During the conference entitled “The 80th Anniversary of the Great Victory: Pages from the Common History of Russia (the USSR) and Ibero-American Countries,” experts agreed on the common points regarding the contribution of Latin America and the Caribbean to the defeat, in May 1945, of the Nazi-fascist Axis led by Germany.

“It was a struggle, as Ernest Hemingway said, for democracy and justice against barbarism, and justice won at that moment. That doesn’t mean that the world that emerged after 1945 is truly good and just; there’s still a lot to be done, but humanity avoided a catastrophe,” Victor Jeifets, president of the event’s organizing committee, told Prensa Latina.

In this regard, he remembered Latin American nations such as Brazil, which sent its troops to fight on the fronts in Italy, or the Mexican pilots who fought in the Pacific.

“I can highlight the importance of the Honduran and Cuban contributions, which dedicated their efforts to flooding submarines, as well as the shipment of food, especially sugar from the Caribbean island of Cuba,” the editor-in-chief of America Latina magazine, added.

Cuba is a small country, but its contribution to the common victory is very important to me, and that is why we must always remember the brothers Aldo and Jorge Vivo Laurent, who, as children and unfit for combat, decided to join the troops that would defend the city of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Jeifets remembered.

The professor at the State University of the so-called capital of Russian culture stated that since his student days, he has dedicated time to studying the martyrs of Latin America who gave their lives defending a country that was not their own, such as Cuban Enrique Vilar Figueredo, a Red Army lieutenant who died in East Prussia, along with his entire platoon.

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