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a _— rf RE: COUNTERORIENTATION WEEK (The following speech was made by CARL DAVIDSON on September 22, 1969, On the subject "Vietnam Will Win.” CARL DAVIDSON is a former national officer of the SDS, currently with the "Guardian.") F Can you hear me speaking like this, sitting down? & Okay, good. First off, I'll tell you a little bit about the : nature of the meeting. And hopefully I won't speak too long sO we can spend a lot of time with questions. Early in July thirty young Americans, mostly SDS, received an invitation fron the Provisional Revolutionary Government ofSouth Vietnam and the North Vietnamese to attend a meeting in Havana, Cuba. This wasn't the first time that representatives of (unintelligible) organizations have met with the Vietnamese people, but the nature of this meeting was a little bit different, First was the makeup of the American delegation. Unlike previous delegations that have met with the Vietnamese, this delegation was pretty much politically homogeneous in the sence that it represented the, more or less, the hard core of the New Left, rather than having a broad representation of everything from liberal to radical groups. The other thing, and this composition of the American delegation was at the request of the Vietnamese. EE Me VR IIT TERRE AE RE at ay Theother thing that was different was that it was the longest and most intensive meeting that the Vietnamese have had with Americans. It lasted a total of eight days. It was held in a‘very secluded spot outside Havana, wnere we didn't come into much contact with Cubans but mainly just sat morning, noon, and night in discussions, workshops, panels, speeches, both from the Vietnamese and from the American delegation. The main thing I want to talk about is the message that the Vietnamese presented to us. And how they outlined the current situation in Vietnamese liberation struggle. They started by giving you a history of the military and political struggle in Vietnam, how it‘s developed up to the present point, where the U. &., as they put it, has been defeated politically and militarily in Vietnam. lil Se peeks OE Ra ae Ae