Vol. 79/No. 34      September 28, 2015

The first excerpt below is from the foreword by Mary-Alice Waters, who, like Barnes, was an active participant in many of the actions in defense of the Cuban Revolution and of Black rights in the 1960s described in the book. Both are currently members of the Socialist Workers Party National Committee carrying out central responsibility, working with others worldwide, to build parties that are proletarian in composition and program.

The excerpt by Barnes is from the chapter titled, “There Will Be a Victorious Revolution in the United States Before a Victorious Counterrevolution in Cuba.” Copyright © 2007 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY MARY-ALICE WATERS  
In less than seventy-two hours of combat in April 1961 along the southern coast of Cuba near the Bay of Pigs, Cuba’s Revolutionary Air Force, militias, police, and Rebel Army defeated an invasion by some 1,500 Cuban counterrevolutionaries financed, armed, trained, scripted, and deployed by Washington. The stunning victory, Yankee imperialism’s first military defeat in the Americas, had repercussions around the world — not least of all within the United States itself.

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.

BY JACK BARNES  
The cadres of the people’s militias, the Revolutionary National Police, the Rebel Army, and the Revolutionary Air Force, on the other hand, were fighting for something worth giving everything for at Playa Girón — something that was transforming the life of the great majority. They were fighting to defend what they had accomplished through two and a half years of a deeply popular revolution, and the ways they were changing themselves in the process. They were fighting to defend the redemption of Cuba’s national sovereignty and dignity from U.S. imperialism and its exploiting factory owners, landlords, and brothel and casino operators. To defend the land reform; the literacy campaign and universal public education; the enforcement of laws against racial discrimination; the slashing of housing rents and utility rates; the steps to draw women and youth, together with the workers and peasants, more deeply into all aspects of economic, social, political, and military life; the internationalist solidarity with struggles by toilers throughout Latin America and the world.

That is the kind of army that can withstand big sacrifices and fight to the death. That is the kind of army that won’t develop self-destructive doubts about what it is fighting for. That is the kind of army the enemy slowly but surely comes to realize won’t stop doing battle, no matter what.  
 
 
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