On the 44th anniversary of those events we reprint below excerpts from remarks by Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, on how communists in the United States responded to the so-called Cuban missile crisis. Barnes made the remarks during the discussion period at a Militant Labor Forum in New York City on Nov. 7, 1992.

On Oct. 15, 1962, the White House learned that spy planes had photographed Soviet-supplied missiles in Cuba. The missiles were there as part of a mutual defense pact between Cuba and the USSR in face of stepped-up U.S. preparations to launch another invasion of the island.

Washington ordered a naval blockade of Cuba and placed U.S. armed forces on nuclear alert. On October 22 Kennedy convened a bipartisan congressional leadership meeting where he reported plans to assemble a force of 90,000 U.S. troops to invade Cuba within seven days.

In response Cuban working people mobilized across the island to defend the revolution. In answer to a White House inquiry about Cuba's military readiness, Pentagon planners told Kennedy that U.S. forces would suffer 18,000 casualties in the first 10 days alone in an invasion. Faced with that grim prognosis and the domestic political cost enormous U.S. casualties would entail, the White House sought an alternative course.

On October 28 Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev announced over Radio Moscow that he had ordered the removal of the missiles from Cuba. It was part of a secret deal between Washington and Moscow, in which the Pentagon would remove its missiles in Turkey in exchange.

The Cuban government was not consulted about the deal. Cubans first learned of it over the radio. Havana countered with a list of five demands to settle the crisis. They included ending the U.S. economic blockade, halting U.S. support for counterrevolutionary gangs, and withdrawing U.S. forces from the naval base in Guantánamo Bay.

In a 1992 NBC TV interview Cuban president Fidel Castro explained that Havana had agreed to accept the missiles as an "unavoidable duty" of international solidarity with the USSR, which was threatened by U.S. missiles in Turkey. "If it had been a matter of our own defense, we would not have accepted the emplacement of the missiles here," Castro said in a PBS documentary the same year, "because this would damage the image of the revolution throughout the rest of Latin America, and the presence of the missiles would in fact turn us into a Soviet military base and that had a high political cost."

In a more recent speech, in November 2005, Castro explained why Cuba depends for its revolutionary defense on the armed readiness and political consciousness of Cuban working people, not on chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. "Even if they were accessible, how much would they cost and what sense would it make producing a nuclear weapon with an enemy that has thousands of nuclear weapons?" Castro said. "We have a different type of nuclear weapon: it's our ideas," he said—Cuba's revolutionary ideas and living example. "We possess a weapon as powerful as nuclear power, and it is the magnitude of the justice for which we are struggling."

The talk by Barnes excerpted below is titled "The Vote for Ross Perot and Patrick Buchanan's 'Culture War': What the 1992 Elections Revealed." The entire presentation is published in Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium. Copyright © 1999 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
 

But I was struck in watching all of these documentaries by an inaccuracy that gave me a new insight into the importance of the political leverage communists have today through the use of our propaganda arsenal. Each of them portrayed what was happening in the United States at the time as universal mass hysteria. But if you lived through the missile crisis as a political person, as a revolutionist, you know that was not true.

The TV specials showed residents of the United States running into grocery stores to buy canned goods, taking them home, putting them in shelters, and carrying out air raid drills in schools and workplaces. The idea that everybody in the United States in 1962 joined together as "we Americans" and just waited in a patriotic panic for the Kennedys to incinerate the world is utterly inaccurate.

I lived through those days as a young person and as a relatively new member of the Young Socialist Alliance and Socialist Workers Party. I know from my own experience that there were thousands of people in the United States who worked round the clock to stop Washington from invading Cuba. We did not stock up on canned goods. In fact, we did not buy much of anything. We were too busy—we hardly had time to eat. We were organizing people to come down to the picket lines. I remember marching in downtown Chicago across the street from a Woolworth store, for example, where we had picketed earlier in support of civil rights sit-in fighters. Some people who worked at the store came out and supported the picket line.

This single-minded effort was the response of the overwhelming majority of Socialist Workers Party and Young Socialist Alliance members of all generations. They responded to Washington's heightened war threats against Cuba with the immediacy of a revolutionary fighting instinct. This political course was discussed and decided by the party's Political Committee and the Young Socialist Alliance National Executive Committee and was carried in the news coverage, analysis, and editorial line in the pages of the Militant….  
 
Political space inside working class
One of the most difficult things for capitalism's propagandists to understand and portray accurately is how a political vanguard of the working class reaches out to others to use and defend political space—as we did during the October missile crisis. Communists have no schemas or timetables. But we do know that the tensions inevitably rising from world capitalism's depression conditions and its inexorable march toward fascism and war keep leading not only to unanticipated crises, but also to resistance out of which vanguard workers can build a movement. Right now, we can anticipate that growing interest among working people and youth in radical ideas ignored by them in the past—or rejected without serious study—will keep ahead of the pace of mass popular struggles.

But these political realities cannot even be seen, much less understood, unless we recognize the space that exists inside the working class and the unions—space that can be used by revolutionary-minded workers to practice politics. This space is not seen or registered by anything in bourgeois public opinion. It can only be seen from inside the working class and the unions. It can best be seen by workers who are communists who are using that space to talk politics with other workers, to promote revolutionary literature, to bring co-workers and their unions into fights around social and political issues, and to participate in guerrilla skirmishes around conditions on the job. Without using this political space, the tensions just seem like tensions, the openings are missed, and the space will be diminished over time….  
 
Working-class vanguard
Today there are opportunities to win a new generation of revolutionists to the Socialist Workers Party. Many of them right now will not initially come out of a revitalized labor movement. Through the proletarian party, however, they can be won to join in building a leadership that can organize the working class to make a popular revolution and prevent the fascist devastation and world war that capitalism is dragging humanity toward. Fighters from this generation will reach out to find parties of revolutionists who are workers, revolutionists who have some experience in the class struggle.
 
 
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