Rebel-held territory in eastern Aleppo has been split in two after Syrian government forces captured the key district of al-Sakhour.

….The Syrian military and their allies launched a major operation in the east of Syria’s second largest city in September. This weekend alone (November 26-27), heavy fighting forced thousands of civilians to flee, while hundreds of families within the besieged districts have been displaced.

Government forces are now said to be working to dismantle explosive devices and mines in the area.

The FARS News Agency, which is approved by the Iranian government,  has been reporting the taking of another major district of eastern Aleppo, Masaken Hanano, which would confirm the above report by Euronews that the jihadist-controlled east of the city has been split in two, cutting off the jihadists in the northern area from their comrades in the southern area.

It appears that things are moving fast and that the SAA’s hopes of retaking all of Aleppo before a new U.S. president is inaugurated are on track, barring a major unforeseen setback.

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(Fidel Castro and American journalist, Deena Stryker; from Deena Stryker’s personal collection)

We’ve all heard the news by now that Fidel Castro, or “El Comandante” as he was known in Cuba, passed away peacefully this past Friday night at the age of 90.  It’s a fitting end to a man who, whether you loved him or hated him, took 60 years worth of what history’s most powerful empire threw at him (over 600 assassination attempts by some estimates, numerous coup attempts and economic blockades) and endured.

My retired journalist friend, Deena Stryker, interviewed Castro in 1964 (along with Raul Castro, Celia Sanchez and Che Guevara), which culminated in a compelling book discussing – from the horses’ mouths – what the revolution was all about, how they had pulled it off and what their future hopes were at the time.   Stryker wrote the following upon the news of Castro’s death:

In July, 1963, Fidel Castro knocked on my door at the Habana Libre. I had been scheduled to depart that very morning, having exhausted my funds in what seemed like a hopeless attempt to reach him with my request for a ‘portrait’ for the French weekly Paris Match. A last minute intervention by the foreign minister, then by the head of the propaganda department of the ruling party, changed what would have been the next 50 years of my life.

….Since the year Kennedy was killed, there has scarcely been a part of the world that has not been impacted by Fidel’s thirst for knowledge, his energy and his generosity. Meanwhile, the US”s protege, Haiti, located fifty miles across the Caribbean from Cuba, has still not recovered from an earthquake that struck six years ago, and the country that obsessively sought to silence him heads into the unknown.

Few countries have had leaders so determined to lift their people out of poverty (in the US, no one has come close to FDR) and those of us who witnessed his efforts, can only wonder how much longer it will be before the rest of the world’s South catches up to Cuba.

For those raised on the old Cold War shibboleths about socialism being evil and Castro being the worst dictator in Latin America, Stryker’s words may be hard to swallow.  But the fact is that Castro brought major advances in health and education to a deeply impoverished island nation whose chief export to the rest of the world became doctors.   Alexander Mercouris writes in Fidel Castro – Death of a Titan:

The death of Cuba’s revolutionary leader Fidel Castro has provoked the usual praise of him from some and condemnation of him from others.

What no one denies is the colossal impact he has had, not just on his own country but on the world.

This fact bears repeating because it is so remarkable.  Cuba – the country which Fidel Castro led – is small (its current population is 11 million) and relatively poor.  It has no great wealth of natural resources, and no great industries.  At the time Fidel Castro came to power its social services were primitive, its school and health systems hugely unbalanced and undeveloped, and much of its population was illiterate.

By no conceivable stretch of the imagination is Cuba a Great Power, and before Fidel Castro became its leader it occurred to no one to think of it as one.

That the leader of such a small country was able to have such an extraordinary impact on the world stage is little short of astonishing, and says a huge amount about Fidel Castro’s personality as incidentally it does about Cuba and about the revolution he led.

….There have been many other left wing and revolutionary leaders in the Caribbean and Latin America before and after Fidel Castro.  None of them – not even Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez – have ever come close to matching Fidel Castro’s political stature, or managed to make their countries the centre of superpower conflict in the same way.

The reason Fidel Castro succeeded in doing this was because he was prepared to do things in the Caribbean and Latin America – the US’s backyard – that no other Caribbean or Latin American leader has been prepared to do. Unlike them he carried out in the 1960s a genuine revolutionary transformation of Cuban society, something that no other Caribbean or Latin American leader has ever done.

What that means in practice is that there is no institutional continuity between pre-Castro Cuba and the Cuba today.

The army, police, state bureaucracy, media and judiciary, are completely different, the wealth – including the lands and factories – of the old Cuban oligarchy, has been subjected to a comprehensive revolutionary expropriation, and the economy, health and education systems have been entirely taken over and recreated in Fidel Castro’s own image.

To say that this was controversial would be a gigantic understatement.  In fact it remains the main charge and grievance against Fidel Castro of the people he displaced to this day, and explains the relentless quality of their hostility to him.

It is also the reason for the US embargo.

The revolutionary changes Fidel Castro carried out in Cuba in the 1960s made it impossible for his government and revolution to be reversed internally – the fate of every single other Caribbean and Latin American revolution before and since – because it deprived the US of the usual tools it uses to reverse such revolutions.

It is however important to say that Fidel Castro was able to do it because of the support of Cuban society.  The reason for that is in part because of a peculiar feature of the Cuban revolution, which is bound up with Cuba’s unusual relationship to the US.

….“The breakdown in relations between the United States and Cuba was the consequence of the Castro Revolution of 1959. This was a revolution launched from the countryside against a corrupt oligarchic elite based in Havana.

That elite in turn had extremely close connections with the United States. These extended back decades to Cuba’s liberation war against Spain in the 1890s. The United States intervened in that war in a manner that achieved for it a dominant position in Cuba right up to the point of Castro’s revolution in 1959. It would not be an exaggeration to say that throughout this period Cuba was essentially a protectorate of the United States.

….This US political and economic control went together with considerable corruption. Its status as a protectorate was incompatible with democracy and at no time before the Castro Revolution in 1959 was Cuba in any true sense one. At the time of the Revolution Cuba was actually a dictatorship led by a former staff Sergeant Fulgencio Batista.

….In fairness it was also a time of considerable cultural achievement, of the emergence in Havana of a substantial middle class and of the construction of a highway system of a sort unknown at this time in other Latin American states.

These intense connections between Cuba and the United States explain much about the subsequent period of protracted hostility.

For the Cubans many of their societal problems became explicable by reference to their subordinate position to the United States, which to a proud people was humiliating and exploitative. The Castro Revolution was in a sense Cuba’s declaration of independence from the United States.”

….Though the revolution has transformed Cuba – especially its formerly impoverished countryside – and has provided Cuba with what are by any standard exceptional health and education systems, the degree of political and social control Fidel Castro was forced to impose on Cuban society in order to safeguard his revolution has by all accounts been causing increasing frustration within Cuba itself, as an immeasurably better educated, healthier and far more self-confident generation of younger Cubans increasingly feels – whether rightly or wrongly – that the existing system does not give full scope to them to develop their abilities.

….Despite perennial Western criticisms of Cuba’s human rights record, Fidel Castro never carried out  the sort of Terror in Cuba that has been such a feature of other revolutions carried out elsewhere, and in a region where political repression continues to be common, and where life is still cheap, life in Cuba under Fidel Castro has been immeasurably safer and more secure for the vast majority of Cuba’s people than it has been in any of Cuba’s neighbours.

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The EU has announced that they are finally going to allow visa-free travel for Ukrainians, part of what was promised with the EU Association Agreement that was rejected by former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich in late 2013.  According to the BBC: