NEW YORK — “Under the leadership of Fidel Castro, the Cuban people carried out a successful socialist revolution by uniting working people on the basis of a program that championed their own independent class interests,” Socialist Workers Party National Committee member Róger Calero told some 60 people at a special meeting here Jan. 5. The gathering was a celebration of the 66th anniversary of the Jan. 1, 1959, Cuban Revolution and to demand an immediate end to Washington’s decadeslong economic war aimed at crushing the Cuban people and overturning their revolution.
“The two most important intertwined accomplishments of the revolution are the transformation of the millions of workers and peasants who became agents of their own emancipation, and the building of a Marxist leadership,” Calero said.
The meeting was sponsored by the New York and Northern New Jersey branches of the SWP. Similar celebrations were organized by SWP branches across the country.
“The example of what Cuba’s toilers accomplished is important today for the millions of workers around the world who are being drawn into politics as conditions of life deteriorate in the face of the worldwide capitalist crisis,” Calero said. “They are looking for ways to fight back. They are learning the importance of extending solidarity whenever fights break out and the need to build a revolutionary-minded leadership of the working class. They will discover through their own experiences the lessons provided by the Cuban Revolution.”
A highlight of the program was when Terry Evans, organizer of the Northern New Jersey branch of the SWP and the event’s chair, read greetings from the Sugarcane Workers Union of the Dominican Republic.
One wall of the meeting hall was covered with an attractive display of photos, including one of the massive demonstration Dec. 20 in Havana protesting the U.S. rulers’ economic embargo. The demonstration, led by Army Gen. Raúl Castro and Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel, marched past the U.S. Embassy. Other photos highlighted recent labor battles.
Both Calero and Evans gave examples of workers using their unions to stand up to boss attacks. Through these struggles, they pointed out, workers will come to understand the need to break with the capitalist parties and build their own party of labor to lead workers in their millions to emulate the Cuban Revolution.
In addition to Calero, Erika Valencia, a community worker in the Bronx and graduate of the Latin American School of Medicine in Cuba, spoke. She explained how as a young art student in Venezuela she had decided that “art can wait, I want to help people.” Against her mother’s advice, she organized to go to Cuba to study medicine. She described how she was won to the Cuban Revolution and how this led her to meet up with the SWP in the U.S.
‘Mobilize, educate, organize’
The program opened with a short video of the Freedom Caravan. One week after Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista fled on Jan. 1, 1959, leaders of the victorious Rebel Army crossed the island, from Santiago de Cuba to Havana. “At each stop Fidel described the revolution’s program and goals to hundreds of thousands of jubilant workers, peasants and youth,” Calero said. “Now the revolution begins,” Castro explained.
“The new revolutionary government acted to mobilize, educate and organize the people to transform social conditions and property relations,” Calero said. It carried out a massive land reform, organized tens of thousands of young people to eradicate illiteracy in less than a year, and expropriated the factories owned by U.S. and Cuban capitalists.
“Within these advances, women’s social, economic and political status was transformed and the legacy of Jim Crow-style racist discrimination was pushed back,” he said.
From the beginning, the revolution extended international solidarity to those fighting imperialist oppression and exploitation around the world, Calero pointed out. “Castro and the leadership educated working people that the advance of the socialist revolution in Cuba is interconnected with the struggles for national liberation and against imperialist domination worldwide.” And that the road to real independence Cuba had taken was open to working peoples everywhere.
“Six decades later, the U.S. rulers can still neither forgive nor forget the Cuban people and their leadership for making their revolution and for the example they set,” Calero said. “That’s why they continue to seek every opening to destroy the living example of Cuba’s workers and farmers.”
Fight for workers power in the U.S.
The Cuban Revolution had an enormous impact on working people throughout the Americas, especially in the U.S., where it transformed the communist movement, the SWP leader said. “In 1960, Jack Barnes, at the time a student at Carleton College in Minnesota, organized to go to Cuba.” Today Barnes is the national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party.
“When he returned home he met leaders of the SWP in Minneapolis and described to them how workers he met in Cuba had impressed on him that the most important thing he could do to aid the defense of the revolution in Cuba was to build a workers’ party capable of making a victorious socialist revolution in the U.S.,” Calero said.
“In Cuba and the Coming American Revolution, Barnes explains how through their experiences defending the Cuban Revolution, he and others were won not primarily to ideas or even a moral stance, but to a course of political conduct and, most importantly, to the proletarian habits consistent with it.”
“With a sense of history,” Barnes wrote, “we signed on for the duration, recognizing that the revolutionary fight for power, while an international struggle, can only be waged country by country, and possibly the most satisfying victory of all will be in the United States.”
Today, Calero said, “the SWP continues to fulfill that pledge to build a working-class party here capable of organizing and leading the working class and its allies in a revolutionary struggle for power, opening the socialist revolution in the strongest bastion of world imperialism.”
The Cuban Five
In addition to being the 66th anniversary of the revolution, Calero said, this is the 10th anniversary of the victory in the battle to win the release of the Cuban Five. The five Cuban revolutionaries — Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González and René González — had come to southern Florida to gather information on paramilitary forces there with a long history of organizing terrorist attacks on Cuba. The FBI framed up the five in 1998 on charges that included conspiracy to commit espionage.
After a 16-year international campaign to win their release, Hernández, Labañino and Guerrero returned home as heroes on Dec. 17, 2014. Fernando González and René González had returned home earlier after serving their sentences. The SWP played an important role in the yearslong fight to win their freedom, Calero said. The program ended with the video of their return to Havana.
Participants came to the meeting from New York City and Albany, New York; New Jersey; Philadelphia; and Boston. Mamadou Bah, a worker in New York originally from Africa, said he was struck by Valencia’s description of how what she found in Cuba was different than the lies she has been told about the revolution.
“It’s important that the SWP teach people the truth about Cuba,” he said, noting, “Many doctors in my country studied in Cuba also.”
People came early and stayed for well over an hour after the meeting to take advantage of a delicious buffet of food and drink, look at books by leaders of the SWP and the Cuban Revolution, and to discuss politics.