This special issue of Monthly Review, The Cuban Revolution Today: Experiments in the Grip of Challenges, carries forward a tradition established six decades ago. The stance of the magazine reflects the view of C. Wright Mills. In his Listen, Yankee, Mills wrote that we don’t worry about the Cuban Revolution, we worry with it. This volume is put together in that spirit. | more…
The U.S. government is obsessed with Cuba. Cuba is a small island, ninety miles off the shore of Florida, that is home to eleven million people. Not a day has gone by that the United States has not tried to overturn the Cuban Revolution, through the assassination of its leaders, invasions by proxy forces, preventing it from normal commercial and diplomatic relations, and encouraging social distress in the island to become a counterrevolutionary force. That is the level of the obsession. | more…
Notwithstanding an ongoing commitment to redouble its efforts, Cuban socialism has not taken full advantage of its own human and material resources to develop its productive forces. It is necessary to distinguish between our right and duty to struggle against the blockade and our expectations regarding what one can and cannot hope for if it is lifted. | more…
The Cuban Revolution cannot disintegrate because it was never made of meringue. Not because it has not been sweet, but because the revolution has also tasted bitter fruits that, to date, we have known how to turn into strengths. | more…
On Sunday, July 11, 2021, demonstrations occurred in various parts of Cuba. Many of the demonstrators went onto the streets to protest the frequent prolonged power outages in various locations, shortages of food and medicine, and the general precariousness of daily life. A variety of different perspectives are putting their own spin on these events. | more…
The Eighth Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba—held from April 16 to 19, 2021—offers salient questions, issues, and other themes of the current reality of Cuba from the view of revolutionary militants. Let us take heed. | more…
Despite Cuba’s advantages—its free, universal public health system and its capacity for rapid scientific development, which put it at the forefront in research and vaccine production globally—it was unable to escape the pandemic’s blows. | more…
With the rapidly worsening capitalist demolition of the planetary environment and the expansion of ecosocialist movements in response, leading establishment think tanks, like the corporate-supported Breakthrough Institute, dedicated to promoting the ideology of “green capitalism” at any cost, have found themselves in a difficult place. | more…
Bhagat Singh is an iconic figure of the radical left tradition in India. If Singh, killed in the resistance to British colonialism, were to return from the dead, would he feel that the India of today, brought about by its ruling classes and their political representatives, was really worth his and his comrades’ martyrdom? | more…
There are a thousand ways to be a radical lawyer. Michael Ratner’s magnificent Moving the Bar gives a tantalizing taste of how one person, with his increasing band of colleagues, defended movements for social justice and revolution during his lifetime. | more…
This exchange appeared in the September 1961 issue of Monthly Review. The questions were submitted, in writing, to Comandante Guevara by Leo Huberman during the week of the Bay of Pigs invasion; the answers were received at the end of June. | more…
A few days ago, a cable brought the news of the death of some Guatemalan patriots, among them Julio Roberto Cáceres Valle. In this difficult job of a revolutionary, in the midst of class wars which are convulsing the entire continent, death is a frequent accident. But the death of a friend, a comrade during difficult hours and a sharer in dreams of better times, is always painful for the person who receives the news, and Julio Roberto was a great friend. | more…