Fidel Castro’s warning that the imperialists impose wars on humanity, and that the stronger they feel the more dangerous they become, came from a life spent facing the most powerful empire in history ninety miles from its shores. Born in 1926 in eastern Cuba, he led the 1953 assault on the Moncada barracks against the Batista dictatorship. At his trial he declared that history would absolve him. After prison and exile, he returned on the Granma in 1956 and led the guerrilla war in the Sierra Maestra that triumphed on January 1, 1959. Under his leadership the revolution nationalized land and industry, carried out a national literacy campaign, and built free health care and education for all.

Washington answered with war in every form. In 1961 it sponsored the invasion at Playa Girón, the Bay of Pigs, which the Cuban people defeated in less than three days. It followed with sabotage, terrorism, and biological attacks, along with assassination plots against Castro himself that Cuban intelligence counted in the hundreds, and an economic blockade that continues today despite the near-unanimous condemnation of the UN General Assembly year after year. Castro saw that the danger only grew as the empire’s power grew. After the fall of the Soviet Union, a United States unchecked by any rival launched wars from Iraq and Yugoslavia to Afghanistan and Libya. In his later years he warned repeatedly of the threat of nuclear war.

Against that logic of war, revolutionary Cuba practiced internationalism. Cuban troops helped defeat apartheid South Africa’s armies in Angola, and Cuban doctors have served in dozens of countries across the Global South. Fidel Castro died in 2016. His words remain a warning that imperialism does not become gentler with power but more dangerous, and that peace can be secured only by the organized resistance and solidarity of the world’s peoples.

• 1 print shipped in a rigid mailer (made from recycled cardstock)
• printed on acid-free, premium matte-photo paper

• paper weight + thickness: 250/m² / 66lbs 

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