Pathfinder Press Was Born With The October Revolution

[Brian Hauk]

Pathfinder Press Was Born With The October Revolution:
A publishing house for working-class fighters that lets revolutionary
leaders speak in their own words {International Socialist Review}
*********************************************************************
from the Militant, vol.62/no.6 February 16, 1998

A conference on Political and Social Publishing in the
1990s took place in Havana, Cuba, February 2-3, sponsored by
the publishing house Casa Editora Abril. An article on the
gathering appears on the front page. Mary-Alice Waters,
president of Pathfinder Press, was among the speakers who
addressed the meeting. We reprint below her presentation. It is
copyright Pathfinder Press 1998 and is reprinted by
permission.

BY MARY-ALICE WATERS
First of all a thank you to Casa Editora Abril for taking
the initiative to organize this conference as part of the
events surrounding the Eighth International Book Fair that
opens here in Havana tomorrow. It gives us all a rare
opportunity to share experiences and discuss how to do a more
effective job in meeting those goals we hold in common.

Pathfinder Press was born with the October Revolution. As a
publishing house, our direct line of continuity goes back to
the earliest publication of speeches and writings by Lenin in
the United States on the eve of 1917. That is when magazines
like the International Socialist Review, produced by left-wing
militants in the Socialist Party, began publishing articles by
the Bolshevik leader.

Origins in 1919
Following the victorious insurrection of the workers,
peasants, and soldiers of the tsarist empire, revolutionary-
minded working people the world over sought to emulate the
example of the first worker-bolsheviks. By 1919 a regroupment
of left-wing socialists, members of the Industrial Workers of
the World, and others had come together to found something
truly new - the communist movement in the United States, whose
explicit goal was to emulate the Bolsheviks. Through many and
varied channels they began to publish the periodicals,
pamphlets, and books that for the first time in the 20th
century brought to the working class in our hemisphere a
communist perspective that drew on the toilers' initial
experience of taking power, defending it, and using it
worldwide.
I start with this because it is the clearest way I can
explain what guides the editorial policy of Pathfinder to this
day. For more than 80 years, Pathfinder and its various
predecessors (from Merit and Pioneer, all the way back to the
Literature Department of the Workers Party of America) have had
one and only one objective: to publish and distribute as widely
as possible the books, pamphlets, and magazines that are
necessary to advance the construction of a communist party in
the United States - an objective that is inseparable from the
building of a communist movement internationally.
From 1917 to today, we have sought to defend a course true
to Lenin's leadership of the Russian Revolution and the early
years of the Communist International, as opposed to the course
that later became identified with the Stalin-led Communist
Party of the Soviet Union - the results of which are being
reconfirmed in the colossal events of recent years that
continue to unfold. And we have prioritized printing works
created by revolutionists who exemplified Lenin's
internationalist and proletarian course in deeds as well as
words.
We always started with the ongoing facts before us in the
world, with the most important challenges of the world class
struggle, thinking about how to strengthen the fighting
vanguard of the working class so it is better armed to
understand the world in which we live; to understand the
history of the modern working-class movement; to become more
conscious of its strength and historic responsibilities; and to
chart a line of march toward taking power in order to open the
road to the construction of socialism.

Communism: a movement, not a doctrine
We have always subscribed to Engels's famous response to
Herr Heinzen, written at about the same time as the Communist
Manifesto, that "communism is not a doctrine, but a movement;
it proceeds not from principles but from facts... Insofar as it
is a theory, [it] is the theoretical expression of the position
of the proletariat" in its struggle with the bourgeoisie and
the "theoretical summation of the conditions for the liberation
of the proletariat" and its allies from exploitation and
oppression.
To bring this home for us today, I want to use the example
of one of the most important books that Pathfinder has
published in the last eight years. It is entitled U.S. Hands
Off the Mideast! Cuba Speaks Out at the United Nations. It was
published in English and Spanish in October 1990 as Washington
was driving toward the horrendous, massive assault on Iraq that
began in January 1991. Cuba's then-ambassador to the United
Nations, Ricardo Alarco'n, speaking from the seat Cuba
fortuitously held on the Security Council, was the only voice
speaking out clearly and consistently, utilizing the arena of
international diplomacy, against the imperialist war being
mounted under the auspices of the United Nations flag.
Pathfinder, in a matter of days (literally) brought out a
small booklet containing each and every one of Alarco'n's
speeches to the world, along with the main speech by Fidel
condemning Washington's aggression. When that sold out in a few
weeks, we printed a second, expanded edition, so that
communists and anti-imperialist fighters around the world could
use it to campaign against the war that the magazine New
International rightly calls "the opening guns of World War
III."
In the short space of six months, Pathfinder sold some
10,000 copies of that title in English, and 1,500 in Spanish.
Today, as Washington is again accelerating toward a new
murderous - and cowardly - assault on the people of Iraq, and
one that will if anything be even more brutal than the last,
that Pathfinder title takes on renewed importance. The fact
that - as is our policy - we have not allowed the book to go
out of print means that our weapons are ready, and, as we meet
here, it is again being used by opponents of Washington's
course around the world.
In a similar way, 30 years ago Pathfinder published another
book - Che Guevara Speaks. In December 1967, only weeks after
the death in combat of Ernesto Che Guevara, while news of that
event and its implications still resounded like a drumbeat
around the world, Pathfinder published the first edition of
that collection of speeches and writings. We have not allowed
it to go out of print from that day to this.

*****

I want to make a number of quick points about the facts and
policies that guide our publishing efforts. I hope they will
provoke some discussion and comment.
1. Pathfinder is not formally or legally the publishing
house of a party (it has its own corporate structure and lines
of decision-making). At the same time, from the beginning the
writers, editors, directors and production personnel have all
been active communist cadres in the United States (communists
with a small `c'), experienced in the working-class movement.
Pathfinder is the publishing house that has always kept in
print the major documents, resolutions and speeches by leaders
of the Socialist Workers Party. In the historical perspective,
this is one of its most important and irreplaceable
accomplishments. Without this the documents that both reflect
and guide the practical work of communist workers, students and
their allies in the United States would be nowhere available.
The Changing Face of U.S. Politics: Working-Class Politics
and the Trade Unions by SWP national secretary Jack
Barnes - which has been published by Pathfinder in three
languages (English, Spanish, and French) - is the most recent
important example of this central core of our publishing.

Produced in heat of political battles
2. As has been true throughout the history of the workers
movement, the best materials we publish are almost without
exception those produced by revolutionists in the heat of
political battle - not abstract analyses or distanced studies,
but pamphlets and books written by those who have been
responding to the needs of the day.
One of the best examples of this is a book written in the
anti-Nazi underground during World War II by a young Belgian,
who was a Jew. The Jewish Question, by Abram Leon, perhaps the
finest historical materialist study of this question ever to be
written, was put down on paper while Leon was active in the
underground. He finished it only a short time before he was
captured and died at the hands of the Gestapo. Sailors,
merchant marine men who were members of the SWP and often acted
as couriers internationally, were able to salvage a copy of the
manuscript in the closing days of the war. Pathfinder
translated it, published it, and has kept it in print for
decades.
Since 1928 when the Militant first began publishing - and
1931 when Pioneer Publishers produced its first title - there
has always been a close working collaboration between the
newspaper and what is today Pathfinder. Many of the materials
that eventually find their way into Pathfinder publications
first appear in the pages of the Militant. It couldn't be
otherwise with a publishing house that is always in the thick
of struggles and seeking to promote a clear class perspective.
From the beginning of the Cuban revolution, for example,
the Militant has been the main periodical in the United States
that published important documents and speeches by leaders of
the Cuban revolution. These were often then rapidly reprinted
by Pioneer Publishers as pamphlets and used widely by the
active defenders of the Cuban Revolution both in the United
States and Canada, many of whom organized themselves during the
revolution's opening years as the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.
In the days before photo-offset printing, it was especially
important to be able to reuse the hot-lead type set for the
newspaper, which was by far the costliest element in the
printing process.
Pamphlets such as the first edition of The Second
Declaration of Havana were published this way, for
example - another title that Pathfinder has kept continuously
in print, in this case since 1962. Tomorrow, in fact -February
4 - we will be marking the 35th anniversary of that call to
action to the toilers of the Americas. Today we still use it
widely as one of the best and most basic publications we have
to explain the character of U.S. imperialist domination of
Latin America and the place of the Cuban Revolution in the
uncompromising struggle against it.
Just in the last days, the most recent example of this kind
of collaboration came off the press, in English and Spanish.
Celebrating the Homecoming of Ernesto Che Guevara's
Reinforcement Brigade to Cuba. It is a collection of articles
published in the Militant last year, including a series of
articles, interviews, and speeches about Che by those who knew
and worked with him as a leader of the Cuban revolution, a
number of them reprinted from various publications here in
Cuba. It also includes an excellent piece by Algerian
revolutionary leader Ahmed Ben Bella, reprinted from Le Monde
Diplomatique.
This is a Militant publication, but it will be distributed
by Pathfinder and used broadly by young socialists and Militant
supporters everywhere. Over the years, a number of publications
like this have eventually evolved into Pathfinder books. But
this kind of format allows for rapid, and relatively less
expensive, publication of materials that might not otherwise be
quickly available and easily accessible.

What is needed, not what is profitable
3. Pathfinder's starting point has always been what is
needed by those fighting to change the world, not what will
sell in the capitalist market. In other words, what guides us
is the opposite of what guides any bourgeois publishing house.
Moreover, with limited resources, we have always had to choose
carefully, and often had to make painful decisions, on what,
and what not, to publish. We do well to publish 4 or 5 new
titles in a year's time, although in 1997 we were able to bring
out 12 new titles, including 5 in Spanish and 4 in French.
That's exceptional.
Our guideline, and this is especially true of books, is to
publish materials that have a lasting value, that deal - in
something more than a conjunctural way - with questions that
are and will remain central to the workers movement for years.
For us - and again this is the opposite of the way
bourgeois publishers function - the important list is our
backlist, keeping in print the titles that contain the
crystallized work of decades. Upgrading and improving them when
possible, but keeping them in print in any case. That in-print
backlist is one of the greatest leverages we have, allowing a
relatively small cadre of communists to have substantially
greater weight than would otherwise be possible.
In the last year alone we have reprinted 83 of our titles
as we strive to approach capitalist norms of efficiency and
stock control with small runs and just-in-time delivery. That
is an enormous challenge that we don't always meet.
Some books, like Lenin's Final Fight, published last year
in Spanish for the first time ever, are actually titles
Pathfinder has had in print for 70 years or more, in one or
another edition or collection.
All told, Pathfinder has more than 330 titles in print
today. Some 280 are in English, 31 in Spanish, 16 in French,
and a number in Russian. Together with Pathfinder supporters in
other countries, several Pathfinder titles are also published
in Swedish, Farsi, Greek, and Icelandic.
4. Most of the books we print, of course, are works that no
one else is interested in publishing, because there is no other
English-language publisher that shares Pathfinder's objectives.
Books like Fighting Racism in World War II, for example,
that tells the story of the fight against segregation and
discrimination inside and outside the U.S. armed forces, even
as the Second World War was unfolding. Or the magnificent
series of books Pathfinder has published on the documents of
the early years of the Communist International. These were
things we had no competition for.
The same can be said for some of the books that are today
among our best-sellers -speeches by Malcolm X, one of the most
outstanding leaders of the working class in the United States
in the 20th century, a man who was killed by his enemies
precisely because of his uncompromising revolutionary and
internationalist trajectory. At the time Pathfinder began
publishing Malcolm - while he was still alive -many on the left
in the United States were denouncing him as a racist, and even
a fascist. Fidel and Che, who were warmly welcomed to Harlem by
Malcolm, understood his magnificent leadership qualities the
same way we did.

In the words of revolutionists
Pathfinder always tries to publish books by revolutionary
leaders, letting them speak for themselves in their own words.
I would say we give precedence to such books over works by
others about the great revolutionary leaders and events of our
epoch. Workers, revolutionary-minded young people, don't
primarily need interpreters, explainers, intermediaries. They
can do the work of reading for themselves and over time
understand more and more, especially if they discuss with
fellow fighters. They gain self-confidence by knowing that they
can read Marx, or Lenin, or Malcolm, or Che and work together
to understand what such kindred spirits are talking about.
Pathfinder's "Speaks" series is one that captures this
well: Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, Leon Trotsky Speaks, Malcolm X
Speaks, Che Guevara Speaks, Sandinistas Speak, Nelson Mandela
Speaks, Thomas Sankara Speaks, Maurice Bishop Speaks, W.E.B.
DuBois Speaks, Eugene V. Debs Speaks.
That is why we publish books of speeches and writings by
leaders of the Cuban revolution - by Che and by Fidel
especially. To let the Cuban revolution speak for itself,
through its most capable representatives. That's also why we
are so happy that Secretos de generales [Secrets of generals]
has been published here in Cuba, and a further set of
revolutionary voices are able to be heard, read, and studied by
new generations around the world.
And today, with the writings of Marx, Engels, and
Lenin - previously readily available from the publishing houses
of the Soviet Union - becoming more and more difficult to
obtain, we anticipate that Pathfinder will soon of necessity
begin to fill that gap as well.

Bearers of culture
5. At the point where politics and broader questions of
culture intersect, the working-class movement constantly wages
battle against both bourgeois dominance and mind-deadening
escapism. From Marx and Engels to Che and Fidel, the great
working-class leaders of our epoch have always fought to make
the highest cultural conquests within class society the
property of working people. They have done so knowing that it
is working people who will be not only the bearers of the best
of bourgeois culture into the new society, but will be among
the great majority who more and more become the confident
creators of culture.
Pathfinder considers the publications of works such as Art
and Revolution by Leon Trotsky (with its trenchant polemic
against the Stalin bureaucracy's politics of socialist
realism), What is Surrealism? by Andre' Breton, and our newest
title, John Coltrane and the Jazz Revolution of the 1960s by
Frank Kofsky, to be a necessary part of our publishing program.
As Malcolm X insisted, broadening your scope makes working
people better, and more effective, political people. It also
enables them to fight with more joy.
For the same reason we are proud to help distribute
internationally La Gaceta de Cuba, published by the Union of
Writers and Artists of Cuba, as we do Granma and Cuba
Socialista, published by the Communist Party of Cuba.

Depend on volunteer labor
6. Pathfinder is only able to maintain this kind of
publishing program because of the generous support of communist-
minded workers around the world, above all. They subsidize our
publishing program because they agree with it, and they make
real sacrifices to keep these revolutionary weapons in print.
Pathfinder loses money on every book it publishes. It has never
had a year, or even a quarter, when it broke even.
Because Pathfinder books are expensive for working people
even in the United States (they are in the upper-middle range
of going market prices), several years ago we set up the
Pathfinder Reader's Club to make them more accessible to
regular readers. For $10 per year anyone can join the club, and
receive all Pathfinder titles at 15 percent off the cover price
at any Pathfinder bookstore, or by ordering directly. And
throughout the year we offer even higher discounts on selected
titles.
We also rely heavily on volunteer labor to translate,
proofread, scan and format, set type, do artistic work for our
covers - some of which are truly beautiful - and all the other
time-consuming work that is necessary to produce and distribute
printed materials.
Right now, we are in the midst of a major project,
involving volunteer labor from countries around the world, to
put every single title currently in print by Pathfinder in
digital form. Only by doing this will we be able to continue to
take advantage of advances in printing technology that allow us
to frequently print small quantities and continuously upgrade
new editions as our resources permit.
Volunteers are also now finishing the work to produce a
series of three CD-ROMs that will contain the entire collection
of almost 65 years of the journal of Marxist theory and
politics New International. With only a few copies of many of
the early years of the magazine in existence, we were in danger
of losing this irreplaceable resource entirely. Now it will
once again be readily available to new generations communists
in the U.S. and around the world.
7. The sale and distribution of Pathfinder titles also
depends on the volunteer efforts of supporters. First and
foremost, Pathfinder sales are "street sales" - sales by
communist youth and workers off what we often call "guerrilla
tables." Folding card tables set up regularly on street corners
in popular shopping areas, at plant gates, on university
campuses, near high schools. They sometimes get harassed by
cops who don't like what we are selling and try to establish
that the tables are illegally placed on private property. So
the guerrilla tables sometimes have to stand their ground,
sometimes retreat in order to retake the position later, or
find a more defensible location.
An international network of Pathfinder bookstores in seven
countries is another important source of sales. These also are
organized completely by volunteers, by workers, who keep the
stores open as many hours a week as possible.
The same volunteers also act as sales representatives,
visiting regular commercial bookstores, libraries, and
professors in dozens and dozens of cities, discussing the books
with buyers and teachers. They obtain orders that are placed
either directly with Pathfinder or through wholesale
distribution businesses that buy from Pathfinder as well as
other publishers.
Through these kinds of volunteer efforts - which include
taking Pathfinder booths to numerous international book fairs
around the world, from Moscow, to Frankfurt, to Tehran, to
Guadalajara, to Sydney, to Havana - the reach of our
publication effort is truly surprising.
8. A special word about our publishing in Spanish. Our
Spanish-language publishing began, in a modest way, in the
1930s as the communist movement in the United States increased
its collaboration with revolutionary fighters in Mexico, Puerto
Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. A not insignificant
part of this, again, was due to the efforts of communists who
were part of the merchant marine, who frequently sailed to the
major ports of the Caribbean.
Chicano fight propels Spanish titles
But the modern period of publishing in Spanish owes its
impetus to the new rise of the Chicano movement in the United
States at the end of the 1960s - part of the revolutionary
upsurge throughout Latin America in the wake of the 1959
victory in Cuba and the defeat of U.S. imperialism at the Bay
of Pigs. The upsurge of the Chicano movement was also the
product of the mass opposition within the United States to
Washington's aggression against the people of Vietnam, and the
determination of young Chicanos to do everything possible to
end that war - a war in which they were being conscripted to
fight and die, waged against a people for whom they had nothing
but growing respect. The powerful example of the struggle for
Black liberation, followed by the rising wave of struggles by
women against their oppression, were a mighty impetus, as well.
That is when the Spanish-language sister publication of the
Militant was born - Perspectiva Mundial. As with the Militant
earlier, collaboration between PM and Pathfinder has been the
source of a growing arsenal of books and pamphlets in Spanish.
The first book in Spanish was published in 1981. That was
Wall Street enjuicia al socialismo -the court record of the
trial and conviction on subversion charges of the entire
central leadership of the SWP and leaders of the Midwest
Teamsters union on the very eve of U.S. entry into World War II
(in fact they were sentenced to prison the day after Pearl
Harbor). Published in English as Socialism on Trial, it centers
on the actual court testimony of James P. Cannon, a founding
leader of the communist movement in the United States and of
the Socialist Workers Party. This is a book we have used in
English and Spanish for decades as a very basic piece of
communist education and propaganda. It is similar in this
regard to Fidel's 1953 courtroom speech, "History Will Absolve
Me," though, needless to say, not with the scope of the
historical impact of that document. That day will come!
With the major increase in immigration to the United States
from throughout Latin America in the last decades - a wave of
immigration that is similar in size and historic weight to the
immigration from Europe at the end of the last century - the
need for a growing arsenal of weapons in Spanish has increased
even more. It is not only Los Angeles, Houston, and Miami that
are today major Spanish-speaking metropolitan centers. The
composition of the working class within the U.S. has changed
dramatically from coast to coast, even in the smallest cities
and in every basic industry. The working class has been
strengthened by this influx of working people from throughout
Our America, who are every day more and more confident about
their ability to be active vanguard fighters in class-struggle
battles within the United States. A communist party in the
United States today is inconceivable without a strong component
of Spanish-speaking members within its leading cadres, a cadre
that reflects the working class as it is, and as it is
becoming. Nor is it conceivable without a strong publishing
program in Spanish.
(Even though I won't take time to expand on the point here,
it is important to note that our French-language publishing
program, a product of collaboration between Pathfinder and
communists in Canada, is born out of similar necessities
dictated by the class struggle in North America, and the
powerful new rise of the independence movement in Quebec,
beginning in the 1960s.)
In addition to the 31 titles in print in Spanish,
Pathfinder distributes dozens more of the classics of Marxism
as well as many titles imported from publishers in Cuba. This
year, for the first time ever, we received substantial
volunteer help from a team of comrades in Cuba, at the
University of Matanzas, whose efforts made possible the
publication of La ultima lucha de Lenin [Lenin's final fight],
in an edition that includes corrected and improved Spanish
translations of Lenin's final writings, all of which were
checked against the Russian original by comrades who had
studied for years in the Soviet Union.
9. Several times I have mentioned the magazine New
International. Like many publishing houses associated with the
communist movement, Pathfinder helps to promote and distribute
a political and theoretical magazine that has its own imprint.
Editora Poli'tica, for example, the publishing house of the
Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, helps to
produce and distribute Cuba Socialista. New International, as
the magazine we distribute is now known (like Pathfinder it has
had several different names over the decades since it first
began publishing in 1934), is published in English and
translated into three other languages - Spanish, French, and
Swedish. It plays an indispensable role in our overall arsenal,
focusing as it does on the most important questions of world
politics and presenting a communist line in practice on today's
burning issues.

Exacting and demanding standards
10. Before closing with a few words about our work
publishing titles that spread the truth about the Cuban
revolution, I want to address one other point.
For us, the care with which we edit and prepare every
single book or pamphlet we produce is the most important test
of our publishing efforts. We consider this to be a class
question. If it is to prepare itself to be the ruling class,
the working class must have access to truth, to culture, to
clearly presented, accurate information. Their own history and
continuity must be made accessible to new generations of
fighters as they enter the struggle. These are things that Che
understood and fought for so well. The working class must learn
to be exacting in the standards of quality it demands in all
things. That is part of our self-respect and self-confidence.
Those who belong to the class that produces everything know
better than anyone when work is done with quality and when it
is shoddy and unworthy of their efforts.
A publishing house that strives above all to provide
revolutionary fighters with access to the world class struggle
that they must know about and understand in order to be
effective in transforming themselves and that world - a
publishing house with such a goal must maintain the highest
possible standards of accuracy.
A misspelled name; an incorrect date; an erroneous or
confusing or even uncomfortable translation; an inaccurate
footnote or caption (or none at all where one is needed for the
new young reader or the worker or farmer for whom reading is
still a challenge); lack of care in presenting pictures, maps,
or other aids to the reader; covers that are ugly or lack
inspiration and work; printing that is too light and
unreadable; a book that is carelessly bound or cut - all these
are lapses that pain us when they occur. And they should. They
are not worthy of the working class and its historic tasks.
None of these flow from problems created by the limits on
material resources from which we all suffer one way or another.
They are questions of political training and discipline and
respect for our class. They are an example of the question of
questions - proletarian habits, which are the well-spring of
discipline.
At root, this is the same question that was at the center
of the Fifth Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba last
October - why the revolution has to prove it can be more
efficient, and produce with greater quality than the
capitalists. And it can.

Seventy titles on Cuban revolution
11. Out of the 351 books and pamphlets and New
Internationals that Pathfinder is responsible for keeping in
print, 70 are directly related to the Cuban revolution. Four
full pages of the 1998 Pathfinder catalog are devoted to titles
on "The Cuban revolution in world politics." Everything from
six volumes of speeches by Fidel, to Socialism and Man in Cuba,
to Women and the Cuban Revolution, to How Far We Slaves Have
Come, to Dynamics of the Cuban Revolution by the late SWP
leader Joseph Hansen - in addition to the three titles singled
out yesterday by Iraida Aguirrechu of Editora Poli'tica that
have been published in the last few years, working together
with that publisher. The Bolivian Diary of Ernesto Che Guevara,
Che's Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War, and Pombo: A Man
of Che's `guerrilla' by Harry Villegas, are books that would
not have been possible in their current form or with the
quality they attained without the aid of Editora Poli'tica. For
us, such collaboration is indispensable.
The significant number of titles published by Pathfinder
that aim to present the truth about the Cuban revolution is, I
believe, a vivid concretization of the importance of the Cuban
revolution in today's world, its actual weight in the world
class struggle. Because Pathfinder has never set out to be a
publisher of books about Cuba. To the contrary, we have always
tried to bring the Cuban revolution into sharp focus as part of
the world, and part of history.
Publishing books and pamphlets about the Cuban revolution
is not a matter of solidarity nor, to say the least, a
profitable commercial venture. As with everything else we
publish, our purpose is to produce the works that revolutionary-
minded fighters within the United States need in order to be
more effective. And the Cuban revolution is today the only
example in the world of a communist leadership that has taken
and holds state power and uses that most important of all
levers to advance the world struggle for socialism, both inside
Cuba and internationally. A leadership that fights to lead the
working class along its line of march, not to stifle or oppose
it.
Pathfinder's publishing of pamphlets and books about the
Cuban revolution began within the first months of the
revolutionary victory in 1959. Among the earliest pamphlets
were the speech on the first agrarian reform and "The
revolution must be a school of unfettered thought," both by
Fidel, as well as pamphlets like the one prepared by Militant
reporter Harry Ring in 1961, based on his visits to Cuba,
entitled How Cuba Uprooted Race Discrimination. The latter is a
wonderful pamphlet, reprinted from the pages of the Militant,
of course. I remember what a powerful impact it had on me when
I first came around the communist movement about that
time - just as the mass street battles to bring down the Jim
Crow system of segregation in the United States were gaining
such momentum. It helped recruit me.
One of the most effective titles we have published in
recent years is a collection entitled To Speak the Truth. It
includes the four speeches given over the years by Fidel and by
Che before the United Nations General Assembly - in 1960, 1964,
and 1979 - plus the speech by Che in 1964 to the Geneva
conference on trade sponsored by the United Nations. We
subtitled that collection, "Why Washington's Cold War Against
Cuba Doesn't End," because more than any other book we have,
Fidel's and Che's speeches before the United Nations explain
the origins of the U.S. rulers' war against the Cuban
revolution and why they will never forgive the working people
of Cuba for charting their own independent course. All these
are books that have been sold in the hundreds and thousands of
copies across the U.S. from "guerrilla tables" as well as in
big commercial bookstores. They have been used in classes and
study circles in dozens of cities and towns. They have been
carried into factories, mills, and mines in lunch buckets to be
shown to interested co-workers.

`Communist Manifesto' is top seller
I think that perhaps the best way to capture many things
about the class struggle in the United States today, and the
opportunities that exist for communists is tell you what the
best-selling titles produced by Pathfinder are. Our number one
best-seller year after year is the Communist Manifesto. Second
are books by Malcolm X. And third are books by Che Guevara.
That hit parade says a lot!
I could add that last year - 1997 - our two best-sellers
were the Communist Manifesto and Pombo: A Man of Che's
`guerrilla'. And among our top 15 titles, 6 were related to the
Cuban revolution - including the Bolivian Diary, Che Guevara
Speaks, Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War, and the
pamphlet of interviews with Gen. Harry Villegas At the Side of
Che Guevara. Six others were collections of speeches by Malcolm
X or other titles related to the Black struggle in the U.S. Two
were basic texts of the modern communist movement - the
Communist Manifesto and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. And
the remaining title in the top 15 was The Truth about
Yugoslavia: Why Working People Should Oppose Intervention,
explaining the roots of the current war in that country and
imperialism's interests there.

*****

As a new war crisis confronts us in the Mideast, that line-
up will shift somewhat in 1998. I dare to predict that U.S.
Hands Off the Mideast! will once again move toward the ranks of
the best-sellers, and the example of the Cuban revolution will
come into sharp relief from a slightly different direction.
Once again, it will be the opportunity for men and women
within the United States who unflinchingly oppose the war drive
of Washington and its allies to help produce and expand and
sell in increasing numbers the arsenal of political weapons
that working people the world over need - publications that
tell the truth about imperialism and war, and why the interests
of working people the world over are irreconcilable with those
of the exploiting classes.
Of one thing we can be sure. The demand for such books will
grow.

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Pathfinder Press
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