In Venezuela the month of May began with a bang. A group of mercenaries—North American, Colombian, and Venezuelan, armed and trained in Colombia with the participation of drug-dealing paramilitaries, the Drugs Enforcement Administration of the United States, and the benign surveillance of the Colombian government—mounted an invasion of Venezuela. The […]
International
Cuba faces covid-19
ON 11 MARCH, Cuba had the first three cases of covid-19, detected in three Italian tourists. From that moment the country began to implement the contingency plan for dealing with this virus, which had been developed months earlier.
At the time of writing [24 April] the country has 1,285 people infected, has had 44 deaths and more than 2,000
The old world is dying
WHATEVER WAY one looks at it, the reality is that this crisis, and its four forms— environmental, health, economic, and political—will prove to be worse than 2008. The fact that China’s economy has slowed down, for the first time in decades, only shows that this crisis will be a global affair, rather than a Western financial crisis, as happened in 2008. The 2020 crash will be a
Why the West hates Sandinista Nicaragua
NICARAGUA’S SUCCESS in containing the covid-19 virus makes the failure of the United States and its allies look pathetic. The country’s low numbers of nine confirmed cases to date and just two fatalities categorically vindicate the policies of its Sandinista government, led by President Daniel Ortega and Vice-President Rosario Murillo.
The same is true of other revolutionary and socialist governments around the world. Cuba has given a shining example of global leadership and solidarity. Most notably elsewhere, Venezuela, Viet Nam and India’s state of Kerala have also implemented diverse but successful policies containing the pandemic.
Venezuela blockaded
JUST AS the coronavirus is wreaking havoc in the United States, and has also begun to affect Venezuela, the Trump regime has decided to step up its aggression against Venezuela, which can only obstruct the country’s efforts to safeguard the health of its population from the threat of the pandemic.
António Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations, has appealed for an end to all economic sanctions on account of the pandemic.
Cuba’s medical internationalism
Cuba’s medical internationalism – Graham HarringtonDownload “Whoever cannot fight for others will never be sufficiently able to fight for themselves.” Fidel Castro Since 1960, socialist Cuba has sent 400,000 doctors and nurses to more than 164 countries to share their medical expertise. Internationalism has been a part of the Cuban […]
Dictatorship: Who decides?
Dictatorship: Who decides? – Seán Ó MaoltuileDownload The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas. Karl Marx (1845) Once from the pulpit, now from the mass media, the elite of society have always sought to ingrain within us an acceptance of our own subjugation. The […]
Who said that?
“Ironically and cynically, both the US and the European Union impose these sanctions under the guise of protecting human rights when in fact the sanctions always impact negatively on the human rights of the civilian populations. Ireland is complicit in these breaches of international law by virtue of its membership […]
Leaving the EU is just the beginning
THE BRITISH State left the European Union on the 31st of January, after nearly three years of political theatre, manoeuvring, backstabbing, and manipulation. How the ruling class now manage this process will depend very much on what the working class does. Many on the left have adopted a wait-and-see approach, thereby allowing the ruling
The iron fist of capitalism
THE RISE of the right wing, of fascist ideology, is inextricably linked with the crises of capitalism, which are periodic and inevitable because of the internal contradictions within the capitalist system, which can never be overcome, because capitalism is an antagonistic class-based system in which differing class interests cannot be reconciled.
Che and Fidel: Revolutionaries to the end
As we celebrate the sixty-first anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, a great Irish friend, loyal defender of Cuba, asked me to write for Socialist Voice about the imprint of Fidel
Castro and Ernesto Guevara on the most important event of the twentieth century in Latin America—not without first clarifying for me, with the typical frankness and the
classic and imperative Irish style: it had to be brief.
International Anti-Imperialist Conference in Caracas
2019 was a year of victories for Venezuela, President Maduro claimed at a ceremony on 23 January for the anniversary of the fall of the Jiménez dictatorship in 1958. This was also the date chosen last year by Juan Guaidó to proclaim himself “interim president” of Venezuela. His argument, prompted by Mike Pence, was that the office was vacant, because of their non-recognition of the election of President Maduro, and therefore should go to the chairperson of the National Assembly, the office he held.
The unavoidable question of the EU
Socialist Voice has arguably been the most unwavering of English-language socialist periodicals in its analysis and exposition of the European Union as an inter-state structure of monopoly capital, under German…
Cuba: A living, developing revolution
On 1 January 2020 we celebrated the sixty-first anniversary of the triumph of the first socialist revolution in the Western Hemisphere. Sixty-one years after that historic event Cubans, and the friends of Cuba in the world, recognise the greatness of that event, which made the peoples of the world fix […]
Is national pride anti-Marxist?
As the “Irish question” comes back to haunt British Toryism as well as British social democracy, it is worth reflecting on what attitude Irish Marxists should take on the national question.
It is worth pointing out that nationalism is only ever criticised when it comes from an oppressed people
“My sin was being indigenous, leftist, and anti-imperialist”
As the brutal coup in Bolivia has yet again demonstrated, these suffocating limits on democracy are even narrower in nations under the boot of imperialism and neocolonialism.
Under the leadership of President Evo Morales and his party, MAS (Movement to Socialism), the poor and indigenous people of Bolivia have made enormous…