Bernardo (Joe) Cerini was born on February 20, 1932, named Bernardo Cerini, and lived his entire life in New York City. He grew up during the hardest years of the Great Depression. His family had a very hard time. Joe remembered dreading that there would be nothing to eat at home. The brutality of capitalism was a lesson he learned from an early age.
Witnessing racism and
U.S. imperialism firsthand
In 1950, when he was 18, he was drafted. Draftees were sent by train to basic training in the South. As a NYC contingent it was a multiracial group and they made friends as they journeyed south. They were traveling into the Jim Crow south of the 1950s that was still segregated. Joe and his buddies fought many fights against racists, on the base and in the local town, whenever they hung out as a multi-racial group. Eventually they were reassigned to separate units and labelled as troublemakers. Joe wore that label proudly.
After their training, the soldiers were shipped to Korea to the Korean War involving many countries. Now, besides the overt racism of the Army, Joe learned of the horrors of imperialism. He said that some of the troops from other countries had been mustered by “recruiting” men from their prisons, putting them in uniforms and shipping them to Korea. These guys were brutal. They stole everything off the bodies of fallen soldiers and peasants around them, wore looted watches all the way up their arms, and didn’t give a damn about who they killed. Joe said he was more afraid of the troops behind him than the troops facing him!
But the greatest horror of the war was the abject savagery of U.S. imperialism. The U.S. Air Force would swoop in before an assault and drop white phosphorus on a village. It burns right through human flesh and the hides of animals destroying every living thing in its path. Then the troops were ordered to attack, running over the dead in their assault. Joe was sickened beyond belief even as he retold this 70 years later.
When he returned to the U.S., Bernardo changed his name to Joe, in honor of Joseph “Uncle Joe” Stalin who was the leader of the heroic Soviet Red Army that crushed the Nazi war machine in WWII and, and in honor of Joe Hill, an American union organizer who was framed for murder by the bosses and executed in 1904. He was evolving into a new person – a fierce fighter for the working class.
Becoming a lifelong PL’er
When he met the newly formed Progressive Labor Party in the 1960s Joe embraced it wholeheartedly! Here were the comrades, the like-minded workers with whom he would fight for the rest of his life! Here was an analysis of the world that made sense of all his experiences and offered a view to the only future for the working class – communist revolution!
Joe was in PLP for 60 years. He was a NYC transit worker for over 30 years. He and fellow white transit workers went to Harlem to actively recruit Black workers into transit jobs. He was a dedicated leader in the historic 1966 strike, when 33,000 transit workers completely shut down the city for 12 days. Joe also dedicated himself to the production and distribution of CHALLENGE. He was still distributing the paper at the age of 90! As he lay ill, his last words were, “Tell everyone, fight for communism, power to the working class.” We will, Joe, we will!
