HAVANA compels you to think about time. It is not the time of the philosophers who debate whether “now” is a speckle or a span.

It is a material time, whose past rolls into the present, and whose future peeks through in the institutions and practices built by the hands of the Cuban people.

Everywhere there are auguries of a utopia not unrealised, but denied. Cuba is anachronistic in both directions, towards both past and future.

It exists in the past, because it has inherited the burden of underdevelopment. Like much of the world, it is haunted by the many shadows of colonial domination.

Its cars are old. Its roads need mending. Its concessions to the world it inhabits tug at its people from different directions.

Its northern neighbour — even in its advanced state of rot — refuses to lift its knee from Cuba’s neck. The longest-standing sanctions regime in human history is now compounded by the crippling and absurd designation of Cuba, a state-sponsor of hope, as a state-sponsor of terror.
 
It exists in the future, because it has built a project that, for most of us, remains in the realm of imagination.

The 1959 Cuban revolution overthrew the shackles of colonialism and, from the devastation it inherited, eliminated illiteracy and guaranteed free healthcare, housing and food for all. It transformed the structure of land ownership and built the most prosperous society in one of the world’s most overexploited regions.
 
The Cuban people, in all their warmth and generosity of spirit, have the air not so much of being undefeated, but of being undefeatable.

When the light of world socialism dimmed with the fall of the USSR and the engines of our progress seemed to grind to a screeching halt, Fidel Castro doubled down and called on his people to rise up in a renewed “battle of ideas.” We still follow that unflinching injunction.
 
Today, Cuba has more hospitals than banks. It has more doctors than policemen — and has dispatched them to help as many nations as the US has sanctioned.

Cuba supported liberation movements from Angola to Bolivia. Its victory against South Africa’s armed forces at the battle of Cuito Cuanavale marked, as Nelson Mandela said in 1991, “the divide in the struggle for the liberation of southern Africa.” Without it, the African National Congress would have remained underground.
 
Today, Cuba stands firmly with the Palestinian resistance against the zionist genocide. “To be an internationalist is to settle our own debt with humanity,” Castro said, and, for six decades, the Cuban people have held the aspirations of the Third World on their shoulders. They are, to paraphrase a poem, exiles from the future, cast into an old world still unprepared for their fellowship.
 
That old world has tried to expel Cuba as if it were a cancer. Indeed, a 1997 visit by US doctors to a children’s oncological hospital in Havana found 35 children who vomited 28 to 30 times a day because the embargo blocked Cuba’s access to drugs that prevent nausea during chemotherapy, one of a million cruel punishments imposed on the island’s people.
 
Still, we have not seen mass child mortality in Cuba. Not like in Iraq, where US sanctions killed half a million children.

Cuba struggles to buy the materials to build homes, but we will not see a crisis of homelessness on the island.

Cuba has advanced beyond the ailments of more primitive societies. It is, after all, a project of the future — a project of socialism.
 
The old world has failed to crush Cuba because the old world is the cancer to which Cuba has been building the cure.

The world of the coloniser and imperialist is the parasite that feeds on the body of humanity to sustain its grim futurelessness.

The so-called Western world is the aberration — an anomaly so far past its due date, so deeply panicked, that it is prepared to kill children.
 
The genocide in Gaza and the blockade of Cuba represent violence different in form but identical in intent: to eradicate the very dream of defiance.

They are warnings, commanding us to lower our chins and turn our eyes to the ground lest we catch a glimpse of the future from which the struggles for liberation visit us.
 
But take a walk along the streets of Havana or Ramallah and you will see that the people of Cuba, like the people of Palestine, hold their heads up high. They are among the peoples whose struggles, to quote the Soviet soldier and poet Nikolai Mayorov, “rendered the word ‘humanity’ into flesh.”
 
Those who judge Cuba for not throwing off the vestiges of its past — for not having yanked, by some transdimensional command, humanity’s entire future through the pinhole of our paralytic present — would do well to remember: Cuba has not yet exited the time of struggle.

And because the Cuban people have not surrendered, we keep fighting.