The peoples of the three continents focus their attention on Vietnam and learn their lesson. Since imperialists blackmail humanity by threatening it with war, the wise reaction is not to fear war. The general tactics of the people should be to launch a constant and firm attack on all fronts where the confrontation is taking place. . . . There are no frontiers in this life-or-death battle. We cannot remain indifferent to what is happening in the world; a victory in any country over imperialism is also our victory, and the defeat of any nation is a defeat for all. The practice of proletarian internationalism is not only the duty of the people who are struggling for a better future; it is also a sheer necessity.
WE WORKED hard for six weeks, cutting a lot more cane than the Cubans ever expected. After we celebrated reaching the goal of one million arrobas (25 million pounds) of cane cut, one of the 59 Cubans who had worked with us commented that before we started work he thought we'd be "messes rather than million-aires" in cane cutting. With 39 hours of work a week, traveling outside the camp had been limited to walks into Aquacate, a little town 2 miles away and bus tours on Sundays to beaches and other places.
One Sunday we drove in our yellow-and-blue Czech bus (called wa-wa in Cuba because of the sound of the horn) to the Harvana "Green Belt" where coffee. rice, citrus fruits, and many types of vegetables are being grown for the needs of the population of the capital city and the surrounding province. Havana Province historically has been an economic burden on the rest of the nation. One out of every four Cubans lives in the Province: but before 1959 it was always completely underdeveloped agriculturally since Cuba's Yanqui corporate chieftains preferred to invest in the vast expanses of the other less-populated provinces. The purpose of the Green Belt is to change that situation. In a decade Havana Province will be self-sufficient in most foodstuffs. Much of the work in the Green Belt is being done voluntarily by the very people who will benefit directly from the development, the residents of the capital city and its suburbs.
At one stop we got out and joined hundreds of smiling, energetic people of all ages and both sexes who were filling black wax-paper bags full of dirt and placing a coffee seedling in each bag for later germination. It was a hot day but lots of people were talking animatedly and singing. They seemed to see it as a weekly outing and only a portion of the work that thousands of others in the canefields and in factories were also involved in. There are no financial rewards for this kind of labor, just a colorful pin to wear and the feeling that you are participating in growing your own food and the food that will feed everyone in your country.
We also stopped that day at the first "school in the fields," the forerunner of the kind of education all kids from 13 to 15 will be getting in the years to come. In addition to a full schedule of classes (including English) each student has one hectare of land on which he is responsible for growing and harvesting a crop. The teachers work with the students in all the various processes of agricultural production from fertilization to replanting. In this way kids grow up experiencing a harmony between intellectual and practical work. They are taking an active part in Cuba's great task of economic development, and they'll grow up to be adults with a wider consciousness of both mental and manual labor because of it.
OUR last two weeks in Cuba were spent traveling all around the island, from the city of Havana to the easternmost province of Oriente. The first day we had a free afternoon to spend in the capital. I started to walk with some friends to the old part of the city, but as soon as we got off a main boulevard, kids started to come from everywhere to talk to us. Everybody we saw had on clean clothes in good condition and looked as healthy as white teenagers from Newton. The contrast with my memories of Guatemala and Mexico was amazing. And the way people related to us, and this was true all over Cuba, was as equals. Immediately kids of thirteen and fourteen, girls as well as boys, would come up to us in the street and ask us questions to start a conversation, overjoyed to get the chance to discuss their schools, the careers they wanted to pursue, and to find out about the revolutionary movement in the United States. They all knew about the Black Panther Party and SDS, wished us luck in pressuring Nixon to pull out of Vietnam and liked to compare their cane-cutting averages to ours.
I was continually surprised at the self-confidence and frankness of almost every Cuban I met. My meager knowledge of Spanish was little problem since every new acquaintance would listen patiently to my attempted phrases, trying to guess what I was trying to say if I wasn't able to put it in intelligible language. In Havana all the kids we met had seen our brigade in newsreels in movie theatres, and in film clips on TV. They loved to talk about how the Cuban national baseball team had beaten the American team for the world amateur championship this past fall in Santo Domingo (a sports team not widely reported in the U.S. media) and broke out in big smiles when we told them how much we liked Cuba and that we had come to help them in the harvest.
Havana itself looked pretty sturdy, no inner-city slums or decaying buildings, but the city looks rather under-populated. The emphasis of construction and manpower is in the countryside where Cuba's natural wealth is being developed and where volunteer brigades made up often of young people born in large cities are learning to live, work, and study collectively. (Even Cuban TV is involved in the development of the countryside. Regularly scheduled variety shows frequently are televised live from cane-cutting camps and sugar mills with the workers from each particular location the audiences and active participants.) In this way. Cuba is avoiding the ??emend??s hardships and dislocations caused in non-socialist Third World nations by the steady exodus of former peasants and agricultural families into urban areas, economically and culturally unable to absorb them, thus leaving the rural expanses with a severe shortage of labor which lowers food production and increases the hunger of the population.
The Isle of Youth
After Havana our destination was the Isle of Pines, a seven-hour ferry ride off the southern coast of the main island. On our way into the harbor, several boats brimming with teenagers floated by us waving bouquets of flowers and singing and shouting at the top of their voices. On dry land, the welcome was overwhelming. Our buses became the main exhibits in a human parade through the small town next to the port. Old people in rocking chairs waving vigorously from their porches and everyone else lining the streets - applauding, chanting "Venceremos, Venceromos" over and over again, and singing revolutionary songs; some girls jumped on our buses and give us bags of candy, and all along the route to our hotel every Cuban we saw-on tractors, on foot, in other buses-waved and smiled as if we were long-lost relatives. We realized for the first time that our support in daily work for the Revolution had earned us a place in the Cuban family.
The next day, after sleeping in a hotel that some unlucky American businessman had finished building just four days before the military triumph of the Revolution, we were taken to see the Isle. The Isle of Pines used to be the biggest jail in Cuba. Radical journalists, student leaders, and union organizers were prisoners there along with burglars and other less political "criminals." The few agricultural projects on the island were all owned bly a group of four or
five millionaire families who kept their workers sentenced to life terms of illiteracy, malnutrition, chronic illness, racisin, and powerlessness. Now the large majority of the jails are museums or have been converted for use as school buildings.
And the Isle of Pines is now the Isle of Youth. Thousands of kids from all over Cuba have come to the Isle for two-year periods to grow citrus fruits and to raise cattle. But just as important they have come to build the first communist community in the world. The plan is to climinate money on the island in the next decade and, right now, most of the agricultural work is being done by young people who work in brigades, live collectively in work camps where all their needs are provided free, and run most of the island's affairs. The leaders of the Communist Party on the island are all in their twenties.
And to understand the kids who work on the Isle of Youth is to understand the future of the Revolution. We spent a few hours talking to the members of a brigade called "The Followers of Camilo and Che" who were selected from the best young workers in Havana province. Don't get the wrong impression from the word "selected": to be a member of the Followers is considered a great honor by all the kids we met around the island. The life of a Follower is Spartan and deeply involved in understanding the politics of world revolution. They get out of bed at 5 a.m., have a political education class (reading and discussing the writings of Che, Marx, Lenin, Fidel, and others) for an hour after breakfast and then work in the fields still 7 p.m. They are in charge of a few thousand acres of grapefruits, tangerines, and guavas; so they have become skilled in every phase of citrus fruit agronomy including grafting techniques, fertilization, and testing fruit varieties, After dinner, they talk about the news in the daily paper and on the radio and then they may see a movie, study, or go to bed.
After running down this schedule, the sixteen-year-old Cuban I was talking with insisted that the brigade could work harder and longer, but that they'd only been together for a little over a month and so were taking it easy for a while. He had a pretty accurate idea of what was going on in the U.S. politically and told me that both of us were fighting in the same war against American imperialism, only the locations of the fronts was different, he said.
In everything he said and in the relaxed but strong determination in which he spoke about his goals being the same as the goals of the Revolution and that its problems were his problems, I began to grasp why the Cuban belief in the development of the New Man is so central to the entire revolutionary process. The young people we met all over Cuba are the freest and happiest people I've ever met. They feel free because they recognize the necessity of doing exactly what they're doing for the welfare of the people of Cuba and for the example it is setting for the people of the whole world. Because they are showing that men and women can work for the collective good of society and not for private profit; because they are demonstrating every day that economic development can only occur by destroying a class society, young, Cubans have a perpetual joy and enthusiasm about their lives that can only come about through a true understanding of the reasons for human misery and a complete agreement with the methods being used to end it.
Playa Giron-The Bay of Pigs
From the Isle of Pines we went back to the big island for twelve days of concentrated touring and visiting. First we traveled to Playa Giron, known more familiarly to Americans as the Bay of Pigs, where 1500 mercenaries, armed and directed by the U.S. and provided with air cover by U.S. planes, were easily defeated in less than 72 hours by an armed Cuban population. In a museum there, we saw Sherman tanks, U.S. Army heavy machine guns and mortars, and a picture of Adlai Stevenson, the left liberal representative of a liberal government, telling the Security Council that the United States government had no involvement in the invasion; while at the same time CIA officials were directing the short-lived intervention. The Cubans have characteristically marked the site of "imperialism's first defeat in the Americas" with the construction of a school at Playa Giron where the bloodiest fighting took place in April, 1961. Historical sites in Cuba are not left as sterile monuments but are usually turned into schools; the Cubans think the best way to honor fallen heroes is by having children study and learn to carry on the Revolution that others died to defend.
And on we traveled to Orient, where in the Sierra Maestra, Fidel began thirteen years ago with a force of twelve men to make the Cuban Revolution. We stayed at the University of Santiago de Cuba for four days in a dorm with female medical students who couldn't understand how Americans in the U.S. could tolerate having to pay for medical care and medicines. We visited a new housing project with pastel-colored pre-fabricated panels, a free day-care center like those all over Cuba where infants from the age of 45 days are cared for while their parents work, and a primary school on the grounds of the project. As in all housing built by the Revolution, no one in the project pays any rent. Within six months, all rents will be abolished in Cuba.
On our last day in Oriente, we went to the Moncada barracks in the center of Santiago. On July 26, 1953, 135 Cubans with a strong love for their countrymen and a burning hate for tinhorn dictators with rich American friends tried unsuccessfully to capture the barracks in an attempt to spark an insurrection which they though would topple Batista's government. There is a huge school now in the long, pink building with seventeen-year-old bullet holes still pock-marking its walls. That day the fourth-graders had filled a bulletin board with a photo exhibit of Vietnamese children. A few pictures showed kids staring blankly at the camera, their flesh grotesquely disfigured by Dow's napalm, but most of the shots were of boys and girls dancing in a circle, making pungi sticks to trap U.S. soldiers, or working in the rice-fields. On top of the pictures was a strip of paper with the words, "Children are born to be happy."
Cubans are working to make that homily into the world's reality.