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This included one in August 1960 with eight volunteers from the UK, one of whom, long-time CSC member Nicola Seyd, captured rare colour pictures of Che Guevara on camera when he came to address the volunteers. The first work brigades had already visited the island before ICAP was formed. “One of the principal tasks for the new organisation was to arrange work brigades (where international volunteers work alongside Cubans on agricultural and building projects) so that people could see for themselves the ways in which the Revolution was transforming the lives of our people,” explains Holmedo. It was from here that Holmedo Pérez Rubio, director of the European department, who has worked at ICAP for 36 years, described the Institute’s early years. ICAP’s palatial headquarters are located in Calle 17, once the home of the wealthy Faya Bonet family who, having made their fortune from sugar plantations, left Cuba for Florida in 1959. Work is divided in five geographical areas, each housed in a separate office in Havana’s Vedado district: Latin America and the Caribbean, North America and Puerto Rico, Europe, Asia and Oceania and Africa and the Middle East. Today ICAP has relations with more than 2,000 solidarity groups worldwide, and developing these links remain the Institute’s first priority. In 2010, the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos, or ICAP for short) celebrated half a century of developing international solidarity and links between Cuba and the world.įormed on 30 December 1960, the Institute’s first priority was to tell people outside Cuba of the true purpose of its embryonic Revolution and of the progressive changes taking place there in the face of threats and attacks from the United States.Īt a time when the majority of international media only reported hostile and distorted opinions about the changes in Cuba, through ICAP, it was left to international solidarity campaigns like CSC to convey a truer picture of Cuban reality.Ĭonsequently, ICAP’s principal task during these early years was to forge links with the groups that had formed in solidarity with Cuba worldwide, particularly following the imposition of the US blockade in February 1962. Jenny Kassman reports on five decades of building solidarity with the island Spring 2011 In June, CSC will mark 50 years of the Cuban Friendship Institute with a public event in London.