The meeting of the coordinating teams of the Antifascist International, whose background, the network in defense of humanity, celebrates its first twenty years has just ended. One of the names Fidel proposed back then for the network was the one who now adopts the international clearly, given the dangerous advance of fascism. Intellectuals, social activists, revolutionaries from 74 countries we meet in that city, which today is one of the transnational imperialism center in dispute.

In Latin America, imperialism attempts to suffocate economy, but also in the symbolic side, the Cuban, Venezuelan and Nicaraguan revolutions. Softening and dividing the left in power as much as possible, some weakest than others, more organic to capitalism. In the Middle East, the war spreads against the Palestinian, Lebanese, Iranian, Yemenite and Syrian peoples. In Europe, the focus, the trench is Ukraine: NATO relies on local fascism to wear down and bend a renewed Russia, which has recovered its pride, and its strength. Meanwhile, in Asia a new advance against China is announced, which stops its vertiginous growth, and its economic and political leadership. To do this, it seems foreseeable that Taiwan's fact comes into play.

That is today's world. Each "little" war (some incite and justify, sell weapons; others put the lifeless bodies, the mutilated and the missing), contributes tens of thousands of dead. In a way, World War III is happening already. It’s not, right now, like the previous ones, but their economic, media and moral skirmishes involve us. It’s a three-dimensional dangerous war: the first, between economic blocks, one established but in decline, another ascending, about to get established; one that bets on the unilateral exercise of power, another that rehearses a multilateral vision; the second, between exploited countries and exploiting countries, a war of a geopolitical nature that somehow derives from the first; the third, between capitalism (imperialism) and the society of the future, which in the twentieth century we called socialist, and can keep that name or receive another, on condition that it’s essentially anti -capitalist.

Like the previous world wars, it has an economic root, but the motivations of its protagonists are different. In a meeting like the one that has just ended in Caracas, the invaded, the oppressed, those who have as horizon the national liberation and those who fight for another world. The claims of national sovereignty and anti -capitalists come together, because in one way or another, the former cannot be conquered without the second.

In Caracas I was able to hug Wafi Ibrahim, a Lebanese-Cuban, although he could say that he is also Palestine and Venezuelan, and of any other oppressed or besieged nationality. The Zionist missiles (Americans) thrown into the air fell on his apartment building in the Lebanese capital, and turn it to rubble. Nothing remained, nothing, not a family photo, not a memory, the tangible and the intangible of a lifetime were reduced to dust. Not her, not her people either, because they are renewed in each dawn, in each martyr. That’s why they delivered a humiliating defeat to the invaders, who had to accept the agreement to a ceasefire in the least desired terms.

Wafi explained that Israel is no longer a state of Semites, because foreign settlers come from everywhere to settle in the best Palestinian lands; They can be blond, blue-eyed, and what unites them is religion, inherited or adopted. But in the world there are no citizens of Christianity, or Buddhism, but of different nations where these religions are practiced. She dreams of a united and democratic Palestine, which accepts the equal existence of all religions: Christianity, Islamism, Judaism, among other possible. But the strongest, most urgent claim in this Peoples Meeting is the cessation of Zionist genocide in Palestine, the attempt of ethnic cleansing which toll reaches more than 40 thousand lives.

Another claim is the ending of harassment and siege to Latin American countries in rebellion, of media campaigns, aggressions, the theft of resources, the planning of murders and attacks with total impunity for which, supposedly, they are stronger. But we know that they will not cease, and that times of total war are coming. Therefore, it’s necessary to identify our enemy, and unite to repel it in trenches of ideas, and if necessary, in stone trenches. Force will be battled with force. Because without a doubt, imperialism and Zionism assume fascist behaviors.

In some European and Latin American countries fascism can take economic measures and social measures of high impact social and violently repress the dissatisfied. In others, however, it can lead to deaths, due to gunshot, hunger or diseases; it can cause invasions and the mass extermination of its peoples. What’s fascism? It’s one of the forms of conservation of capitalism (of its surplus value, of its profits, its unlimited exploitation, its expansionism) to extreme hazards; a form that dismisses the traditional norms of bourgeois democracy, because they are no longer efficient in their only reproductive function of power, and this becomes violently. If we understand it, we will understand that every anti-fascist struggle is necessarily anti -capitalist. That it’s not about restoring "democratic" capitalism, but about overcoming it.

But why the poor, the exploited, the dispossessed, the discarded can vote for their oppressors?, To support the exploitation with the hope of being, one day, exploiters?, To bet on radical solutions before the crisis that drowns them, when the left, cowardly, lacking horizons, agrees, moves cautiously, declares without blushing its moderation, defends democracy abandoned by the bourgeois? The world needs radical changes, and fascism promises to apply them, even against their peoples. The revolutionaries turned into left-wing politicians collaborate, unknowingly, with the dangerous rise of ultra-right, fascism. The anti-fascist international recently created in Caracas must act and demonstrate that there’s popular democracy, that another better world is possible. To fascist radicalism we have to oppose revolutionary radicalism. It will never be a national issue, of each nation separately; There will be no victory in a country, until victory is conquered in all countries. The resistance of Cuba and Venezuela is our contribution. When eight Cubans went up on the stage with the flag of the lonely star, with the intention of taking a photo, the attendees began to chant "Cuba yes, Yanquis no" and "Cuba yes, blockade no." Then the magic occurred: delegates from many countries went up on the stage and surrounded us; Suddenly, the Cuban delegation multiplied, the lonely star shone stronger, taller. All were Cuban that afternoon, because the country for us is humanity. The slogan will always be one, as Che Guevara would say: to imperialism, to Zionism and fascism, "not an inch to give up."

Translated by Amilkal Labañino / CubaSí Translation Staff