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Literature sales were brisk at “A World in Revolt”,
with close to a thousand dollars spent on the purchase of mostly small
booklets, newspapers and magazines. Of the five newest titles
issued by Socialist Action, the best seller was “The Cuban Revolution and
a World in Revolt – Celia Hart Speaks, Selected articles and interviews
2005-2008". This was followed in popularity by “An Injury to
One is an Injury to All! – What’s at Stake in the Fight for Immigrant
Rights?” by James Frickey and Andrew Pollack, “Stop the Occupation of
Iraq! Bring the Troops Home Now!” by Jeff Mackler and Andrew
Pollack, “The End of the Blue Collar ‘Middle Class’ – Ramifications of
historic UAW surrender” by Bill Onasch, and “Revolutionary Socialist
Politics Today” by Jeff Mackler.
Purchasers of books and revolutionary posters besieged
Celia Hart and Esteban Volkov for their autographs, and many impromptu
photo ops.
Celia Hart captivated the crowd with her fiery prose
and poignant analysis. The following excerpt from “Celia Speaks” is
representative of her talks in Toronto:
“Ernesto Guevara made me a Trotskyist. When I
had access to Trotsky’s writings, very belatedly for my liking, I
realized that many of these things had already been told to me, from my
childhood onward, by Che. From the first pages, I had the
confirmation of what I had so many times felt in reading Che: that the
revolution has nothing to do with national idiosyncrasy; that there is no
room in socialism for the pronouns “our” and “your”; that revolutionary
theory, like the laws of physics, is a universal language. As
Armando Hart (Celia’s father) stated in another epoch: ‘Our struggle is
not only for Cuba, but for all the workers and the exploited of the
world. Our frontiers are moral. Our limits are those of
class.’
“What I appreciate most in Trotsky is his way of
speaking, the passion that his discourse always awakens in me. It
is the same thing that won me to Che Guevara. That is why I am
fighting in Trotsky’s army, as well as in Che’s, without betraying
anyone. Both of them express with the same truth the word, the gun,
and the heart.”
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