25, 50, and 75 years ago

October 31, 2022

November 3, 1997

SANTA CLARA, Cuba — “We come not to bid farewell to Che and his heroic comrades, but to welcome them,” Cuban president Fidel Castro told an overflow crowd in the Ernesto Che Guevara Plaza Oct. 17. “I see Che and his men as reinforcements, as a detachment of invincible fighters, who this time include not only Cubans but Latin Americans coming to fight alongside us and write new pages of history and glory. Che was a genuine communist — and today he remains an example, a model of a revolutionary and a communist.”

Tens of thousands packed the square to honor the revolutionary leader and his fellow communist fighters who fell in battle in Bolivia 30 years ago. The rally and military ceremony were the culmination of activities in which the remains of Guevara and six of his co-combatants, recently returned from Bolivia, were interred here.

November 3, 1972

The Militant urges its readers to vote for Linda Jenness and Andrew Pulley, the presidential ticket of the Socialist Workers Party. Jenness and Pulley are the only presidential candidates who have campaigned for immediate and unconditional U.S. withdrawal from all of Indochina and for the right of the Indochinese people to self-determination.

Many other deep problems plague American society. All the major questions facing working people — the war, unemployment, racist oppression, and inflation — are political questions. Jenness and Pulley call for the formation of a labor party, based on the trade unions, so that working people will be able to fight for their own political interests.

To those who say voting for the Socialist Workers candidates is “throwing your vote away,” we say voting for the SWP is the only way to make your vote count.

November 3, 1947

Sitting in Washington as prosecutor, judge and jury is the Thomas-Rankin Un-American Committee “investigating” the movies. In the name of “Americanism” they violate the basic civil liberty of freedom of thought, guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution.

The investigation is one of the chief red-baiting instruments of the Wall Street-State Department combine. The victims of the red-hunt are deprived of their civil rights. A monstrous campaign of red-baiting and violation of civil liberties has been going on for a year now.

Supreme Court decisions limiting the Bill of Rights, the Taft-Hartley Act, purges of federal employees, deportation proceedings, and now we see it entering the phase of “thought control.” It is aimed against free speech and thought, just as red-baiting in the unions is really aimed at the trade unions themselves.