March 26, 2001
NEW YORK — Some 270 people gathered here to celebrate the 40th anniversary of U.S. imperialism’s first military defeat in the Americas: the victory of the Cuban people in crushing a U.S.-backed counterrevolutionary invasion at the Bay of Pigs and defending their socialist revolution.
The meeting celebrated the publication of Pathfinder’s newest book, Playa Girón/Bay of Pigs: Washington’s first military defeat in the Americas. Jack Barnes, SWP national secretary and author of the foreword, noted that in Cuba, 1961 was the Year of Education.
Many people are impressed with the fearlessness of the Cuban toilers in the face of death, he said, but what is different about those who were transforming themselves was their attitude toward life. The conquests workers and farmers made with the literacy campaign and other steps to broaden culture were at the heart of what the Cuban people defended at the Bay of Pigs, Barnes said.
March 26, 1976
OVEN FORK, Ky. — The greed of the coal profiteers has claimed the lives of twenty-six men from this cluster of small communities in southeastern Kentucky.
On March 9, one day after a federal inspector cited the company for three explosion-related safety violations, a blast killed fifteen miners. Two days later, a team of miners accompanying federal inspectors met a similar fate. Eight miners and three inspectors died. It is the worst mine disaster in the U.S. since a 1970 explosion killed thirty-eight men.
Company and federal officials refused to speculate about what caused either explosion. The miners and their families already know: “I’ll tell you what’s happened,” one miner said. “This bunch sent my brother into a hot mine and got him killed. They knew this mine was hot. They knew it before it blew out, and they knew it would blow again.”
March 26, 1951
Delegates to the 13th annual CIO United Auto Workers convention in Cleveland meet at a time of political crisis for the American labor movement.
The major question before the convention is how to protect the living standards, working conditions and organizations of labor against the Big Business politics of the Truman administration.
The main problems are political. First, the economic position of labor can no longer be protected by pure and simple trade union methods. This fight can only be fought on the political plane.
Labor does not have a single genuine spokesman in Congress. The unions have no independent political voice.
The burning need is the formation of an independent labor party, which can mobilize the potentially gigantic political strength of the working people.
As the UAW delegates gather, all labor listens: it is time to speak out boldly for a new program!