As Washington’s blockade of the Cuban people intensifies, members of the Socialist Workers Party and Communist Leagues in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom are campaigning to get out the truth about, and defend, Cuba’s socialist revolution.
They’re organizing public protests to demand “U.S. hands off Cuba!” and urging working people to join and build the actions. And they’re using SWP election campaigns, the Militant and Pathfinder books by Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and other Cuban revolutionaries.
Party members are campaigning in working-class neighborhoods, on union picket lines, and at immigrant rights protests, explaining the stakes for working people in opposing Washington’s assaults on Cuba’s sovereignty.
“The government’s threats against Cuba are totally wrong,” Jessica Wallace told SWP members Marklyn Wilson and Susan LaMont when they spoke with her outside her apartment in Union City, a suburb of Atlanta, Feb. 14. LaMont and Wilson showed Wallace the Call to Action issued by the SWP National Committee, “US hands off Cuba! End Washington’s economic blockade!”
“The resources of their country are for the Cuban people. They shouldn’t be bullied by anyone,” Wallace said. Her mother’s family originally came from Cuba. She was glad to learn about the Feb. 17 protest to demand “U.S. hands off Cuba!” in downtown Atlanta.
“As capitalism’s world crisis grows, it’s the example of Cuba’s socialist revolution that the U.S. rulers fear,” LaMont said. She described how both Democratic and Republican administrations have enforced the U.S. rulers’ economic and political war against Cuba for more than 60 years.
Wallace subscribed to the Militant. Several other workers in the apartment complex, who said they were unaware of the mounting threats against Cuba, picked up single copies of the paper.
Attacks on Cuba and U.S. workers
In Oakland, Margaret Trowe, the SWP candidate for governor of California, met striking Kaiser Permanente midwife Neel Arant on the picket line Feb. 11. She was eating the pizza lunch the union provided. Arant reacted favorably to the SWP’s call to action in defense of the Cuban Revolution.
“I’ve heard about the Latin American School of Medicine in Havana,” she said. Tens of thousands of doctors from all over the world have been trained free of charge at the school before returning to their countries to provide much-needed health care to working people.
“There’s a connection between the bosses’ attacks on workers like you, the stepped-up deportation of immigrant workers and the economic war against Cuba,” Trowe said. “The rulers’ wars abroad are an extension of their war against workers at home.” Arant got a year’s subscription to the Militant, Cuba and the Independence War in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde: The Fall of the Last Colonial Empire in Africa by Cuban combatant Víctor Dreke and made a contribution to the SWP campaign.
Trowe joined a lively Feb. 10 march and rally of thousands of teachers, paraprofessionals, students and others in support of striking teachers in San Francisco. She met Mission High School music teacher Osvaldo Carbajal, who emigrated from Cuba in 2001.
“I agree with that,” he told her after seeing the SWP call for action. “I’m against the blockade.”
SWP campaigners there sold two Militant subscriptions, several Militant copies and Cuba and the Coming American Revolution by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes. The book explains why the U.S. ruling class underestimates the capacities of working people in both Cuba and the U.S. to take control of their own destinies.
Learn about Cuban Revolution
Party members in Washington, D.C., went door to door Feb. 8 in a building where several people had recently subscribed to the Militant.
They met the daughter of a subscriber from El Salvador. She works in a Cuban restaurant and told SWP member Sarah Ullman she was sorry for the suffering of the Cuban people following Washington’s oil blockade and a recent earthquake.
“She hadn’t heard about the accomplishments of Cuba’s socialist revolution and its importance for workers everywhere,” Ullman told the Militant. To learn more, she bought Cuba and the Independence War in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde in Spanish, so her mother could read it too.
In Minneapolis SWP members joined hundreds gathered for a march and ceremony on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives Day of Remembrance Feb. 14 at the American Indian Center there.
The SWP literature table was a center of nonstop discussion. Malia Little Wolf told SWP member Mary Martin that her mother was one of those missing and murdered women who was being remembered on the march. She bought a six-month subscription and Labor, Nature, and the Evolution of Humanity: The Long View of History by Frederick Engels, Karl Marx, George Novack and Mary-Alice Waters.
“I’m looking for answers, I think I can find them in this book,” she said.
The sign “US hands off Cuba” at the SWP table caught the eye of Sharrell Villebrun. She told Martin she had heard about Washington’s threats against Cuba and wanted to learn more about the revolution. She got a subscription to the Militant and Revolution and the Road to Peace in Colombia: The Example of the Cuban Revolution by Fidel Castro. Seven participants subscribed to the Militant and eight books by SWP leaders and other revolutionaries were sold.
To learn more about the SWP’s campaigns or to join in distributing the SWP National Committee’s Call to Action and the Militant, contact the area nearest you.
