February 28, 2000
HAVANA — “We are here because we have no choice but to learn how to fight, and we want to learn from those who know how to fight,” Eddie Slaughter told an official of the Cuban small farmers organization here. “You have been fighting the U.S. government for 40 years,” the Georgia farmer continued. “You have a lot of experience.”
Slaughter was one of six farmers from Georgia, Florida and New Jersey who landed at José Martí International Airport here Feb. 12, wearing colorful T-shirts inscribed with the words “Farmer to Farmer: US Farmers Trip to Cuba.”
Gladys Williams said, “I am impressed with the way of life in Cuba. There aren’t people with guns standing around telling people what to do and where to go like some people said there would be. We have been misled and lied to for a long time but now I am here and can see Cuba for myself.”
February 28, 1975
The Boston NAACP’s call for a united antiracist demonstration on May 17 opens the way for a massive mobilization to defend busing and deal a decisive rebuff to the rock-hurling racist mobs. The 2,000 participants in the National Student Conference Against Racism, representing more than 100 organizations and all parts of the country, endorsed this call for mass action.
The call by the NAACP, the largest and most authoritative civil rights organization in the country, and the breadth and success of the student conference, can pave the way for uniting in action broader forces than at any time since the civil rights battles of the early 1960s.
Labor has a particular responsibility to join the antiracist campaign. The rulers are trying to pit white workers against Black and thus weaken the unions in the face of the economic crisis.
February 20, 1950
After nine weeks of secret negotiations the Kremlin, amid great fanfare, made public the text of an alliance of “amity and mutual assistance” with the People’s Republic of China for a term of thirty years.
Territorially, Stalin made no concessions whatsoever to Mao Tse-tung. He did insist on the formal detachment of the “Mongolian People’s Republic,” whose “independence” is now recognized by both sides. This vast territory is left as one of the Kremlin’s private preserves in Asia. Contrast this with the action of the Soviet state under Lenin and Trotsky who in 1921 in a treaty with Kemalist Turkey ceded the provinces of Kars, Ardahan and Artvin, previously grabbed by the Czars.
The Kremlin propaganda machine is making the most of it right now, not only abroad, but especially inside the Soviet Union and in the satellite countries.