The Cuban Revolution

How much it means to me.

I have been thinking about Fidel Castro a great deal these past few weeks. The Cuban Revolution is being squeezed by the United States government with more force than ever before. The Trump administration is preventing the entry of fuel into the island, which has made it very difficult to run basic services (including life saving equipment in hospitals). Basically, the Trump regime has decided to violate all the norms of human behaviour to try and demolish the living conditions of eleven million people. The intensified blockade is itself a genocidal act. Someone needs to take the US to the International Court of Justice. Or, since we know that this is not going to happen, we should just start to call the Trump policy an attempted genocide, because that is precisely what they are doing. Fidel would have written his Granma column on it. He woudl have called it, Trump’s Attempted Genocide and Our Resistance.

The second part of the title is the key phrase - Our Resistance. The Cuban Revolution has, since 1959, been an act of resistance against imperialism and has defied the US with its entire might. This defiance has been inspirational, contagious across the Third World. That is why so many national liberation leaders came to Havana in 1966 for the first Tricontinental conference, and that is why the residue of that conference lingers fifty years later. Manolo has edited a book of speeches and documents from the conference which is now available from 1804 Books (and soon from LeftWord Books and Inkani Books). This coming Wednesday, Manolo and I will release the book at The Peoples Forum in New York:

I’m going to be thinking of Fidel during the entire presentation. He would have been so happy to see this book out in the world. When I first had a long conversation with him in 2001, he emphasised the importance of the Battle of Ideas, and that is precisely what we are engaged in. The US says Cuba’s Revolution is this or that, all garbage propaganda. We say that the Cuban Revolution is about sovereignty and dignity, fortitude.

Chris Hazzard of Sinn Fein sent me a picture of Fidel’s grandson, Fidel Antonio Castro Smirnov, with a copy of the book that Manolo and I had made of Fidel’s speeches given at times of great adversity (Comrade of the Revolution).

Fidel would be proud of the speech that Cuban president Miguel Diaz Canel gave on the crisis. It is precisely the kind of speech for a leader to give when times are tough, You can watch it here.

See you in New York.