SOLOMON HUGHES recommends Sunjeev Sahota’s recent novel set in a trade union election campaign for its fresh approach to what unites and divides workers, but wishes the union backdrop was truer to life
IN HAVANA, written on a wall there is a slogan accredited to young communists: “Amor es la major ley” (love is the best law). What would you give to live in a society where love is proclaimed as the best law? Words like “love thy neighbour as thyself” are often spoken at this time of year but it is Cuba that provides an example the like of which the world has never seen before.
In 1998 when Hurricane Mitch devastated Nicaragua and Honduras, Cuba immediately sent medical personnel to help. But instead of just short-term emergency relief Cubans pointed out that “the permanent hurricane of poverty and underdevelopment kills more people every year than these hurricanes just did…”
Many of those treated had never seen a doctor before so Cuba came up with its own version of the “teach a person to fish” story. They immediately set about transforming a naval academy on Cuba’s north coast, just west of Havana, into the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM) and it was officially opened by Raul Castro a few months later in March 1999.
As the US intensifies its economic and political pressure it is now vitally important to demand the British government intervene to end US aggression, writes GEOFF BOTTOMS
In the centenary year of Fidel Castro, Cuba faces ferocious aggression from the United States — but we will not kneel, vows FIDEL CASTRO SMIRNOV
On January 29, US President Donald Trump declared Cuba an ‘unusual and extraordinary threat’ to US national security and tightened the blockade against the island nation MANOLO DE LOS SANTOS reports
While ordinary Americans were suffering in the wake of 2005’s deadly hurricane, the Bush administration was more concerned with maintaining its anti-Cuba stance than with saving lives, writes MANOLO DE LOS SANTOS



