Fernando Martínez highlighted a statement by Barnes: “It is the strength and resilience of toilers who are Black, not the oppression, that bowls you over.” He described Malcolm X’s attraction to the socialist revolution in Cuba, captured in Malcolm’s remark that “the Cuban Revolution—now that’s a real revolution. They overthrew the system.” Malcolm’s “greatest legacy,” he said, was throwing “his authority as a fighter behind the need for anticapitalist revolution.”

Dreke pointed to the significance of Malcolm X’s political evolution and his understanding that “the problems could not be solved by uniting only blacks” but all the oppressed. Malcolm visited Africa and met with revolutionaries there, listened to their opinions, and his views changed. “Malcolm advanced toward the idea that what is needed is to change the capitalist system of exploitation,” he said. “He became a leader of the working class in the United States.”

Forty-five copies of Malcolm X, Black Liberation, and the Road to Workers Power were sold to participants in the meeting. Altogether, more than 200 copies of the book—in Spanish, English, and French—were purchased during the course of the book fair.

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