To Speak the Truth: Why Washington's 'cold War' Against Cuba Doesn't End

In historic speeches before the United Nations General Assembly and other UN bodies, Guevara and Castro address the peoples of the world, explaining why the US government fears the example of the socialist revolution in Cuba and why Washington’s effort to destroy it will fail.

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) – A student leader at the University of Havana from 1945. Founding member of the Orthodox Party in 1947 and central organizer of its revolutionary-minded youth.

Fidel Castro led the July 26, 1953, attack on the Moncada and Bayamo garrisons and was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Released in May 1955 after a mass amnesty campaign, he organized the founding of the July 26 Movement. From Mexico, Castro prepared the Granma expedition, which returned to Cuba in December 1956. He commanded the Rebel Army during the 1956–58 revolutionary war and from May 1958 headed the July 26 Movement.

Castro was prime minister from February 1959 to 1976, when he became president of the Council of State and Council of Ministers. He was commander in chief of the armed forces from 1959 to 2008 and first secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba from its founding in 1965 to 2011.

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) was an Argentine-born central leader of the Cuban Revolution. Guevara was a Rebel Army commander during Cuba’s 1956–58 revolutionary war; held central responsibilities in revolutionary government, including minister of industry and president of the National Bank; led volunteer internationalist columns in Congo 1965, Bolivia 1966–67; wounded, captured, and murdered by Bolivian army in CIA-organized operation.

Other Contributor:

Mary-Alice Waters (1942– ), a member of the Socialist Workers Party National Committee since 1967, is president of Pathfinder Press and editor of New International magazine. She joined the Young Socialist Alliance in 1962 and Socialist Workers Party in 1964. She has helped lead the SWP’s work nationally and internationally, especially in defense of the Cuban Revolution as well as the fight for women’s liberation.

Waters was YSA national secretary, then chairperson (1967–68). She covered the 1968 student-labor uprising in France for the Militant and edited that working-class newsweekly from 1969 through the early 1970s.

She has edited more than thirty-five books on the Cuban Revolution as well as more than a dozen other titles. Waters has spoken in the United States and around the world on the Cuban Revolution and its lessons for working people and youth everywhere.

Her works include:
The Turn to Industry: Forging a Proletarian Party (2019, coeditor)
In Defense of the US Working Class (2019)
Is Socialist Revolution in the US Possible? (2016)
“It’s the Poor who Face the Savagery of the US ‘Justice’ System”: The Cuban Five Talk about Their Lives within the US Working Class (2015)
Cosmetics, Fashion, and the Exploitation of Women (2024, coauthor)
Rosa Luxemburg Speaks (1970, editor)