• Jamaican constitutional reform to transition the state to a republic
• A thorough review of the LANDS constitution
• The election of a new secretariat and selection of new officers for committee positions

Today, Jamaica is a Commonwealth monarchy, a relic of its past as a feudal possession of the United Kingdom. It was under the restored Charles II that Jamaica was captured from its original colonial masters of Spain; it is, perhaps, appropriate, that it will advance down the road of decolonization under the geriatric Charles III.

International solidarity is the cornerstone of the Communist movement. It is the sine qua non, the without-which-not, which defines the commitment to a Communist struggle and differentiates it from opportunism, reformism, and revanchism. We at USU stand today, and always, in solidarity with the work of our brave international comrades.

Jamaica LANDS has tackled problems of organization and mobilization that the so-called Communist parties of the United States Empire can only dream of achieving.

We salute you, comrades! May you march ever toward liberation!

In the midst of all this, we workers have very few options to defend ourselves. Historically, the most effective tool has been to simply refuse to make our bosses rich at our own expense. We’ve put down our tools, walked away from the factories, and left the mines. Strikes are nothing new. Work stoppages, lockouts, slowdowns, boycotts, and every other flavor of depriving the bosses of profits have historically been the bedrock of workers’ rights. Why do these efforts work? Because we are stronger together than they are. Alone, we’re weak: subject to harassment, firing, eviction, jail. But the bosses can’t jail us all, and without us they can’t run the machines that make them rich. If we want to get results, we have to make sure that when we strike, no one breaks the line. Strikes are as effective as they are unified.

There’s a reason the bosses paid their cronies in the government to make solidarity strikes illegal. There is nothing they can do in the face of united opposition. When one workplace puts down its tools, the bosses groan. When all the workplaces of a single company refuse to work, the bosses tremble. And when all workers in all sectors of the economy proclaim as one “No more!” the bosses scream in mortal terror. 

The second a single strike begins, the bosses start to sweat. They know they cannot survive without a constant stream of profit — without our labor to provide them goods and services to sell, and without our consumption to realize those profits. They employ all manner of tactics to put an end to our united front. They hire scabs. They abuse the legal system. They call the cops. They cancel healthcare. They sic their hired guns on us, beat us, shoot at us, even drop bombs on us. But as of late, their strikebreaking weapon of choice has been the media. At the mere whisper of a strike, they get to work crafting a narrative designed to drive resentment. “See these selfish workers? How they refuse to compromise? How their actions deprive you — the poor consumer — of the goods and services you so desperately deserve?”

It’s all nonsense. It’s the bosses who deprive us. Their avarice drives them to extract as much profit as possible from every drop of sweat off the workers’ brow. They squeeze the working class on both ends: production and consumption. As workers, we face low pay, harsh work conditions, and scant time off. As consumers, we face soaring prices, shoddier products, and manufactured scarcity. These twin struggles are one and the same: capitalist greed at our expense. Try as they might to separate labor disputes from the bulk of “the working class” who need the services our fellow workers provide, it is a fool’s errand. We are all the working class. We are rail workers, teachers, baristas, researchers, nurses, harvesters, artists, hospitality workers, steelworkers, caregivers, builders, writers, and more. We deserve dignity, respect, health, stability, and all the wealth we are due.

It is not just our duty to stand with striking workers. It is our right. Solidarity is the ethos of the working class: to stand together, regardless of the identity of your fellows, so long as you are all people who work. Solidarity is the basic tool by which we wring concessions from the bosses. Every successful strike strengthens us all. We shoulder whatever pain may come from this, we blame the bosses, and we make each other whole. This is what it means to be working class. This is solidarity.

EDITORS NOTE: This statement was released by the New School Students Occupation on 12/8/22 and is reproduced here exactly as it was released, with their permission.

In light of recent attacks by the New School administration on all school employees including faculty and students, as well as the blatant refusal to meet ACT-UAW 7902’s demands or even negotiate in good faith, the students have decided it is the time to escalate direct action. The University Center will be occupied until the administration resumes pay, full healthcare protection, and retirement benefits to all striking employees and a fair contract is reached with part-time faculty.

New York, NY: ACT-UAW 7902, composed of Part-Time Faculty at the New School, has been on strike for 23 days—this makes the strike the longest strike of adjunct faculty in the nation’s history. Part-time faculty are fighting for a fair contract that truly compensates them for their labor, their care, and their commitment to their students—which the New School administration has refused to offer. Not only has the administration prolonged this strike, showing a complete disregard for its students, staff, and faculty it claims to care for, it offered nothing of substance.

They have retaliated violently. As of yesterday, ALL striking workers at the New School have their wages withheld, no access to healthcare benefits, as well as no added funds to their retirement plans. This decision risks the lives of our faculty—many of whom are caretakers, primary insurance holders, some even pregnant or have upcoming surgeries—and this is all happening while New York City experiences a Covid-19 surge with over 40k cases as of the last two weeks. Students who work at The New School have also been notified that if they don’t cross the picket line they will be without pay as well. This applies to Federal Work Study employees—a disgusting move by the administration upon students who qualify based on financial need for the FWS grant.

The administration has also attacked Full-Time faculty who are in solidarity with PTF, notifying them that they must sign “work certification” forms that they will hold class, and if they do not or are found to have not fulfilled what they sign on the form—they risk termination. At all points, the administration of the New School is trying to break the solidarity that ALL faculty and students have fostered—but we will not let them.

This abuse of power by the administration is exemplary of a long history of the New School betraying its founding mission, radical history, and declared values. We no longer recognize the administration as representative of The New School.

The violent, manipulative, and cruel attacks from the administration upon every part of the New School community have left us with no choice but to escalate student action—We are now occupying the University Center.

We will peacefully occupy the building day and night until the administration resumes pay, full healthcare protection, and retirement benefits to all school employees and until the university reaches a fair contract with part-time faculty. We do not take occupation lightly, this is a necessary response to the administration’s violent escalations.

We students will stand in solidarity with faculty who we love and trust, and demand that they are treated and paid not only a living wage and benefits—but that they are respected. The administration would like to believe they can divide us, that we will allow them to exploit our faculty and our friends, but if anything this strike has shown us and the struggle for fair working conditions around the world, the UCs, in HarperCollins, in UCU in UK, that ‘Solidarity is Forever.’ These Administrators have nothing on us and cannot be allowed to continue operating as such. We will win.

Last weekend, for the first time, the Cuban Mission to the United Nations was permitted to send delegates to the state of Connecticut to meet directly with the U.S. people. This visit comes at a time when the island of Cuba is in dire need. The Trump government reversed gains won by the working classes of the U.S. Empire under Obama, not only undoing the steps the Obama government had been forced to take, but instituting 243 new, choking, sanctions rules, denying the Cuban people critical supplies and trade.

The delegation was led by Cuba’s Permanent Representative to the UN, Pedro Luis Pedroso Cuesta. Ambassador Pedroso was accompanied by the Deputy Representative, Yuri A. Gala Lopéz, Minister Counsellor Roberto Hernández de Alba Fuentes and Second Secretary Ernesto Sierra Pérez. Normally, members of the Cuban mission to the UN are not permitted to leave the ten-block area around the United Nations building in New York; the U.S. Empire does not have relations with the country of Cuba and does not recognize its diplomats. This was highlighted by a story Ambassador Pedroso told — he once tried to test the boundary by walking beyond the ten blocks. FBI agents sprang out of the ground and escorted him back, informing him that he “had to step back to the other side of the street.”

For two years, Connecticut’s José Oro has been working on bringing the Cuban mission to Connecticut. José is a Havana-born Cuban engineer who lives in North Haven, Connecticut and writes extensively for the website Cubadebate. He’s spent the past two years lobbying interest groups and state officials to permit the delegates from the Cuban mission to come to Connecticut in the hopes of building solidarity between the U.S. people and economically embattled Cubans. Enlisting the aid of the Greater Hartford Cuba Solidarity Committee and Connecticut State Assemblyman and Deputy Speaker for the Connecticut Hout Edwin Vargas, his efforts have borne fruit.

State Department approval was required to permit the embassy to leave its ten-block confines. It was through the efforts of Assemblyman Vargas that the Biden regime’s Secretary of State finally approved the visit. The ambassadors came to Connecticut for two days, 9 and 10 September, and made stops in Hamden, Hartford, and New Haven. They spoke at Quinnipiac University, the SEIU headquarters, and the New Haven public library before returning to the embassy in New York.

While we waited for the ambassadors to arrive at the SEIU headquarters (they had been delayed by late state department clearance), José recounted what Cuba had been like before the revolution: “They say it was flourishing. That’s a lie. It was flourishing… if you had money, were white, were Christian.” He told the gathered audience, consisting of delegates from the Connecticut Democratic Socialists of America, the New Britain Racial Justice Coalition, the Connecticut Green Party, and other activist organizations, that he had grown up in an upper middle-class family in Havana. The island was heavily divided by class — and, as a result, race. José described the Catholic school in Havana he attended, run primarily by Quebecois priests. There were no Black Cubans there. Later, after the revolution, José asked the priests, “You taught us that we were all children of God… why didn’t you let Black children in?”

“It wasn’t up to us,” the priests told him. “If we had let a single Black student into the school, your parents would have pulled you out, just like that.”

This is the pre-revolutionary legacy that still lives on in Miami. “Most of the Cuban descendants in America don’t want to strangle Cuba,” he said. “That position belongs to an ultra-right group who live in Miami mansions. Unfortunately, they are very powerful. It is up to us to counteract them.”

Deputy Speaker Vargas inveigled against the powerful interests in the Democratic party that forced it to bow to the Miami rightists. “They’ll never be on our side, no matter what we do,” he cautioned. Nevertheless, he warned that the jackals of the Biden administration have abandoned their campaign promises to normalize relations with the island of Cuba precisely to appease this group of wealthy Cuban exiles. “They’re ultra-right racists,” he thundered, “And if the United States can have normal relations with the most repressive countries in the world — Saudi Arabia, which oppresses women and gay people, for example — then we should be able to have normal relations with this little island that’s only ninety miles away.”

The ambassadors arrived to a standing ovation. Ambassador Pedroso began with a summary of the current relations of the U.S. Empire and Cuba. The 243 new economic measures put in place by Trump he characterized as a “strategy of maximum pressure.” As Trump fled office, in his last days, he added Cuba to the U.S. list of sponsors of state terrorism. Biden failed to review the sanctions — worse, the Biden regime has adopted new actions with the aim of enforcing the embargo. It was Biden who refused to permit Cuba to purchase oxygen during the COVID pandemic, Biden who maintains the economic stranglehold that threatens Cuba.

“It is important,” said Ambassador Pedroso, “that there are people who are working for change, and equally important that there are people who believe change can come. There is nothing in Cuba against the U.S. people. You are welcome in Cuba with open arms. Still, we are here; and we will be there. We have the right, and we have the determination to resist. We are not going to yield.”

The ambassador thanked Connecticut especially for starting the car caravans to protest the U.S. blockade, which have become a staple of pro-Cuba demonstrations across the country. They know, he told us, back in Cuba what we’re doing to try to put pressure on our bourgeois politicians. International solidarity is a keystone not only of good morality, but of Cuban policy.

He went on to describe the ways that Cuba lived up to its moral obligation of solidarity. “We send aid and, unlike the U.S. aid, the World Bank, and so forth, we take nothing back when we go.” The Cuban soldiers in Angola, he reminded us, were not there for imperialist plunder, but to end apartheid. When they left, the only things they took with them were the bodies of the Cubans who had died fighting that evil regime.

The Cuban medical cooperation missions are a point of pride. “We do not force those doctors to go abroad. They read the contract and they have the choice. And if they do go, they still get their salary at home while they’re gone,” he explained, to dispel the pernicious myths constantly repeated in the bourgeois press by figures like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Even when Cuba really didn’t have doctors to spare, during the pandemic, they sent doctors to Italy and the colonized periphery. Ambassador Gala added, “We do not say ‘here, have our leftovers,’ we say please, take some of the little resources we have because we want to share.”

The COVID pandemic, Ambassador Pedroso said, had marked the point of reversal from the victories the working people of the U.S. had won against the blockade. It was an opportunity for the rapacious business interests in the U.S. to turn back the clock. Capitalist crises were striking, exacerbated by the COVID crisis. U.S. businesses want to minimize their exposure. But, the ambassador warned, even under the logic of capitalism, the embargo is “a non-sense.” Cuba would pay for the commodities it needs, would help the capitalists in the short term. Their natural desire for markets is being overridden by the ultra-right elements in Miami.

Then, he pointed to Cuba’s incredible achievements, even under the embargo. Only three countries were able to manufacture COVID vaccines: the U.S., biotechnological center of the world, business and corporate center of the world; the Russian Federation; the PRC; and Cuba. Out of these four countries, Cuba is the only one that had not two, but three different vaccines. “Why is this? What is behind this?” he asked. Cuban investment not in imperialist missions, but in the people. Education. Empowerment. The rugged self-reliance of a free people; he did not say as much, but the rugged self-reliance of a Communist people.

Afterwards, José approached me and greeted me warmly. We’ve only met a few times, through other activist circles, but he was as warm as if I were a long-lost comrade. He told me that, although he was born in Havana, he loves New England, and that he was working on getting Governor Sununu to invite the Cuban ambassadors to New Hampshire. He pumped my hand as he said, “His grandfather was an American soldier stationed in Havana during the Spanish-American War. Imagine, a Republican governor meeting with the ambassador. There is a saying in Spanish: whatever hole or crack, the water must get in the coconut.”

Whatever way, we will end this blockade.