Fair Play for Cuba Committee published, distributed inexpensive pamphlets of speeches by leaders of Cuba’s socialist revolution, eyewitness accounts of steps forward by working people.
On Sept. 7 President Joseph Biden signed off on extending the U.S. embargo of Cuba for another year under the capitalist rulers’ Trading With the Enemy Act. This is no surprise since every president — Democrat and Republican alike — has done the same since 1962. Biden, like his predecessors, views Cuba’s socialist revolution as the most serious challenge to U.S. imperialism in the world.
All those who oppose U.S. aggression against Cuba today can learn valuable lessons from the work of chapters of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee organized across the country during the early years of the revolution.
Soon after working people in Cuba, led by Fidel Castro and the July 26 Movement, overthrew the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in 1959, the U.S. government put their revolution in its gun-sights.
Washington organized counterrevolutionaries to sabotage industry and assassinate literacy volunteers, spread lies about the revolution and prepared an invasion. What the U.S. capitalist rulers most feared was that working people in Latin America and elsewhere would emulate the Cuban Revolution.
But working people, participants in the rapidly expanding fight against Jim Crow segregation, young people, journalists and others went to Cuba to see the revolution for themselves. Inspired by what Cuba’s workers and farmers were doing and becoming, many were determined to get out their story on return to the U.S.
Rapid growth of Fair Play for Cuba
On April 6, 1960, the New York Times printed a full-page ad, initiated by journalist Robert Taber, who visited Cuba after the overthrow of Batista, calling for the creation of committees to promote a fair hearing for the Cuban Revolution. The ad was signed by prominent artists and writers, including Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote and James Baldwin, as well as Black rights fighters like Robert F. Williams.
Before long chapters were being organized across the country, bringing together people from a wide variety of political views, but united in opposition to Washington’s attacks. This included members of the Socialist Workers Party and the Communist Party. Within six months the Fair Play for Cuba Committee had 7,000 members in 27 chapters and student councils on 40 college campuses.
The committees organized picket lines, rallies, debates and forums to get out the truth about the revolution unfolding in Cuba and protest U.S. aggression. A rally in New York City Oct. 20, 1960, drew 1,500 people to demand “U.S. Hands Off Cuba.”
The next month 400 people attended a Fair Play-sponsored meeting in Harlem where they heard two recent visitors to Cuba — William Worthy, an Afro-American journalist at the New York Post, and Robert F. Williams, well known for leading a fight to free two Black youth, 7 and 9 years old, who had been jailed for kissing a white girl in North Carolina. Top NAACP leaders later removed Williams as president of its chapter in Monroe, North Carolina, for organizing fellow Black veterans into armed self-defense of their community against racist thugs.
Ed Shaw, right, Midwest organizer of Fair Play for Cuba Committee and a leader of the Socialist Workers Party, and Robert F. Williams, inset, Black rights leader and former autoworker, did 1961 nationwide speaking tour to build movement to defend Cuba’s socialist revolution from Washington’s attacks.
“The same people who are our oppressors in the South,” Williams told the crowd, “are the first to say ‘overthrow Castro.’ They try to make us believe that when Castro takes over the big corporations he has taken something from us.” Can you imagine, he said, a Black woman working in a kitchen for $10 a week being worried that Castro is “taking property from us.”
In 1961 Williams, who earlier had worked in the auto factories in Detroit, and Ed Shaw, Midwest organizer of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, as well as a leader of the Socialist Workers Party and a union typesetter, went on a nationwide speaking tour talking about the Cuban Revolution and the struggle for Black rights.
The committee published dozens of inexpensive pamphlets, both eyewitness accounts of the unfolding socialist revolution and speeches by its central leaders.
Among the titles: Cuba’s Agrarian Reform: A Speech by Dr. Fidel Castro; Against Bureaucracy and Sectarianism by Castro; The Revolution Must Be a School of Unfettered Thought by Castro; The Second Declaration of Havana; and Socialism and Man by Che Guevara. Committee members sold thousands of copies of the pamphlets.
The Fair Play for Cuba Committee was open to anyone who opposed U.S. aggression against Cuba. Its members were convinced the best way to counter the U.S. rulers’ assaults was to tell the truth about the revolution.
Solidarity with socialist revolution
When working people and youth in the U.S. learned about the banning of racist discrimination in Cuba, the confiscation of the huge estates of capitalist landlords and the guaranteeing of access to the land for landless peasants, workers control of oil refineries, factories and sugar plantations that were being nationalized, the participation of women in all aspects of society, and more, it solidified their support for the revolution.
Jack Barnes, today national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party, was a student at Carleton College in Minnesota and helped establish a chapter of Fair Play there after visiting Cuba. In Cuba and the Coming American Revolution he describes the impact the committee had on students, workers and instructors on the eve of the U.S.-backed mercenary invasion of Cuba at Playa Girón (Bay of Pigs) in April 1961.
As news came out on April 17 on the beginning of the U.S.-backed assault, right-wingers in the campus cafeteria started chanting “War! War! War!” But when the Cubans defeated the invaders in less than 72 hours the atmosphere rapidly changed.
“Committed builders of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee at Carleton in early 1961 had been fewer than half a dozen. But now came the payoff for the weeks of education, propaganda work, writing, talking, pushing for and organizing open political debate, and taking up the challenges of every opponent on every issue,” Barnes wrote. “As the workers and peasants of Cuba inflicted a crushing defeat on U.S. imperialism, support for the political positions we had been defending exploded overnight. But only because we were there, we were known, and we were prepared to respond.”
At a 1996 meeting to celebrate the political life of Shaw, Barnes explained how the SWP approached its participation in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Like revolutionaries they worked with in Cuba, party leaders were committed to the perspective that defense of the Cuban Revolution should be organized without factional bias or exclusion, he said. “No one party should control this work.”
“Surely one of the greatest tests of any political organization is the capacity of its members to participate in mass work with others,” Barnes said, “regardless of diverse points of view, to carry out agreed-on tasks.”
The growing impact of Fair Play did not go unnoticed by the U.S. government and its cop agencies. The committees were accused of being “controlled” by the Socialist Workers Party and the Communist Party. A subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, headed by notorious segregationist Democratic Sen. James Eastland and liberal Democratic Sen. Thomas Dodd, launched a red-baiting witch hunt against the group, attacks that expanded widely after the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Shaw was one of those subpoenaed, and like many others, refused to testify about the activities of Fair Play. Despite hours of bullying by Dodd on June 14, 1961, Shaw wouldn’t budge. Near-apoplectic Dodd shouted, “You’re the worst witness I have had in 30 years.”
The Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which dissolved at the end of 1963, told the truth about Cuba’s socialist revolution and widely publicized the words of its historic leaders, winning support among working people and others to end the U.S. economic and political war on Cuba.
Labor’s transformation of nature is the source of all wealth, all advances in social productivity, culture, and conservation. It is the very foundation for the ongoing existence of our species.
At the same time, from the earliest stages of class-divided society, the propertied classes have organized labor to advance their private gain. They have done so with no concern for the social consequences of their methods. The exploiters use labor as an expendable beast of burden, while they simultaneously deplete the soil, destroy forests through slash-and-burn or other farming methods, wipe out animal life through overhunting and overfishing, and poison streams, ponds, and other bodies of water.
Thus, over the thousands of years since the rise of private property, the relationship between social labor and the natural environment has been marked by the mutually contradictory poles of transformation and destruction. It has been, and remains, a relationship determined by social contradictions, not by natural laws.
Since the rise of industrial capitalism in the mid-1700s, the productivity of social labor has increased at a quickening pace, and with the consolidation of the imperialist world order at the opening of the twentieth century, the degree of labor’s alienation from nature and from its own fruits has become greater than ever before in history. The stakes for the earth’s toilers in eradicating that separation by putting an end to the dictatorship of capital increase daily.
Science and technology — which are developed and used by social labor — have established the knowledge and the means to lessen the burdens and dangers of work, to advance the quality of life, and to conserve and improve the earth’s patrimony.
It is possible today to end once and for all the material, social, and political conditions that have ravaged the lives of countless generations of slaves, serfs, bonded labor of all varieties, peasants, and rural and urban workers and their families.
It is possible to end the treatment of toilers past their prime laboring years as used-up tools, whose demands for food, clothing, shelter, and health care are a regrettable deduction from profits.
It is possible to end the unsustainable private obligations imposed on individual families for the welfare of the young, the elderly, the ill — all of which are social responsibilities that pay tribute to human solidarity.
It is possible to end deaths, maimings, and disease from overwork, hunger, and lack of sanitation.
It is possible to end the slaughter of untold hundreds of millions due to wars of conquest, enrichment, and domination by the ruling classes.
It is possible to end capital’s ever-extending exploitation of nature and labor, with its devastating toll on the constantly growing numbers of working people in the semicolonial world who are being drawn into the capitalist mode of production.
Yet under capitalism — the last of the world’s exploitative property systems — this liberating potential is turned into its opposite. So long as labor remains an inextricable component of the ruthlessly acquisitive, unplanned, and violent operations of the market system, increased productivity simultaneously reproduces the social relations of production specific to capitalism — social relations that perpetuate workers’ own exploitation and oppression. As a result of the unceasing competition among capitalists to maximize profits, the product of labor’s exertion ends up worsening the perils to workers’ life and limb; polluting the soil, waters, and skies; and endangering civilization’s very survival from the use of massive arsenals of nuclear weapons and delivery systems.
....For those who understand politics as an expression of the class struggle — and that is the way we Marxists understand it — the basic cause of the crisis in the party is not hard to find. The crisis signifies the reaction in our ranks to external social pressure. That is the way we have defined it from the outset of the crisis last September, immediately following the signing of the Soviet-Nazi pact and the beginning of the German invasion of Poland. More precisely, we say the crisis is the result of the pressure of bourgeois-democratic public opinion upon a section of the party leadership. That is our class analysis of the unrestrained struggle between the proletarian and the petty-bourgeois tendencies in our party. …
This issue marks the anniversary of two events that impacted the class struggle in the U.S. — the al-Qaeda attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., in 2001 and the social catastrophe unleashed on working people following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. We are reprinting major excerpts from the statement by Martín Koppel, then candidate for mayor of New York, released Sept. 11, 2001, by the Socialist Workers Party.
Waving the banner that “America is under attack,” that it has sustained “a second Pearl Harbor” in the wake of today’s assault on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the U.S. government will seek to advance its “right” to launch military assaults on other countries, as it has done over the past few years against the peoples of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Sudan, and Afghanistan. [Within a matter of weeks, the U.S. imperialist rulers launched a massive bombing campaign and ground invasion in Afghanistan, a war that lasted 20 years with devastating consequences for working people. — Ed.]
The Socialist Workers Party calls on workers, farmers, and all defenders of democratic rights to speak out against the U.S. rulers’ demagogic efforts, in the name of preempting “terrorism,” to rationalize restrictions on political rights. We must oppose the campaign by the U.S. government — Democrats and Republicans alike — to curb the constitutionally guaranteed space for political organization and activity and to legitimize the use of the U.S. armed forces at home and abroad.
On September 11 the U.S. government placed U.S. armed forces worldwide on hair-trigger war alert. It called out an army regiment of light infantry onto the streets of Washington, D.C.; mobilized the New York National Guard; and deployed heavily armed FBI “counter-terrorism squads” and other special federal police units in Los Angeles, along the borders with Mexico and Canada, and elsewhere across the country.
In coming days, as the administration acts on Bush’s vow “to hunt down and punish those responsible,” the labor movement and all democratic-minded organizations and individuals must be on the alert to protest government frame-up trials and oppose its trampling on the presumption of innocence; the right to due process; Fourth Amendment protections against arbitrary search, seizure, and wiretaps; and freedom of association without spying and harassment by government informers and agents provocateurs. The last four years of the Clinton administration, and the opening months of the Bush White House, have been marked by stepped-up bipartisan efforts to strengthen the federal death penalty, erode the rights of the accused and convicted, and increase the room for commando-style operations by the U.S. Border Patrol and other Immigration and Naturalization Service cops, the FBI, and other federal assault agencies.
Whoever may have carried out the September 11 operations, the destruction of the two World Trade Center towers, and the air attack on the Pentagon — with the resulting deaths and injuries of thousands of men, women, and children — these actions have nothing to do with the fight against capitalist exploitation and imperialist oppression. Revolutionists and other class-conscious workers, farmers, and youth the world over reject the use of such methods.
The U.S. government and its allies for more than a century have carried out systematic terror to defend their class privilege and interests at home and abroad — from the atomic incineration of hundreds of thousands at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the 10-year-long slaughter in Indochina, to the war against the Iraqi people in 1990-91, to the burning to death of 80 people at Waco on its home soil, to other examples too numerous to list.
The U.S. rulers know that as they press their assault on the living and working conditions of workers and farmers in the United States, they will meet growing resistance, as working people organize to defend their livelihoods and their rights. That’s why Washington is systematically strengthening its hand against the battles it knows are coming.
The Socialist Workers Party calls on workers and farmers in the United States and worldwide to speak out against all the ways in which the world capitalist order presses humanity toward fascism and war. We must oppose U.S. military intervention anywhere in the world. We must oppose efforts by Washington to escalate an assault on the political rights of working people and the organizations of our class and its oppressed and exploited allies.
....Union membership is only 6.3% in the privately employed workforce. At the same time, the Gallup poll shows approval of unions is running at 68% today, the highest since 1965. This shows more workers are looking for a weapon to hold off bosses’ attacks....
....“We need to break from the dead end of backing the bosses’ Democratic and Republican parties, and build our own party — a labor party based on the unions — that can centralize the struggles of all those exploited and oppressed by capital,” Kuniansky said. “It would unify and lead millions of working people to bring an end to capitalist rule, establish a workers and farmers government and reach out a hand to workers worldwide to join in carrying through a socialist revolution.”
....“We need to organize independently of the Democratic and Republican parties who have done nothing to organize to fight growing attacks on women’s right to choose,” Kennedy said....
In 1973 the Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade decriminalized abortion up to the point where a fetus can sustain life outside the womb, then considered to be 24 weeks. But since the moment the law was passed, capitalist politicians and state governments have relentlessly sought ruling after ruling restricting that right, closing family care clinics, harassing health care providers and enacting more and more limits on women’s access to exercise her right to choose.
....More abortion restrictions have been enacted this year than any other since Roe v. Wade was decided, the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks reproduction statistics, reports.
These restrictions were made easier because of the character and content of the Roe v. Wade decision. It was based on medical criteria centered on “fetal viability,” and required a “doctor’s consent.” This limited abortion to a “health issue” — not a fundamental right based on women’s “equal protection of the law” guaranteed by the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
About 90% of U.S. counties had no abortion provider at all as of 2017, and since then several other clinics have been forced to close. The sharp drop in the number of clinics hits working-class women and women in rural areas especially hard.
In the fall the Supreme Court will hear Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which could decide whether state laws that ban previability abortions are unconstitutional. The Jackson Women’s Health Organization is the only remaining licensed abortion provider in Mississippi and it is challenging the “Gestational Age Act,” passed in 2018, which bans most abortions after 15 weeks. Mississippi’s attorney general filed an additional motion in the case in July, urging the Supreme Court to void its previous rulings legalizing abortion. Texas Gov. Gregory Abbott signed a law a few days later that would ban all abortions in the state “the moment Roe v. Wade is overturned.”
“The Socialist Workers Party supports a woman’s right to choose whether and when to have a child, free from state interference,” Alyson Kennedy, SWP Texas campaign chair, told the Militant. “We call for working people to mobilize to defend clinics that offer women family planning, including the right to safe and secure abortions.
“Defending this right is fundamental to a woman’s control of her own life and to winning full social, economic and political equality,” Kennedy said. “This right is key to uniting the working class as broader class battles are on the horizon. Millions more women are unemployed today, forced to choose between responsibility for child care under government lockdowns or going to work.
“We need to build a powerful working-class movement that breaks from the capitalist rulers’ parties and forms our own party, a labor party, to fight for women’s rights and for all those exploited and oppressed by capital.”
