If you look at Cuba in historical context, you’ll see that before it had a communist government, it was ruled by a corrupt rightwing military dictatorship that was supported by the United States. You’ll also see that literacy levels, health levels, education levels have improved very dramatically since the revolution, and that poverty is a lot less of a problem that it used to be.

Out of context, there’s Cuba, a little island with a backward communist government ruling dictatorially; it looks a mess. In context, Cuba is one of many Latin American countries. Almost every single Latin American country is either ruled by a rightwing dictatorship or was until very recently; most Latin American countries have been plagued by large-scale drugs problems, civil war and death squads, and several still are. Out of context, Cuba’s economy is a mess. In geographical context, Cuba’s economy is pretty good. The whole of Latin America is a mess for God’s sake. Cuba has done fairly well for itself.

1955: Cuba had a life expectancy of 59.5 years, shorter than Paraguay, Argentina, and Uruguay. Cuban infant mortality was also higher than in those three countries.

1959: The year of the Cuban Revolution.

1985: Cuba had a life expectancy of 75, longer than anywhere else in Latin America. Life expectancy was 75.9 in the USA. Infant mortality was the lowest in Latin America. Cuba’s children were the best fed in Latin America, and its level of literacy was the highest in Latin America.

1960: Infant mortality in Cuba was 60 per 1000.

1991: Infant mortality in Cuba was 9.7 per 1000. Lower than the United States. Cuba’s literacy level was higher than that of the United States.

Longman, 1989: "Cuba’s economy remains overwhelmingly dependent on sugar... Roman Catholicism is tolerated by the regime... Full independence (from the US) in 1903. The new nation suffered recurrent periods of dictatorship during which reformist zeal gave way to corruption and repression, notably under Gerardo Machado and his successor, Fulgencio Batista y Zaldivar.... An unsuccessful US-supported attempt by anti-Castro exiles to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 was followed by Castro’s declaration of his government as Marxist-Leninist." Notice that? Castro did not decide on communism until after the US had tried to restore military dictatorship to Cuba. "The US has maintained a trade embargo against Cuba provoked by Cuban alliance with the USSR... Domestically, Castro has built up the educational and health systems but has failed to develop the economy... Opposition to the Castro government comes mainly from rightwing Cuban émigrés living in the US."

The revolution had strong popular support. The Bay of Pigs invasion failed mainly because the Cuban people failed to back the invaders, not because of "insufficient air coverage" as the US invaders claimed.

Now, with a young generation that doesn’t remember the revolution, and the hardship of the people increased by the loss of Soviet aid and by brutal US sanctions, the strong support that the Cuban people once had for Castro seems to be ebbing.

"Travelling across Cuba in 1959, immediately after the overthrow of the US-supported rightwing Batista dictatorship, Mike Faulker witnessed ‘a spectacle of almost unrelieved poverty’. The rural population lived in makeshift shacks without minimal sanitation. Malnourished children went barefoot in the dirty and suffered ‘the familiar plague of parasites common to the Third World.’ There were almost no doctors or schools. And through much of the year, families that depended solely on the seasonal sugar harvest lived close to starvation.

"Smallpox, malaria, tuberculosis, polio, and numerous other diseases have been wiped out by improved living standards and public health programmes. Cuba has enjoyed a level of literacy higher than that in the United States and a life expectancy that compares well with advanced industrial nations."

"The revolution has sent teachers, doctors, and workers to dozens of Third World countries without charging a penny. It shed its own blood fighting colonialism, fighting apartheid, and fascism. At one point we had 25,000 Third World students studying on scholarships. We still have many scholarship students from Africa and other countries. In addition, our country has treated more children [13,000] who were victims of the Chernobyl tragedy than all other countries put together. They don’t talk about that, and that’s why they blockade us - the country with the most teachers per capita of all countries in the world, including developed countries. The country with the most doctors per capita of all countries.... A country where life expectancy is more than 75 years.... Why are they blockading Cuba? Because no other country has done more for its people. It’s the hatred of the ideas that Cuba represents."

In 1954, the French colonial regime in Vietnam was finally defeated by a coalition of nationalists and communists under the communist leader Ho Chi Minh.

At the 1954 Geneva Conference, Vietnam was divided by the UN into North Vietnam, under communist control, and South Vietnam, under nationalist control.

Nationwide free elections were scheduled. But the South Vietnamese regime refused to hold the elections, since it feared a communist victory. In 1955, South Vietnam declared its independence.

Consequently, the Viet Cong (communist guerrillas), together with North Vietnam, tried to overthrow the South Vietnamese government. The US sprang to the defence of the illegal South Vietnamese regime.

The authoritarian government of South Vietnam was backed unconditionally by the US on the grounds of anticommunism. Yet the communists in Vietnam were an overwhelmingly popular force. Indeed, in 1966 the US Ambassador to South Vietnam said: "The only people who have been doing anything for the little man - to lift him up - have been the communists."

Similarly, a New York Times columnist in 1965 reported that: "Even Premier Ky [the US-supported dictator of South Vietnam] told this reporter today that the communists were closer to the people’s yearnings for social justice and an independent life than his own government."

The Italian Socialist party, which had backed almost every single US foreign policy, dissented on this issue. Its 1966 congress unanimously condemned "the indiscriminate massacre of civilians due mainly to the massive American bombings".

General de Gaulle, the French rightwinger, was similarly unimpressed. For him, the Vietnam war was "the greatest absurdity of the twentiwth century". Sassoon tells us, "as early as 1967, de Gaulle patiently explained to Harold Wilson [British socialist] that Ho Chi-Minh and the North Vietnamese would never yield because the future of their country was at stake, that the war would go on until the Americans left, that there was no purpose in further US escalation."

Meanwhile the Swedish social democrats condemned "the meaningless war of the United States".

Chomsky explains that in the US, all the criticism of the Vietnam War tends to be on the basis that the war was unwinnable, or that it was a tactical error to get involved, or that it was wrong to endanger US servicemen’s lives. Few have the courage to point out that the whole sorry episode was and is a lasting disgrace to the United States.

The US bombed civilian targets in rural South Vietnam, where more than 80% of the South Vietnamese population lived. President Kennedy instigated a campaign to place several million people into concentration camps ("strategic hamlets") surrounded by barbed wire and guards. John Maher explains: "This was to ‘protect’ them from the Viet Cong guerrillas, whom the population supported, as the US itself conceded. The US resisted attempts at a peace settlement and in 1964 planned the ground invasion of South Vietnam, which took place in early 1965. Intensified bombing of the South rose to triple the level of the more publicized attack on the north. This gruesome and pointless war went on until 1975."

And was all this a tactical error, a goodnatured misjudgement? No, it was US imperialism supporting the corrupt South Vietnamese dictatorship in preference to the popularly supported North Vietnamese regime, and in the face of the opposition of most of the rest of the world. And the US didn’t care how many people died in the process. Just as it didn’t care how many Nicaraguans died as a result of aid to the Contras, or how many Grenadans died when Grenada was invaded, or how many people were murdered by US-backed armies in pre-1979 Iran, in Indonesia, in Sierra Leone, etc.

Notably, not a single one of America's European allies was willing to help it out with the Vietnam War. Britain, for example, endorsed the war (for which it has been heavily criticized) but it did so very lukewarmly, and was unwilling to commit even nominal troops.

British students protesting against American involvement in Vietnam,

Grosvenor Square, London, 1968.

• Key western leaders and elites sympathized with fascism
• There is no clear dividing line between conservatism and fascism
• The west sat by as the fascists took Spain
• The west did not go to war for the right reasons
• The fascists were pandered to after the war
• Collaboration with neo-fascism