WE CAME to Cuba in the middle of the most intense period of the continuous illegal blockade by the US since 1960.

Cubans are suffering loss of power for over 23 hours a day, loss of mains water supply for days on end and severe disruption to public and private transport because of the lack of fuel.

As a senior member of the Cuban Communist Party said to us, “How can you run a country without electricity?”

And yet Cubans are fighting back with enormous determination, resilience, social solidarity and resourcefulness.

We brought £2,000 worth of non-prescription analgesics, anti-inflammatories, insect repellent and other essential supplies which have been blocked from entering Cuba by the United States sanctions.

Donald Trump’s executive orders impose a strict economic embargo targeting Cuba’s energy and finance sectors. These include oil and energy sanctions, penalising foreign countries through tariffs if they sell oil to Cuba and sanctioning Cuba’s state-owned oil company, Union Cuba-Petrolio.

Financial and travel restrictions as well as secondary sanctions on foreign banks that do business with Cuba have effectively cut the country off from the global banking system.

Trump has also issued targeted sector sanctions authorising asset freezes for individuals or companies operating in Cuba’s energy, defence, mining, financial services and security sectors.

This has had a devastating impact on Cuba’s world-leading health service as imports of essential medical supplies have all but ceased, causing infant mortality to double; a waiting list of 98,000 awaiting treatment, including 12,000 children; pregnant women unable to get ultrasound scans, and an inability to treat cancer patients because of the lack of chemotherapy and radiotherapy supplies.

The distress this is causing the Cuban people was expressed by President Miguel Diaz-Canel at the 24th International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties in Havana on August 7-8 who described this blockade as a collective punishment of the Cuban people amounting to genocide — illegal under international law.

The travel restrictions and the difficulty of getting direct flights to Cuba has also severely damaged its critical tourist industry.

And yet, despite the difficulties, the Cubans hosted a huge celebration of Fidel Castro’s centenary, attended by over 1,500 delegates from around the world. The First International Colloquium “Fidel: Legacy and Future” was a crowning moment for Cuba’s fight against the isolation the US blockade is trying to impose.

The message was clear — Cuba is not alone, Cuba’s revolution is a living inspiration for millions of workers, peasants, artists and intellectuals struggling to defeat US imperialism and build a socialist future.

Simultaneously the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP), founded in December 1960 by Fidel Castro to promote international solidarity held a huge conference in Havana University which included the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (Alba) founded by Fidel and Hugo Chavez in 2004 as well as numerous work brigades including young communists from Britain.

Despite the difficulties the Cubans were exemplary hosts, accommodated us in top-class hotels, ensured we were well nfed, transported and looked after and proved that they can and want to provide a fantastic experience for people visiting the Island.

There was palpable love and pride for Fidel and the revolution among the Cuban people who remain committed to their sovereign and independent path of building a socialist society under the most difficult conditions imaginable.

As well as bringing medicines funded by the Communist Party’s appeal for aid for Cuba our purpose in visiting Havana was to take part in the International Meeting with 48 Communist and Workers Parties from around the world.

The fact that this took place in Havana in 2026 was a profound statement of solidarity with Cuba’s socialist revolution. The meeting was dedicated to defending and honouring the legacy of the Cuban revolution on the centenary of Fidel’s birth, deepening solidarity with socialist Cuba, strengthening joint actions and uniting communist forces for peace and against imperialist aggression.

If there were any doubt about why worldwide solidarity with Cuba is not only essential but entirely justified this quote from Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, minister in the presidency for women, youth and persons with disabilities in South Africa sums it up: “Cuba did not send us declarations of support, they sent us doctors.”

As we pointed out in our statement to the international meeting, Cuba has had decades of anti-imperialist initiatives, which have served working peoples of so many countries in health, education, culture, public administration and in southern Africa, helped bring military victory over imperialism and apartheid.

For a nation of 9.5 million people, Cuba has given more to the world than any other country, with the possible exception of the Soviet Union which defeated fascism in the 20th century.

The clear message from Cubans to us is that none of this, neither the revolutionary process nor the eradication of illiteracy, their world-leading health system and culture of solidarity would have been possible without the Communist Party of Cuba which has succeeded against the greatest odds imaginable in creating a proud nation defying the most powerful, imperialist force on Earth located just 90 miles to the north of Havana.

Our visit has reaffirmed Fidel’s legacy as our inspiration. Those of us in Britain who want socialism in our lifetime must study and learn from Cuba’s example and Fidel’s legacy.

^{Article originally published in the Morning Star, a socialist daily newspaper owned by its readers; you can support it here: https://morningstaronline.co.uk/support}

KEIR STARMER’S tearful resignation on the steps of Downing Street on the tenth anniversary of the referendum which took Britain out of the European Union underlines the popular vote for Brexit as the most consequential moment in British politics since the 1984-5 miners’ strike.

Unlike Thatcher’s state onslaught against the miners, meticulously planned in the Ridley Report (June 1977)[1]and the Stepping Stones Programme (November 1977)[2], which consolidated class rule in Britain, the vote to leave the EU on 23 June 2016 confounded, disconcerted and weakened class rule. In this sense, Brexit was a revolutionary act.

The EU referendum on June 23, 2016, was a catastrophic defeat for the principal strategy of British state monopoly capitalism, from which a decade later it has still not recovered and from which it shows little sign of being able to do so.
Class power in Britain’s unwritten constitution is wielded by an incredibly small network of leading bankers, corporate executives, senior mandarins, intelligence and military-industrial chiefs.

Britain’s two governing political parties have taken turns to act as temporary tribunes for the interests of British capital and US imperialism for 70 years. This pact proved both stable and durable during the cold war between the rival superpower blocs — the US and Nato, and socialist countries led by the Soviet Union.
Britain’s ruling class did not adopt its subservient position to US imperialism willingly. In 1956, Britain, France and Israel launched a joint military attack against Egypt, aimed at punishing President Gamal Abdel Nasser for his temerity in nationalising the Suez Canal.

US President Dwight D Eisenhower intervened to halt the Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt using political pressure and financial coercion to force a humiliating retreat by Europe’s declining imperial powers. British foreign secretary Anthony Eden suffered a complete physical and nervous breakdown in the aftermath.
Ever since that chastening experience, Britain’s political Establishment has been dedicated to shoring up its so-called “special relationship” with the United States, a relationship frequently likened to that between a dog and a lamppost.

As a new cold war global hegemon, the US wanted to block Britain and France from flexing their declining imperial might to control the world’s most strategic waterway.
The Suez debacle was the moment when Britain’s ruling class was forced abruptly to come to terms with its subaltern role in the new cold war world order.
France continued to fight and lose bloody and disastrous colonial wars in Vietnam and Algeria. Britain’s rulers opted to become the US poodle.

A core element of the US geopolitical strategy was to use Britain’s ruling class as an agent inside the European Economic Community (later the European Union), founded with the 1957 Treaty of Rome, the year after the Suez crisis.

Britain’s integration into the EEC had been a strategic aim of US cold war policy since February 1949 when the CIA formed the American Committee on United Europe[3].

ACUE was a front organisation to channel funds to the European Movement and European federalist campaigns promoting a Europe loyal to US interests. Britain’s adherence confirmed US leadership and Britain’s subordinate role to US imperialism.
In February 1957, Rajani Palme Dutt identified the moment a wing of the Tory Party pivoted towards the European Common Market, writing: “‘Europe Limited’ – “The new vision of the Macmillan-Thorneycroft-Eccles team is to turn to the project of the so-called ‘European Common Market’.” [4]

In December 1962, US secretary of state Dean Acheson told the US Military Academy at West Point: “Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role. The attempt to play a separate power role — that is, a role apart from Europe, a role based on a ‘special relationship’ with the United States, a role based on being head of a ‘Commonwealth’ which has no political structure, or unity, or strength … this role is about played out.”
For US imperialism, Britain’s application to join the European Common Market was in Acheson’s words, a “decisive turning point.” If Britain joined, “another step forward of vast importance will have been taken.”

US pressure first led the British government to apply to join the EEC in 1961. Successive applications were vetoed by French president Charles de Gaulle.Britain eventually joined the EEC on January 1, 1973, with a mission to promote US banking, commercial and strategic interests. The outcome was the Single European Act signed in February 1986.

In October 1986, Thatcher’s “Big Bang” liberalised London’s financial markets as a prelude to her European policy for a full European single market without borders or regulatory obstacles for free movement of goods, services, capital and labour.
A young Thatcherite, John Bercow, recalled: “Margaret Thatcher was herself a driving force behind the Act and some of her ministers positively fizzed with enthusiasm about the single market which it spawned. She and they believed that the Act achieved the Thatcherisation of Europe through the furtherance of free trade.”[5]

The influx of US finance capital into the City of London drove EU political developments through EU treaties of Maastricht (1992), Amsterdam (1997), Nice (2001) and Lisbon (2007), which mandated aggressive neoliberal policies opening energy, water, post, rail, docks, shipping and air transport to private capital.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, the contradictions in EU enlargement to include central, eastern and south-eastern Europe and the Baltic meant the agreement between Anglo-US capital and Franco-German capital began to break down.
The latter required a more centralised, federal political structure to consolidate industrial capital, while the former demanded a less regulated, finance-led structure subordinate to Nato’s expansion into former Soviet space.

These contradictions have only deepened since Britain voted to leave the EU in 2016. Those EU-nostalgics today who dream of Britain rejoining the EU have consistently failed to explain how British firms, which are now massively subject to US ownership through mergers and acquisitions, would reconcile those interests with EU regulations.

More pertinently, the mantra of “dynamic alignment” with EU rules prevents any British government nationalising rail, mail, utilities and essential public services, let alone practising “Manchesterism,” as espoused by Andy Burnham.

The democratic vote to leave the EU in 2016 has disoriented Britain’s ruling class who can no longer rule in the old way. The question is whether the working class and those crushed by the interests of the financial oligarchs in the City of London will seize this moment to challenge the failed politics of fifty years of neoliberalism and live in a new way.

Alex Gordon is general secretary of the Communist Party of Britain.

[1] Final Report of the Nationalised Industry Policy Group chaired by the Hon. Nicholas Ridley, Nationalised Industries Policy Group Report (PG/10/77/38), The Conservative Research Department 24 Old Queen Street London SW1 Anne Bulloch, 30th June 1977 https://archive.margaretthatcher.org/doc02/FABEA1F4BFA64CB398DFA20D8B8B6C98.pdf[2] John Hoskyns and Norman Straus, THE STEPPING STONES PROGRAMME, 19 January 1978 https://archive.margaretthatcher.org/doc02/CFB5C6C3B9A546AC834FC3376B498565.pdf[3] Aldrich, Richard J.(1997) 'OSS, CIA and European unity: The American committee on United Europe, 1948- 60', in Diplomacy & Statecraft, 8:1,184 — 227 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09592299708406035[4] R. Palme Dutt, ‘True Blue Democracy’, in The Labour Monthly, February 1957, p55[5] John Bercow, Aiming for the Heart of Europe: A Misguided Venture, Paper No. 33 https://www.brugesgroup.com/media-centre/papers/8-papers/797-aiming-for-the-heart-of-europe-a-misguided-venture (accessed 25 Aug, 2020)Subscribe here: https://morningstaronline.co.uk/subscribe

AS COLUMNS of tanks and tens of thousands of soldiers approached Tiananmen, many troops were set on by angry mobs... dozens of soldiers were pulled from trucks, severely beaten and left for dead.

At an intersection west of the square, the body of a young soldier, who had been beaten to death, was stripped naked and hung from the side of a bus. Another soldier’s corpse was strung at an intersection east of the square.” [1]
“Radicalised protesters, some now armed with guns, and vehicles commandeered in clashes with the military.” [2]

“Other scenes show soldiers’ corpses and demonstrators stripping automatic rifles off unresisting soldiers.” [2]

These accounts are taken, not from the official version of the Chinese government, but from the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal in the immediate aftermath of the events of 4 June 1989.

As the US, its allies, and cheerleaders in the media step up their campaign of anti-communist and Sinophobic rhetoric in the ongoing Cold War against China, we can expect to hear an altogether different, if more familiar, narrative this week, about the “massacre” of thousands of innocent students in a “brutal authoritarian crackdown” this week.

The “events” in fact began two months earlier in April, when students gathered, somewhat ironically, to mourn and commemorate the passing of a senior Communist Party leader, Hu Yaobang, later joined by workers, again ironically, concerned by the inflationary effects of market-liberalising economic reforms.

Beijing’s iconic central square, and much of the city, was all but paralysed for weeks. Following lengthy but failed attempts at a negotiated settlement between the government and student leaders (presenting disparate and undefined demands) and no end in sight to the paralysis of the capital, the authorities eventually ordered the peaceful dispersal of the crowds from the square, which was largely achieved by June 3.

Individual accounts of army snipers and soldiers gunning down fleeing students have been discredited both by a far greater number of eyewitnesses contradicting it, including US journalists (such as the Washington Post’s Jay Matthews), and television footage of an orderly dispersal [3]. Spanish television network TVE had a camera crew on the square covering events, and reported no evidence of a massacre [4].

No doubt the image of the infamous “tank man” has sprung to your mind; it is well worth watching the footage to the end: the outcome might surprise you!
When soldiers, unarmed, originally entered the square to begin the dispersal, they were set upon by groups of coordinated and armed protesters that remained, as was openly reported on at the time. Many dozens of soldiers are known to have been killed, as grisly images of lynched and burned soldiers from the events attest.

Much of the subsequent violence occurred following the dispersal, between June 4-5, and took place elsewhere across the city, rather than on the square itself. The violence can accurately be described as clashes between armed protesters and soldiers, not a massacre of unarmed civilians on the Square.

Of course, it wasn’t long before the US propaganda machine churned out an altogether different story, with media pundits, who hadn’t even been there, regaling unverified accounts of “thousands” of deaths.

“Two thousand six hundred” was the go-to figure for some time, before evolving into “several” thousand, then “8,000.” Most present-day accounts are happy to settle on “tens of thousands.” The figures are conspicuous in their ambiguity alone.

Numerous editorial corrections were made in the initial weeks following the events, as the fog cleared; diplomatic cables confirmed the chronology of events, and on-the-ground reports (see above) presented an altogether different picture [5]. But the massacre narrative had been decidedly set.

It should come as no surprise that this co-ordinated propaganda campaign took place concurrently with the fall of socialism across central and eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The US, then as now, remains committed to undermining and destroying Chinese socialism, and has relied heavily upon thinly veiled, CIA-sponsored bodies like Radio Free Asia, National Endowment for Democracy, and the fanatical anti-communist and fantasist Adrian Zenz, with the sole objective of bringing about the fall and disintegration of China, much as happened to the former USSR and Yugoslavia.

Thirty-seven years on, it is time to ask: would the authorities in our “open democratic” society demonstrate such restraint in the face of a two-month-long protest, the paralysis of central London or Washington, or the subsequent death of several security personnel attempting to reassert control over the capital?
When exposed to the annual flurry of false narratives of the events of June 4 1989, do those telling it have any vested interest in concocting an unsubstantiated account, so utterly divorced from the actual reality?

References

[1] The Wall Street Journal, “Troops Open Fire in Beijing,” June 4, 1989.
[2] The Washington Post, “Chaos in the Streets of Beijing,” June 5, 1989.
[3] Matthews, J. (1998). “The Myth of Tiananmen,” The Columbia Journalism Review.
[4] TVE (Televisión Española), En Portada: Crónica de Tiananmen, broadcast June 1989.
[5] US Embassy Beijing, Diplomatic Cable: June 4 Events in Beijing, 1989 (Released via FOIA).