NEW YORK — “There couldn’t be a more important moment to be celebrating the 67th anniversary of the Jan. 1, 1959, victory of the Rebel Army and July 26 Movement over the U.S.-backed Fulgencio Batista dictatorship that opened Cuba’s socialist revolution,” Mary-Alice Waters, a member of the Socialist Workers Party National Committee, told some 80 people at a celebration held Jan. 11.
We’re celebrating “its irreplaceable vital example for working people everywhere, for the future of humanity.” This meeting is especially important after the “U.S. imperialist military assault a week ago on the people of Venezuela to kidnap President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. It is the most arrogant violation in decades of national sovereignty and the rights of oppressed nations.”
The event was sponsored by the New York and northern New Jersey branches of the SWP. It was co-chaired by Róger Calero from New York and Joanne Kuniansky, the SWP candidate for U.S. Senate from New Jersey.
In opening the event, Calero said the meeting had been called to celebrate the centennial of the birth of Fidel Castro, the historic leader of the Cuban Revolution, and to mark the victory of workers and peasants in taking power in Cuba. It was also planned to feature the publication of a new book, Cuba and the Independence War in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde: The Fall of the Last Colonial Empire in Africa by Cuban leader Víctor Dreke.
But today we must add in the loudest voice possible, Calero said, “a condemnation of Washington’s war drive in the Caribbean, and the demand U.S. hands off Venezuela! U.S. hands off Cuba!”
U.S. working people want peace
Waters pointed to the statement, “Condemn Washington’s Attack on Venezuela’s Sovereignty! US Out Now!” issued by the Socialist Workers Party the day of the assault. It denounces Washington’s imperialist ambitions “to run” Venezuela, she noted. It also condemns Washington’s actions as a “flagrant violation of the desire of working people in the U.S. to live in peace.” It’s a desire we must fight to conquer as a right, she said. “Something so decisive for the future of humanity can only be won in struggle.”
The course the propertied rulers are on, as they declare their “right” to “run” or “buy” the world, the SWP leader said, “doesn’t start with Venezuela, Greenland, the Panama Canal or Cuba. That assault on working people starts right here at home. Their foreign policy is an extension of the brutal methods they use against working people in the U.S., including immigrant workers, not the other way around.”
Their course is not driven by President Donald Trump. He may be a gross, egotistical character, but he “is an astute capitalist politician.” He is acting on U.S. imperialism’s vital interests by recognizing that the U.S. industrial base, which has over decades been “eroded by the workings of capitalism,” must be rebuilt and expanded. Finance capital had shifted to shore up sagging profits by slashing labor costs, moving manufacturing platforms overseas to China above all, but now to India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Mexico and more.
The U.S. rulers no longer have “control of energy supplies, rare earths and other vital resources, technology and space, decisive for their military machine, economic domination and ‘national security.’ They know they are currently in no shape to fight the rulers of China or Russia or a united Europe.”
Conflicts in imperialist alliance
“There has been much weeping and wailing, especially in the European liberal press, over the death of what they call ‘the West,’ referring to the post-World War II alliance between Washington and the western European imperialist powers,” the SWP leader said. “They claim this is based on common values of ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ etc., but now the components of the capitalist alliance are turning on each other.”
“Venezuela is simply the opening move for Washington,” Waters said. “Trump’s threat to take Greenland is no joke.” He says it’s the source of rare earths and site of strategic military installations “we” need and the U.S. is the only power that can prevent the rulers of China or Russia using the Arctic island “against us,” by which he means against the U.S. propertied rulers.
Washington’s fight over that Arctic island involves challenging Denmark’s colonial rule there. “Both Denmark and the United States are members of NATO, so what will happen to the ‘alliance’ in this confrontation?” Waters asked. Denmark is backed by the other European imperialist powers and members of the NATO alliance.
Stephen Miller, a top official in the Trump administration, openly asserted Jan. 5 that Greenland rightfully belonged to Washington. “Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland,” he said.
The president of the U.S. has proclaimed that the Panama Canal was “foolishly” given to Panama and “we’re going to take it back.” When he “renamed” the Gulf of Mexico or claimed Canada should be the 51st state of the U.S., these were no laughing matters, the SWP leader said. Trump was speaking about a shift the U.S. rulers see as necessary to assert their threatened dominance.
Waters cited the Dec. 26 Wall Street Journal, which quoted German Chancellor Friedrich Merz as saying, “The normative West no longer exists.” He told Germans to put aside nostalgia for the past. “The Americans are now pursuing their own interests very, very aggressively,” as if that hasn’t always been true. He said the German rulers must do the same.
“This is not the result of a maniac in the White House,” Waters said, “but the evolution of the conflicting interests of capitalist classes and states. This is not the world of 1945. Nor is it the world of 1959, the anniversary we’re celebrating.”
Cuba’s example
This is the world in which the revolutionary example of Cuba’s working people is so necessary, she said.
Washington’s commando operation against Venezuela and declaration the U.S. rulers will “run” that country for the foreseeable future is also aimed at the long-sought goal of crushing Cuba’s socialist revolution. There, the working class did mobilize to take over the capitalists’ factories and plantations during the nationalizations led by the revolutionary government in the early 1960s, Waters said. Havana offered compensation for the owners’ declared tax book value of the properties. This was rejected.
Washington’s unbroken 66-year economic war against the Cuban people has taken its toll, however. Especially in the last few years, the U.S. rulers have increasingly strangled every source of currency and trade. The economic crisis in Cuba today is deep. “There are many hours of electricity cuts, with water out, phones out and transport paralyzed,” Waters said.
The Trump administration is escalating its efforts to economically strangle the Cuban population by its seizure of tankers carrying oil from Venezuela to Cuba. Trump has demanded Havana “make a deal” with Washington.
“Cuba is a free, independent and sovereign nation,” Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel responded to Washington Jan. 11. “No one dictates what we do.”
“Cuba does not attack; it has been attacked by the U.S. for 66 years,” he said, “and it does not threaten, it prepares, ready to defend the homeland to the last drop of blood.”
“None of this has anything to do with drugs,” Waters said, nor is it directed against the people and governments of Venezuela or Cuba alone. It is also directed against the growing economic weight and political influence of the rulers of China in Latin America. It is a blow to the Iranian regime, which has used Venezuela as an entry point on the continent for Hezbollah and its Jew-hating attacks. It is a blow against Moscow’s political and military influence. In short, it is part of the sharpening class conflicts worldwide.
Attack on Venezuela’s sovereignty
“It is hard to believe” that Washington’s assault and seizure of Venezuela’s president “is the will of the people of the United States,” Venezuelan-born Fernando Hernandez told this reporter at the New York celebration. He and his wife, Gali, came to the SWP event, after he subscribed to the Militant at the Jan. 3 protest demanding “U.S. hands off Venezuela!” in New York. “This week has made me both sad and angry,” he said. “It doesn’t feel like Venezuela is a sovereign country anymore.”
Hernandez said he was only 12 years old when Hugo Chávez was elected to Venezuela’s presidency in 1998. Some in his family said this was “the end of democracy,” while others supported Chávez. Venezuela’s history has swung between “dictatorship and moments of democracy,” he said. “There is so much propaganda,” he said, so he appreciated Waters’ talk, which will “help me make up my own mind.”
Greetings
In opening the meeting, Calero read fraternal greetings from members and supporters of the Sugarcane Workers Union in the Dominican Republic who were holding an event the same day to honor the 32 Cuban combatants who died fighting in Venezuela during the Jan. 3 assault by U.S. forces. They applauded the release of Cuba and the Independence War in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, saying, it is “through such publications that we sugarcane workers — the most exploited sector of the Dominican proletariat — have raised our class consciousness.”
The unionists have been part of protests to demand Washington’s forces get out of the Dominican Republic. These U.S. units joined warplanes based in the U.S. colony of Puerto Rico to aid the Jan. 3 attack on Venezuela.
Kuniansky read a greeting to the meeting from Olga Sanabria, a longtime fighter for Puerto Rico’s independence, who explained the mutual solidarity between the peoples of Cuba and Puerto Rico since the 19th century. She greeted the anniversary of the Cuban Revolution and saluted the centennial of “one of the world’s most outstanding revolutionaries and fighters for the working class and the dispossessed, Comrade Fidel Castro.”
“To several generations worldwide, the Cuban Revolution has given meaning and content to the word revolution, to workers’ rights, to transformation,” she said, “to sovereignty and independence, to anti-imperialism and to solidarity. What would be our understanding of these qualities without the Cuban Revolution?” She noted that the Cuban Revolution “has maintained its principles while enduring the unrelenting criminal blockade by the United States Government.”
In closing the meeting, Calero highlighted two campaigns in defense of the Cuban government and people against the U.S. rulers’ intensifying economic, political and financial war. One is the “Let Cuba Play!” campaign against Washington withholding visas for Cuban athletes seeking to compete on U.S. and Puerto Rican soil in qualifying matches for the 2028 Olympics.
The other campaign, “Sutures Save Lives,” has a goal to raise $75,000 by mid-February to send 60,000 sutures to hospitals in Cuba, where they are badly needed for life-saving surgeries. A collection at the meeting raised $1,400 to go to Global Health Partners, which is spearheading the solidarity effort.
In closing, Kuniansky introduced her fellow SWP candidate from New Jersey, Craig Honts for U.S. Congress. She urged people there to join the SWP’s upcoming campaign that will be launched soon to put the party’s candidates on the ballot.
A lively informal discussion and tables of good food kept many participants engaged for a good hour more.