On Jan. 1, 1959, Fidel Castro led Cuba’s working people to victory, ousting the U.S.-backed military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. To mark that anniversary, we are featuring Cuba and the Coming American Revolution by Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. The excerpt is from the first chapter, “1961: Year of Education.” That year saw the deepening of the socialist revolution as Cuba’s workers and peasants defended their accomplishments arms in hand. As Barnes notes, “The victory of Cuban working people at Playa Girón punctured the myth of U.S. imperialism’s invincibility.” He describes how the Cuban Revolution led him to the SWP. Copyright © 2007 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
This political battle that began more than forty years ago was one that changed the lives of a substantial number of young people in the United States. It transformed the communist movement here in a way that paralleled the profound changes taking place in Cuba and elsewhere around the world. Nothing since the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia has had such an impact on the class-conscious workers movement and on radicalizing youth.
There are moments in history when everything ceases to be “normal.” Suddenly the speed of events and stakes involved intensify every word and action. Neutral ground disappears. Alignments shift and new forces come together. The polite conventions of civil discourse that normally reign in bourgeois circles evaporate, including within the “academic community.”
April 1961, when the bombing and invasion of Cuba by mercenaries organized, financed, and deployed by Washington met the fearless resistance and lightning victory of the Cuban people, was such a moment. …
Our understanding of these class questions was accelerated immeasurably by the fact we were sharing our day-by-day experiences … [with] people like V.R. Dunne, who had been a member of the Communist International from its founding in 1919, a leader of the Teamsters strikes and organizing drives in the Upper Midwest during the 1930s, and one of the first victims railroaded to prison by the federal government under the infamous Smith “Gag” Act for opposition to U.S. imperialism leading up to and during World War II.
These workers pointed us to the history of the class struggle in the United States, to the lessons we needed to learn from the workers and farmers in this country whose fighting legacy we inherited. They drew on this rich history to help us understand what we had to be prepared for as we went up against the most violent and brutal ruling class in the world.
Above all, they taught those of us who, like themselves, were so strongly and passionately attracted to the example being set by the fighting workers and peasants of Cuba that the challenge — for us — was not in Cuba. Our fight was in the United States. Cuba’s workers and farmers had proven they could take care of themselves. Washington, to paraphrase Cuban Division General Enrique Carreras, would never be able to get that bone out of its throat.
Those workers like Dunne and others helped us see that the contest would end only with the defeat of the revolution in Cuba or a victorious socialist revolution in the United States.
“There is one thing we can most certainly tell Mr. Kennedy,” Fidel Castro told a cheering crowd in Cuba on March 13 of that year. “A victorious revolution will be seen in the United States before a victorious counterrevolution in Cuba.”
That had become our conviction too. But above all it was becoming the guide to a lifetime of action, a course of conduct born of the historic needs, interests, and capacities of the working class. As beyond belief as this revolutionary goal appeared to the average American, it had become clear to us it was the only realistic perspective, and we set out to speed the day. …
As Cuban workers and farmers pressed forward their socialist revolution and U.S. aggression mounted in reaction to their gains, the lessons transformed the way we looked at the battle for Black rights in the United States as well. The mass proletarian-based struggle to bring down the Jim Crow system of statutory segregation throughout the South, with its various forms of discrimination deeply entrenched throughout the country, was marching toward bloody victories at the same time that the Cuban Revolution was advancing. We could see in practice that there were powerful social forces within the United States capable of carrying out a revolutionary social transformation like the working people of Cuba were bringing into being.
The core of the activists defending the Cuban Revolution were young people who had cut their political eyeteeth as part of the civil rights battles, supporting the Woolworth lunch counter sit-ins and joining or supporting marches and other protests in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and elsewhere in the South.
The many faces of reaction, some in Ku Klux Klan hoods, others with sheriff’s uniforms and FBI jackets protecting them; the lynchings and murders on isolated country roads; the dogs and water cannons unleashed on protesters — all were burned in our consciousness as part of the lessons we were learning about the violence and brutality of the U.S. ruling class and the lengths to which it will go to defend its property and prerogatives.
And we were learning lessons, too, from the armed self-defense organized by Black veterans in Monroe, North Carolina, and elsewhere in the South. …
We rapidly came to see that the legal and extralegal violence directed against those fighting for their rights and dignity as human beings here in the United States was one and the same as the mounting overt and covert aggression against the people of Cuba. We took part in the struggle for Black rights as part of the world class struggle, not just in “domestic politics.” It became totally intertwined for us with the stakes in defending the Cuban Revolution.