Every year since 1992 the overwhelming majority of UN member countries have voted for Cuba’s resolution demanding an end to the US economic blockade against the Caribbean socialist state. On October 29, the UN General Assembly voted for the 17th consecutive year in favour of Cuba’s motion.

Brussels – In 2007-2008, the standard of living of more than half of the world population dropped dramatically when the price of food soared. There were massive demonstrations in at least 15 countries in the first half of 2008.

While capitalist governments around the world have responded to the freezing up of the capitalist financial system by turning trillions of dollars of public funds over to bankrupt bankers, the revolutionary government of Venezuelan socialist President Hugo Chavez has continued to take steps to redistribute wealth to Venezuela’s working people.

In the Indian state of Gujarat, 50 kilometres southeast of the city of Bhavnagar, lie the ship-breaking yards of Alang. What was once a pristine beach is being used as a deadly graveyard for the world’s supertankers, container ships, car ferries and naval vessels. Even aircraft carriers are dismantled at Alang.

On October 25, Major-General Tariq Khan, commander of Pakistan’s paramilitary Frontier Corps (FC), announced that his officers had captured Loi Sam, a key Taliban stronghold in the Bajaur region, part of the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA) on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

Aghast at the atrocities committed by US forces invading the Philippines, and the rhetorical flights about liberation and noble intent that routinely accompany crimes of state, Mark Twain threw up his hands at his inability to wield his formidable weapon of satire. The immediate object of his frustration was the renowned General Funston.

“A nuclear strike” is how Cuban leader Fidel Castro described Hurricane Gustav, which roared across Cuba’s Isle of Youth and the western province of Pinar del Rio on August 30. A week later Cuba was hit by the even more destructive Hurricane Ike, which gouged a swathe of devastation from one end of the Caribbean island to the other.

On October 9, millions throughout the world will commemorate the 41st anniversary of the assassination of Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Che was central to the victory of the Cuban revolution of January 1, 1959. Since then his role and contribution to socialism in Cuba and to socialist understanding have been reflected upon and admired by millions of revolutionaries around the world.

The Eighth Congress of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) [CPI (ML)], held in December 2007 in Kolkata (Calcutta), West Bengal, was its biggest yet, registering the party’s growing support among India’s workers and peasants.

As the Sun disappeared below the horizon of the North Pole on September 22 – ending the Northern hemisphere’s summer – it left behind the second-lowest minimum level of Arctic summer ice cover since satellite records began 29 years ago.

Havana – The economic, commercial and financial blockade imposed by the United States for 50 years is the main obstacle to Cuba’s development, the well-being of the Cuban people and, under the current circumstances, all the work involved in recovering from the extensive damage caused by hurricanes Gustav and Ike, stated Cuban foreign minister Felipe Perez Roque in Havana.

San Francisco, September 25 – Today there are spontaneous demonstrations occurring on Wall Street and over 200 other places across the country denouncing the plan to bail out the Wall Street financiers to the tune of US$700 billion. One journalist sent out an email proposing such demonstrations and then support for it exploded on the internet.

Peter Camejo, a Venezuelan-American and life-long revolutionary, died on September 13 in the San Francisco Bay area. The cause was cancer.

La Paz – On the eve of the 35th anniversary of the September 11, 1973, CIA-backed military coup that overthrew the elected social-democratic government of Chilean president Salvador Allende, Washington was again attempting to orchestrate a coup against a left-wing government in South America.

[The following is the address given by Cuban Vice-President Jose Ramon Machado to the UN General Assembly on September 24. It has been slightly abridged.]

On September 17, former Venezuelan vice-president Jose Vicente reported to the country’s National Assembly that the US government was at the centre of a foiled coup plot planned for October 15 to violently overthrow the elected government of President Hugo Chavez that is leading a socialist revolution in Venezuela.

Forty-six human rights activists from 17 countries broke the Israeli siege of Gaza on August 23. The SS Free Gaza and SS Liberty, two refitted Greek boats carrying 40 people, some food and medical supplies, left Cyprus on August 21 to make the 350-kilometre, 32-hour journey to Gaza.

It’s not surprising that we tend to associate Cuba with the word “dictatorship” rather than, say, “democracy”. This is not because Cuba really is a dictatorship, but because most Australians form an opinion of socialist Cuba based on how Cuba is portrayed in the corporate media.

On August 10, Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, and his vice-president, Alvaro Garcia Linera, secured a resounding victory in an opposition party-initiated recall referendum with a popular vote of 67.4%, an increase of 14 percentage points on the vote that brought Morales to office in December 2005.

In 1964, a 22-year-old Palestinian poet named Mahmoud Darwish shared the struggle of his people with the world, writing: “Record!/ I am an Arab/ And my identity card is number fifty thousand/ I have eight children/ And the ninth is coming after a summer/ Will you be angry? … Record! I am an Arab/ I have a name without a title/ ...

San Francisco – The nomination of Barack Obama as the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party is historic. He is the first African American presidential candidate of one of the two major capitalist parties. He may win the election and become the first black president, something inconceivable even only two years ago.

In the months preceding the March 2003 US-British-Australian invasion of Iraq, the French government’s opposition received a great deal of publicity. This led to illusions among some anti-war activists that the French rulers represented a progressive alternative to the “Anglo-Saxon” imperialists.

This year’s May Day demonstrations in Jakarta took on a special significance because they came 10 years after General Suharto was forced by mass street protests to resign as Indonesia’s president. The May 1 marches were followed by another lively round of protests on May 21, the anniversary of the day Suharto fell.

“I naively took as a reference point Tony Blair’s proposal for a ‘third way’ between capitalism and socialism – capitalism with a human face”, Hugo Chavez, told Time magazine in 2006, reflecting on his own views before he was elected Venezuela’s president in 1998. Since then, Chavez’s views have dramatically changed.

“Chavez makes a new power grab” screamed an August 6 Wall Street Journal headline. The following day, in an article titled “The autocrat of Caracas”, the London Economist claimed that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was “violat[ing] the constitution”.