Solidarity 3/102, 16 November 2006

Castro and the Cuban revolution

By Paul Hampton

Paul Hampton assesses Fidel Castro’s legacy — the nature of the 1959 revolution and the social and political changes Cuba is now experiencing.

The overthrow of Batista in the last days of 1958 was a popular revolution that socialists and radicals everywhere supported. Batista had made Cuba a vassal of the US and held down the Cuban working class with repression and a compliant union bureaucracy.

How to fight, and how not to fight, the BNP

His porcine cheeks ruddy with the burst veins of the long-haul serious whisky drinker, looking like an overfed pork butcher on a spree, Nick Griffin, Führer of the fascist British National Party, emerged from the Crown Court in Leeds spluttering with triumph and vindication. He praised the jury. He denounced the politicians. He told people how wonderful the BNP is.

Debate: Labour Party, hijab, Georgia

The politics of denial

The editorial Maria Exall criticises in Solidarity 3/100 may have misunderstood and (inadvertently) misrepresented specific details about the Labour Party. But it is a matter of fact, surely, that there is now very little life in the Labour Party? Maria seems to me to be in a state of denial. She uses “nit-picking” facts, alleged facts and “factoids” to destructure and obfuscate the overall picture.

Education, education, alienation

By David Broder

The demand for free education is often linked to the assertion that “education is a right, not a privilege”. The right of access to education for all represents a great social conquest for the working-class, a gain perhaps even akin to healthcare. That right must be defended. But it would be short-sighted to think that the education system represented everything we want, or was not in its own way alienating, a weapon in the armoury of bourgeois ideology designed to serve the needs of capital.