeros like Armando Hart and Mayito with us today as well is so important.

These two issues of the magazine are complementary. A number of compañeros on our panel who were working on presentations jokingly objected, “These are not magazines, these are books!”—and asked how frequently the “magazine” is published. The answer is, “whenever possible.”

The SWP has always worked to help publish a political/theoretical magazine. The first magazine called New International was published in 1934, and it has come out under different names and in different formats ever since.

The first issue in its current format was published in 1983. Since then 13 issues have been published in English, 7 in Spanish, 8 in French, 3 in Swedish, and 1 in Icelandic. Many of the major articles have been published in Greek and in Farsi as well. On the stand behind us you can see a representative display of this political treasure chest.

Despite the number of pages, the magazine character of the publication is real. Each issue brings together articles and documents that enrich each other by coming at similar questions from different directions, from different experiences, sometimes even from different historical periods.

Issue no. 6 of Nueva Internacional, for example, which features “Capitalism’s Long Hot Winter Has Begun” and “Their Transformation and Ours,” also includes reports given to the 1921 congress of the Communist International by Lenin and by Trotsky, the reasons for which are explained in the magazine’s introductory column, “In This Issue.”

Issue no. 7 in Spanish, whose lead article is “Our Politics Start With the World,” also includes an exchange of views between Harvard professor Richard Levins and Steve Clark, a member of the editorial board of Nueva Internacional, on the questions addressed in Clark’s article in that issue, “Farming, Science, and the Working Classes.”

I want to emphasize only one political point about the content of these two issues of Nueva Internacional.

With conviction and with facts, they put forward the view that we are today living through a great turning point in the international class struggle. Communists and the broader vanguard forces they lead must fully absorb this historic shift and begin acting on its political logic.

The origins of the new world situation do not lie in any single mythic event such as September 11. They do not lie in specific policies pursued by one or another Congress or U.S. president, whoever his advisors may be. The roots are to be found in the downward turn in the curve of capitalist development that began almost three decades ago with the exhaustion of the economic expansion rooted in the preparations for World War II, the enormous destruction it wrought, and turbulent postwar reconstruction. What is unfolding now is the acceleration of that crisis. “One of capitalism’s infrequent long winters has begun,” Nueva Internacional explains. And for us it is going to be very long and very hot. That’s why we need men and women who have no fear of the heat, men and women who have the stomach for the struggles that are coming.

Decades of economic, financial, and social convulsions, and deepening class battles are before us. In preparation for these coming battles at home and abroad, Washington is implementing a major shift in its military policy and organization. It is the most far-reaching change since the U.S. rulers established a massive, permanent military command and national security structure to “contain” the Soviet Union at the end of the 1940s.

Washington’s just-released Quadrennial Defense Review stresses that the rulers are engaged in “a long war”—one they will wage “in many locations simultaneously and for some years to come.” Africa and Latin America have been added to the Pentagon’s list of “key geographic operational areas,” with Venezuela singled out as a “source of political and economic instability.” China, the Pentagon notes, “has the greatest potential to compete militarily with the United States,” and the document warns of the “possibility that cooperative approaches by themselves may fail to preclude future conflict.”

This is not the world we have known for the last sixty years. For communists this is not reason for despair, much less fear. Quite the opposite. What we see in this emerging world is another transformation beginning. Impelled by these momentous changes, by the increasing social and economic pressures on a growing majority of the toilers, including probes to restrict political and democratic rights even within the more stable bourgeois democracies, working people are responding. They are resisting. A small but expanding vanguard of militant workers are beginning to take the lead to reach for, organize, and use union power and other forms of popular power to defend themselves.

We know this is hard to see from afar. These changes are still visible in only partial, scattered, and often disguised ways. But this is what marks our lives as communists within the United States, every day. It is the political logic of these great shifts that we act on now.

These are the political lines developed in these two issues of Nueva Internacional. As issue no. 7 expresses it: Our politics start with the world and how to transform it. And that is what brings us together here today to discuss these questions that are of such great importance to us all.
 
 
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