April 23, 2001
HAVANA — “The antiaircraft gunners who fought at Playa Girón were almost all 15, 16, 17 years old. At 22, I was one of the oldest,” said Enrique Dorta, a colonel in Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces, who took part in the March 22–24 conference here on “Girón: 40 Years Later.”
Participants discussed the Cuban victory over a U.S.-organized counterrevolutionary invasion. Cuba, in less than 72 hours, was able to crush a mercenary invasion financed and organized by the mightiest imperialist power in the world.
In 1973 Dorta was part of a mission to Vietnam to study the Vietnamese antiaircraft units, whose effectiveness and courage during the U.S. war were legendary. In 1983-84 he joined with other Cuban volunteer combatants in Angola to help defend the African nation from the U.S. imperialist-backed attack by the apartheid regime in South Africa.
April 23, 1976
We’re matched one to one in New York City. About eight million people against eight million rats. But the battle for dominance in this center of world finance and culture could tip dramatically in favor of the rats. The federal government is considering a cutback of $500,000 in aid to New York’s pest-control program which would reduce the exterminator staff by 57%.
The results would be devastating in those areas of the city where poverty is enforced by unemployment, slumlords, and segregated schools. Already in 1,900 blocks of depressed ghetto areas rats may outnumber people 25 to one, according to health department estimates. And in just a year, each female rat can breed up to 54 of its disease-carrying progeny.
Is Congress concerned about this crisis for millions of New Yorkers? Probably not. The only rats on Capitol Hill are the ones who can vote to provide the cuts.
April 23, 1951
We are celebrating this May Day, 1951, amid one of the gravest political crises that has ever struck the American ruling class. This crisis is the direct result of the debacle of U.S. military intervention in Korea. The American people do not support this war.
The conscience of the decent people of this country — all those who work honestly for a living and have nothing to gain from war profiteering — cries out at the horrors U.S. imperialism has inflicted on the people of Korea. More than a million civilians dead — a whole land gutted by U.S. bombs and shells.
Our most urgent message to American labor on this May Day is: Declare your political emancipation! Break with all capitalist politics and build your own party! Armed with its own party, the laboring millions can strike mortal blows at imperialism, its wars and its profiteering.