Month: March 2026

Why Cuba must be defended

The video embedded below is a speech given by Carlos Martinez at a fundraiser for Cuba, organised by the Portland Global Friendship Group, held on Friday 13 March 2026.

Cuba is facing the gravest crisis in the history of its revolution. The US economic blockade, now in its seventh decade, has been systematically tightened to the point where the island faces blackouts of up to twenty hours a day, acute fuel shortages, and disruption to food supplies.

The blockade has been in place since 1962 – the longest-running embargo in modern history – and has cost Cuba an estimated 2 trillion USD, adjusted to today’s prices. The 1996 Helms-Burton Act extended its reach extraterritorially, penalising companies in third countries for doing business with Cuba in a manner that is flagrantly illegal and unprecedented in modern economic warfare. Cuba’s listing on the US State Sponsors of Terrorism list is designed to choke off Cuba’s access to international banking and finance, making even routine trade almost impossibly difficult.

The immediate trigger for the current energy crisis is the collapse of oil supplies. Cuba had developed a close and mutually beneficial relationship with Venezuela since the start of the Bolivarian Revolution, and Venezuela had been supplying up to 100,000 barrels of oil per day, in exchange for the services of vast numbers of Cuban doctors, teachers and other experts. The Trump administration’s invasion of Venezuela in January and the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro was motivated by multiple strategic objectives, but strangling Cuba was almost certainly among them. The result has been devastating.

Trump has been explicit about his goal: regime change in Cuba by the end of the year. Marco Rubio – the ideological driving force behind the Cuba policy – has openly threatened the Cuban government. The US is reportedly searching for government insiders willing to cooperate in a soft coup.

Why such a ferocious campaign against a small Caribbean island? The answer is largely ideological. Cuba represents the threat of a good example – a formerly colonised country, ninety miles from the US, that dares to assert that another world is possible: to control its own resources, follow its own development model, and align itself with the forces of progress globally. The US response is designed to demonstrate what happens to countries that make that choice.

Yet Cuba’s achievements under sixty-seven years of revolution, blockade and constant pressure are extraordinary. Literacy has risen from 70 percent at the time of the revolution to 99.8 percent – higher than both Britain and the US. Healthcare is free, universal and world-class: Cuba has one doctor for every 220 people, a life expectancy of 79 years, and an infant mortality rate of 4.83 per thousand live births. Cuba developed the world’s first meningitis B vaccine, and during the Covid pandemic produced its own vaccines indigenously, despite the blockade, achieving mass vaccination ahead of far wealthier nations.

The 2022 Family Code, developed through an extensive popular consultation process and passed by referendum with a 74 percent turnout, is one of the most progressive family law frameworks in the world. Women hold 43 percent of parliamentary seats. The World Wildlife Federation has declared Cuba the only country on earth to have achieved sustainable development by the dual measure of human development and environmental sustainability.

Cuba’s internationalism is perhaps its most extraordinary dimension. Over 400,000 Cuban medical personnel have served in 164 countries. Cuba deployed 375,000 troops to Angola between 1975 and 1991, playing a decisive role in protecting Angola’s independence, defeating South African apartheid forces and helping liberate Namibia — prompting Nelson Mandela to describe Cuba’s contribution as “unparalleled in African history”.

Cuba is now responding to the energy siege not with surrender but with transformation. Solar power has tripled in a single year, from 5.8 percent to over 20 percent of electricity generation. Forty-nine new solar parks have been connected to the grid. China has been Cuba’s most important partner in this effort: 92 solar parks are being built with Chinese equipment, financing and expertise, with a combined capacity matching Cuba’s entire current fossil fuel output.

But Cuba urgently needs international solidarity. As Fidel Castro said in 1994, “we understand what it would mean for all the progressive forces, for all the revolutionary forces, for all the lovers of peace and justice in the world, if the United States succeeded in crushing the Cuban Revolution”. The defeat of the Cuban Revolution would embolden imperial aggression everywhere – a signal that no country, however principled, can defy global capital and survive.

Interview: Why does the West fear China?

The video below is an interview of Carlos Martinez by Jason Smith, for CGTN’s The Bridge podcast. In this wide-ranging discussion, touching on a range of issues from the war in Iran to the nature of China’s whole-process people’s democracy, Carlos opines that “democracy” is not an abstract universal but always has a specific class content. What the West calls liberal democracy is more accurately described as capitalist democracy: a system in which the ruling class – those who own and deploy capital – dominates political life, and government is fundamentally oriented towards preserving existing production relations and expanding capital. As Marx observed, the oppressed are permitted once every few years to choose which representatives of the oppressing class shall govern them.

China operates a different democratic model suited to a different social system. The capitalist class cannot organise politically, cannot direct state power in its own interests, and cannot dictate to the government – for example, Huawei does not tell Beijing what to do. The Communist Party, with over 100 million members, is a party of the working class and its allies, obliged to maintain legitimacy by actually delivering – on poverty alleviation, healthcare, pollution control, housing, renewable energy and more. The result, borne out by polling data including a Harvard Kennedy School survey showing 94 percent government approval, is that Chinese citizens report far higher levels of satisfaction with their democracy than citizens of the US or Britain. The Two Sessions – the annual meetings of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference – give concrete institutional expression to this whole-process people’s democracy, translating debates from across society into national policy, including this year’s 15th Five-Year Plan.

The US-China rivalry is not a conventional geopolitical contest between two comparable powers. The US helped integrate China into the global economic order in the late 1970s on the assumption that China would remain permanently at the bottom of the hierarchy – making cheap goods, opening up to Western capital, abandoning its socialist orientation through peaceful evolution. The reality has been entirely different: China is now the world’s largest economy, the leading force in renewables, telecoms, advanced infrastructure and space exploration, and is advancing an alternative model of modernisation that operates entirely outside the paradigm of imperialism – without war, occupation, austerity or the Washington Consensus. That is the real threat: not military aggression, but the ideological and material demonstration that another development path is possible. The hybrid war against China – sanctions, tech controls, military encirclement, demonisation – is aimed at preventing China’s further rise, weakening its global relationships, and ultimately reversing the Chinese Revolution. China, for its part, simply wants to develop and to cooperate.

The multipolar project is in essence a demand that the principles of the UN Charter – sovereign equality, non-interference, peaceful coexistence – be actually observed, not merely invoked rhetorically. The record of US-led imperialism in the postwar period, from the Korean War to the 1953 coup in Iran to the current wars on Venezuela and Iran, makes clear these principles have never been adhered to by Washington. Institutionally, multipolarity means strengthening the UN, building out BRICS, the SCO, the NAM and the G77+China, developing alternative financing, and expanding south-south cooperation backed by China’s economic weight and the Belt and Road Initiative. This project increasingly has institutions, momentum and a trajectory – though it faces the enduring obstacle of US military hegemony and the reckless aggression of a declining empire.

For those in the West who want to engage constructively, the starting point is to resist the war propaganda that saturates mainstream media, tell the truth about China, and actively participate in anti-war movements – making the case for maximum global cooperation on climate, peace and development.

Below the video of the full interview is a selection of clips with individual answers, which have been posted on the newly-revived Invent the Future YouTube channel.