The brutal effects of the U.S. rulers’ six-decades-long economic, trade and financial war against the Cuban people deserve the condemnation of working people everywhere. Our unions should demand the immediate and unconditional end to the embargo, as well as Washington’s inclusion of Cuba on its list of “State Sponsors of Terrorism.” They’re aimed at overturning Cuba’s socialist revolution.
The stark consequences of Washington’s assaults were outlined in a Sept. 12 special report by Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez.
The U.S. rulers’ hatred of Cuba’s 1959 revolution stems from the fact that it was a mighty turning point in working-class history. It drew millions of workers, peasants, women and youth into participation in all aspects of social, economic and political life, transforming their lives, conditions and class consciousness. Like the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia four decades earlier, it showed in practice what working people can accomplish and opened a renewal of communist leadership in the Americas and worldwide, including for the Socialist Workers Party.
Nowhere in the world do the capitalist rulers recognize the capacities and worth of working people. They deeply fear the prospect that the toiling majority will rise up and take political power themselves.
“And what does the Cuban Revolution teach?” Fidel Castro asked an assembly of 1 million people in Havana in 1962. “That revolution is possible, that the people can make it.”
It showed that with leadership, the exploited classes could take power, expropriate the capitalist class and run the factories, banks and production on the land in the interests of the great majority. With a government worth defending, workers and farmers in Cuba defeated a U.S.-backed counterrevolutionary invasion at Playa Girón in 1961. In the decades since, Cubans in their hundreds of thousands have volunteered to join those fighting imperialist oppression in Africa, Latin America and elsewhere.
“What is it that is hidden behind the Yankees’ hatred of the Cuban Revolution?” Castro said in 1962. “It’s fear. Not fear of the Cuban Revolution, but fear of the Latin American Revolution,” he said. “Fear that the plundered people of the continent will seize the arms from their oppressors and, like Cuba, declare themselves free people of the Americas.”
First and foremost, the Socialist Workers Party acts on the conviction that the struggle to make a socialist revolution here, to bring down the world’s final empire, is essential. Building a party to lead working people to replace capitalist rule with a government of our own will change the world forever.
This week the SWP launches its fall drive to win and organize endorsers of the Rachele Fruit-Dennis Richter campaign to reach out more broadly; to expand the Militant’s readership, circulation of books by revolutionary leaders in the U.S., Cuba and elsewhere; and raise $140,000 for the party’s work. Defense of Cuba’s socialist revolution and fighting Washington’s economic war against it are a key part of that effort.
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