This incredible battle you're having in the US, just to establish a basic system of public healthcare, is undermined by the example of Cuba - a small Caribbean nation subject to hundreds of years of colonialism, then imperialism, then brutal US blockade, that is able to provide healthcare for all, but not only that, has sent some 400,000 healthcare professionals around the world. The 'threat' of Cuba is the example of an alternative way of organizing society, and a mode of development that puts human development at its center.

Historian Helen Yaffe explores the characteristics of Cuba's longterm socialist revolution - from the nation's commitment to healthcare and education as universal rights across society, to the revolution's capacity for self-critique and mass mobilization to build a better world for its citizens.

Helen is author of the new book We Are Cuba! How a Revolutionary People Have Survived in a Post-Soviet World from Yale University Press.