In the face of the United States accelerating aggression against Cuba, organisations connected to the International Peoples Assembly (IPA) globally have been meeting with the Cuban ambassador of their country to pledge a strengthening of international solidarity.

On 17 April, Red Spark visited the Cuban Embassy in Canberra to personally deliver a letter of solidarity to Ambassador Gilma Moreira Lino (see below) and discuss concrete proposals for ongoing collaboration with Cuba. Similar initiatives are taking place across the world including at the Tanzania Socialist Forum (TASOFO) and by the Mazdoor Kisan Party (MKP) in Pakistan.

The Embassy wrote of the meeting,

“a fruitful exchange took place at the Cuban Embassy in Australia with young members of the solidarity movement in Australia…as part of the commemorative activities for the centennial of the birth of Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro Ruz.

“During the meeting, participants discussed various initiatives aimed at honouring the legacy of the historic leader of the Cuban Revolution, with an emphasis on the leading role of youth in defending and continuing the revolutionary work. Educational proposals were highlighted to encourage young Australians to study the life and political ideology of the Commander.

“The young people from Red Spark shared their experiences and commitments to promoting Fidelist values, anti-imperialism, and international solidarity. Representatives of the Cuban diplomatic mission emphasized the importance of these actions within the framework of the commemoration of the centenary of Fidel’s birth.

“The exchange took place in an atmosphere of enthusiasm and revolutionary commitment, reaffirming that Fidel’s ideas and example continue to inspire the youth of Cuba and the rest of the world.

“The event is part of a broad program of activities being carried out in Cuba and in various countries around the world to mark the centenary of the Commander’s birth. The year 2026 was declared in Cuba the “Year of the Centenary of Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro Ruz.”

Letter in Solidarity with Cuba

Your Excellency,

We, the undersigned members of Red Spark, which forms part of the International Peoples’ Assembly (IPA), write to you today in solidarity with the Cuban people and the Cuban Revolution, and in firm opposition to the ongoing and escalating United States blockade against Cuba. We write not only as organisations committed to a world free of imperialism and exploitation, but as peoples whose own histories bear the scars of colonial plunder and whose present struggles are inseparable from the fate of Cuba’s revolutionary project.

The IPA is an internationalist process uniting over 200 organisations, social movements, political parties, and trade unions across all five continents. Founded on the principles of anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, feminism, and ecology, the IPA was built with the mission of forging the unity of the working class and constructing a global mass movement for the liberation of humanity and the planet. Our strength lies in the solidarity of peoples, and it is in that spirit that we act today.

On the Escalating Assault Against Cuba

The world knows that Cuba is not a threat. It is US imperialism that threatens the peoples of the world — plundering nations to extend imperial control across the Western Hemisphere and beyond. The return of the Trump administration has brought with it a dangerous intensification of aggression against Cuba: a tightened oil embargo that threatens to extinguish the basic conditions of life for 11 million people, the maintenance of Cuba on Washington’s fabricated list of State Sponsors of Terrorism, the suffocating extraterritorial application of sanctions designed to deter third countries from normal trade and cooperation, and the broader revival of the Monroe Doctrine as the operating logic of US foreign policy across the Global South.

These are not sanctions. They are collective punishment. They are an act of economic warfare against a small island nation whose only crime is having built a society in defiance of imperial dictates. The recent attacks on Venezuela, the illegal detention of President Nicolás Maduro and Congresswoman Cilia Flores — which took the lives of 32 Cuban combatants — and the weaponisation of tariffs against sovereign nations from Latin America to Asia and the Pacific reveal a concerted attempt to re-impose the hierarchies of domination that our peoples have spent generations fighting to dismantle.

Cuba and the Peoples of Asia: A History Written in Solidarity 

We in Asia have a particular reason to stand with Cuba, because Cuba has stood with us. When calamity has struck our peoples, Cuba has answered — not with charity from a position of power, but with internationalist solidarity rooted in shared humanity. Cuban medical brigades have served in the wake of earthquakes, floods, and epidemics across Asia and the broader Global South, including in the aftermath of the catastrophic 2005 Pakistan earthquake and recurring disaster emergencies across South and Southeast Asia. Cuba’s Henry Reeve International Medical Brigade has deployed to crisis zones across the world, carrying a tradition of solidarity that no other nation on earth has matched in proportion to its own size and resources. During the COVID-19 pandemic, while wealthy nations hoarded vaccines, Cuba developed its own, including Soberana and Abdala, and shared them with countries that the global pharmaceutical oligopoly had abandoned.

Cuba has trained generations of doctors from Asia, Africa, and Latin America through the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM), offering full scholarships to students from poor and working-class families who would otherwise never have accessed medical education. These doctors return to their communities and serve the people. This is what internationalism looks like in practice, and it stands in permanent contrast to the conditional aid and structural adjustment that imperial powers impose on nations in crisis.

Cuba also stood with the liberation movements of Asia in the era of anti-colonial struggle, recognising the common thread connecting the revolutionary aspirations of peoples across the tricontinental world — a tradition that the International Peoples Assembly, of which several of our organisations are partners, continues to develop and deepen.

What Cuba Has Built and Why It Must Be Defended

This blockade is a desperate attempt to erase a socialist project that dares to put people before profit. Despite enduring more than 60 years of illegal and violent collective punishment, the Cuban Revolution has opened the world’s political imagination. Cuba has guaranteed universal healthcare and education to all its citizens, achieved among the world’s highest literacy rates, a higher healthy life expectancy than the United States, low infant mortality, and at times the effective elimination of child malnutrition. Cuba has one of the highest rates of homeownership and women’s political participation on the planet. Its Family Code is among the most progressive in the world. At every moment of international crisis, Cuba has asked not what it can receive, but what it can give.

The current oil embargo is designed to choke this project to death — to force rolling blackouts, to halt transportation, to render impossible the functioning of hospitals and schools, and in doing so, to manufacture a crisis whose costs will be borne entirely by ordinary Cuban people. The logic is clear: if you cannot defeat the Revolution politically, starve it materially. We refuse to accept this logic. And we refuse to remain silent while it is applied.

Our Demands

In light of this, we call upon the Government of Australia to:

1. Publicly and unambiguously condemn the United States blockade against Cuba as a violation of international law, an act of economic aggression, and a form of collective punishment against a sovereign people, and to raise this condemnation in all relevant multilateral forums including the United Nations General Assembly, where an overwhelming majority of nations have repeatedly voted for the blockade’s end.
   
2. Defy the extraterritorial reach of US sanctions by actively continuing and expanding trade, energy, diplomatic, and people-to-people relations with Cuba, and to refuse complicity with Washington’s attempt to impose its unilateral coercive measures on third countries as a condition of access to the US market and financial system.
   
3. Provide concrete and immediate support — including humanitarian and technical assistance, energy resources, and medical supplies — to the Cuban people in response to the crisis induced by the tightened oil embargo, and to work in coordination with other governments of the Global South to develop mechanisms of South-South solidarity that bypass the imperial financial architecture.

Our Solidarity Is Not a Gesture — It Is a Commitment

When we defend Cuban sovereignty, we defend the sovereignty of every nation to chart its own path. When we oppose the blockade, we oppose the broader architecture of imperial coercion that has been deployed against our own countries — through sanctions, through debt, through military encirclement, through the manipulation of trade regimes. The struggle for Cuba is inseparable from the struggle for a multipolar world in which the nations and peoples of the Global South are free to determine their own futures.

The Cuban Revolution has demonstrated to the world that dignity is a non-negotiable right. It has shown that a small nation, even under siege, can build a society of extraordinary solidarity. We draw inspiration from that example. We are strengthened by it. And we commit ourselves to defending it with the same spirit of internationalism with which Cuba has stood with us.

In the name of Red Spark and the International Peoples’ Assembly, we extend our steadfast, unconditional, and active solidarity with Cuba and the Cuban people.

Viva Cuba libre!
Venceremos!

In solidarity,

Red Spark