Fidel at 100: A Centenary of Legacy and Solidarity

Corbyn calls for solidarity

by New Worker correspondent

NCP leader Andy Brooks joined over 200 diplomats, union leaders, parliamentarians, academics, and long-standing friends of Cuba to reflect on Fidel Castro’s  legacy and enduring international solidarity on the anniversary of his birth on 13th August 1926. Mander Hall, at the headquarters of the NEU, the largest education union in Europe, was packed on that Thursday morning last week. By the time the lights dimmed, there wasn't a spare seat left.
The morning opened with a short tribute film tracing Fidel's life, his legacy, the achievements of the Cuban Revolution he led, and the international solidarity he built across the world. Woven through it were brief contributions from doctors, trade unionists, academics, filmmakers, campaigners and politicians, each speaking to what that legacy means in their own corner of society. Some of them had actually known Fidel in person. Friends speaking about a legacy. Friends remembering a man.
Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Independent Alliance group in the House of Commons, took the platform next and spoke with real feeling about what Fidel built for every corner of Cuban society and for the cause of international solidarity, then went further, calling on Britain to deepen its solidarity with Cuba at every level, including government to government. Coming from someone who, this March, rode in the Nuestra América aid convoy into Havana and stood inside a cancer hospital struggling to keep its machines running through a blackout, with Richard Burgon MP alongside him, those words carried weight.
The Cuban ambassador, Ismara Vargas Walter, closed the event and the room went still. She took us back to the beginning: a twenty-six-year-old leading the assault on the Moncada barracks, captured, standing alone at his own trial to say the words that outlived every judge in that courtroom: "Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me." Prison. Exile in Mexico. Eighty-two men on a leaking yacht called Granma, scattered on a beach under fire, barely a dozen reaching the Sierra Maestra alive. From that dozen, in under two years, a country and a Revolution.
She reminded us what he did with that victory: over one hundred thousand volunteer teachers, many of them teenagers, walking into the mountains until Cuba could declare itself free of illiteracy. Cuban doctors in Chile and Algeria by 1961 and 1963. Cuban internationalists at Cuito Cuanavale, standing with a nation fighting apartheid — the same struggle Nelson Mandela himself later called a turning point in the liberation of his continent.
And then she brought us to the present: a naval armada in the Caribbean, oil tankers tracked and seized on the high seas, a total fuel blockade, "a profound breach of the equality of states and sovereignty," in her words, not a bilateral dispute. Families cooking over firewood. Blackouts lasting entire days. Eleven thousand children among more than one hundred thousand people waiting for surgeries that cannot be safely scheduled. Survival for a Cuban child with cancer and infant mortality, fallen. "When a hospital in Havana loses power tonight," she said, "it is not the weather. It is policy, arriving exactly as designed."
And still, 300 Palestinian students are training as doctors in Cuba right now, free of charge, because Fidel taught his country that internationalism is a debt paid, not a favour granted. And to be internationalist is to pay our own debt to humanity. 
She thanked the National Education Union for opening Hamilton House's doors to us once again, the 117 MPs who backed this year's Early Day Motion against these illegal unprecedented sanctions, and six decades of the Cuba Solidarity Campaign's unwavering friendship. Fidel is a hundred years old today, she told the room. Cuba is still standing!

End the blockade now!

by New Worker correspondent
 ·
Good turnout at last weekend’s rally outside the Cuban Embassy in London calling for an end to the US blockade which Cuba has been subject to since gaining its freedom. Also an end to Western aggression and attacks against Venezuela, where it is nearly two months since President Maduro and his wife were kidnapped in a terrorist attack. All these actions were and are illegal – where is the outrage from the so-called international community?
There’s been nothing, except from the Axis of Resistance countries. But when you consider that most Western politicians have no problem with the ongoing genocide and crimes in Palestine, a couple of regime change operations won’t make them lose a moment’s sleep. 
Nor will Ukraine where, sadly, Britain plays a more prominent role as a driver for more war and losses and a force against a peace settlement. The Russian intervention was reluctantly undertaken in February 2022 because of the immediate threats against the people of the Donbas and the longer term threat of Ukraine becoming the forward line of NATO and the whole country turned into an imperialist military base.
The conflict could have ended in April 2022 but for Johnson’s visit to Ukraine to personally persuade Zelensky to continue an unwinnable conflict, in line with NATO’s goal of weakening Russia at the cost of Ukrainian lives. The longer this goes on, more Ukrainian lives and the conditions for the final settlement will be worse for Ukraine. Sadly all these people are dying for nothing except Western shareholders, corrupt Ukrainian politicians desperate to keep the money flowing, and the geo-strategic aims of NATO and American imperialism.

Red Salute to Karl Marx in Highgate

Ismara Vargas Walter and Dr Dhawali at the tomb

By Theo Russell

London communists joined other comrades and friends, including the ambassadors of People’s China, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos and Sri Lanka, to mark the death of Karl Marx at his graveside last Sunday. Marx died in London on 14th March 1883 and was buried in Highgate Cemetery three days later. 
And by his tomb speeches in Marx’s honour were delivered by the Cuban ambassador Ismara Vargas Walter and Dr Ashok Dhawali, an Indian peasant leader and a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party of India (M). 
Ismara Vargas Walter said the event was “not only to honour Karl Marx’s memory but to reaffirm our commitment to the ideas that ignited the Cuban Revolution and continue to guide our struggle for justice, sovereignty and socialism”.
In Cuba “our youth learn Marxism not as dogma but as a tool for critical thinking” and that the answers to the problems of globalised technology, climate change and a US-dominated world order “lie in Marx’s emphasis on collective action and socialist planning.
“The digital age has brought new forms of exploitation, platform capitalism, algorithmic oppression, and the commodification of human attention, but it has also created new avenues for resistance, for mobilising, for spreading revolutionary consciousness. Our task is to harness these tools for the people, not for profit“. Cuba stands with Palestine, Venezuela and Nicaragua against genocide and US “criminal unilateral coercive measures”, and “all nations resisting imperialism”.
Dr Ashok Dhawali, the president of the All-India Farmers Union, said that Marx’s thinking is still relevant today in a world which  “since 2020, the richest one per cent have grabbed
nearly 67 per cent of all new wealth... billionaire fortunes rise by $2.7 billion a
day...and 46 per cent of the world’s population live under the global poverty line.”
The Indian communist said the entire imperialist camp backed the “Zionist genocide by Israel against the courageous people of Gaza”  while “the socialist countries like Cuba, China, Vietnam, Laos, DPRK, and the left-led countries of Latin America and Sri Lanka… are boldly opposing imperialism and Zionism”.
Dr Dhawali also recalled the historic year-long struggle by millions of farmers which led to the repeal of three anti-farmer laws in 2020-21, and said that a massive general strike was planned in April against four proposed new pro-corporate labour codes in India.
The gathering ended with the laying of flowers by the ambassadors and representatives of political parties, including a delegation from the New Communist Party, and the singing of The Internationale.

Farewell to Teresita

 

 by New Worker correspondent

Teresita Vicente welcomes guests

New Communist Party leader Andy Brooks joined diplomats, politicians, businessmen and solidarity workers at a reception to say goodbye to Teresita Vicente Sotolongo the Cuban ambassador, who returned to Havana at the end her five-year tour of duty in London last month.

Honoured guests, which included Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and former London Mayor Ken Livingstone, heard Teresita highlight Cuba’s long relationship with Britain and her fond memories of Britain, at the lunch-time commemoration in a London hotel that also marked Cuba’s National Day.

Britain maintained diplomatic relations with Cuba 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 to the socialist island in the Caribbean.