Cuba Solidarity Campaign: Brits abroad brigade
The Cuba Solidarity Campaign (CSC) positions itself as a key – if not the leading – actor in building British solidarity with Cuba, as both the largest and the most financially backed group in Britain. The organisation is loud and proud in their support for a sovereign Cuban state. Yet, their recent brigade of young trade unionists to Cuba for May Day raised serious questions about how exactly they understand and practice solidarity within their work.
Speaking to other brigadistas at the camp brought some alarming matters to light. Namely, some members of the CSC delegation being ex-military, weapons manufacturers and active prison officers complicit in the ongoing state sanctioned violence against incarcerated people. For some of the officers, violence against incarcerated people was a running joke, lightened only by their need to excessively drink, seek out illegal drugs and objectify women.
A unionised prison and policing force will always remain antithetical to the global, decolonial movement that Cuba has pledged itself to. Their presence was not an isolated oversight but symptomatic of an approach to solidarity that prioritises credibility within established systems of power over political clarity, discipline, and shared values.
A key tenet of the CSC’s political strategy is to heavily rely on the trade union movement, often without question or interrogation of exactly who this movement seeks to unify and represent. For the brigade, allegiance with a trade union was the sole criterion needed to come to Cuba and no further political vetting or questioning was done. Arguably, an unwavering loyalty to workplaces entangled with war crimes and institutional racism is not a symbol of political integrity but of moral weakness; a signifier that your vision of a united working class only goes as far as the Global North borders can stretch.
Fidel Castro reminds us that ‘internationalism is paying our debt to humanity,’ but what internationalism was practised here? What solidarity was built with a ‘Brits Abroad Brigade’ whose response to being in revolutionary Cuba was to drink, party and sip the colonial kool-aid? To call it voyeuristic tourism would be an understatement. It was a masterclass in rebranding neocolonial volun-tourism and white entitlement as international solidarity.
Sabreen
MAY DAY BRIGADE PARTICIPANT
For a report on the Revolutionary Communist Group’s delegation on the International May Day Brigade to Cuba, see:
Defend the Cuban Revolution!
Stand with Kneecap!
I stand completely behind Kneecap and their expression of hatred against the oppression and mindless murder of innocent lives. They are being painted as the crooked youth, but they are anything but. While I’m British in accent, I’m Irish in blood, spirit, and passion. And this isn’t about free speech, this is about using your platform to shine a spotlight on injustice.
Also, who gives a fuck about Sharon Osbourne. If Ozzy was the rock star of his youth today, he would be saying the exact same thing.
Paddy McLean
FRFI READER
Palestinian comrades and elections in Venezuela
We were in Venezuela as international observers during the recent elections for the International Assembly and the Regional Governments. This electoral system includes both in-person and digital voting, using machines. The process consists of 18 different audits; in other words, it has a level of control and legitimacy that makes the fraud alleged by the imperialist media impossible.
During our stay, the people welcomed us with great affection, and we were able to witness the reality and resilience of our beloved Venezuela. It must be said that the Venezuelan people are a brave and dignified people who, once again, voted for the right to justice and against fascism, where they had the rights and democracy to elect their leaders who will lead the country toward a better future.
Viva Venezuela! Viva Palestina libre!
Yazan Zahran
PALESTINIAN YOUTH ORGANISATION, HAVANA
Counterfire misuses Marx
The Marxism article in Counterfire April 2025 misuses the quote from the Communist Manifesto that ‘the working class has no country’.
The article notes Marx’s support for the bourgeois nationalist struggles in Italy and Poland and for the abolition of slavery in America but makes no mention of Ireland. This is deliberate. It promotes a distorted view of Marx as an ‘internationalist’ ie. not nationalist.
Marx and Engels defended the Fenians against Gladstone and organised massive demonstrations in their support. Three reactionary unions left the International in protest. Marx and Engels understood that revolutionary nationalism is nationalist in form but internationalist in content. James Connolly knew this implicitly and gave his life for it. Trotsky didn’t understand. He dismissed the Easter Rising as a ‘putsch’.
Marx and Engels’ work on Ireland at the end of the 19th century is the root of Lenin’s position on the right of nations to self-determination, the division of the world into oppressed and oppressor nations, the need for workers and oppressed peoples of all countries to unite against imperialism. The superprofits of imperialism inevitably give rise to the formation of labour aristocracies and opportunist politics in the oppressor nations, a reality that Counterfire denies.
When Counterfire applies its abstract notion of internationalism to Palestine it imagines Palestinian and Israeli workers coming together to fight capitalism in this ‘little loyal Ulster in the middle east’. Connolly would have found this ‘screamingly funny in its absurdity’.
Counterfire does not have a letters page or an editorial address to write to, placing itself outside the Marxist tradition of polemic.
Peter Lynch
MANCHESTER
Solidarity with FRFI
Thank you for FRFI 305, As usual I read it with much interest.
Overall, I give you the best wishes for your comrades, and the other comrades, of course, arrested or charged because of their activity or speeches in solidarity with Palestine. They are on the right side of history, as are the heroic people they sustained.
Prison isn’t a ‘shame’ for those who are in it, but for the ones who put them in it! Hoping they are quickly free of all prison time and charges. I send you a big embrace.
Stefano Scarabello
STRADA STATALE 31, 50/A SAN MICHELE
15122 – ALESSANDRIA
Justice for Terry Allen
I am writing to FRFI on behalf of my dad’s friend Terence ‘Terry’ Allen. Terry got sentenced and is still in prison now because he will not plead guilty to something he did not do.
In 1985 Terence was charged with the rape and murder of Anita Kirkwood, despite conflicting accounts and evidence which were not disclosed during his trial. He was found guilty of the murder and given a 15-year tariff, with his earliest date of release being June 2000.
In 2014 DNA testing was done on the case, which produced 3 reports. The first report was deemed inconclusive, and more testing needed to be done. The second stated he was one point short of being a perfect match to the DNA sample removed from Anita’s body. The third and final report states that Terence Allen is NOT the source of this DNA sample.
Despite the conclusive results from the final report, the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) used the first report to reject his application for appeal in 2015. On 29 April 2025 the CCRC are coming to collect another DNA sample from him using another DNA firm based out of France.
Terence is now 73 years old; his life has been stolen from him by the British legal system.
Our legal system is rotten to the core: falsified statements, fake forensics, perjury and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, the legal system has cost him 40 years of his life.
JUSTICE FOR TERENCE ALLEN!
Laura Lee
FRFI READER
Response to FRFI on trans liberation
The recent FRFI article by Lainey Everin, ‘Supreme Court rules against trans people’ is as fantastic as it is scathing. It is a must read for all comrades to understand the topic at hand. All that remains to be said are two points omitted from the article which must be made crystal clear:
- The necessity of placing this vicious attack in the greater context of British imperialism’s terminal crisis
- Recognising the danger posed to the trans liberation movement by the opportunist forces mobilising to neutralise it’s revival, terrified of its potential.
On the first point, the outsized, universal transphobia of the British state and political climate needs to be understood in the wider context of British imperialism’s crisis. The point made that Labour is trying to appeal to the reactionary electorate is similar to the exclusive use of scapegoating accusations; while true, these are politically limited. Labour and the state have gone well beyond electoral desperation and irrationally scapegoating trans folk. What we are seeing now is a mad scramble to defend capitalism’s invisible backbone: patriarchal domination and all that flows from it, namely the gender binary and sex-empiricism. All this is to shield British imperialism as it sinks ever deeper into its terminal crisis.
Opportunists regularly omit this direct link to pinkwash Labour, and so, portray British imperialism’s transphobia as reformable, completely in-line with their class character as labour aristocrats and petit bourgeois. On this fact we must be clear.
On the second point, the fact London’s national, headline winning protest against the ruling was endorsed openly by all the, until now, hesitant trade union usual suspects (CWU, UCU, PCS, RMT, Unite, Unison) and received raucous applause for this from the protest’s main organisers, ‘rs21’, should be a clear warning. This supposed change of heart is nothing more than the panicked attempts of the opportunist left to wrangle the white-hot class anger exploding into the streets back into their dead-end Labour apologism, something confirmed by said event also including ‘Pride in Labour’ in its lineup, to say nothing of the entire history of the British trade union movement (and its left cheerleaders who ignore its pacifying role).
For trans liberation to be a serious threat to British imperialism, we must fight any attempt to drag the movement behind the dead-end political lead of the Labour Party and its apologist reformers. This fight is inseparable from the urgent need to ignite the movement in the streets to sweep British imperialism into the dustbin of history where it belongs, arm-in-arm with all the global oppressed, all the while upholding the world-leading example of socialist Cuba and the need it shows for socialist revolution to unlock full social liberation. This is why we must say, as we did to a crowd of hundreds in our Brighton rally:
BRITISH STATE, TRANSPHOBE STATE!
LABOUR PARTY, TRANSPHOBE PARTY!
Frank Rowley
BRIGHTON
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 306 June/July 2025
