Saluting the remarkable life of Bill Camp

September 24, 2024

The following statement was released by the National Network on Cuba

On behalf of our five co-chairs and member organizations we send deep condolences to Bill’s family, the labor movement and his very extensive family of fighters for just causes. Bill died Monday, Sept. 23, around 1 pm Pacific time. His solidarity, example and accomplishments will live on, and his warm and unassuming yet powerful presence will be tremendously missed especially in the Cuba family he was so instrumental in growing.

Bill may be most widely known as the spokesperson of the NNOC member organization, Building Relations with Cuban Labor, alongside his single-minded work to get Cuba off the state sponsors of terrorism list using the power of unions. But there is much more

Two California Federation of Labor resolutions, one in 2016 and another this year expressly to get Cuba off the SSOT, resulted from Bill’s strategy and efforts of his BRCL team. Almost all of the Cuba resolutions in 2023 and 2024 were resolutions, not only from local unions, but California labor councils calling to remove Cuba from the SSOT, something the Biden administration can do easily with a memo to Congress.

Just last October, Bill co-led the labor workshop at the 2023 NNOC Annual Meeting then followed up as a central organizer among solidarity activists focusing on Cuba outreach to organized workers.

Bill’s commitment to normalizing U.S. relations with Cuba and ending the genocidal blockade could be seen in the large and continuous labor delegations to Cuba in conjunction with the Cuban Central Labor Union (CTC) for May Day and more. Annually posters and a banner celebrating the friendship of California labor in solidarity with Cuban workers were welcomed at May Day celebrations in Havana.

But, the NNOC first met Bill in 2006 at one of the early Cuba-North America Labor conferences in Tijuana, Mexico where he presented a fascinating slide supporting a labor solidarity project with Garifuna people in Honduras. The project’s solar cookers could relieve Black Garifuna women of the backbreaking labor of collecting firewood.

Then in 2015, the AFL-CIO co-sponsored and advertised the movie Revolutionary Medicine: A Story of the First Garifuna Hospital at its Washington DC headquarters. How was this happening that a film friendly to Cuba was presented by the AFL-CIO? No surprise, Bill Camp was in that room. His labor solidarity trips to Honduras helped build that first Garifuna hospital deeply tied to Cuba’s medical internationalism through Cuba’s Latin American School of Medicine’s graduate, Cuban trained Honduran Dr. Luther Castillo Harry.

When Victor Manuel Lemagne Sanchez the head of the Cuban hotel workers union came to the U.S. in 2017, Bill agreed to organize the west coast leg – but we later found it was Bill’s lifetime of connections that elevated this Cuban labor leader and the delegation beyond the usual ground floor AFL-CIO Solidarity office to a meeting with the then Executive Director, an African immigrant labor organizer … from California. It was a Miami union organizer in Bill’s circle who welcomed Victor’s flight from Cuba at the start of the tour.

Bill did the hard work, through encouraging phone calls and conversations in person. You always had the feeling that not only did he believe in the urgency to end the blockade but that it was doable if we continued to fight. A good example of this was a campaign he launched in 2016 with his colleagues to get a resolution passed in the California Senate that called for an end to the blockade. The effort succeeded when it easily passed on March 6 of that year in the presence of Miguel Fraga, a diplomat with the Cuban Embassy.

Bill’s accomplishments in the struggle are extraordinary and we never saw him take personal credit for any of it; he stayed focused on the goal and he realized it took collective effort like no other. Often we didn’t know Bill’s hand in it until much later.

Bill Camp’s commitment to the working class and oppressed people was lifelong. In a biography that has all the hallmarks of Bill’s understated humor he says he was born in South Carolina then in 1962 started college in Jackson, Mississippi. He relocated to the West Coast when for “early activities supporting racial integration, he was selected for assassination by the Mississippi State White Citizens Council, the true power in the State, who ran the State death squads.”

Bill returned South for grad school. “In 1968, he played a lead role in organizing student support for a strike by black workers at Duke. The maids and janitors were receiving less than minimum wage. The strike was successful, and he was expelled from Duke.”

“He worked for the state agency that guaranteed the organizing rights of farm workers called the Agricultural Labor Relations Board for 10 years. He ran elections to recognize bargaining rights of farm workers and investigated illegal actions by growers. He played a key role in bringing to conclusion the first collective bargaining contracts for lettuce workers in the Imperial Valley.”

Bill never shied from the consequences of organizing for just causes, against racism, for workers – leaving Mississippi “before sundown,” kicked out of the PhD grad school program, or losing a state appointment for exposing corruption.

We will continue his good work. He’s left us a map, and a lot of successful organizing templates to get really meaningful change done.

What Bill would want is for us to use the example of his life not only to work hard to end the criminal blockade but to always be reaching out to include new people in the struggle and always be thinking about what else we can do.

The Cuban Embassy in Washington has recognized Bill’s friendship in a tweet from Ambassador Lianys Torres Rivera. She wrote: “Deepest condolences to Bill Camp’s family, whom the Cuban people will never forget for his unconditional solidarity and ongoing struggle for justice, peace and better relations between our country and the US. RIP Dear friend🖤”

Fernando Gonzalez Llort, President of the Cuban Institute for Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP) extended sadness and condolences saying, “His enthusiasm and commitment shaped his unwavering support to every action to denounce the U.S. blockade on Cuba.” The photo below of Cuban President Miguel Diaz Canel greeting Bill Camp was attached.