April 16, 2001
HARTFORD, Conn. — “The Cuban people are carrying out many projects to advance our cultural level and develop higher human values,” Cuban youth leader Yanelis Martínez told a meeting at the University of Hartford here. Martínez and Javier Dueñas began the New England leg of their tour April 1.
“The beginning of the discussion tonight has to be 1959, which is the year the revolution took political power in Cuba,” said Dueñas in his opening remarks.
Cuban youth have made important contributions to the revolution, Dueñas said, such as being the backbone of many internationalist missions throughout the world, from the defense of Angola from invasion by apartheid South Africa’s military to the more than 3,000 Cuban doctors currently in some of the poorest areas in Latin America, Africa and Central America providing medical services.
April 16, 1976
In Louisville, Kentucky, a six-foot tall cross was burned on Nancy Galt-Clayton’s front lawn. In Rosedale, New York, a fire bomb was hurled at the newly purchased home of a Black man. In Boston a gang of antibusing demonstrators tried to run a flagpole through the Black director of the Boston Contractors Association.
Not one presidential candidate of the capitalist parties has spoken up to condemn the racist violence. Democratic contender Jimmy Carter chose to come out in defense of segregated housing. Carter talked about “’black intrusion into white neighborhoods.”
None of these politicians can be relied upon. Antiracist forces have a historic opportunity to deliver a message to the racists — and the politicians who refuse to stand up to them — by showing up in massive numbers for the national probusing march on Boston April 24.
April 16, 1951
The nationwide controversy precipitated by President Harry Truman’s kicking out Gen. Douglas MacArthur opens a new phase in the crisis of Washington’s imperialist foreign policy. The rift among the capitalist ruling circles is growing more embittered.
If MacArthur is to be condemned, as he surely deserves, then no less reprehensible is Truman, officially MacArthur’s “superior officer.” He is trying to hide that his own course is likewise exclusively designed to promote war. In claiming success in Korea, there is little to choose between MacArthur’s arrogant boasts and Truman’s: “We have taught the enemy a lesson.”
One immediate safeguard against this terrible war danger is to refer the issue of War and Peace directly to the American people, let the issue be decided in a NATIONAL REFERENDUM! Bring the U.S. troops back home! Stop the Korean war now!