Join the May Day Brigade to Cuba, emulate Cuban Revolution at home

Editorial
February 19, 2018
May Day march in Havana, 2017
Yoandry Avila GuerraMay Day march in Havana, 2017. International brigade to Cuba this year will talk to workers, farmers across country and join march in Havana. Banner says, “Always rebel youth.”

The Militant urges workers and youth to sign up for the April 22-May 6 May Day Brigade to Cuba.

The bosses’ press doesn’t tell the truth about Cuba and the Cuban Revolution. It’s not just that the capitalist rulers and their media tell outright lies, although they do. Like the slander that U.S. Embassy personnel in Havana were attacked by a nonexistent “sonic weapon.”

The capitalist media is incapable of understanding a society where the propertied owners don’t rule. Where decisions are based not on how to maximize profit, but on increasing the consciousness, unity, discipline and solidarity of the working classes. The way the Cuban people say, “no one is left on their own.”

That is reason enough to go see the Cuban Revolution for yourself, to be able to speak out more effectively against the criminal U.S. economic war against Cuba and Washington’s ceaseless attempts to overthrow the revolution.

This year’s brigade includes meetings with Cuban factory workers, work alongside farmers in the field, discussions with leaders of Cuban mass organizations, joining hundreds of thousands at the May Day rally in Havana and participation in an international conference of solidarity with the Cuban Revolution.

But there is an even stronger reason to go on the May Day Brigade — to learn how working people in Cuba were able to overthrow a brutal U.S.-backed dictatorship, bring to power a government of workers and farmers, and begin building a society based on solidarity, becoming different people in the process.

To learn how the July 26 Movement led by Fidel Castro developed a political program and course of moral conduct and built a movement that made one of the two great revolutions of the 20th century; how the government mobilized 100,000 young people from the cities to the countryside in 1961 that taught nearly a million people to read and write; to learn about the internationalist missions, including the thousands of volunteers who helped to defeat the invasion of Angola by the apartheid regime in South Africa in the 1970s and ’80s; and about the kind of revolutionary working-class leadership that is needed for a revolution to be successful.

That’s the kind of party the Socialist Workers Party is building. Here in the U.S., we invite you to go with us to knock on workers’ doors and introduce them to the party, the Militant and books by SWP and other revolutionary leaders — including on the example of the Cuban Revolution. We explain the need to take political and economic power out of the hands of the capitalist class like working people did in Cuba.

Join us at union picket lines and protests against Washington’s wars abroad, the deportations of immigrant workers, against police brutality, for women’s right to choose abortion and other struggles in the interest of working people. And sign up now to join us on the May Day Brigade to Cuba!