THE Morning Star’s motto is “For Peace & Socialism” and we are proud to celebrate Cuban internationalism, and proud too of our long association with the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, which has done so much to secure what I believe is now a wide understanding across the British left and trade union movement of the enormous contribution Cuba has made to the causes of peace and socialism internationally. Fighting to win the British labour movement, and through it the Labour Party, to an internationalist position is not easy, living in the oldest imperialist country in the world and given the political consensus at Westminster in favour of the closest possible alliance with the United States. In this renewed era of militarism and war worldwide, we have seen support for imperialism gain ground even within the labour movement.
So there is something remarkable about the tremendous admiration for Cuba we see echoed across our movement even in unlikely quarters. That’s important because we need to build active solidarity with a state suffering the longest and cruellest economic blockade in history, and other speakers will no doubt detail the practical assistance for blockaded Cuba that this enables us to deliver. But it’s also important because the Cuban example is a daily inspiration to us on the British left and can help counter the defeatism we often encounter, and widen the horizons of what is and isn’t possible in the way of change — horizons which nowadays seem especially narrow at Labour Party conference.
In the words of a beautiful article by Pawel Wargan published in the Morning Star last Friday, Cuba “exists in the future, because it has built a project that for most of us remains in the realm of imagination.” A few years ago we had a different type of Labour leader and for a while high hopes that a Labour government would lead to Britain being a different type of country. Not a country that helps police an unjust world order run in the interests of a handful of rich countries led by the United States.
Not a country that took a stand for Big Pharma against the health of the world’s population during the Covid crisis, blocking international efforts to drop intellectual property rights over vaccines so poorer countries could protect their populations. Not a country that joins the US in imposing illegal sanctions — for that is what sanctions not authorised by the UN security council are — on dozens of other countries worldwide. And not a country that, worst of all, joins the United States in illegal war after illegal war, leaving a trail of human wreckage and failed states wherever our armies go.
Our hope was that Britain could become a country that works for peace, not war, internationally; that we might start challenging rather than enforcing unequal trade treaties that keep a majority of the world’s population in poverty; a country that exported life rather than death. In short, our hope was that Britain might be a bit more like Cuba. Cuban internationalism is proof that another world is possible.
Cuba sends doctors, not soldiers, to troubled parts of the world: whether tackling highly infectious outbreaks of disease like the Ebola epidemic, or carrying out more routine but still life-changing operations like those of Operation Miracle in Venezuela, where cataract removal restored the sight of four million people. I talked of expanding horizons earlier and what could be a better example than Cuba’s Yo Si Puedo literacy campaign, teaching millions of people to read and write across Latin America and the Caribbean. Cuba is punished by a vengeful US for its peace work: facilitating the peace talks which have done so much to end the longest-running civil war in the Americas, that in Colombia, then finding itself slapped on the US list of state sponsors of terrorism for having hosted the warring parties to allow the dialogue.
Cuba exemplifies that motto: always with the oppressed, never with the oppressors. That doesn’t mean Cuba’s assistance is reserved for political allies. During Covid it sent doctors to Italy, a country far richer than itself and aligned with the US.
And we in Britain won’t forget that when our citizens were stuck aboard a Covid-infected cruise ship, and no other country would allow it to dock, it was Cuba that stepped up and provided a haven from which they could disembark and be flown home. But Cuba has always been ready to fight for a better future — including literally, playing a vital role in defeating the apartheid system in South Africa by militarily engaging and defeating the South African army. Nelson Mandela acknowledged that the Cuban victory at Cuito Cuanavale destroyed the myth of South African invincibility, helped liberate Namibia and gave massive forward propulsion to the overthrow of apartheid in South Africa itself.
So it gives us hope today to see Cuba at the forefront of solidarity with Palestine, as another proud people battle dispossession and enslavement. In a darkening world Cuba is that beacon of hope, the proof that it is possible to do things differently. For that we can never be thankful enough.
Viva Cuba!.
