MIAMI — The Socialist Workers Party’s candidates for public office from California to New York, from Minneapolis to Miami, especially those on the ballot, are taking advantage of media interviews and candidate debates to win as broad a hearing as possible among working people against all the bourgeois alternatives. They explain workers need to become involved on the front lines of class battles and help to build the kind of party our class needs to fight to replace capitalist rule with workers power. Strengthening the work of the SWP by joining is the best way to make that possible.
WPLG-TV Local 10 News in Miami interviewed each of the city’s 13 mayoral candidates. Laura Anderson, the SWP candidate, explained in her live interview Oct. 21 that “working people need a voice.” This is only possible if the working class breaks politically from the two major capitalist political parties, Democrat and Republican.
“Any kind of struggle that cuts across divisions, whether you’re an immigrant worker or from an oppressed nationality, a woman or a man,” is important to advance the unity and fighting power of the working class, she said. “To break down those divisions, we need to use our unions.”
Anderson pointed to the importance of the fight for amnesty and to defend the rights of immigrant workers, as in the case of Kilmar Abrego García, who was deported to El Salvador even though a judge had barred the government from doing so. “Because his union backed him, his community backed him, his family backed him, he’s in the United States now.” He’s a member of the same union as Anderson, the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers. “I’m in Local 1138 as a freight conductor,” she said. Abrego García is a sheet metal apprentice in SMART Local 100.
One of the WPLG moderators claimed that the Cuban Revolution is not “up for discussion in Miami,” and that it was “political suicide” for a candidate to admire Fidel Castro, the central leader of Cuba’s socialist revolution.
Anderson disagreed, saying this inflates the level of opposition to the Cuban Revolution among different generations and the class reality facing Cuban Americans in the city.
She explained there are coalitions in Miami, groups that include Cubans, that organize protests demanding an end to the U.S. rulers’ over six-decades-long political and economic war against Cuba, which punishes workers and farmers there for having carried out a socialist revolution, the first in the Americas, under Washington’s very nose.
Anderson said she had joined actions with Cuban Americans on Miami streets who don’t support the Cuban Revolution but are for ending Washington’s economic war against Cuba.
She added that she is opposed to Washington sending a military armada to the Caribbean and bombing boats off Venezuela. This is part of the growing war threats today as rival capitalist rulers look to defend and expand their reach.
Washington’s threats are aimed not only against the government and people of Venezuela, she said, but against Cuba as well.
Anderson also stated, “I am for Israel’s right to defend itself as a refuge for Jews and the complete defeat of Hamas,” which goes against the interests of U.S. imperialism.
Most working people we meet want to talk about unemployment, rising prices, the increase in suicides, co-workers disappearing in Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, and other impacts of the deepening capitalist crisis today, Anderson said. And they like what we have to say.