Vol. 71/No. 15      April 16, 2007

BY BEN O’SHAUGHNESSY  
NEW YORK, April 2—With just under a month remaining in an international youth campaign in solidarity with the Cuban Five, the Young Socialists have stepped up their efforts to broaden support for the framed-up Cuban revolutionaries held in U.S. jails (see article on page 7). The campaign, initiated January 10 by the Union of Young Communists and other mass youth organizations in Cuba, will culminate with an international conference in Havana April 29-30.

On the March 24 weekend, Young Socialists from across the Northeast participated in the Latino Unity Conference hosted by the student group Latinos Unidos con Honor y Amistad at New York University, and in the 17th Annual National Latino Collegiate Conference hosted by Fuerza Latina at the State University of New York at Albany.

At both events, YS members distributed literature on the case of the Cuban Five and promoted an April 7 demonstration in New York calling for their release.

On March 28, about a dozen students and others attended a program at Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, on the Cuban Five and Washington’s economic and political war against the Cuban Revolution. Young Socialist Eddie Beck, a student at that campus, and Maura DeLuca, a New York garment worker and member of the YS National Steering Committee, both spoke. The event was sponsored by Latinos United Networking America, Rutgers Acts for Peace and Justice, and the Young Socialists.

“In order to understand why the Cuban Five are in prison, you have to go back to 1959-60,” said Beck. The Cuban people toppled a hated U.S.-backed dictatorship in 1959. Responding to mobilizations and factory “interventions” by working people, Cuba’s new revolutionary government nationalized all imperialist owned enterprises, foreign- and Cuban-owned banks, and large-scale Cuban-owned industries by the end of the next year.

Beck described the record of U.S.-sponsored counterrevolutionary activity against Cuba—from the April 1961 U.S.-backed mercenary invasion at the Bay of Pigs, where Cuba’s “revolutionary forces mobilized and dealt U.S. imperialism its first military defeat in the Americas,” to the 1976 bombing of a Cubana Airlines flight out of Barbados, carried out by counterrevolutionaries with U.S. blessings.

The five Cuban militants were protecting the Cuban people from these types of actions, Beck noted.

DeLuca described her experiences in Cuba as part of a Militant reporting team during the Havana book fair in February. There she saw firsthand the gains working people in Cuba have won through their socialist revolution.

“These five men aren’t much different from everyday Cubans,” she said. “They will not back down. Just as Cuba’s working people have never flinched in face of imperialist aggression.”

One student asked what will happen after Fidel Castro’s death. “We are already seeing a post-Fidel Cuba,” DeLuca said, noting that since the Cuban president’s hospitalization last year working people have showed firm committment to the revolution. “Cubans explain how the ‘transition’ in the country’s leadership took place when they overthrew the Batista dictatorship,” she said.

“Is the Young Socialists interested in making a revolution in the U.S. just like in Cuba?” another student asked.

“We look to the example of the Cuban Revolution as something working people in the United States can emulate,” said DeLuca. “We work with the Socialist Workers Party to build a movement that can educate and organize the working class to overthrow capitalism, establish a government of workers and farmers, and join in the international struggle for socialism. The only way humanity can end war, class exploitation, sexism, and national oppression is if the working class gets rid of the dog-eat-dog system of capitalism and replaces it with a system that puts human needs first.”

After the program, Beck urged people to get involved in the campaign and to help build and join the April 7 demonstrations in New York and Los Angeles to demand: “U.S. hands off Cuba, Venezuela, and Bolivia! Free the Cuban Five!”
 
 
Related articles:
The Cuban 5: revolutionaries framed up by Washington
The case for fighting to win their freedom
Campaign to free the Cuban Five  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home