October 25, 1993
Armed rightist thugs with full backing of the country’s military, have stepped up their violent attacks aimed at preventing Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide from returning to power.
Washington claims that its contribution of 600 soldiers, as part of a UN force of 1,300 being sent to Haiti, will simply be there to help “retrain” the Haitian army and police. Yet, it was these very same repressive forces that U.S. marines succeeded in installing, training, and equipping with armor in the first place when they occupied the country for 19 years earlier this century.
For 29 years, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, Washington backed and financed the repressive Duvalier dictatorship. Only a massive rebellion of Haiti’s workers and peasants forced an end to the reign of terror in February 1986.
October 25, 1968
LOS ANGELES — The Socialist Workers Party campaign headquarters here was bombed by right wing terrorists on Oct. 16. Police say the explosive was dynamite or a similar substance.
The bomb went off in the stairway leading to the second story offices shared by the SWP and the Young Socialist Alliance. The terrorists left a red, white and blue sticker with the inscription, “United Cuban power.” The bombing is the latest in a series of bomb attacks in L.A. by anti-Castro Cubans.
At a press conference the following morning, Joel Britton, SWP organizer in Los Angeles, said that the responsibility for the bombing lies with the U.S. government. “The war of aggression which the U.S. is carrying on against Vietnam and its anti-Cuba campaign give the inspiration to individuals and rightist groups to carry on their ‘anticommunist’ crusade,” he said.
October 23, 1943
Tired of the runaround they have been getting from the War Labor Board and the company, the swing and night shifts of the Federal Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Co., Kearny, New Jersey, members of Local 16, Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers, CIO, struck October 14.
The contract expired last June 23. The new contract has not yet been approved by the WLB. The main demand, a 9% wage increase, has been rejected.
As soon as the men struck, the union bureaucracy, the company, and the government apparatus joined to break the strike and punish the strikers. The Selective Service Board reported that all Federal Shipbuilding employes registered with them had been put in 1-A. Those who did not strike, the draft board announced, would be put back into deferred classifications.