July 10, 2000
Elián González, his father Juan Miguel González, and immediate family returned home to Cuba June 28, hours after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a final appeal by distant relatives who sought to keep the Cuban six-year-old in the U.S.
After the boy was found off the Florida coast, the U.S. government placed him in the custody of Lázaro González, and for seven months refused to return the boy, in flagrant violation of Cuba’s sovereignty. On April 22, the government seized him in a raid of González’s home, an action the administration used to further limit the constitutional rights of working people.
Cubans mobilized repeatedly to demand the U.S. government return Elián González to his country. The Cuban government issued an official statement that said, “Now our population must act with the utmost dignity, serenity and discipline.”
July 11, 1975
NEW YORK — “We may be garbagemen, but we will not be treated like garbage!” With that spirit, New York City’s 10,000 sanitation workers began a powerful wildcat strike July 1. The strike was sparked by the layoff of 2,934 sanitation workers as part of Mayor Abraham Beame’s “crisis” budgetary measures.
The strike is the first major union challenge to the layoffs and cutbacks implemented by the administration. Gov. Hugh Carey refused to rule out the possibility of using the National Guard to break the strike.
There are indications that the action may spread to other city workers facing similar layoffs. Highways Department workers closed down the city’s largest maintenance yard July 1. Pickets closed down a Parks Department garage in Brooklyn July 2. Later in the day the strike spread to the Sanitation Department central repair shop in Queens.
July 10, 1950
The undeclared war of the American imperialists in Korea marks the initial phase of their all-out offensive to establish themselves as the unchallenged masters of the biggest and richest colonial prize in the world. This is implicit in [President] Truman’s proclamation of his “new Asia policy.”
“Through this statement we advise the world what we intend to do in accordance with what we contend are our rights in the Pacific.” Forever gone is the pretense that the U.S. has no “territorial ambitions” anywhere in the world, that Washington is opposed to “old colonialism.”
Asia’s fate, like the fate of mankind, appears to rest entirely in the hands of the ruling cliques in Washington and Moscow. Both sides are discounting the peoples of Asia, believing they can maneuver with them as with dumb cattle. But these awakened peoples will have their say.