Millions of working people in the U.S. and worldwide face an economic, social and health crisis caused by the ruling capitalist families who exploit and oppress us in their greed for profits. They run a for-profit private health industry that denies care to working people. In contrast, the Cuban Revolution provides an inspiring example of what working people can accomplish when we take political power into our own hands.
That example is one the U.S. rulers have fought to overturn for 60 years, fearing the more workers learn about the Cuban Revolution, the more they will be won to emulate its example.
Since the pandemic struck, Cuba’s revolutionary government has acted as it has for decades, mobilizing working people to tackle whatever challenges they confront. As a result, Cuba has the highest success rate treating those stricken with COVID-19 and the lowest death rate from it in the world.
Thousands of volunteers — medical students and members of Cuba’s mass organizations — have mobilized to visit millions in their homes daily to see if they need help or have gotten sick, and organize rapid and free medical care. Everyone gets the best treatment available.
Preventative measures have been organized at workplaces, including spreading out work stations, something unthinkable for profit-hungry bosses here.
Staffing for elderly residents in care homes has been expanded, the opposite of what happened in the U.S., where the capitalists discard the elderly as expendable, as they’re no longer a source of profit.
Simultaneously, Cuba’s revolutionary government has sent thousands of medical volunteers to any country that requested help to combat coronavirus.
The mobilization of Cuban working people today cannot simply be grafted onto other countries where working people have yet to replace capitalist rule. These feats were accomplished not because Cuba had a better plan. They are the result of the mighty revolution Cuba’s working people made in 1959 and the way they were themselves transformed, then and over decades of advancing and defending the revolution from U.S. imperialist assault. So when coronavirus struck, they were prepared to respond in their millions.
We are determined to organize here in the U.S. to get out the truth about Cuba’s revolution and to build actions demanding that the U.S. rulers end their economic war against Cuba’s people!
Working people in the U.S. have the same capacities. The long history of courageous and disciplined mass struggles by workers and farmers here is proof of that, a history the capitalist rulers try to keep hidden from us. Struggles like the fight that built powerful industrial unions in the 1930s and the Black-led working-class movement that brought down Jim Crow segregation and changed forever working people’s views of each other.
Cuban revolutionary leader Che Guevara told medical students in 1960 that before he met Fidel Castro and joined the Cuban revolutionary movement, he had “wanted to help people through my personal efforts” and become “a revolutionary doctor.”
But his experiences in the Cuban Revolution taught him “a fundamental thing: to be a revolutionary doctor, or to be a revolutionary, there must first be a revolution.” Through the fight to make, defend and advance their socialist revolution, Guevara said, new men and women were forged.
That is the road forward. As our experiences in struggle grow, it will become increasingly clear we need to follow the Cuban people’s example. We will break from the twin parties of the capitalist rulers, the Democrats and Republicans, form our own party, a labor party, and set a course to lead working people here to take political power.