Samuel Nava, a farmworker for more than 20 years and now a landscape designer, met Rachele Fruit, Socialist Workers Party candidate for U.S. Senate, at the May Day action of 250 people in Coral Gables, Florida. Agricultural workers came on buses from Homestead. They were joined by some 40 members of UNITE HERE and the Service Employees International Union at the rally.
Nava told Fruit that farmworkers don’t always get paid for the hours they work and women workers face sexual harassment. “When they resist they’re threatened with being reported to immigration,” he told her. “We are demanding just wages and a safe workplace.”
“The SWP organizes solidarity with all workers’ struggles, and calls for a union-led fight for amnesty for immigrants in the U.S. to unify the working class. We defend the Cuban Revolution,” Fruit said, as she showed Nava several books. “Do you know anything about the Cuban Revolution?” she asked.
“I know a lot about Cuba, as if it were my own country,” he said. “I believe the profits that a country makes should go to benefit the people.” Nava subscribed to the Militant and bought the book In Defense of the US Working Class, a presentation by SWP leader Mary-Alice Waters at a May Day event in Havana in 2018.
“This is very important,” he said, pointing to the book’s title.
Members of the Socialist Workers Party and Communist Leagues in Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom joined the thousands of working people at May Day actions, backing the fight for immigrant rights and presenting a road forward for working people to build parties of our own that can lead millions to take political power from the capitalist rulers and into our own hands.
Interest from participants in May Day actions in the Militant and books by SWP leaders and other revolutionaries gave a big boost to the international campaign to sell 1,300 subscriptions, the same number of books and to raise $165,000 for the Militant Fighting Fund by May 12.
Hundreds of people in San Bernadino, California, turned out for a May Day rally and march organized by the Inland Empire Labor Council and the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice. Utility workers, Teamsters, transit workers and members of the SEIU joined, with many young people protesting the arrest and deportation of immigrants and the deteriorating living and working conditions they face.
The SWP literature table was swarmed by rally participants. Many wanted to learn more about the history of the Cuban Revolution and snapped up books by Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and other Cuban leaders. Books on the fight for women’s emancipation and by Malcolm X and leaders of the SWP were among the 27 titles sold. The Militant front-page headline “A call for action: Unite the working class! Amnesty for immigrants!” captured what a lot of people were thinking, and a dozen people signed up for a subscription.
In London, Julie Crawford, Communist League candidate for Southwark Council, spoke to Michale Lawal, a retired worker, on his doorstep May 3.
“Building unions is key,” Lawal told Crawford. “That’s important here and in Nigeria where I’m from.”
Crawford agreed. “It’s part of forging a revolutionary movement of millions to wrest political power from the billionaire rulers — the only way to prevent their march to another world war and a new Holocaust,” she said.
“The prospect of another world war hangs over the next generations,” Lawal said. “There’s been nothing like the Holocaust in history — before or since! And Jews are still being attacked today. Why?”
“The ruling rich and their supporters scapegoat Jews in an attempt to turn workers and middle-class layers away from the real source of our problems, the capitalist system itself,” Crawford said. She said Communist League members joined protests against the antisemitic stabbing of two Jews, Moshe Shine and Shloime Rand, in Golders Green in London the previous week. Both were seriously wounded.
Lawal signed up for a Militant subscription, bought a copy of The Fight Against Jew-Hatred and Pogroms in the Imperialist Epoch: Stakes for the International Working Class and made a contribution to the Militant Fighting Fund.
Dozens of people stopped by the SWP table at the Little Haiti Book Festival May 3. Fruit, the party’s candidate for U.S. Senate, spoke for a few minutes from the stage, encouraging participants to read the books that contain the history of working-class struggles in the world. She said the fight for amnesty for all immigrants was critical to uniting workers to fight together to defend our interests.
In all, 37 books were sold, including 11 titles by Thomas Sankara, leader of the 1983-87 Burkina Faso Revolution, and four copies of Cuba and the Independence War in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde: The Fall of the Last Colonial Empire in Africa by Víctor Dreke. A number of people expressed opposition to Washington’s attacks on Cuba. Participants also got four subscriptions to the Militant and gave $25 towards the Militant Fighting Fund.
Several hundred defenders of the rights of immigrants, trade unionists and others rallied outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., April 29 to protest moves by the federal government to terminate Temporary Protected Status for immigrants from Haiti and Syria.
SWP campaigners sold 10 subscriptions to the Militant and 32 books on revolutionary working-class politics there.