Cuban seminar marked 80th anniversary of the Russian victory over fascism

The Raúl Roa García Higher Institute of International Relations (ISRI) hosted the seminar "80th Anniversary of the Victory over Fascism", organized to bolster the fight against this radical ideology and hail 65 years of diplomatic relations between Cuba and Russia and the 150th anniversary of Vladimir Ilich Lenin’s birth.

Victor Koronelli, Russian ambassador to Cuba, stressed that the victory of the Great Patriotic War was possible thanks to the courage and heroism of millions of Soviet and foreign citizens who fought under the slogan "All for the front, all for victory" and recalled three Cubans who took part in the effort, namely the brothers Jorge and Aldo Vivo, and Enrique Vilar, to defend their second homeland.

The presentations included the lectures "The Second World War: the impossibility of forgetting the horrors experienced", by Larisa Plachinda, first secretary of the Russian Embassy; "Today’s fascism and neo-fascism", by Emiliano Lorenzo Lima Mesa, head of the Research Project on the Russian Federation at ISRI; and "The victory over Fascism, a non-negotiable historical truth”, by Mario Antonio Padilla Torres, a scholar with the International Policy Research Center (CIPI).

In closing the seminar, ISRI rector Rogelio Sierra Diaz pointed out that the victory over fascism led to the liberation of many European states occupied by Nazi Germany, which also had great impact on the struggles for national independence in Asia and Africa that paved the way for the end of the colonial system.

May 9 marks eight decades since the Allied victory over fascism, a milestone in the end of World War II in Europe and the birth of a new world order.

The Great Patriotic War is a reminder that unity and resistance can stop even the most destructive ideologies.