ONE hundred years since the birth of Fidel Castro, Cuba remains the beacon of internationalism and anti-imperialism that he helped make it.

This island nation of 11 million holds out, just 90 miles from the coast of the greatest military power in world history, which has sought to bully, bomb and blockade its revolution out of existence for all its 67 years.

Cuba is still, as its President Miguel Diaz-Canel says, the “favourite target of imperial fury,” a socialist country whose mere existence enrages its superpower neighbour.

The US has, since the Cuban Revolution, tried invasion, terrorist attacks, the poisoning of crops and deliberate infection of livestock with diseases. It made hundreds of assassination attempts on Castro himself.

It has imposed a six-decade-plus blockade, cutting off international trade and using its huge economic clout to punish anyone anywhere in the world that tries to work with Cuba.

This year that blockade has turned into a siege, totally cutting off energy supplies, threatening the lives, as Cuba’s ambassador to Britain Ismara Vargas Walter writes in today’s Morning Star, of the “90-year-old grandmother waiting for dialysis and [the] seven-year-old child waiting for cancer treatment. Ask yourself what threat they pose to the United States.”

It is not just waging war on Cuba’s healthcare, but the availability of healthcare in some of the poorest parts of the world, threatening countries that welcome Cuba’s world famous medical missions with dire consequences. At least seven Caribbean countries have ended or suspended these arrangements for fear of Washington this year.

The fear is understandable. This is a US regime that boasts of blowing up small boats in the Caribbean sea, killing hundreds with no pretence at due process. That charges into a South American capital, killing scores, and kidnaps its head of state. That starts an unprovoked war on Iran with a missile strike on a primary school.

But the savagery and lawlessness of the United States are reminders that we need to emulate Cuba’s courage.

The Cuba that Fidel Castro helped forge is the opposite of Trump’s US.

A country that prioritises the welfare of the people over private profits — maintaining world-class health and education systems despite the blockade, and struggling to do so even amid today’s US-inflicted blackouts. One that stands with the poorest in the world, exporting life through medical missions rather than death through armaments. A key player in the overthrow of apartheid, when today’s United States attacks black citizens’ voting rights and empowers apartheid’s heirs.

Cuba does not have huge oil reserves like Venezuela, or a decisive geopolitical position like Iran. It is Cuba’s example alone that terrifies the United States.

Fidel Castro shaped that example over decades. Cuba’s reputation was built through the outsized place he made for it on the international stage: as a front-line state in the cold war, but which stayed true to socialism after the Soviet Union was long gone; as a fighter for the liberation of oppressed and colonised peoples, whose contribution to struggles across continents was out of all proportion to its size.

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared war on decolonisation and communism at the Munich Security Conference this year. He acknowledged, after decades of obfuscation, that the liberation movements that ended European empires were also movements to overthrow capitalism itself.

No wonder he has effectively declared war on Cuba too, determined to end almost seven decades of defiance. His government is imposing extreme suffering on the Cuban people, doing everything it can to stop solidarity reaching them.

On Fidel Castro’s centenary we can only redouble our efforts to get the solidarity through. Join the Cuba Solidarity Campaign, donate to the Cuba Vive appeal. Stand with the revolution that, in his words, “does not give up, does not give up, does not give up.” It still stands with us.