Born on this day in 1931, the heroic revolutionary faces a dangerous new wave of White House aggression. We must treat his birthday as a rallying cry to resist the illegal siege of Cuba, writes ROGER McKENZIE
AT ABOUT the same time as the British Empire laid claim to the Falkland Islands, the Russian Empire claimed Crimea. It was the late 1770s and the time of empires, when a fleet of ships could land on a place and declare it henceforth their territory.
The Falkland Islands, which the Spanish had claimed earlier and named Las Malvinas, are nearly 8,000 miles from London, off the east coast of Argentina. Crimea is nearly 800 miles from Moscow and only a few miles from the border with mainland Russia.
The Crimean peninsula, which had previously been part of the Ottoman Empire, was annexed by the Russian Empire on April 19 1783, during the reign of Catherine the Great.
TOMASZ PIERSCIONEK is intrigued by a the changing significance of its vast areas of forest to Russia’s history
JOHN REES replies to Claudia Webbe
In a speech to the 12th Xiangshan Forum in Beijing, SEVIM DAGDELEN warns of a growing historical revisionism to whitewash Germany and Japan’s role in WWII as part of a return to a cold war strategy from the West — but multipolarity will win out
While 69 per cent of Ukrainians want negotiated peace, Western leaders are cynically prolonging the war for their own strategic and economic goals, to the immense detriment of Ukraine and Europe, write BOB ORAM and MAGGIE SIMPSON


