By Frank Solar Cabrales – Oct 21, 2026

In 1934, facing the threat of fascism coming to power, Spanish workers had a slogan with which they rose up in arms in October of that year, at least in Asturias: “Vienna before Berlin.” It reflected a decision to fight to the death: Hitler had taken power practically without resistance in Berlin; the Austrian fascists had to drown an armed popular rebellion in blood to do the same. Today we should say: “Tehran before Caracas.”

Our main weapon against a violent action by imperialism is not so much the military response from the state we can give from an institutional or conventional standpoint, but the one a broader collective revolutionary subject can give, one that transcends Cuba.

Imperialism fears above all, more than the quantity or range of our probable drones, a process of destabilization in the region and in the United States itself. An aggression against the symbol that Cuba represents could be a detonator for an explosion of popular anger and rebellion across the continent. Perhaps the Cuban state cannot do it, because it must abide by certain international norms, but Cuban revolutionaries can and must do it, and work toward it:

A call for an invasion of Cuba must be answered with insurrectional uprisings and a total paralysis of economic activity in this hemisphere. May everyone who feels or calls themselves a friend of Cuba express their militant and active solidarity in that way.

It may sound utopian, but the impact such a call can have in certain circumstances must not be underestimated, given Cuba’s prestige and moral authority. May the War of All the People cross our borders and become the War of All Peoples against imperialism and its local allies.

Our enemy is one and the same throughout the world, and the Cuban Revolution is just one more trench in a combat that has a planetary dimension. We must multiply the trenches opened against the common enemy we share. Our struggles are indissolubly united. Those who impose a criminal blockade on us, asphyxiating our economy in a daily genocide and under the constant threat of military aggression, are the same ones who within their own borders condemn millions of workers, young people, and the oppressed to misery, precariousness, and a lack of future. It is imperialism and the global bourgeoisie, a parasitic and corrupt oligarchy that commodifies human life, destroys the planet, and does not hesitate to sow global terror to safeguard its obscene privileges.

Unlike what the relationship with the Soviet Union or the socialist camp meant—or even with Venezuela, which was an alliance not only economic but political and ideological—in the case of present-day Russia, China, or the BRICS in general, these are friendly countries that condemn the blockade and want to have normal commercial relations with Cuba. Yet, they operate under capitalist logic, and their business and interests with Cuba have no altruistic or humanitarian purposes, but seek to obtain their own benefits and geopolitical advantages. The international economic crisis of capitalism also limits any option the BRICS might represent for Cuba. Without Russian and Chinese cooperation, it would have been more difficult for Cuba to face the current electricity generation crisis, caused by oil scarcity and the precarious state of its grids and thermoelectric plants. However, it would be naive to expect any kind of military aid from these governments if Cuba were attacked. It does not enter their calculations to risk unleashing a third world war to defend the Caribbean island. The safeguarding of national sovereignty and the Cuban Revolution depends on Cubans themselves, and the defeat of imperialism will only be guaranteed by the international triumph of revolutionary, socialist processes that propose a radical transformation and break with capitalism. Despite the material shortages we suffer for resisting with dignity, the Cuban people will not give up.

The main way out of Cuba’s crisis is international solidarity and the advance of the world revolutionary movement. Socialism cannot be built in a single country in isolation. To be fully itself as a transition to communism, socialism must exist on an international scale.

While the world revolution comes about, which must be worked for and promoted as the basic guarantee of its own success, socialist powers cloistered within national borders can only resist and advance as much as they can with what they have at their disposal, amid the fiercest siege by reaction and imperialism. This forces them, out of a need for survival, into cutbacks, retreats, and concessions in order to adapt to an extremely hostile environment of capitalist relations.

We must call things by their name, and not call what is clearly a retreat in order to survive measures to perfect socialism. The project is not tainted. Retreats must be honestly recognized. We must honestly acknowledge these setbacks and not call socialism what it is not—practices and dynamics that have nothing to do with it and can in no way be used to its advantage. The transition can experience setbacks, but they must be openly recognized. The market is not an aseptic tool that can be used to build socialism, a wild horse that can be tamed and reined in to force it to obey the rider’s will.

The instruments chosen to generate wealth, growth, and development are not neutral; they produce their own subjectivities, logics, and social relations, which point in one direction or another and favor one path or another, regardless of their purpose. In Cuba, we have had decades of internal struggle between capitalism and socialism in which the former has been constantly reinforced, especially since the “Guidelines…,” and the latter has been increasingly forced to retreat. One thing is to understand that many of the economic transformations currently underway may be necessary right now to survive, but quite another is to turn them into a virtue for the perfection of socialism. The possibility of disputing a socialist alternative lies, in my opinion, not in a skillful policy capable of conducting the “tactical retreat” using the measures in its favor and taking advantage of the blunted weapons of the market for the benefit of socialism, which I believe is impossible. The alternative is one from below, from the bases, from the real control of community collectives, workers, and peasants coordinated among themselves with decision-making power. Only this is capable of counteracting the effects and setting limits on retreats, and reversing the process when possible.

The difficult situation Cuba is going through, aggravated in recent years to unbearable limits, is due above all and in the first place to the isolation of its socialist project, which has not allowed it to reach full potential for efficiency and development of a nationalized and planned economy. Socialism is much more efficient than capitalism, provided it is managed through collective and democratic control by workers, and it increasingly spreads on an international scale.

In recent years, we have seen a rise of the far right in several countries, with surprising electoral support. Does it mean a shift to the right among the populations of those countries? How have we gotten here? The fundamental explanation should not be sought in the impact of digital social media, nor in cognitive warfare, nor in the lack of political education and consciousness, or in the lack of contact with the poor. It should be sought in the deep crisis of capitalism, and the absence of a coherent, mass left alternative that represents a radical break with the prevailing system. Reformism, with its useless pretension of managing capitalism in a more humane and just way, has reached a dead end. The alternative to the rise of reactionary, far-right governments is not the restoration of the legitimacy of institutions and bourgeois democracy, but its destruction.

We must seek Latin American unity in justice and freedom. The existence of CELAC or any other integration mechanism has proven not to be a sure guarantee of a Latin America united against the threats coming from the north, not only because several member governments are themselves an expression of that international rise of the far-right, but because the interests of the Latin American bourgeoisies are highly dependent on US imperialism.

The true unity of Our America, its real and definitive independence, will come hand in hand with revolution.

Cuba is not a threat to the United States or to its people. Yes, Cuba is a danger to the US ruling class, but not because it possesses drones or missiles that can reach it, or because of the intelligence work it has been forced to deploy to defend itself, but because of the threat its example represents.

That is why they have been deeply determined to make it fail. If the specter of communism today roams with unusual force from one end of the US nation to the other, to the terror of Trump, Rubio, and the billionaires of the “Epstein class,” it is not by the work and grace of this small island, blockaded and the victim of a genocide. It is because of the very conditions of capitalism in crisis and exhausted, incapable of ensuring a dignified existence for millions of people. Making Cuba fail is not only a historical obsession of imperialism and the Cuban American lobby, but a vital internal need for the US establishment—to use it as an ideological argument in containing growing popular discontent and the progressive discredit of capitalism and its institutions. They have to demonstrate in practice the unviability of socialism in order to delegitimize it. That the failure is induced by force, by the total asphyxiation of its economy, by a knee on the neck preventing it from breathing, and not by natural causes, is for them a minor detail. The important thing is to be able to present socialism as a failed, inefficient system, incapable of generating wealth and prosperity, and whose only result after 60 years is misery, garbage in the streets, and long blackouts. That a country with very limited resources like Cuba can, with socialism, work the miracle of providing education, housing, health, culture, scientific development, and quality of life for all under equal conditions, something the most powerful capitalism cannot even dream of achieving, is an unbearably subversive example that they cannot allow 90 miles from their shores.

Cuba does not foster communism in the United States. The very living conditions of the US working class point to its possibility as a better society of justice and dignity for all. Cuba only provides the powerful example of how much a people can achieve when it frees itself from the chains of capitalism.

What truly bothers the hegemonic power and explains the ferocity against Cuba is that, on this island, a way of life has been tested that has proven to be much more just, humane, and dignified than the one lived in other confines of the world. A way of life where equality, health care, education, and housing are guaranteed for all under a socialist model of a planned national economy. The very existence of Cuba, 90 miles from the United States, is a dangerous example that the empire seeks to make fail at all costs so that it does not spread to the rest of Latin America and the world. The mere fact that the blockade exists is palpable proof of the superiority of the Cuban example. If socialism were so inefficient, the United States could lift the blockade and let the revolution fail on its own.

The Cuban Revolution is not the patrimony of Cubans alone, but of all revolutionaries and peoples of the world.

It is a symbol of resistance and hope for the oppressed of the entire planet, the palpable demonstration that the utopia of a better society is possible, that it is possible to establish new relations between human beings, with well-being for all, that it is possible to successfully defy imperialism and powerful dominant forces. The defeat of the Cuban Revolution would mean not only an enormous setback in the living conditions of Cuban workers and the loss of national sovereignty, but also an extraordinary blow to all popular causes and struggles at the international level. Its defense is, therefore, an unavoidable duty of the exploited and rebellious of the entire world. Today, more than ever, its destiny is decided in the outcome of the international class struggle. The survival and definitive triumph of the Cuban socialist project is determined, in the last instance, by the extension of the world socialist revolution. That is why.

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(Medium)

Translation: Orinoco Tribune

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