Dear Compañero Rodríguez,

The 425 participants at the Socialist Workers Party’s 44th Constitutional Convention—delegates, party members, Young Socialists, as well as supporters, contacts, and friends from across North America, Europe, and the Pacific—received with enthusiasm your warm greetings. We would have much preferred to welcome you in person and share with you our deliberations, but the message enabled your presence to be felt despite the unceasing efforts of the U.S. government to prevent the people of Cuba from extending their solidarity to those who are part of the popular struggles today unfolding across the United States.

The deliberations of the convention’s delegates were marked above all by involvement of party members together with our co-workers in the massive proletarian movement for the legalization of immigrant workers that in the last three months has strengthened mightily the workers movement as well as changed broader politics in the United States. The speed and power of these actions caught the U.S. rulers by surprise. By downing tools and taking to the streets across the country in numbers never before seen in the United States, millions of workers engaged in what was in fact a multicity political general strike for the first time in our history.

This was the context in which the convention discussion and decisions helped clarify and strengthen the Socialist Workers Party’s course as we respond to the deepening crisis of the world imperialist order. Among the questions to which the delegates gave special attention were not only Washington's expanding war in Iraq and Afghanistan and the fight for the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from those countries, but the intensifying imperialist pressures and threats directed at Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

The delegates also expressed their determination to continue to do everything possible to broaden the campaign for freedom of our five Cuban brothers, framed, given draconian sentences, and railroaded to prison for their courage and commitment to defend the people of Cuba from the actions of Cuban counterrevolutionary forces that Washington's bipartisan government allow to operate with impunity within the united States.

The convention marked a step forward for us in winning new workers and youth to our ranks, widely expanding the readership of the Militant/El Militante, and advancing the programmatic clarity and discipline needed to effectively join the class battles ahead of us at home and abroad. Along that course, we unconditionally extend our hand to socialist Cuba in internationalist solidarity.

Fraternally,
Jack Barnes
 
 
Related articles:
Socialist Workers Party 44th convention marked by ‘irreversible strengthening of working-class movement’
Scope and speed of mass working-class actions for immigrant rights caught U.S. rulers by surprise
Huge working-class actions affect recruitment
Socialist Workers Party National Committee  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home