Vol. 72/No. 46      November 24, 2008

As the new revolutionary government tried to implement land redistribution and other pressing programs demanded by the masses of working people, it was time and again confronted with opposition by local capitalists and U.S. imperialism. This, in addition to mounting economic and political pressures from Washington, led the government to increasingly challenge the prerogatives of the capitalist class. They first expropriated large land holdings and eventually the sugar refineries and other industries, as well as establishing a monopoly on foreign trade and a planned economy.

As Cuban workers and farmers extended these popular measures, the capitalist press in the United States published more and more slanders against the revolution. To get a firsthand view of the process unfolding in Cuba, two leaders of the Socialist Workers Party, Farrell Dobbs and Joseph Hansen, went to the island in April 1960. They spent nearly a month visiting various parts of the country and learning about what had changed in the lives of workers and farmers.

The trip by the SWP leaders revealed a great deal about the character of the Cuban Revolution and the caliber of its leadership. Dobbs and Hansen reported on the popular mobilizations that took place to carry out programs to combat unemployment, illiteracy, and the high cost of food and housing. They observed a massive expansion of access to health care and education. They witnessed the agrarian reform program in which millions of acres were redistributed to hundreds of thousands of previously landless peasants.  
 
Importance for U.S. class struggle
Upon Dobbs’s and Hansen’s return from Cuba, the SWP worked to get the truth out about the revolution. Dobbs, then the party’s candidate for U.S. president, defended the Cuban Revolution in campaign talks and interviews in the media, explaining it showed what was possible for workers and farmers in the United States to do. Hansen wrote a series of articles for the Militant, which were later published as a pamphlet called The Truth About Cuba, which is today contained in the Pathfinder book Dynamics of the Cuban Revolution.

Members of the SWP were active builders of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which held public meetings across the United States about Cuba and opposed U.S. military intervention. The committee organized tours of the island so that people could see the revolution for themselves, until Washington banned travel by U.S. citizens to Cuba.

In April 1961, the U.S. government organized Cuban counterrevolutionaries into a mercenary invasion of the island at Playa Girón on the Bay of Pigs, with the intention of toppling the revolutionary government and installing a client regime.

Despite Washington’s military might, however, the invasion was defeated in less than 72 hours by the mobilized workers and farmers of Cuba, registering the first military defeat of U.S. imperialism in the Americas.

The SWP denounced the attack and helped organize picket lines against the invasion. The Militant featured a front-page statement by the SWP Political Committee headlined “Stop the crime against Cuba!”

The Young Socialist Alliance, a communist youth organization, played an important role in these protests. The YSA won new adherents among young people who saw the Cuban Revolution as an example of what they wanted to see happen in the United States. In January 1969, a YSA delegation attended the 10th anniversary celebration of the revolution in Havana.  
 
Cuba’s internationalism
Over the course of the following decades, the Cuban Revolution played a decisive role in revolutionary movements throughout Latin America. Popular revolutions in 1979, supported by Cuba, brought governments of workers and farmers to power in Nicaragua and Grenada, both long exploited by the imperialist powers and ruled by despots.

In addition to supporting revolutionary movements in Latin America, Cuba provided internationalist assistance to toilers around the world. From 1975 to 1989, an internationalist mission of 375,000 volunteer Cuban troops went to Angola to help defend that newly independent African nation from invasions by the apartheid army of South Africa. Today Cuba continues to provide international aid to toilers throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America with volunteer medical brigades, literacy programs, and other forms of solidarity.

After the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the early 1990s, which resulted in the loss of 85 percent of its foreign trade, Cuba entered a deep economic crisis. Though the crisis had a deep impact on Cuban society, the revolutionary leadership did not abandon its socialist course. The Cuban government mobilized millions of working people in the cities and countryside to confront the economic challenges in industrial and agricultural production.

Since 1998 the communist movement has been actively involved in the fight to free five working-class fighters framed up by the FBI on “conspiracy” charges and jailed in the United States for the past 10 years. The Cuban Five, as they are known, were defending Cuba against counterrevolutionary groups operating from within the United States to carry out violent attacks on Cuba. (See article on page 6.)

In recent years, members and supporters of the communist movement have set out on a special effort to organize broadly sponsored meetings to discuss the book Our History Is Still Being Written: The Story of Three Chinese-Cuban Generals in the Cuban Revolution. The book presents several chapters of the revolution through the eyes of three generals of Cuba’s armed forces who are of Chinese ancestry. They describe the social injustices they set out to combat when they joined the revolutionary movement as teenagers and how they discovered that socialist revolution was the only viable way forward. Meetings to discuss the book across the United States and throughout the world have featured academics, political activists, artists, and others, presenting Cuba’s example to thousands of people, many of them youth.

Today the communist movement keeps in print a series of 18 books on the Cuban Revolution in its arsenal of revolutionary literature, and works to distribute them widely among fighting workers, youth, and others. Each of the 18 titles presents a piece of Cuba’s revolutionary example and its impact throughout the world.

Cuba’s socialist revolution is a living example of what is possible when workers and farmers take political power out of the hands of the exploiters and reorganize society based on human solidarity. Its lessons remain key to the building of a communist party in the United States today.
 
 
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