Vol. 71/No. 43      November 19, 2007

Pathfinder Press is simultaneously releasing the new edition for distribution worldwide in both English and Spanish.

The book tells the story of the Cuban Revolution’s political impact on a generation of young people in the United States in the early 1960s, the place of the revolution in rebuilding the communist movement in those years, and its continued weight in the U.S. class struggle to the present. As Waters explains, working-class battles in this country, including prospects for making a socialist revolution here, are “and will continue to be inextricably intertwined with the defense of the conquests of the Cuban Revolution.”

Since it was first published in English, Spanish, and French in 2001, the book has become one of Pathfinder’s most widely read titles. In the foreword Waters describes the response to the book’s opening chapter by one reader, Ramón Labañino, one of five Cuban revolutionaries who have been imprisoned in the United States on frame-up charges for nearly a decade. The new edition is dedicated to the Cuban Five (see box on facing page).

In addition to releasing Cuba and the Coming American Revolution, Monte ávila this year has published another of Pathfinder’s most widely distributed books, the Spanish translation of Malcolm X Talks to Young People. Both will be featured at a November 16 presentation by Monte ávila of several of its new titles.

During the Venezuela book fair Pathfinder is organizing several presentations of its titles as well, including The First and Second Declarations of Havana.

The book fair’s theme this year is “The United States: A Possible Revolution.”

Cuba and the Coming American Revolution is available from www.pathfinderpress.com or from distributors listed on page 8.

The foreword is reprinted by permission. Copyright © 2007 by Pathfinder Press.

—Olympia Newton

The victory of Cuban working people at Playa Girón punctured the myth of U.S. imperialism’s invincibility. It left us with the conviction that the Cuban Revolution would be at the center of the class struggle inside the United States as long as the working class was in power in Cuba. We were certain that would be the case for the rest of our lives. And it has been.

Jack Barnes
March 2001
Playa Girón/Bay of Pigs

Jack Barnes takes that historic moment as the starting point for Cuba and the Coming American Revolution. It was the moment when Cuba no longer appeared as yet another potential Latin American victim of the most powerful empire in history, but emerged as its equal. “For us, what Cuban workers and peasants had accomplished,” Barnes writes, “was the example in our own political lifetime of the necessity and the possibility of revolution, of not only how to fight but how to fight to win, of the capacity of ordinary human beings to transform themselves as they confront challenges and take on responsibilities they would have previously deemed impossible.”

Cuba and the Coming American Revolution is not primarily a book about Cuba, however. Above all, it is about the struggles of class-conscious working people in the imperialist heartland, the youth who are attracted to them, and why the course of the class battles accelerating here today is and will continue to be inextricably intertwined with the defense of the conquests of the Cuban people.

“The greatest obstacle to the line of march of the toilers,” notes the author in these pages, “is the tendency, promoted and perpetuated by the exploiting classes, for working people to underestimate ourselves, to underestimate what we can accomplish, to doubt our own worth.” What the workers and farmers of Cuba showed us is that with class solidarity, political consciousness, courage, focused and persistent efforts at education, and a revolutionary leadership of a caliber like that in Cuba—a leadership tested and forged in battle over years—it is possible to stand up to enormous might and seemingly insurmountable odds and win.

That was the lesson internalized in the early 1960s by a vanguard of young people inside the United States aided, encouraged, and educated by veteran workers and farmers of the Socialist Workers Party. Their story is told here in “1961: Year of Education.” It was originally published as the foreword to Playa Girón/Bay of Pigs: Washington’s First Military Defeat in the Americas, a collection of speeches, documents, and testimony by Cuban President Fidel Castro and Vice President José Ramón Fernández published by Pathfinder Press in early 2001 to mark the fortieth anniversary of the victory at Playa Girón.

In “1961: Year of Education” Jack Barnes describes the impact of the opening years of the Cuban Revolution on youth in the United States who were already being radicalized by their involvement in the advancing, mass, proletarian-based struggle to bring down the “Jim Crow” system of segregation in the U.S. South (on which South Africa’s institution of apartheid was modeled), and roll back other deeply entrenched forms of racial discrimination throughout the country. He recounts the work of the students who established a campus chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee at Carleton College in Minnesota in the decisive few months culminating in the April 19 victory at Playa Girón, a committee that in the heat of events briefly became the largest campus chapter in the country. He describes the class-struggle lessons young people learned as they went through these experiences and tells how they began building the Young Socialist Alliance in the course of this work.

The second chapter of Cuba and the Coming American Revolution, “There Will be a Victorious Revolution in the United States Before a Victorious Counterrevolution in Cuba,” is based on talks given by Barnes in both New York City and Seattle in March 2001 at meetings to launch Playa Girón/Bay of Pigs, which had come off the press only days before, and to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of that revolutionary victory. The audiences spanned the generations, from those who were already active partisans of the Cuban Revolution at the time of the Bay of Pigs to socialist youth who were just then making this chapter of history their own. Among the 450 participants in these gatherings were dozens of volunteers from one end of the country to the other whose labor had made possible the quality production of the book in record time.

Playa Girón/Bay of Pigs, published in both Spanish and English, was presented at a March 22-24 conference in Havana on “Girón: 40 Years Later,” where the Cuban hosts provided each participant with a copy of the book. During that gathering the political and military leaders of revolutionary Cuba under whose hand victory had been won, including Commander in Chief Fidel Castro, joined to discuss the events that occurred four decades earlier with a U.S. delegation, some of whose members either fought as part of the U.S.- trained and -financed Brigade 2506, helped prepare the CIA invasion plans, or acted as apologists and advisers for the administration of President John F. Kennedy.
 

Nearly fifty years after the revolutionary victory that brought down the U.S.-backed military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista on January 1, 1959, the U.S. rulers remain as committed to the necessity of overthrowing the Cuban Revolution as they were when the workers and farmers of Cuba, and the young people drawn to their struggles, led by the July 26 Movement and its Rebel Army, fought their way into history and began taking control of their own destiny. The reasons are not hard to understand, and they have everything to do with the subject of this book.

From the class perspective of the U.S. rulers, there was never anything irrational in their hatred for the radical land reform, mass campaign to wipe out illiteracy, nationalization of housing and slashing of rents, outlawing of racial discrimination, nationalization of basic industries, drawing of women into the workforce on a large scale, establishment of a popular militia, and other actions taken by the Cuban people and their revolutionary government. Nor were Washington’s policies toward the Cuban Revolution rooted in “national security” concerns or the strategic conflicts of the “cold war.”

The course of Cuban working people was simply an unbearable challenge to the assumed property “rights” of the U.S. ruling families, who feared that the example set by the first socialist revolution in the Americas would be emulated elsewhere in our hemisphere. What drives Washington is “not fear of the Cuban Revolution” alone, as the Second Declaration of Havana proclaimed in February 1962, but fear of the Latin American revolution. “Fear that the plundered people of the continent will seize the arms from their oppressors and, like Cuba, declare themselves free peoples of the Americas.”

Since the first edition of Cuba and the Coming American Revolution was published some six and a half years ago, the spreading wars, barely contained national and international economic and financial crises, and sharpening class conflicts that have rattled the confidence of the U.S. rulers have done little to diminish these fears.

All the political and economic trends pointed to by Jack Barnes in these pages have only accelerated and deepened. The profit margins of the employers depend even more on “cutting real wages and benefits, speeding up production, lengthening the workweek, increasing part-time and temporary labor, and reducing government-funded social security programs.” The post-2001 upswing in the business cycle following the bust of the “irrational exuberance” of the 1990s was, like its predecessor, the product not of accelerated capacity-expanding capital investment, but of “an enormous mountain of debt and a giant speculative bubble of derivative ‘debt instruments.’” “Multibillion-dollar mergers that substantially increase the concentration of capital” continue to drive stock markets higher as the debt burden rises to levels unsurpassed in the history of finance capital.

“The vulnerability of world capitalism to sudden and destabilizing shocks” pointed to in these pages is once more being confirmed by the still spreading fallout from the inevitable crash of the drive by U.S. financial giants in recent years to press repackaged bundles of so-called subprime mortgages on banks in Eastern Europe and the semicolonial world and on other buyers at home and abroad—as if the risk of defaults was no longer a factor. The misery this collapse will bring to tens upon tens of thousands of working-class families losing their homes, of course, is of no more concern to the capitalists than the “downward-spiraling catastrophe” that hundreds of millions of toilers in Africa, Latin America, and Asia have been living through for almost two decades.

All the major trends in the evolution of world capitalism discussed in this book, as well as the interrelated trajectory of U.S. imperialism’s foreign, military, and domestic policies, were already under way well before the first edition was published in the spring of 2001. That was nearly six months before the new U.S. administration of George W. Bush seized on the September 11, 2001, assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as a rationalization to announce what the U.S. rulers today call their “global war on terrorism.” The foundations for the course that accelerated with the combined imperialist assault on Afghanistan in October 2001 and the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq in March 2003—including the strengthening of federal police and spy agencies, encroachments on political rights, and implementation of Washington’s long-established state policy of “regime change”—had been carefully built over the preceding years by the U.S. rulers under Republican and Democratic administrations and congressional majorities alike.

Above all that course is determined by the U.S. rulers’ preparations to meet what they too know is inevitable—the growing resistance of the working class and other exploited producers in the United States and around the globe as we enter what will be decades of sharpening interimperialist conflict, economic, financial, and social convulsions, and class battles.

As those explosive pressures deepen and spread—the product of how capitalism works, not how it sometimes fails to work—another historic transformation is also accelerating.

In its ceaseless search for ever cheaper labor, U.S. finance capital is drawing into its factories, fields, and mines growing millions of workers from beyond its borders. They come from Mexico first and foremost, as well as elsewhere in the Americas, but also in rapidly increasing numbers from Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe, and Russia. Driven by the lash of economic necessity to leave their homelands, they bring with them their own class-struggle experiences and combativity, broadening the political and cultural horizons of working people as a whole in the United States.

It is from this enriched and increasingly diverse working class that a new political vanguard is today beginning to emerge in struggles driven by the most fundamental needs of the toilers—the need to join forces to protect life, limb, and nature from the inexorable drive for profits that determines every move of the employers. Nowhere has this been more visible than in the outpourings of millions of workers and their families, immigrant and U.S.-born, who in 2006 and 2007 took to the streets in cities and towns across the continent demanding legalization of immigrant workers as they began restoring May Day in this country to its working-class roots. “The proletarian movement in the United States,” notes Jack Barnes, is beginning to be transformed “into something more and more recognizable as the combative mass vanguard of the class that will overthrow capitalism.”
 

This is the world in which the example set by the people of Cuba remains as important as it was the day they took power, demonstrating in practice what it takes to break the stranglehold of imperialist exploitation and defend those conquests. Explaining that truth to workers and farmers in the United States as they find themselves propelled into struggles that lead them to rethink many long-held prejudices in quite unexpected ways is not simply an act of working-class solidarity, however important that may be. It is a proletarian necessity, essential to the internationalist political education and transformation of the working class itself. As the Cuban people proudly say of their aid to the peoples of Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and elsewhere around the world, “Those who are not ready to fight for the freedom of others will never be ready to fight for their own.”

Shortly before Cuba and the Coming American Revolution came off the press in 2001, Colin Powell, the new secretary of state, explained Washington’s uncompromising stance toward Cuba’s revolutionary government. He did so more accurately than he perhaps intended. Testifying April 26, 2001, before a congressional committee, he responded to the question of why the U.S. government refuses to alter its decades-long policy toward Cuba. Powell replied that in China, Russia, and Vietnam “you can see leaders who the world is changing.” But in Cuba, he said, Castro “hasn’t changed his views in any way.”

The secretary of state got it only partially right, of course. As with each of his predecessors, his inability to fathom the human beings driving the Cuban Revolution was above all a class blindness. It is not only Fidel and the broad and deep revolutionary leadership of Cuba who have not changed their revolutionary convictions. It is the people of Cuba in their overwhelming majority who have never surrendered. Who refuse to subordinate the interests of working people to the prerogatives of capital. Who stand ready, as always, to aid revolutionary struggles wherever they may occur, by any means necessary. Whose message to would-be invaders remains the same as at Playa Girón: If you come, you stay.
 

The most important response to Cuba and the Coming American Revolution has been among new generations of readers who discovered something unanticipated in its pages. Those new readers, we are honored to say, included U.S. Federal Prisoner #58734-004, Ramón Labañino Salazar, one of Pathfinder’s many readers behind bars, and one of five heroes of the Cuban Revolution who has been imprisoned in the United States now for nine years. Like his comrades-in-arms Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González, and René González at the time of their arrest in September 1998, Ramón was living and working in the United States, tracking the activities of Cuban counterrevolutionary organizations that operate with impunity here, and providing the Cuban government with advance notice, when possible, of their murderous plans for sabotage and armed actions against the Cuban people. He was framed and convicted on charges of acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign power and conspiring to commit espionage. In what can best be called an act of political retribution aimed at punishing the Cuban people for their continuing revolutionary defiance of Washington’s demands that they “change,” he was handed a life sentence, which he is currently serving in U.S. federal prison in Beaumont, Texas.*

After reading the foreword by Jack Barnes to Playa Girón/ Bay of Pigs: Washington’s First Military Defeat in the Americas, reprinted here as “1961: Year of Education,” Ramón wrote to express his appreciation. While he had read numerous books and documents about Playa Girón, Ramón said, in this one he had learned something he “had never read in any other book on this subject.” For the first time, he noted, he had a feel for “the direct influence of the Cuban Revolution, its example and impact, on the people of the U.S., and on the education of the revolutionary left movement and the movement in solidarity with our country.” It gave evidence once again, Ramón added, “that our peoples are fraternal and invincible.”

Many young readers in the U.S. reacted similarly to learning how a previous generation of young socialists here in the United States had waged an intense political battle in defense of the Cuban Revolution in the weeks leading up to, during, and after the Washington-organized invasion in 1961. This previously unrecorded chapter in the history of the communist youth movement was to its continuators today not just an interesting account of something long past. It has become a model of mass work to be emulated, a guide for action today.
 

It is particularly appropriate that the impetus for this second edition of Cuba and the Coming American Revolution has come from the Venezuelan publishing house Monte ávila and will be presented at the November 2007 Venezuela International Book Fair, whose theme will be “The United States: A Possible Revolution.” The posing of that question by workers, farmers, and youth who have been in the vanguard of the popular struggles that have marked Venezuelan politics the last decade, and recognition that the answer given is of decisive importance for the future of us all, registers the sharpening class struggle and deepening class polarization in our hemisphere. Even more, it signals the political strengthening of the toilers from the Bering Straits to the tip of Tierra del Fuego.

When Fidel Castro defiantly announced to the world on March 13, 1961, that “there will be a victorious revolution in the United States before a victorious counterrevolution in Cuba,” he was not gazing in a crystal ball, or engaging in verbal bravado. Nor did those of us whose political lives began in those days of struggle think it was an exhortation. It was a political course to guide a lifetime of action—one that remains today as compelling and necessary to the future of humanity as it was then.