25, 50 and 75 Years Ago

September 9, 2019

September 12, 1994

Hundreds of working people, joined by youth and others, have organized picket lines in dozens of cities demanding the U.S. government get out of Guantánamo, end its criminal economic and information embargo against Cuba, and stop its lies about the Cuban revolution. More protest actions like these are needed. More efforts are necessary to organize educational meetings and distribute the books and newspapers that tell the truth about Cuba and the achievements of its socialist revolution.

Washington is not wavering from acting on its almost 35-year-long strategic goal to weaken, divide, and ultimately overthrow the government and communist leadership in Cuba.

[Fidel] Castro speaks the truth, with historic insight, when he insists that “socialism or death” has become the first, and only, line of defense of the Cuban revolution.

September 12, 1969

Turbulence within the United Mine Workers continues to give the incumbent president, W.A. Boyle, a bit more trouble. By August 20 a strike which had begun at the Humphrey No. 7 mine of Consolidated Coal Co. a week before over the firing of five local UMW officials, had spread to 28 mines, involving 7,000 men. Among the struck mines were captive mines belonging to U.S. Steel Corp. and Jones & Laughlin Steel.

UMW top officials immediately rushed into the strike area around Fairmont, W. Va., in an attempt to force the miners back to work. U.S. Steel has instituted a damage suit against the union for $123,000 a day. UMW heads maintain the strike is unauthorized.

All of which puts Boyle in a bind. One of the charges being used against him by his opposition candidate, Joseph Yablonski, is that Boyle “is overly protective of coal company interests.”

September 9, 1944

The Allied conquerors, who are seeking to replace the Nazi tyrants with their own imperialist rule in France, reveal increasing alarm over the revolutionary ferment among the French working masses. Anglo-American authorities are maintaining a rigorous political censorship over news from France, in an endeavor to conceal the true state of mass unrest. The Allies regard the independent action of the French masses, who were set into motion by the insurrections against the Nazis and their French capitalist collaborators, as a grave threat not merely to their military-political control over France but to the whole capitalist structure.

This mood of unrest is being aggravated as the demands of the masses for bread, jobs, peace and real freedom come into collision with the counter-revolutionary plans of the Allied rulers and their French agents.