Invent the Future

Why the Chinese working class won’t pay for Western neoliberalism

The following article by Carlos Martinez responds to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s call at the recent EU summit for a new “Plaza Accord” to force up the value of the Chinese renminbi.

Carlos recalls how the original 1985 Plaza Accord was not a neutral rebalancing of trade but the deliberate kneecapping of an economic competitor – Washington strong-arming Japan, West Germany, France and Britain into driving down the dollar, plunging Japan into a “lost decade” of stagnation while failing to dent a US trade deficit that originated in Washington’s own model of high consumption and low savings, not in the exchange rate.

Carlos argues that China today cannot be treated as Japan was. Where Japan was a subordinate Cold War ally hosting tens of thousands of US troops; China is a sovereign socialist state with an increasingly prosperous domestic market of 1.4 billion people, an independent financial policy and a central bank that answers to no one in the West – it simply cannot be “Plaza’d”.

The article also takes aim at the language of “overcapacity”, which Carlos describes as a euphemism for European and North American industry failing to compete after nearly half a century of financialisation, privatisation and deregulation. Chinese competitiveness in electric vehicles, batteries and solar panels flows from a complete industrial system and sustained investment in technology – not from currency manipulation – and the EU’s tariffs of up to 35 per cent on Chinese electric vehicles are, he writes, “an act of self-harm disguised as self-defence”.

This article first appeared in the Morning Star.

At the recent EU summit, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz declared the Chinese renminbi to be undervalued by as much as 30 per cent and floated the idea of a new Plaza Accord — a co-ordinated effort to force up the value of the currency, just as Washington did to Japan in 1985.

It is worth remembering how that story ended, because the history Merz is reaching for is not the cautionary tale he imagines it to be.

The Plaza Accord was not a neutral exercise in rebalancing trade. It was the deliberate kneecapping of an economic competitor. Meeting at New York’s Plaza Hotel in September 1985, the United States strong-armed Japan, West Germany, France and Britain into driving down the dollar.

Within two years, the dollar–yen rate had fallen by half. Japanese exports were hammered, capital fled into frenzied property and stock-market speculation, and when that bubble burst at the end of the decade, Japan was plunged into a “lost decade” of stagnation that stretched into a lost generation.

Tokyo’s tormentors, meanwhile, failed to reap much from this harvest: the US goods trade deficit with Japan stood at around $46 billion in 1985 and, instead of shrinking, climbed past $55bn in both 1986 and 1987. The currency had been clobbered, but the imbalance remained.

The reason is that the imbalance never originated in the exchange rate in the first place. It grew out of the US’s own domestic economic model of high consumption and low savings, and out of the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency, which compels the US to run deficits in order to supply the world with dollars. No amount of bullying Tokyo could fix a problem made in Washington.

Why could Japan be treated this way at all? Because it was never a sovereign equal but a subordinate ally — a Western outpost in East Asia, permitted to grow rich as part of the cold war project of containing communism, but never permitted to seriously challenge its benefactors. When push came to shove, hosting tens of thousands of American troops and sheltering under the US security umbrella, Tokyo had no choice but to fold. The Plaza Accord is now near-universally regarded, even by mainstream economists, as an act of economic sabotage dressed up as co-operation.

The world says no: Iran, the Global South and the end of the unipolar moment

The US-Israeli war on Iran has been defeated – and the world’s response to it, above all from China and the Global South, reveals how profoundly the global balance of forces has shifted. In the article below, Carlos Martinez argues that Iran’s victory provides important evidence that the unipolar moment is over.

The criminal US-Israeli war on Iran has wrought devastation on a horrendous scale. The campaign has included the assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader and numerous other political leaders and scientists; the bombing of schools, hospitals, bridges and energy infrastructure; and, from April, a naval blockade of Iran’s ports. Aerial attacks have killed around 3,500 civilians, including 168 children at an elementary school in Minab, in one of the gravest single atrocities since the Vietnam War.

This is a war of aggression, pure and simple. There has been no Security Council authorisation, and UN human rights experts have denounced the assault as a violation of the most basic principles of the UN Charter. The pretext – that Iran was on the cusp of acquiring a nuclear weapon – is the same threadbare story Benjamin Netanyahu has been telling since 1992, and is roughly as credible as Tony Blair’s claim in 2003 that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes.

But something distinguishes this war from the Iraq war a generation ago. In 2003, Washington could assemble a “coalition of the willing”, browbeat the UN, and assume the world would fall into line. In 2026, the world is conspicuously refusing to do so. And the war has not merely been opposed – it has been defeated. As of late June it stands suspended under an interim memorandum of understanding whose terms read like a list of concessions wrung from Washington. The response to this war – above all from China and the Global South – tells us a great deal about how profoundly the global balance of forces has shifted.

Cuba’s economic reforms and the prospects for socialist renewal

This month Cuba approved the most far-reaching changes to its economic model in more than 60 years. In this article, Carlos Martinez argues that – far from the blockade finally breaking the Revolution – the reforms are best understood as a defence of socialism under siege, following the strategic logic China has pursued since 1978: the controlled use of markets and foreign investment to develop the productive forces while the Communist Party retains political power and public ownership of the commanding heights.

This article first appeared on Friends of Socialist China. A version of the article, translated into Portuguese, can be found on Brasil de Fato.

This month Cuba announced the most far-reaching changes to its economic model in more than 60 years. Approved by an Extraordinary Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba and passed unanimously by the National Assembly, the programme runs to 23 strategic axes and 176 concrete measures. Predictably, much of the Western press – along with a substantial section of the Western left – has rushed to interpret it as the moment the blockade finally broke the Revolution, as proof that Havana has at last been forced onto the capitalist road.

Such a reading misunderstands both the content of the measures and the history that has produced them. The reforms are best understood as Cuba’s attempt to do what several other besieged socialist states have had to do before it: to defend itself by developing its productive forces, on its own terms, but under conditions not of its choosing. As the Cuba specialist Isaac Saney puts it, the measures, “far from representing a retreat”, in fact constitute “a strategic effort to preserve and deepen the social gains of the Revolution in the face of relentless external pressure and unprecedented economic challenges”.

For those that have followed China’s development, the framework on display in Havana is immediately recognisable. Cuba is reaching, under enormous duress, for the strategic logic that has guided the Chinese Revolution since 1978: the controlled use of markets and foreign investment to develop the productive forces, while the Communist Party retains political power and public ownership of the commanding heights. It is also reaching for the support of its longstanding friends. China and Vietnam have been Cuba’s most consequential partners in weathering the present siege, and the deepening relationship between their parties forms an essential part of the backdrop to these reforms.

What the reforms actually do

Under the new package, Cuba will scrap the long-standing requirement that foreign investors partner with a state-owned company. It will authorise large private firms, permit private banks to operate, allow private real estate development, and open the door to domestic and foreign investors acquiring stakes in state enterprises, some of which are to be converted into joint-stock companies.

Cubans living abroad will be actively encouraged to invest, donate, import technology and build businesses at home. State-owned enterprises – which remain the principal pillar of the economy – will be granted far greater autonomy over investment, hiring, pricing and financial management, while municipal governments will gain expanded powers to pursue local development. Wage ceilings that have motivated significant numbers of skilled professionals to leave the country are to be lifted.

Imperialism vs multipolarity: how the war on Iran backfired on the US

The US-Israeli war on Iran was meant to halt the world’s drift towards multipolarity. Instead it accelerated it.

In this talk from the webinar “Imperialism vs Multipolarity: US and China’s clashing visions” (organised by Friends of Socialist China and the International Manifesto Group), Carlos Martinez argues that the war on Iran is the sharpest illustration we have of two clashing visions of world order – a declining empire that rules through sanctions, blockades and bombing, and an emerging multipolar order based on sovereignty, development and peace.

The presentation covers:

What the war was really about: Iran, Palestine, the Belt and Road, and the containment of China
Why Iran survived in 2026 what Mossadegh’s Iran could not in 1953
China’s role: buying Iranian oil in defiance of sanctions, the UN Security Council veto, economic and diplomatic support
How the outcome has strengthened Iran, weakened the US, isolated Israel, and accelerated the rise of the multipolar world

Watch the full webinar: Imperialism vs Multipolarity: US and China’s clashing visions.

Transcript

I’m going to make Iran – rather than China or the US directly – the main focus of my remarks, because the war there is the sharpest illustration we have of the two clashing visions we’re discussing today.

First I’ll talk about how the Iran war relates to the overall global struggle between imperialism and multipolarity.

Second, how the emerging multipolar reality has shaped the outcomes of that war.

And third, how those outcomes are, in turn, reshaping the trajectory of the multipolar project.

Interview: Can the working class win?

The video below is an interview of Carlos Martinez by Jason Smith, for CGTN’s The Bridge to China podcast. Recorded in the lead-up to the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China, the wide-ranging conversation covers the nature of China’s economic system, the achievements of Chinese socialism, the state of the left in the West, and the transition to a multipolar world.

Carlos argues that China is best understood on its own terms, as socialism with Chinese characteristics: a fundamentally socialist system with a significant market component, in which the state holds the commanding heights – banking, energy, telecommunications, rail and the top levels of industry – and directs investment through national planning. The presence of markets, billionaires or inequality does not make a country capitalist; what matters is which class holds power, and the ultimate measure is the living standards of ordinary working people.

On that measure, China stands apart: it is the country that has eliminated extreme poverty, effectively ended homelessness, and pursued common prosperity, a world-leading renewable energy build-out and the saving of lives during the Covid pandemic. If China is socialist and succeeding, Carlos contends, that vindicates the project of the global left – which is precisely why the West’s new cold war is aimed at preventing a socialist alternative from succeeding.

The interview surveys the scale of China’s transformation – some 800 million people lifted out of poverty, the “seven guarantees” that underpin poverty alleviation, life expectancy rising from around 35 at liberation to over 79 today, near-universal mortgage-free home ownership, and the most extensive public infrastructure in the world. Comparing China with India – liberated within two years of one another, from similar starting points – Carlos draws out what a revolution and Communist Party-led planning have made possible: sovereign development free of IMF discipline, coherent five-year plans, and the capacity for mass mobilisation, exemplified by the three million cadres deployed in the poverty alleviation campaign.

Turning to the West, Carlos describes the long retreat of the left under the neoliberal counter-revolution – de-industrialisation, the rise of the precariat, and a social peace bought with the super-profits of imperialism that are now drying up. He points to the crisis of confidence deepened by Gaza and to the Corbyn moment as signs that material reality is shifting, and to a growing openness to China – from “Chinamaxxing” and the RedNote migration to the surge in inbound tourism. The dogmatism that still leads much of the Western left to withhold recognition of China’s decidedly socialist achievements, he argues, plays into a US grand strategy whose core is the encirclement and containment of China.

The lesson for developed and developing countries alike, Carlos concludes, is that public ownership is not inefficient but the precondition for any serious industrial policy, that long-term planning beats short-term shareholder value, and that the West must come to terms with an inevitably multipolar world – starting, at a minimum, with adherence to the United Nations Charter.

A full transcript follows below. Individual answers will also be posted as separate clips on the Invent the Future YouTube channel.

Transcript

Jason Smith: Socialism, China, and the West. Hey everyone, I’m Jason Smith, originally from sunny California, now living in beautiful Beijing. Joining us today is Carlos Martinez, a British Marxist writer, researcher, and anti-imperialist activist. He is co-author of The East Is Still Red: Chinese Socialism in the 21st Century, and co-editor of Friends of Socialist China. Welcome back to The Bridge to China.

Carlos Martinez: Hey Jason, great to be with you. I think this is the third time.

Jason Smith: I think it is. I really wanted to have you on because the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China is coming up, and I wanted to get your thoughts on socialism, Marxism and Western perspectives of Chinese socialism. But before we get there — people may not have seen our previous interviews, or may not be familiar with your work. Can you tell us a little bit about your experience with China and how you got into studying it?

Pure socialism is pure idealism: a reply to Jacobin on China

Carlos Martinez responds to a recent Jacobin book review that frames China’s development as “brutal exploitation” indistinguishable from Britain’s industrial revolution. Originally published at Friends of Socialist China.

Jacobin has published a review by Daniel Cheng of Adrift in the South, the memoir of the Chinese worker-poet Xiao Hai, detailing the harsh conditions he faced as a migrant worker in the megacities of southern China.

The book itself sounds interesting and worthwhile, and there is no reason to doubt the harshness of the conditions Xiao Hai describes. But the frame the review wraps around his story – that China’s economic miracle was “made possible by the brutal exploitation of millions of workers”, and that China’s development and the dark satanic mills of Britain’s industrialisation can be comfortably placed together in a category of “the universal suffering of capitalism” – is ahistorical, idealist, and, in the present geopolitical conjuncture, actively unhelpful.

Exploitation has to be contextualised

The first thing to say is that China’s growth has not simply enriched a class of capitalists. It has transformed the lives of the great majority. Over the past half-century, China has lifted an estimated 800 million people out of extreme poverty – by the World Bank’s own reckoning, more than three-quarters of the entire reduction in global poverty over the same period. Chinese workers and farmers today live longer, eat better, are far better educated and enjoy a level of material security their grandparents could barely have imagined.

Why does China still love Mao so much?

The standard Western story about modern China is that Mao has been quietly buried by the Communist Party, that Deng Xiaoping repudiated his legacy, and that the China that emerged after 1978 is no longer really socialist. By implication, China’s success is the success of capitalism, not of the revolution.

So why do ordinary Chinese people still travel in their millions to Shaoshan – the village in Hunan where Mao was born, now one of the most-visited tourist sites in China – to pay their respects to the founder of the People’s Republic? Stand there among the crowds and the Western story falls apart on contact.

In this video, Carlos Martinez draws on a recent trip to Shaoshan, and on the hard development data from the Mao era, to answer that question: the Mao era and the reform era are not opposed phases of Chinese history. They are two stages of a single revolutionary project, and the Chinese people know it.

Between 1949 and 1976, life expectancy in China rose by 32 years – the fastest improvement ever recorded by any country in human history. Adult illiteracy fell from over 80 per cent to 33 per cent by 1978. Land was redistributed. Women were emancipated. A complete industrial base was built from near-zero. The treaty ports were abolished. The country was unified after a century of fragmentation. This is the China the post-Mao leadership inherited – not the impoverished backwater of Western myth.

Without Mao, no Deng. Without 1949, no 1978. As the late Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin put it, the take-off of the post-1978 period “would not have been possible without the economic, political and social foundations that had been built up in the preceding period.” It is also exactly how the Communist Party of China understands its own history, in Xi Jinping’s doctrine of “the two cannot negates.”

Sources and further reading:

Carlos Martinez, “No great wall: on the continuity of the Chinese Revolution”
https://invent-the-future.org/2021/05/no-great-wall/

Samir Amin, “China 2013”
https://monthlyreview.org/articles/china-2013/

Domenico Losurdo, “Has China Turned to Capitalism? Reflections on the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism”
https://redsails.org/losurdo-on-china/

Friends of Socialist China
https://socialistchina.org

Transcript

Hello and welcome. In April this year, I had the privilege of visiting Shaoshan, the small village in Hunan province where Mao Zedong was born in 1893. And Shaoshan is one of the most visited tourist sites in China. Ordinary Chinese people travel there in their millions every year. The Mao family home is preserved as it was. There’s a major statue erected in 1993 for the centenary of his birth. And across China, there are museums, study halls, and exhibition rooms commemorating the life of the man Chinese people overwhelmingly regard as the founder of modern China.

And I wanted to talk about Shaoshan because what you see there very much goes against the narrative that Western ruling class media and academia have been telling us about China for the last half century or so. The standard story runs like this. Mao’s been quietly buried by the Communist Party of China. Deng Xiaoping repudiated his legacy. The reform era China that emerged after 1978 is essentially a market economy with red branding, no longer connected to the revolutionary project that began in 1921, or to the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. And the implication is that China’s success story is not a function of socialism. The achievements you can see across the country today are the achievements of capitalism. And Mao is some kind of embarrassing relic that the party can neither fully claim nor fully repudiate.

Sri Lanka’s Hambantota port and the complete collapse of the ‘debt trap’ narrative

In this article, Carlos Martinez examines how the “debt trap” narrative around Sri Lanka’s Hambantota port has completely collapsed. Originally published at Friends of Socialist China.

Hambantota, the deep-water port on the south coast of Sri Lanka, was for years the canonical example of what the Trump administration’s erstwhile vice-president Mike Pence labelled “debt-trap diplomacy” – the supposed Chinese practice of luring poor countries into unsustainable loans, then seizing strategic infrastructure when repayment failed.

Presenting a menacing, predatory China exploiting hapless developing nations to extend its reach and dominance, Hambantota became a top New Cold War talking point, propagated by Western journalists, Indian think tanks and Washington policy advisors alike.

However, the most obvious problem with the story was that it was patently untrue.

A succession of careful studies – by Chatham House, by Deborah Bräutigam at Johns Hopkins, and by Sri Lankan officials with first-hand knowledge of the negotiations – has now systematically dismantled the whole story.

First, the port project was not proposed by China. It was conceived in the 1970s by a Sri Lankan parliamentarian, D. A. Rajapaksa, and championed by his son, the future president Mahinda Rajapaksa. Feasibility studies were carried out by Canadian and Danish firms. Sri Lanka approached the United States and India for funding, and both declined. Only then did China step in, with the China Export–Import Bank (Exim Bank) lending and China Harbour Engineering as the contractor.

When Sri Lanka subsequently fell into debt crisis, this was driven not by Chinese lending but by Sri Lanka’s massive borrowing on Western-dominated capital markets – borrowing made cheap by post-2008 quantitative easing, then made suddenly expensive when the US Federal Reserve began winding down its programme in 2013. Chinese loans constituted just 9 percent of Sri Lankan government debt by 2016. The Hambantota loans specifically constituted 4.8 percent.

The 2017 concession agreement was painted as a debt-for-asset swap, but the reality was considerably less sinister: China Merchants Port leased the port for $1.12 billion in fresh investment, which Sri Lanka used to pay down its much larger Western creditors. Sri Lanka’s minister of ports at the time, Mahinda Samarasinghe, put it plainly: “We thank China for arranging this investor to save us from the debt trap”.

Sri Lanka’s debt trap was made on Wall Street, not in Beijing. As for the accusation that the Chinese military would use Hambantota as a naval base, that was always nonsense. The lease agreement explicitly prohibits the use of the port for military purposes. There have been no Chinese naval vessels at Hambantota, and the port is subject to US Coastguard inspections under the International Port Security scheme.

What has actually happened at Hambantota over the last few years? The port has actually become a major regional success.

Under the management of China Merchants Port – a state-owned operator with stakes in 42 ports across 25 countries, including Greece, Belgium and France – Hambantota has been transformed from a loss-making white elephant into one of the fastest-growing trans-shipment hubs in the Indian Ocean. By 2023 it was handling 700,000 vehicles, up 26 percent year-on-year. It has expanded its Sri Lankan staff from 300 in 2017 to more than 1,000 today. In November 2023 the Sri Lankan cabinet approved a $4.5 billion oil refinery to be built by Sinopec adjacent to the port – the largest foreign direct investment in Sri Lankan history.

Now, in 2026, comes the next phase. In March, the Hambantota International Port Group signed a $108 million agreement with Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries – the world’s leading manufacturer of port cranes – for six quay cranes, 16 rubber-tyred gantry cranes and 40 trailers. The new quay cranes will have a 72-metre outreach and a 65-tonne lifting capacity, enabling the port to handle the largest container vessels currently in operation. The investment will activate the port’s 1,300-metre container berth and lift annual capacity to around two million TEUs (Twenty-Foot Equivalent Units). Sri Lanka’s minister of ports has described Hambantota as “evolving into a modern, integrated port and industrial ecosystem capable of meeting the diverse needs of global maritime stakeholders”.

This is the Belt and Road Initiative in practice: massive long-term investment; transfer of technology; training of local workers; integration into a global logistics network; substantial revenue generation for the host country’s economy.

Sri Lanka’s ambassador to China between 2020 and 2023, Palitha Kohona, summarised the partnership: “It was not unusual that Sri Lanka, like many other developing countries, decided to work with Chinese companies due to China’s advanced skill levels, stunning technology and cost advantages. The Chinese role in Sri Lanka’s debt is grossly exaggerated and exploited mischievously for political advantage.”

You will not, of course, read any of this in the Western press. The same news organisations that carried out a multi-year campaign against Chinese “neocolonialism” have shown no interest whatever in the port’s subsequent transformation. Their interest in Hambantota was never journalistic; it was ideological. The story existed to serve a specific anti-China narrative. Once it could no longer be credibly sustained, the Western media simply moved on to the next anti-China story.

Who actually traps developing countries in debt? The IMF and the World Bank do. Wall Street’s bond markets do. The European Central Bank’s monetary policy does. The US Federal Reserve does. Across the Global South, more than three-quarters of external sovereign debt is owed not to other states but to private Western financial institutions – institutions with no obligation to consider the development needs of their borrowers, and every incentive to extract the maximum possible return. The track record of structural-adjustment programmes, debt-driven austerity and IMF-imposed privatisations across Africa, Latin America and South Asia over the last four decades is the actual story of debt and neocolonialism in our time.

The Belt and Road Initiative offers, by contrast, infrastructure, technology transfer, training and long-term investment on terms vastly more favourable than the major Western institutions have ever extended. That is why some 150 countries have signed up to it.

The BRI embodies three things that Western imperialism hates: the Global South’s emergence from dependency; the growing influence of the People’s Republic of China and its friendly, mutually beneficial relations with the rest of the developing world; and the emerging multipolar alternative to the Western-dominated global order. The Western media’s obsession with Chinese “debt traps” is thus nothing more than a demonisation campaign and a blatant act of self-projection.

Siege socialism or barbarism: why we must stand with Cuba

Carlos Martinez’s article on Cuba, siege socialism and the case for international solidarity, originally published in the Morning Star on 4 June 2026.

A few weeks ago, Donald Trump told reporters that he expects the Cuban government to be gone by the end of the year. He called Cuba “a failed country” and added: “Other presidents have looked at this for 50, 60 years, doing something. And it looks like I’ll be the one that does it.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has declared that “Cuba has consistently posed a threat to the national security of the United States” — a standard preamble before regime-change operations.

The Department of Justice has unsealed a federal indictment against 95-year-old Raúl Castro for events that took place 30 years ago, and in which Cuba acted in a completely legal and just manner.

Meanwhile, the USS Nimitz carrier strike group has entered Caribbean waters. And in the Caribbean and Pacific, the US Navy has over the last few months killed almost 200 people and destroyed 57 vessels in what are, by any reasonable definition, extrajudicial executions.

It is clear that the US is escalating its economic, diplomatic and military pressure on Cuba to unprecedented levels, with a view to getting rid of the Cuban Revolution once and for all.

What alternative future does Washington propose for Cuba?

It helps here to recover a concept developed by the late Marxist historian Michael Parenti.

In his 1997 book Blackshirts and Reds, Parenti pointed out that for the entire history of actually-existing socialism — in the Soviet Union, in China, in Vietnam, in Cuba, in Korea and elsewhere — there has never been a single example of a socialist project that’s been allowed to develop in peace, to pursue its own development model.

Every socialist state has existed in a context of imperialist encirclement; socialist states have faced invasion, sabotage, blockade, embargo, assassination attempts, sanctions, coup attempts, proxy wars.

Parenti argued that you cannot judge any of these societies without taking that into account.

To compare really-existing socialism with an imaginary, abstract socialism that would have been allowed to develop in peace is intellectually dishonest. The socialism that actually exists is, in his phrase, siege socialism. It is shaped and distorted by the conditions under which it has been built.

Cuba today is the canonical example of siege socialism. It’s very literally under siege. The US blockade — 64 years old and counting — is now the most comprehensive economic siege in modern history.

Over the last couple of years, fuel imports have been cut by 90 per cent. Parts of the country are now experiencing blackouts of up to 20 hours a day. Hospitals are operating on emergency generators.

Medicines, basic foodstuffs, replacement parts, fertilisers — all are being squeezed by a sanctions regime purposely designed to bring about hunger and poverty, and to generate discontent against the government.

And yet, under that siege, socialism continues to deliver for the Cuban people. Cuba has a life expectancy of 78 years and an infant mortality rate of around five per thousand — both better than the US. A literacy rate above 99 per cent, and an education system that produces doctors in such abundance that Cuba exports more medical personnel worldwide than the WHO, UNICEF and Médecins Sans Frontières combined.

When hurricanes hit the Caribbean, Cuba invariably experiences the lowest death toll in the region: last year Hurricane Oscar killed seven people in Cuba and 235 in Haiti, despite hitting Cuba first and harder. This is what a basic orientation towards the needs of the people, rather than profit, can do.

The standard Washington framing for a post-socialist Cuba is something along the lines of a thriving market democracy, a haven for tourists and a consumer utopia where people cheerily drive their Teslas to the nearest polling station to vote for one of several neoliberal pro-US parties. But there is absolutely no historical evidence that supports the viability of that vision.

It would be more instructive to compare Cuba with Haiti, which has been subjected to non-stop US intervention and interference for over a century and is today, by pretty much every metric, a humanitarian catastrophe.

Or to compare Cuba with the Dominican Republic, with Guatemala, with El Salvador — countries that suffered the kind of regime change Trump is now threatening Cuba with, and that have spent the decades since exporting their populations northwards because life at home became unliveable.

We can also compare Cuba today with pre-revolutionary Cuba — the Cuba of Fulgencio Batista, where Havana was a mafia gambling capital and a brothel for North American tourists, where illiteracy and child malnutrition were endemic, where much of the country was racially segregated, where the US Marines came and went as they pleased and the presidents were chosen in Washington.

That is the Cuba the US is trying to bring back. A playground for the rich, a colony in all but name. That is what Trump’s talking about when he says he wants the Castro regime gone.

So Cuban socialism is very much worth saving. Can it be saved? It can. The Cuban people are extraordinarily resilient and committed to defending their sovereignty and their revolution. Furthermore, Cuba is not alone.

China is now Cuba’s largest energy and infrastructure partner, and a major source of food and medicine. This week, Chinese and Cuban officials met in Beijing for talks on agricultural co-operation, framed around a “Cuba-China community of shared future.”

The same day, the first 15,000 tonnes of a 60,000-tonne Chinese rice donation arrived in Havana — what Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez called “a new display of solidarity and brotherhood.”

On top of that, China is financing 92 solar parks across the island by 2028, projected to cover roughly half of Cuba’s daytime electricity demand.

Once Cuba generates its own power from the sun, the central weapon of the energy blockade begins to crumble.

China’s diplomatic backing is also worthy of note. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning declared this week that “China firmly supports Cuba in safeguarding its sovereignty, security and development interests” — the second such statement in a week.

Meanwhile Russia, Vietnam, Iran, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Mexico and Brazil are all providing practical solidarity to Cuba, along with campaign groups such as Britain’s Cuba Solidarity Campaign. If Cuba can hold the line through this period, the multipolar world taking shape on the other side will be a far more hospitable environment for projects like the Cuban Revolution.

That is why Cuba must survive the present. The alternative has nothing to do with freedom or democracy.

It is the Miami exile establishment, the return of the old oligarchy, the carve-up of every public asset by foreign capital. We have seen what that looks like in Yeltsin’s Russia, or in Libya after Nato’s regime change war.

Rosa Luxemburg coined the phrase “socialism or barbarism” in 1916, in the middle of the first world war, as a general statement about humanity’s choices. In the Caribbean in 2026, it is a concrete question on the table.

Cuba has stood for 67 years as a beacon of hope for the oppressed and exploited around the world. It has been a source of inspiration for generations of activists, a symbol of resistance against imperialism, a model of what a different kind of society can look like.

The whole world must stand with Cuba now, in its hour of need. We must demand an end to the blockade, an end to sanctions, an end to threats. We must support Cuba’s right to self-determination, to sovereignty, and to development on its own terms.

Going to Tehran: the book that predicted this mess in Iran

In 2013, two former US national security officials – Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett – published a book called Going to Tehran. In it they argued, on the basis of insider experience, that the United States was making a strategic mistake of historic proportions in its policy towards Iran; that the Islamic Republic was a stable, legitimate, rational political entity; that decades of US sanctions, isolation and threats would fail; that Iran would emerge from any direct confrontation stronger, not weaker; and that the only rational US course was the kind of grand rapprochement Nixon achieved with China in 1972.

The US foreign policy establishment declined to read it. Months into a war on Iran that the US is manifestly losing, every one of the Leveretts’ predictions has come to pass – and the establishment is implicitly conceding it. Robert Kagan in the Atlantic. Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times. Dan Shapiro in the Washington Post.

In this video, Carlos Martinez reviews Going to Tehran, explains its central arguments, and makes the case that it is one of the most important unread books of the twenty-first century.

Sources and further reading:

Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, Going to Tehran (2013)

Robert Kagan, “Checkmate in Iran”, The Atlantic (May 2026)

Gideon Rachman, “Iran is beating Trump at the art of the deal”, Financial Times (May 2026)

Mohammad Marandi’s interviews on multiple channels

Transcript

Hello and welcome. Those of you who, like me, listen to a lot of interviews with Said Muhammad Marandi will know that he is one of the most incisive and insightful analysts of Iran’s politics and foreign policy. He’s also one of the most candid and direct. He’s been recommending a book that he says is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand Iran, called Going to Tehran.

It’s written by two former US national security officials and was published in 2013. Marandi often says that if the US foreign policy establishment had read it and paid attention to it, then some of the disasters of the last few months could have been avoided. So I read it.

It’s excellent. You should probably read it, too. And in this video I’ll give an overview of the book and try to explain why it’s so important, why it’s so relevant.

So who are the authors? Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett are not anti-imperialist pragmatists. They are in fact former senior US national security officials. Flynt worked at the CIA, then at the State Department, then on the National Security Council where he ran Middle East policy under George W. Bush in 2002 to 2003. Hillary served at the State Department and on the NSC and was the US delegate in talks with Iran on Iraq, Afghanistan, and al-Qaeda in the early 2000s.