Vol. 71/No. 17      April 30, 2007

“When I was introduced to this book, I had little idea what it was about,” said Mabel Almonte, secretary of LASO. “All I had heard about Cuba were lies.”

In reading it, however, she learned what drove Cubans to rebel against the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship. She also discovered how Cuba since 1959 has eliminated illiteracy and provided free education and health care to all, has given internationalist aid in many countries of Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and has instilled new values in the population.

Almonte said she liked a quote by Fidel Castro in the book: A people “not willing to fight for the freedom of others will never be ready to fight for its own.”

Yoland Skeete, director of the Sumei Multidisciplinary Arts Center in Newark, also spoke. She is working on a book titled When Newark Had a Chinatown.

In the 19th century British colonialists brought Chinese to Skeete’s native Trinidad as indentured laborers to replace Black slaves, she recounted. They thought the Chinese would remain isolated from the Black population. But the Chinese mixed in, she said, citing her own Chinese-born grandfather. To halt this process the colonialists stopped bringing in Chinese workers and replaced them with contract labor from India.

“When I moved to Newark, I was unaware that a Chinese community had existed there,” Skeete said. Walking her dog one day, she came across a building with a Chinese inscription. She began investigating and uncovering the history of Newark’s Chinatown of earlier decades, a task to which she has dedicated herself.

Martín Koppel, one of the interviewers for the book, outlined some key points in it and how the Cuban Revolution provides an example for those seeking to fight the injustices of capitalism and transform society.

Replying to a question about women’s role in the Cuban revolutionary struggle, Koppel said Cubans refer to the fight for women’s equality as a “revolution within the revolution.” It began in the Rebel Army during the revolutionary war, he said, with the creation of an all-female platoon. Since then the revolutionary leadership has taken steps to draw women into the workforce and into all spheres of society, from the unions to the defense of the revolution.

A questioner asked about a statement by Skeete that in the 1990s, when Cuba was suffering scarcities of school supplies after the loss of favorable trade relations with the Soviet Union, she had observed on a visit there that education continued to advance and that some of the best minds in the world were being created.

In Cuba, Skeete replied, “people are hungry for knowledge.”

Koppel added that this hunger is a result of the revolution. “In the U.S., schools have nothing to do with education,” he said. “For working people, they are designed to fit you for a role as an obedient worker for a boss. For those who do have opportunities to further schooling, they aim to instill a ‘me-first, to hell with the rest’ mentality. But in Cuba, education is a necessity so workers and farmers can run society.”

In response to another question Almonte said, “Teachers always tell us we can make a difference. But after reading this book I saw it is possible to make change, if you’re willing to fight for it.”

She added, “When Fidel Castro got involved in the struggle in Cuba, he was just a student like us, a student of law. If they did it in Cuba, why can’t we?”

At the end of the meeting, Almonte raffled off five copies of Our History Is Still Being Written that LASO had bought. In addition to the five delighted winners, four others bought copies of the book.
 
 
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