Delegates from around the world convened in Havana earlier this month for the 24th International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties, hosted by the Communist Party of Cuba during one of the hardest stretches the island has faced in years.
Just days before delegates arrived, Cuba’s national power grid collapsed for the third time in six months, leaving the country in another nationwide blackout on Aug. 3. Fuel shortages have shuttered factories, idled buses, and darkened homes for months, the toll of a Trump administration campaign to cut off the fuel and financing Cuba needs to keep its economy running.
Anita Waters, Organizational Secretary of the Communist Party USA, addressed the assembly on Aug. 10. “It is a deep honor for me to represent us here in socialist Cuba, in this year, the centenary of Fidel Castro, hero of working people everywhere,” Waters told delegates, thanking the Cuban party for hosting.
Waters traced a line from Gaza to Iran to Venezuela to Cuba as evidence of a U.S. administration escalating its aggression on every front. Trump, she said, “supplied and supported the brutal and genocidal war against the people of Gaza,” then “began an illegal, deadly and destructive war in the Middle East, causing thousands of deaths and injuries.”
Turning to this hemisphere, she told delegates that after “more than a hundred extrajudicial killings in the Caribbean Sea,” Trump “kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores from their home, seized control of Venezuela’s resources, and initiated in turn an energy blockade against Cuba that is causing suffering, hardship, hunger, and death.”
She linked that foreign aggression to a domestic crackdown, saying Trump “unleashed federal troops on our major cities and ripped hundreds of thousands of law-abiding immigrants from their families and communities, and detained and deported them.”
She also pointed to a State Department report she said “falsely claims that Cuba alone is responsible for all protest movements in the United States,” calling it part of a broader war on what the administration frames as “the danger within.”
Still, Waters framed her remarks around what she called a turning tide at home. “‘Socialism’ is an increasingly popular concept especially among youth, and young people have been joining our party in record numbers, from all parts of the country,” she said, citing recent progressive wins in New York City, Colorado, Washington, D.C., and Michigan.
She pointed to a labor movement “resisting in completely new ways, with the AFL-CIO endorsing May Day for the first time in history,” and described Minneapolis neighborhood brigades organizing to warn residents of ICE activity, along with “No Kings” marches that drew, she said, eight million people nationwide.
Waters closed by tying CPUSA’s fight against Trump to the internationalist mission of the gathering itself. “We pledge to continue our efforts to end the blockade against Cuba,” she said. “We pledge to continue fighting to end the U.S. war on Iran. We pledge to stand against the imperialist threats against China and other countries.”
Her final words to the assembly were a direct call to action: “The time for a worldwide anti-fascist front and greater cooperation among all Communist and Workers’ Parties is now.”
That call was echoed in the meeting’s final declaration, which reaffirmed solidarity with socialist Cuba and demanded an end to what it called the “genocidal and inhumane” U.S. blockade, along with Cuba’s removal from Washington’s list of state sponsors of terrorism. For the dozens of parties gathered in Havana, the meeting doubled as a strategy session against a rising fascist tide and a tribute to Castro on his centenary.
Read the CPUSA’s full presentation to the meeting.
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