[....] Róger Calero, a leader of the SWP in New York and former meatpacking worker, expanded on what Waters had said about the centrality of defending protections and freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution in face of assaults by the federal government and the Democratic and Republican parties.
Workers, he said, should never applaud attempts by figures in the capitalist government to use the police and courts against their political opponents, such as the Democrats’ multiple legal assaults on Donald Trump.
“If they do that to an ex-president, you know they’ll try to use those same methods against us,” Calero said. Today, he noted, the federal government is going after leaders of the African People’s Socialist Party, four of whom were recently charged with “conspiring” to act as “unregistered foreign agents.” The FBI has also sought to interrogate members of a Cuba solidarity brigade in Puerto Rico.
“This is an important discussion, because conditions are difficult for workers all over the world,” Rabaza said.
She noted that in Cuba, in contrast with capitalist countries, workers are backed by their government, which defends their rights. The working class in Cuba is leading the fight to confront the economic problems we face. “We can’t lose hope, we can’t lose our faith in the struggle,” Rabaza said. “That’s what this book points to.”
“What Noemí says is important,” Waters said. “Working people in capitalist societies are taught we don’t have the power to change things and must accept that.” But it’s not true, she added. “It’s why the example of Cuba’s socialist revolution remains a beacon throughout the world. In Cuba, workers and farmers took power out of the hands of a capitalist ruling class fully backed by U.S. imperialism and established a government that serves the interests of working people.
“That changed everything for us in the United States too,” Waters said. It renewed prospects for building a revolutionary workers vanguard capable of leading the exploited and oppressed majority to power in the U.S.” That perspective and the defense of the Cuban Revolution are intertwined.
“Alone we will be defeated. Fighting together, we can have much more than hope — we can win,” she concluded....
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