Cuban National Day in London

By New Worker correspondent

Teresita Vicente welcoming guests

New Communist Party leader Andy Brooks joined diplomats, businessmen and solidarity workers at a celebration to mark Cuba’s National Day in London last week. Cuba’s Ambassador in London, Teresita Vicente Sotolongo, highlighted Cuba’s long relationship with Britain, which began with the brief occupation of Havana and other parts of the island during the Seven Years War with Spain in the 18^th century.

Britain maintained diplomatic relations with the socialist island throughout the Cold War and British–Cuban trade has thrived in recent years, boosted by the efforts of the Cuban tourist industry to attract more visitors from Britain and the rest of the European Union (EU).

Last November Cuban president Miguel Diaz-Canel stopped over in London following talks in China, Democratic Korea, Laos and Vietnam. There, he held talks with the Chancellor, Philip Hammond, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and members of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign. and paid tribute to Karl Marx at a ceremony at the Marxist thinker’s tomb in Highgate.

Never Again!

 by New Worker
 correspondent

Andy Brooks paying tribute to the dead

New Communist Party (NCP) leader Andy Brooks joined comrades, war veterans, diplomats and anti-fascists last week at the annual Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) commemoration, organised by the Soviet War Memorial Trust and Southwark Council.

The Nazis killed six million Jews during the Second World War. There were hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens amongst them. About three million Soviet prisoners of war perished in extermination camps.

On 27th January, 1945, the Red Army liberated Auschwitz, the largest death camp in the Third Reich. The day is now commemorated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day to remember those who suffered Nazi persecution. Every year, on that day, the millions of victims of the Nazi Holocaust are remembered in the gardens outside the Imperial War Museum in south London.

The Act of Remembrance began with a procession led by veterans’ associations to the Holocaust Memorial Tree and the Soviet War Memorial, followed by the laying of wreaths and floral tributes by the company that included four London mayors and a judge, military veteran organisations, representatives of the embassies of the Russian Federation, Belarus and Georgia, as well as local Labour and Liberal Democrat councillors, the NCP and the Communist Party of Britain. It closed, as always, with a minute’s silence and the Last Post.