“I’m very interested in what you have to say about Cuba,” S.D. Harris, a truck driver, told Samir Hazboun, Socialist Workers Party candidate for mayor of Washington, D.C., and campaign supporter Sarah Ullman Oct. 8. Hazboun was introducing the SWP campaign at a truck stop in Jessup, Maryland. “I once had a Spanish teacher who was anti-Castro, but then I started to read for myself. When I read that Fidel was taking on the plantation owners I realized whose side I was on,” Harris said.
After looking over Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes, Harris explained his family had roots in the small town of Yanceyville, North Carolina. He told them how State Sen. John Walter Stephens was killed by the Ku Klux Klan there in 1870 for encouraging newly freed slaves to vote.
He also described how Matt Ingram, a Black tenant farmer, was convicted of “reckless eyeballing” of a white woman in 1951. Ingram fought the racist frame-up all the way up to the North Carolina Supreme Court, and won.
Harris got the book, a subscription to the Militant, and two other titles, Cuba and the Independence War in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde: The Fall of the Last Colonial Empire in Africa by Cuban revolutionary Víctor Dreke, and We Are Heirs of the World’s Revolutions by Thomas Sankara, the central leader of the 1983-87 popular revolution in Burkina Faso.
This discussion was one of hundreds like it during the second week of the international campaign by the SWP and Communist Leagues in Canada, Australia and the U.K. seeking to win 1,150 new readers to the Militant, sell an equal number of books by SWP and other revolutionary leaders and to build the parties. Winning support for SWP candidates, the only ones presenting a working-class road forward, over the final three weeks of the 2026 campaign will be a key part of the effort, along with raising $140,000 for the SWP Party-Building Fund.
“That was terrible,” Noah Atchison, an Amazon driver, told Sam Manuel, SWP candidate for U.S. Senate from Georgia, and campaign supporter Marklyn Wilson, when they showed him the Militant article on the botched execution of Christa Pike by Tennessee prison officials. “They are trying to normalize the death penalty,” Atchison said as we spoke with him in Atlanta.
“The death penalty is a weapon of terror used by the capitalist rulers against working people,” Manuel said. “Democratic and Republican politicians take advantage of cases like this to push for its increased use. It’s part of their drive to undermine democratic rights in preparation for taking on growing resistance by working people to the deepening capitalist crisis.”
Atchison got a Militant subscription along with a copy of Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power to learn more about the party.
“I’ve lived in this country for a long time and never had a candidate come to my home like you,” said Leo Tarr, a tech worker originally from Liberia, when Tony Lane, SWP candidate for governor of Pennsylvania knocked on his door in Pittsburgh Sept. 27.
After talking about Cuba’s role in the liberation struggles in Africa, Tarr looked over some of the books by Sankara, Nelson Mandela and Amílcar Cabral. “You guys know the African revolutionaries!” he said.
He bought a subscription to the Militant and copies of How Far We Slaves Have Come by Mandela and Fidel Castro, and Cuba and the Independence War in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde.
Interest at student protest in France
“There was a lot of interest in our literature,” Derek Jeffers told the Militant, describing the table he and other Militant supporters set up in Paris Oct. 6 at the massive march to back students’ demands the government provide a decent education. “For two and half hours, we watched a human wave march nonstop.” Fifteen books, mostly in French, were sold, as well as a subscription to the Militant and three copies of the paper.
SWP members from Oakland, California, joined protesters outside a screening of the film “NAZA” in San Rafael Oct. 6. The movie, filmed in Israel, is part of a growing international propaganda campaign spreading false charges that Israel’s defensive war against Hamas is premeditated “genocide” against the Palestinian people.
“We’re here to protest the content of this movie,” SWP member Betsey Stone told the San Francisco Chronicle. “We think it covers over the big danger in the Middle East and the seven-front war against Israel after Oct. 7. There’s not a real examination of Hamas or the role of the Iranian regime in arming them,” leading to the deadly Oct. 7 pogrom there.
Some readers of the Militant were surprised when they got a vote-seeking emailed letter from President Donald Trump this week telling them a piddling $90 would be knocked off the cost of their traditional Medicare coverage for the one month of October. “I want to send it along to the SWP Party-Building Fund,” one reader wrote to the party. “It’s not much, but it’s such a repulsive step just before the November elections that I probably won’t be the only one who wants to pass it on.” If you get one of these bribes, put it to good use and do the same.
To join SWP campaigning in your area, contact the nearest Militant distributors.
