656

p Comrades,

p This International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties is the culmination of long months of work by the Preparatory Committee, resulting in the draft Main Document devoted to the unity of the socialist camp and the working-class movement as an effective weapon in the struggle against world imperialism.

p We frequently come up against new events with a bearing on the growth and life of the world communist movement. Partly, these events are traceable to the imperialist strategy of softening up and splitting the socialist camp. On the other hand, the absence of internationally co-ordinated actions by the communist and working-class movement, too, enables imperialism to perform its outrages.

p We understand that the Document is designed primarily to resolve just these problems and that its content is centred on this particular practical aim. And we know that imperialism is the ulcer that envenoms the life of society, undermines economic and social stability, and robs men of happiness.

p Millions of Communists and non-Communists follow the work of our Meeting in the hope that it will produce an antidote to imperialism, that sole culprit of humanity’s woes. The riches created by the working people in the capitalist world are appropriated by a handful of families and social parasites. They neither sow nor reap, live in luxury, and know no want. In the meantime, the larger part of mankind lacks the necessities of life: people are denied medical treatment, hospitals and drugs, are denied jobs and education, and cultural and other spiritual blessings. Two thousand million people on earth are continuously undernourished. According to statistics, a hundred thousand die daily from hunger in the "free world”.

p All these people are sacrificed to imperialism with its unquenchable thirst for profit, which exploits them with cold and heartless indifference, living and carousing at their expense. The only way to end these social crimes, including predacious wars, is to stamp out imperialism, because, as the old proverb says, "when the mad dog dies, madness ends”.

p Imperialism cannot be smashed by attacking the socialist camp. What has to 657 be attacked is the imperialist camp. Nor can this aim be attained by individual struggle. The struggle has to be collective, based on the unbreakable unity of all the anti-imperialist forces. And though the growling beast will resist, withdrawing to its den, it shall be destroyed.

p The Document is based on the principles of Marxism-Leninism and backed by the experience of many years of anti-imperialist struggle. It offers a realistic picture of the versatile tactics and strategy used by imperialism in the fight against the People’s Democracies, indicates the objects of imperialist attacks, and shows what the imperialist forces are aiming at.

p Showing respect for each Party, the Document does not prescribe what it must do in its country. Since the fraternal Parties work in different political, social, cultural and economic conditions, the Document merely indicates the need for aligning their struggle with the objective conditions prevailing in the respective countries.

p We think that no part of the Document may be severed from the whole. So considerable a reduction in size and content may result in a "mountain breeding a mouse". That is why we stand for approving the Document as a whole.

After the Document is approved—and we hope it will be—each delegation will go back to its country. It will be our duty to step up the anti-imperialist struggle by all the means at the disposal of each Party and by methods it deems fit to employ. But that is not enough. While we are farthest from the thought of interfering in the internal affairs of other Parties, we believe there should be a modest-sized information bureau in contact with all Communist and Workers’ Parties of the world, receiving and disseminating information, and briefing the news agencies, radio and television of the socialist countries on events related to the struggle.

p The Latin American continent is one of those regions of the globe where imperialism, especially US imperialism, casts the nets of economic exploitation and political oppression with particular ease. The Main Document says that "US imperialism continues to step up its economic penetration, as well as its political, ideological and cultural intervention in the Latin American countries. In alliance with the local reactionary forces it has been pursuing a policy designed to prevent the peoples from following the example of Cuba. It suppresses any step leading to economic and genuine political independence.”

p The riches of our countries are controlled by US monopolies. Only a negligible share goes to the people, while the bulk is pocketed by the exploiters and stowed away in the bottomless safes of the Wall Street banks.

p A word about Puerto Rico’s place in the American colonial system. Puerto Rico is the smallest island of the Antilles group in the Caribbean and, perhaps, one of the smallest countries represented at this International Meeting. Its area is about 10,000 sq. km. and its population about three million, excluding the nearly 30,000 servicemen in the US naval bases, the 70,000 US civilians and about 30,000 Cuban counter-revolutionaries reluctant to live under the socialist system of social equality and justice established in their homeland, who emigrated 658 to Puerto Rico, where they are allowed to pursue occupations they had pursued in Cuba before the revolution. Puerto Rico has no law to restrict immigration and the US State Department admits anyone there, so long as he is no Communist. Nearly all Cuban emigres have by now become naturalised US citizens. The FBI and CIA employ them as a shock force against the Communist Party and other movements for our country’s national liberation. Many were trained in the USA in subversion against progressive movements, in breaking down doors, setting fire to or dynamiting the premises of these movements.

p That was how the premises of the Independence Movement leadership were set afire and a plastic bomb was placed in the car of Juan Mari Braz, the leader of that organisation. A bomb was also placed in his bookshop. The same men broke into the premises of the Communist Party and destroyed its archives. They act as provocateurs, throwing bottles, stones and the like at meetings, pickets and processions. The FBI and CIA do not arrest these law-breakers, whom they use as spies and informers.

p Today, Puerto Rico is an important sphere of investment for US monopoly capital. In 1965-1967 US investments in Puerto Rico amounted to half the total US investments in Latin America. More than 80 per cent of all investments in our industry are US-controlled. During the regime of Luis Munos Maria, the most outrageous traitor in Latin American history, US industrialists setting up branches in Puerto Rico were relieved of paying taxes for 15 years. What is more, the Marin puppet government, and the present-day rulers of the same ilk, are unable to prevent the US industrialists from transferring their enterprises, after the 15-year tax-free term, to the United States, and shipping out the profits they have amassed by virtue of the niggardly cost of labour and tax-free operation.

p The average profit on US investments in Puerto Rico is considerably higher than in the United States. In our country, US monopoly capital makes more than $300 million annually in profits, dividends, and tax exemptions. From the United States, Puerto Rico buys commodities worth more than $1,400 million annually, and is thus an important market for US goods. The United Kingdom, Canada, West Germany and Japan are the only countries to import more than Puerto Rico from the United States.

p More than 13 per cent of Puerto Rican territory is occupied by US naval bases, used to suppress revolutionary movements in Latin America and as a standing threat to revolutionary Cuba. Out of the nine biggest bases, two are atomic: one being a base for atomic B-52 bombers and KG-135 refueling aircraft and accommodating an atomic depot of the US Strategic Air Command, while the other is a base of long-range guided missiles.

p Puerto Rico’s wage-earners are paid about one third of what workers receive in the United States, while the cost of living in the country is about 25 per cent higher than in North America.

p The US conscription law is applied to our youth and young Puerto Ricans are made to take part in the dirty US war against the heroic people of Vietnam, just as they were earlier sent to fight against North Korea. Our youth resists this law, refusing to join the US Army and participate in the predacious US wars.

659

p The repressive anti-communist and anti-labour legislation passed by US Congress is also applied in Puerto Rico. Dr, Pedro Albiza Campos, distinguished patriot, was held in US and Puerto Rican prisons under these laws, being released just a few days before his death. Many patriots are still languishing in jails, with many sentenced to life imprisonment.

p Our people fought a bitter battle against the imperialists to retain their language. Repeated attempts were made to introduce English as the official tongue, while our own language was to be but secondary. The matter was taken to a court. The pressure of the people, intellectuals and workers foiled this conspiracy against the language of Miguel Cervantes, willed to us by our ancestors. The people of Puerto Rico came out in defence of our Iberian traditions. Those, in sum, are just a few of the colonial features in the life of Puerto Ricans.

p The International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties shoulders a big responsibility before the Communists of the world, before the mass of working people, before the peoples languishing under the colonial yoke. The people’s of the capitalist countries are fighting for economic, political and social emancipation and hope that the Meeting will produce a united front of Struggle against imperialist crime.

p We might say that the Puerto Rican Communist Party operates on a military basis. We could even say that it functions on Pentagon territory. The close surveillance to which its steeled leaders are subjected is easily imagined. To name oneself a Communist is to doom oneself to hunger, because no one in our country gives employment to Communists. We have to use special tactics to protect our comrades earning their livelihood by manual labour. In a small country where everyone knows each other, where it is impossible to hide, it is hard to carry on revolutionary work on a large scale. All the same, using MarxistLeninist tactics, we always find a way out. As we see it, Communists exposed to intensive surveillance must change tactics daily to outwit the enemy, just as guerrillas do it in the mountains.

p The traitor Luis.Munos Marin zealously assured Washington that Communists had been wiped out in Puerto Rico. It was an unpleasant surprise for him and the US punitive agencies that squads of our comrades were working among the masses. Marin had no choice but to state that they were groups of fanatics and madmen who could do no harm, because closely watched. Again we changed tactics, concentrating on the youth. And to our enemies’ surprise, an active and courageous Communist youth, unafraid of the government’s bloodhounds, joined in the social struggle.

p Our newspaper, Pueblo, and our literature, are disseminated in considerable numbers in the working-class and student communities. Considerable practical work has been accomplished, the results of which are already visible. But much still has to be done.

p In the days of McGarthyism in the United States and the adoption of the Taft-Hartley Law by US Congress, with Communists driven out of labour organisations, our Party suifered considerable losses among the working class, which we are still trying to recoup. When Communist Party leaders were imprisoned in the USA and Communist intellectuals were dismissed from their 660 jobs in uniiversities, those few intellectuals that we had in our Party went into hiding and never returned to our ranks. Many of them took jobs in government offices. Only the incorruptible, only those who have nothing to lose but the chains of colonial and economic slavery, the upright toilers, stuck by us.

p We are working for the unity of the anti-colonialist forces fighting for independence. The independence movement is divided into five factions or groups without any influence among the workers. We are hard at work now to forge unity in the fight against colonialism and imperialism. Some of the above groups want no unity with the Communist Party, while others think real unity is inconceivable without us.

p The victory of the glorious Cuban revolution exercised an extremely strong influence on considerable sections of Puerto Ricans, especially the students and intellectuals. That victory stimulated our struggle against the dirty US war in Vietnam, against military conscription and against imperialism. The main burden of the struggle falls on the Independence Movement, with which our Party co-operates closely.

p Those are the main features of the Communist Party’s struggle in ’Puerto Rico, a colony of US imperialism.

p Anti-communism and anti-Sovietism are products of imperialism. MarxismLeninism shows that the problems facing mankind are a single chain the links of which are interconnected. But there is one principal link, on which the lesser ones depend. Marxism-Leninism shows that to resolve the problems, we must begin by tackling that principal link—imperialism.

p World imperialism uses the same dialectics, but in reverse, against the Communist Parties. For the imperialists the most salient link of concern is the Soviet Union, its military, scientific and economic potentials, its socialist internationalism. It is the Soviet Union, the CPSU, the Party founded by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin that blazed the trail to the immense progress achieved by the Soviet Union, that are the objects of imperialism’s most ferocious attacks. The proletarian internationalism that highlights the relations of the Soviet Union with the other socialist countries foiled the perfidious intents of the imperialists aimed at weakening the socialist camp.

p We frequently meet people who call themselves Communists, but are saturated to the marrow with anti-Sovietism. As we see it, anyone who calls himself a Communist and yet opposes the Soviet Union is only fooling himself and others that he is a real and upright Communist. By his hostility and malice towards the world’s first socialist state whose gallant citizens, men and women, did not bend to the capitalist blockade, that Communist in effect renders a service to imperialism and its lackeys. Imperialism is the only anti-Soviet force. This could not be more logical, because the glorious October Revolution broke the backbone of the capitalist system and the capitalists will never forgive this to the Soviet Union.

p Comrades, an article in one of the Albanian papers on June 5, the day this Meeting of Communist an,^^1^^ Workers’ Parties opened, compels us to say a few words of regret over the Maoists’ contrad’ctions with the Soviet Union.

p The Puerto Rican Communist Party has long formulated a firm and clear standpoint on the Maoist attitude towards the Communist Party of the Soviet 661 Union. The article is an assortment of crude insults, describing the Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties as a "conference ofrenegades".The Maoists are so facile at lies and invective that none can compare with them. They have developed a special propaganda jargon. Anyone thinking differently from Mao Tse-tung is for them a “renegade”, “revisionist”, "running dog of imperialism", “colonialist”, etc.

p The disrespect and malevolence with which the delegates to this Meeting are called “renegades” and “revisionists” cannot but irritate us. It makes us think that those who disrespect others can hardly respect themselves. We cannot recall any article of the Maoist press against the imperialists or Chiang Kai-shek that was charged with as much invective as those against Communists and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. It is a sad thing to say, but it is a fact, and it grieves us deeply. How much better they would have done to use the energy and bullets fired at the Soviet frontier-guards for retrieving Formosa, which does really belong to the People’s Republic of China, for driving off the US 7th Fleet defending that island and Chiang Kai-shek.

p In connection with the coming centennial of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’s birth, the Puerto Rican Communist Party, as represented by its delegation, pays a deep-felt tribute of gratitude, affection and respect to the man who moulded the thinking of so many people, the founder of the Bolshevik Party that sparked the victory of the Great October Revolution.

p We Puerto Rican Communists have been raised on the ideas and teaching of Lenin. His thinking roused us to the struggle. The light of the thoughts of the founder of the world’s first socialist state illumined the world, creating a new life for the toiling and exploited masses.

p From this international rostrum we send our fraternal greetings to the heroic Vietnamese people and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, where courageous, battle-steeled men and women are fighting for the independence of all the peoples languishing under the imperialist yoke, for justice. The people of Puerto Rico are fighting to prevent the US imperialists from sending our youth to kill Vietnamese youth, the people of Vietnam.

p I should particularly like to note the excellent coverage of the Meeting by the press, radio and television. The Soviet people and the world public could follow the work of the Meeting daily in every detail. For us this was important, for we know all too well the methods of bourgeois propaganda, which employs every kind of lie, falsification and false rumour to distort anything done by the Communists. The extdtasive publicity given to the Meeting has knocked that trump out of the hands of anti-Communists, and it will be no exaggeration to say that our ideological foes were dumbfounded. I should like to note yet another aspect of this: the practical organisation of this extensive publicity of the Meeting by the CPSU speaks of its profound and consistent democratism.

In conclusion, we should like to thank the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for its fraternal hospitality, and for its invaluable contribution to the materialisntion of this Meeting, which will go down in the history of the struggle of the peoples for deliverance from imperialism.