May 31, 1999
HAVANA, Cuba — “On May 17, 1959, we crossed the Rubicon,” stated Cuban president Fidel Castro at a rally here celebrating the adoption, exactly 40 years ago, of a land reform law, one of the first — and defining — measures of the Cuban revolution. “It was a step from which there was no retreat.”
Through that 1959 measure, the revolutionary government confiscated millions of acres of large landholdings owned by U.S. and Cuban capitalist families, and hundreds of thousands of small farmers received titles to the land they worked.
“The revolution gave peasants something more than a land reform law,” Castro said. “The peasant began to fully become a person, instead of being a pariah as he was before the revolution. It is the peasants who have defended the revolution, together with the farm workers, the workers in the cities, and students.”
May 31, 1974
The Brookside Women’s Club is as far as the moon from a typical women’s club. These women are fighters. They have joined the picket line of their men in Brookside, Ky., who have been on strike since last July for the right to form a local of the United Mine Workers.
The strikers knew the history of “Bloody Harlan County,” and its “gun thugs” who were hired by the coal barons to terrorize the miners. The current crop of “miners” trying to scab at Brookside are their blood brothers.
These women want their men in the UMW for the free hospitalization; the monthly pension; the union safety committee; and the benefits to the widows provided by the Welfare and Retirement Fund. When the New York Times asked Barbara Callahan, 23, if the club supported women’s liberation, she said, “Right on!” adding, “except that I’m all for families and motherhood.”
May 30, 1949
The plight of the Berlin railway strikers epitomizes the trap in which German workers generally and those in Western Europe as a whole find themselves today. In Berlin, as in Paris or Rome, the workers are caught in the middle between the two rival camps — Washington and Moscow.
Last September in France the Stalinists supported the hungry coal miners. This served the Kremlin’s foreign policy at the time. A few days ago, the Stalinists in Berlin, again for the Kremlin’s own sordid reasons, shot down in cold blood hungry railway workers.
It was not so long ago, either, that the U.S. Big Brass was riding herd on hungry demonstrators, slashing rations and breaking strikes in West Berlin and surrounding areas.
Until the occupation troops of both these ruthless destroyers are withdrawn, crimes such as those will be repeated time and again.