In his autobiography based on hundreds of hours on interviews, Fidel Castro proudly celebrates Cuba’s gigantic achievement in world history by inflicting on a historic military a defeat on apartheid South Africa’s troops. Under encouragement by the United States, Britain, France and other NATO allies, South Africa had rushed troops across Namibia’s border with Angola to prevent a socialist liberation movement – the Movement for the Popular Liberation of Angola (MPLA) – from taking power.
Without consultation with his ally, the Soviet Union, Castro in November 1975 responded to a call by Agustinho Neto – a medical doctor turned revolutionary – to help halt South Africa’s troops keen on capturing Luanda, the capital. Under the call that ‘’African blood flows in veins of Cubans’’, heavy casualties inflicted on South Africa’s troops shattered the myth among whites South Africans of their invincibility. With troops of the African National Congress and South West African Peoples Organisation (SWAPO) fighting together with the Cubans, the end of three hundred years of white racial brutalities loomed alarmingly.
That apartheid South Africa’s military, economic and bureaucratic power was not crushed; it forced the ANC to negotiate for power. NATO countries scrambled to protect their sacred gold, diamond and other mineral mines; plantations, and financial infrastructure. Nelson Mandela’s rebuke of American demand that Castro must not attend his inauguration ceremony, underlined Cuba’s grand responsibility in wrecking a global ‘’crime against humanity’’.
President Obama’s marking Mandela’s funeral by shaking hands in public with President Raul Castro, was his salute to Mandela in his grave; and acknowledging the triumph of Cuba’s revolutionary diplomacy during times when his country’s white slavery over Black Americans was a model for racist South Africa.
Che Guevara had argued that Cuba’s strongest weapon for defending Cuba’s freedom against American domination was ‘’to create more Vietnams’’. This would weaken America’s military and economic power by forcing her to fight wars against revolutions on all continents. Across South America, Cuba began exporting social services to poor and oppressed communities. She trained thousands of doctors and nurses for export. Unlike doctors lured by money by serving high income classes in urban centres, Cuba’s doctors served among poor rural and in slum communities. They combined cure of the body with cure of the mind through political education for their patients.
This contrasted with American support for her companies which owned the most fertile lands for growing tropical crops including bananas, sisal, coffee, and sugar cane. They took land from local communities, forcing them to work for slave wages; and supported brutal military governments to silence social protests. American intelligence agencies valued assassination of patriotic and socialist politicians and rulers. As Castro was sending 76,000 troops to fight in Angola, the CIA was overthrowing and assassinating President Salvador Allende of Chile.
Cuba’s radical social diplomacy has fermented electoral victories by patriotic and socialist politicians. From Chile to Ecuador in the western rim of the Andes Mountains to Brazil and Argentina on the Atlantic rim, pro-people parties won power. In Brazil the ruling party invented the novel practice of paying weekly salaries to poor women to feed their children so that they can attend free education on full stomachs. Venezuela devised a scheme of flying to Cuba poor patients from other South American countries for free treatment of the highest quality. Cuba received Venezuelan oil as payment.
When President Hugo Chavez suddenly caught cancer, many suspected an attack with a cancer-causing agent. He had publicly offered Obama a copy of ‘’Open Veins of Latin America’’- a book critical of a history of Euro-American genocide and exploitation across South America.
Following United States’ intervention in Cuba’s struggle for independence from Spain, she began segregating Cuba’s army. In 1906 she forced Cuba’s government to import over half-a-million European immigrants to dilute the black-Cuban population. It was only in 1940 that Cubans had the courage to criminalise racism. Castro’s guerrilla war from the mountains later integrated black Cubans into the revolution. Castro would underline this by sending a black Cuban as ambassador in Moscow. Free education for all up to university level sends panic to racists inside the United States.
Entrenched interests in the Pentagon and numerous intelligence agencies are currently responding by promoting ‘’regime change’’ in Brazil and Ecuador. With a tradition of raising the political awareness of her citizens, importation by American diplomats of a form of democracy which has been characterised as a ‘’pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of the ignorant’’, Cuba should beat this dollar-oiled threat.
The long economic violence inflicted on Cuba’s development by a cruel America’s trade embargo must receive urgent intervention by the African Union. Fidel’s call for payment of REPARATION by the American government for impunity must inform Africa’s diplomacy.
