Keep it Left

[Carlos @agent_of_change]

The Trump administration has found a new target in its long war on Cuba: the island’s doctors. As the Wall Street Journal reports, Washington is now moving to destroy Cuba’s overseas medical missions – one of its last remaining sources of dollar income – having already blocked its fuel, sanctioned its officials and choked off remittances. Marco Rubio has toured the Caribbean threatening visa bans against any official who keeps employing Cuban medics, denouncing the programme – bizarrely – as “forced labour” and “state-sponsored human-trafficking brigades”.

Since 1963 – the first mission went to newly independent Algeria – Cuba has sent what Fidel called an “army of white coats” to heal the poor of the world. Some 24,000 Cuban health workers currently serve across more than 50 countries, from tiny Caribbean islands to the rural villages of southern Italy. They staff the clinics no one else will.

In Honduras, residents gave the departing Cuban medics a tearful ovation. Jamaica’s prime minister, standing beside Rubio, pushed back to his face: the Cuban doctors “have been incredibly helpful to us”. St Lucia’s leader said plainly that “our medical system would basically collapse without them”. And when the US leaned on St Vincent and the Grenadines, Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves responded firmly: “I will prefer to lose my visa than to have 60 poor and working people die.”

That is the choice the United States is forcing on the region: get rid of the Cuban doctors, or be punished. The world’s richest country would rather the poor of the Global South go blind and die than tolerate Cuban solidarity.

Why? Because those missions are not only Cuba’s largest export – some $5.3 billion in 2024, half of all its foreign earnings – but the clearest proof of what a small socialist country can offer humanity. That is the real target. Not “trafficking”, but the threat of a good example: a blockaded island of 11 million that sends doctors where empires send gunboats.

To wage war on Cuba’s doctors is to admit you have nothing to offer the world. Solidarity with Cuba has never been more urgent. ¡Venceremos!

[Mao Ning 毛宁 @SpoxCHN_MaoNing]

Watch 60-year-old ladies own every beat of Michael Jackson—because cool has no expiration date.

[Akademia 🇵🇸🌋🔴 @elakademicista]

“Si la izquierda pudiera declarar feriado la mitad del año, lo haría”

[BBC News (World) @BBCWorld]

China sentences official to death for taking $325m in bribes https://t.co/dsoeusMq0p

[JerryRigEverything @ZacksJerryRig]

So this is why elon wanted to rush the IPO so bad... 🤔 China just did it cheaper on their first try. RIP 🔻

[Ben Norton @BenjaminNorton]

Absolutely ridiculous. He died of *cancer*, but the FT implies that he was killed for criticizing the government.

This is extremely irresponsible. Usually the FT's coverage is better than most of the Western media's, but when it comes to China, they all just spew propaganda.

[DaiWW @BeijingDai]

Lukashenko has a clear understanding of China:

"I often tell my friends: the most striking thing about China is its composure. It never rushes, never overreacts, and never overplays its hand. It just keeps moving forward, step by step, toward its goals. 'Composure'—those four syllables sound simple enough, but they're incredibly hard to live by. When someone provokes you on the world stage, smears your name, or shows up at your doorstep with hostile intent, and you still manage to keep your cool and stay focused on your own development—that, to me, is real strength. This isn't diplomatic flattery. It's the conclusion I've drawn after 17 visits to China and decades of watching it closely. Even before the Soviet Union fell, I argued that we should seriously study China's development path."

"Unfortunately, we tore our own country apart—the Soviet Union—and now we're swallowing the bitter consequences: brother fighting brother. I lived through the collapse, and I've witnessed the post-Soviet era with my own eyes. I saw a superpower break into pieces overnight. Thirty years on, some of the former republics have tilted toward the West, others have been consumed by war, and former brothers-in-arms are now killing each other on battlefields. Countless families have been shattered, countless lives lost. Yet here is another great power—facing similar external pressure, dealing with its own internal challenges—and China hasn't lost its footing, hasn't turned on itself, and has simply stayed the course at its own pace."

"Sending my youngest son to study in China wasn't a whim. I'm entrusting my country's future—the hopes of our young people—to a path I genuinely believe in. I know that if you follow a steady hand, you won't fall into a ditch."

[Keep it Left @KeepItLeft]

@TheFinalCall01 ... Its so easy to armchair successful communist victories 80 years later when your not the one doing the risks or sacrifice, and quite frankly insulting to the people at the time to do like the person who dismissively shared the "gonna be voting" video to insult people post war

[Keep it Left @KeepItLeft]

@TheFinalCall01 They yanks would have launched operation unthinkable and rearmed nazi pows before just folding to a communist insurgency. Any communist strong holds would have been carpet bombed and ussr supply lines would have been overstretched and going through Germany so open to sabotage...

[Keep it Left @KeepItLeft]

@TreborRhurbarb It's how they get the monster trucks in for half time shows

[Teortaxes▶️ (DeepSeek 推特🐋铁粉 2023 – ∞) @teortaxesTex]

For context, the location of "Kinmen, Taiwan":

[Philip Proudfoot @PhilipProudfoot]

@andyburnham Cowardice. Would you say this double tap strike on rescue workers and journalists — after an Israeli attack on a hospital — just “may” be a war crime?

Would you say the same if this was a Russian strike on Ukraine? If not, why not?

[BladeoftheSun @BladeoftheS]

Harmful Bacteria cannot survive in water below 20C.

These 'data centers' are pumping out water at 45C.

It's the perfect temperature for growing huge amounts of deadly bacteria.

[Mreza Danaei @mrdanaei]

اگه تو اوج جنگ ایران و عراق، کسی به صدام می‌گفت: سرنوشتت تو عراق سیاه‌چاله و چوبه‌داره؛ اما رهبر ایران روزی در عراق و در میان انبوهی از مردم تشییع می‌شه، هیچ‌کسی باورش نمی‌شد.
عجب تاریخی رو داریم زندگی می‌کنیم...

[Politics UK @PolitlcsUK]

🚨 WATCH: Count Binface responds to the BBC unmasking him live on Newsnight

[🇲🇽🇻🇪🇵🇸Bronx Anti-War 🇾🇪🇱🇧🇮🇶 @BXAntiWar]

it’s truly sad and disgusting that the western “pro-Palestine” movement still hasn’t atoned for celebrating regime change in Syria. no reckoning, no self-criticism, nothing. just moved on like it never happened and expects us to forget too.

[Communist Party ☭ @CPBritain]

Helen Crawfurd was a minister's wife who smashed army recruiting office windows with a hammer. She was jailed five times. She left the suffragette movement when its leadership chose the war over the vote and built a mass anti-war movement from the streets of Glasgow instead. She organised the rent strike that won protection for working class tenants across Britain.

She met Lenin. She joined the Communist Party and set up its Women's Department and never left. She ended her autobiography at seventy-odd years old with the words that the world is ours and we should go in and possess it.

That is not a woman who ran out of fight. Working class women have always been at the centre of the communist struggle in Britain, not at its margins.

#HelenCrawfurd #RedClydeside #GlasgowRentStrike #CommunistParty

[Annemarie Ward 💜 @Annemarieward]

The joke isn't the bin. The joke is pretending the man inside it is some random eccentric. Jonathan David Harvey is an Oxford-educated writer with three decades at the heart of the BBC comedy establishment, writing for programmes such as The Thick of It, Have I Got News For You and Yes Minister. He's won awards, been celebrated by the media, and is hardly an unknown outsider.
So let's stop pretending Count Binface is just a bloke who wandered into politics wearing a wheelie bin.
The costume is the gimmick. The career behind it is anything but.