Resisting the work of the Gringos
Campaign News | Tuesday, 10 December 2024
An image of Che on the West Bank separation wall, East Jerusalem
Coll McCail, activist, writer and member of Progressive International's Secretariat, writes on Cuba and Palestine’s shared fight against imperialism
“Look, this is the work of the Gringos,” Che Guevara declared in Gaza in June 1959. Observing the devastation and dispossession of the Nakba first-hand, Guevara promised the people of Rafah that he would denounce their oppression “before all of humanity.”
Today, Rafah has been reduced to rubble. The streets Che once walked are unrecognisable even to those who call them home. Yet still the ‘Gringos’ guarantee the operation of Israel’s war machine. As I write, President Biden is planning to use the final days of his administration to send an $8 billion arms shipment to Tel Aviv. Washington’s support sustains Israel’s genocide in the face of popular international opposition.
Every Saturday, the streets of cities the world over are draped in the Palestinian flag. Dock workers in Morocco, Greece and India have refused to load weapons destined for Israel. Even the International Criminal Court – “built for Africa and thugs like Putin” in the words of one of its prosecutors – has crawled into action. Meanwhile, Western governments would rather repress those fighting for justice than act on their demands.
There is one island, however, where humanity’s shared call for Palestinian liberation finds national expression. Since October 2023, the Cuban government – suffering under the longest sanctions regime in human history – continues to provide over 200 fully-funded medical scholarships to Palestinian students. True to Che Guevara’s promise all those years ago, the Cubans have joined South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at The Hague. “Palestine is the location that defines the global struggle for justice and dignity,” said President Miguel Díaz-Canel, who has led thousands on solidarity marches through the streets of Havana, in June 2024.
His words embody a principle that can be traced back through the annals of history to Gaza in 1959. For the Palestinian academic Salman Abu Sitta, Che’s visit to Rafah was among the first signs that “the Zionist colonisation of Palestine” was “transforming … from a regional conflict to a global struggle against colonialism.” Less than six months after the triumph of the 26th July Movement sent shockwaves around the world, the question of Palestinian freedom became a central concern for the Cuban Revolution. Che Guevara’s visit to Al-Bureij camp – placed under week-long siege by the Israeli Occupation Forces in October 2024 – inaugurated a chain of events that would bind revolutionary Cuba to Palestine’s national liberation struggle and weave resistance to Israel’s settler-colonisation into the rich patchwork of Third World revolution.
The axiom of Cuban independence hero José Martí that “to divorce a people from its land is a monstrous criminal attack” was echoed more than a century later in the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish. In 2005, at the conclusion of the Second Intifada, Palestine’s national poet published To Our Land, which concludes:
To our land, and it is a prize of war,
the freedom to die from longing and burning
and our land, in its bloodied night,
is a jewel that glimmers for the far upon the far
and illuminates what’s outside it...
As for us, inside,
we suffocate more!
In different ways, imperialism – buoyed by two respectively powerful lobbying operations – has long tried to suffocate both the Cubans and the Palestinians. The Caribbean Island has faced a 63-year-long campaign, led by the US State Department, to deny “money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” Meanwhile, Israel’s blockade of food, fuel, water and medicine led even British Prime Minister David Cameron to compare the Gaza Strip to a “prison camp” in 2010. In 2024, the escalation of this blockade left over one million people facing famine and prompted the return of polio – only for the IDF to inhibit UN-led vaccination efforts. Today, the Palestinians are divorced from their land at record pace as illegal Israeli settlements expand with state support in the occupied West Bank. Thousands of miles away, the US continues to occupy 118 square km of Cuba’s southeastern territory to maintain its torture camp at Guantánamo Bay.
Though different in method, the violence meted out to both peoples shares a motivation: To crush the very aspiration of self-determination and human dignity. First entangled by the hand of their shared oppressor, today the Cuban and Palestinian people are united on their own terms by the bonds of solidarity constructed over decades.
Two years after Che Guevara’s visit, the Executive Committee of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organisation (AAPSO) met in Gaza in 1961. Six years after the Bandung Conference and two months after the foundation of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in Belgrade, the meeting proposed to organise a tricontinental conference. Convened in Havana five years later but conceived in Palestine, the conference brought together 500 delegates – including members of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) – from 82 countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America “to unite, coordinate, and step up the struggle against US imperialism on the part of all exploited peoples.”
Marking a high point in the articulation of the Third World project, one British consular officer in the Cuban capital called the Conference “the most important communist meeting” of its era. The Tricontinental’s final declaration called specifically for the “solidarity of all peoples with the Arab people of Palestine in its just struggle for the liberation of its homeland from imperialism and Zionist aggression.”
Having left Cuba to apply his experiences as a guerilla in the Sierra Maestra elsewhere, Che Guevara was absent from the conference and sent a written message to delegates: “How close we could look into a bright future should two, three or many Vietnams flourish throughout the world with their share of deaths and their immense tragedies, their everyday heroism and their repeated blows against imperialism, impelled to disperse its forces under the sudden attack and the increasing hatred of all peoples of the world!”
To this end, in the following years, Cuba’s revolutionary government worked with the PLO to ensure a blow was struck against imperialism in occupied Palestine. After the 1967 War, which led to the forced displacement of a further 300,000 Palestinians, Cuba’s military experts were dispatched to Jordan to help train the Palestinian resistance. Five years later, during the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, Fidel Castro dispatched an expeditionary force of more than 500 to fight alongside the Arab nations.
One month before the war began, at the fourth summit of the NAM in Algiers, Castro announced that Cuba had terminated all diplomatic relations with Israel and invited Yasser Arafat to Havana. Arriving in November 1974, the Chairman of the PLO was afforded the reception of a head of state and awarded CubaŹ¼s highest honour, the Order of Playa Giron.
The formal establishment of relations between Cuba and the PLO in 1974 saw the subsequent opening of a Palestinian embassy in Havana. 50 years later, the people of Palestine continue to be denied this right in Washington or London, whose streets have been adorned by their flag every other Saturday for over a year. However, in their refusal to recognise the State of Palestine, Britain and the US are increasingly isolated. 146 countries and 75 per cent of UN member states have followed Cuba’s lead over the last half-century. Indeed, in 2012 – despite the US’ best efforts – the Cubans led a successful campaign to grant Palestine Non-Member Observer status at the UN.
It is often said that Cuba is a beacon of hope for humanity. But the Revolution is much more than that. The spirit of defiance that commanded the Cuban people to throw off the chains of dictatorship in 1959 has always demanded a passionate commitment to the world’s oppressed. “To be an internationalist,” said Fidel Castro, “is to settle our own debt with humanity.” Such an imperative has seen the Cuban Revolution offer free university education to some 1,500 Palestinians, many of them doctors, since 1974. This selfless contribution, grounded in the resolute belief in a better tomorrow, is perhaps the greatest irony of Cuba’s designation as a ‘State Sponsor of Terrorism’ by the US. For Palestine, just as for Angola and South Africa forty years ago, Cuba is a state sponsor of hope in times of genocide.
