MICHAEL SMITH: I can’t tell you how happy I am. I’ve been dreaming of this ever since I became a socialist in college 50 years ago. The United States was defeated here. They thought they could isolate Cuba for 50 years. They tried. They not only assassinated Che, but they tried to assassinate Fidel. They isolated Cuba from the rest of the countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. The tables were turned on them. Last year, the Panamanians, which is not a left-wing government, told the United States, “Unless you allow Cuba to come to the Summit of Americas, you don’t have to come. We want Cuba.” And the United States started thinking, “We’ve got to switch tactics.” It’s not like they’re still not trying to restore Cuba to the capitalist empire, but they’re not doing it in the old ways.
MICHAEL RATNER: Think about Cuba’s place in history, when we think about it for young people, not just for the fact that it leveled a society economically, gave people all the social network that we don’t have in the United States, but think about its international role. You think about apartheid in South Africa, and the key single event took place in Angola when 25,000 Cuban troops repulsed the South African military and gave it its first defeat, which was the beginning of the end of apartheid. It had an internationalism that’s just unbelievable. And I remember standing in front of—in the 100,000 people in front of a square in Havana in 1976. I was on a Venceremos Brigade. And Fidel gave a speech, and he said, “There is black blood in every Cuban vein, and we are going into Angola.” I’m telling you, I still cry over it.
PHYLLIS BENNIS: For decades, we have seen Cuban terrorists in this country, anti-Castro terrorists, who, among other things, assassinated my colleagues in 1976, Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt, just a few blocks from here on Sheridan Circle, with a car bomb, in what was then the worst act of international terrorism here in the United States—approved by the United States, allowed by the United States. And it was at the behest of the U.S.-backed junta in Chile. The first time I went to our annual memorial at the spot where they were killed, just a few blocks from here, on Embassy Row, Sheridan Circle—you could walk from here in 10 minutes—and I looked at the plaque right at the spot where they were killed, and it had their birth dates and the date of their death. I was exactly Ronni Moffitt’s age. We were nine days apart. And I realized that Ronni and I were like the same person. So, it’s a very powerful thing for me to see that—knowing that it’s not going to happen again.
When Cuban exiles shot down a plane over the Bahamas, a plane that had taken off from Venezuela, with—killing 73 people, including the entire Cuban youth fencing team, a nine-year-old child—it was all civilians—it was an act of global terror that was—and the guy who was responsible for it still is living in Miami without any accountability. This is the beginning of ending that. It’s not the end, but it’s the beginning of ending that.
JAMES EARLY: Well, my first thought is Operation Truth, which was the word of Fidel Castro when he was here in 1959. He said, “This is an operation of truth. We carry the weight of the Cuban revolution.” This flag is a manifestation of the achievements of the Cuban revolution, and, in that context, its failures and its errors, which it is self-determined to deal with, now with hopefully less interference externally from the United States, so that they can get on with their internal negotiations of a democracy inside Cuban socialism. I say that because when I listened to the foreign minister, Bruno, today, he was very clear, he was very precise, that this is an achievement of the Cuban socialist revolution.
— source democracynow.org