The Militant (logo)  

Vol. 72/No. 9      March 3, 2008

 
Cuba, Africa, the fight against
racism from 1959 to today
Mary-Alice Waters speaks at meeting to celebrate
publication in Cuba of ‘From the Escambray to the Congo’
(feature article)
 
The following remarks by Mary-Alice Waters, president of Pathfinder Press, were given at the February 16 presentation of From the Escambray to the Congo: In the Whirlwind of the Cuban Revolution by Víctor Dreke, as part of the Havana International Book Fair. The event was chaired by Iraida Aguirrechu of Editora Política, the publishing house of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba.

The book, originally published by Pathfinder Press in 2002, was recently issued in Cuba for the first time as part of the Cuban Book Institute’s Special Plan, a program to make books broadly available to the Cuban people at heavily subsidized prices.

Dreke was a combatant in Cuba’s 1956-58 revolutionary war that overturned a U.S.-backed dictatorship there. He helped lead the Cuban armed forces and popular militias in crushing U.S.-organized counterrevolutionary units in the Escambray mountains in the early 1960s. In 1965 he was second-in-command under Ernesto Che Guevara of the Cuban volunteers fighting alongside anti-imperialist forces in the Congo. Today he is Cuba’s ambassador to Equatorial Guinea.

The talk is copyright © Pathfinder Press 2008. Reprinted by permission. Footnotes and headings are by the Militant.
 

*****

BY MARY-ALICE WATERS  
The publication here in Cuba of the book From the Escambray to the Congo by Víctor Dreke, six years after it was first published in the United States in both English and Spanish, is truly an event to celebrate. The availability at this year’s Cuba-wide book fair of some eight million books—made possible by the policies and efforts of the Cuban government and the Special Plan of the Cuban Book Institute—is a registration of how far the Cuban people have come in pushing back the most difficult years of the Special Period.1 It demonstrates to the world once again that with a clear revolutionary perspective, discipline, and courage, and the kind of leadership the Cuban Revolution has forged, imperialism is not the inevitable victor.

And it demonstrates to the world once again the priority and content that a revolutionary government of the toilers gives to the words of Cuba’s national hero José Martí,2 “To be educated is to be free.”

Thank you for the opportunity to be part of this celebration.  
 
He did ‘get involved’
I want to speak about the impact this book has had in the United States, including its original presentation during a one-month speaking tour in the United States by Víctor Dreke and Ana Morales 3 in 2002.

In the opening pages of From the Escambray to the Congo, Dreke says: “When I was young, my father used to tell me, ‘Don’t get involved in anything.’”

My father was against Batista, Dreke recalls. “But he didn’t believe in anyone. ‘Don’t join anything,’ he’d say. ‘Things will always stay the same. One side wins now, the other side wins later, and the ones with money will always be in power. Study and get an education and don’t mess with strikes or any of that. It won’t get you anywhere. Besides, that stuff’s not for blacks.’”

That’s how many blacks in Cuba looked at things, Dreke adds. “Fortunately, I didn’t listen.”

Nor did hundreds, then thousands, and then tens of thousands of other rebel-minded workers and youth like him. They began to resist, to fight back, and their actions changed the course of history not only in Cuba but throughout the Americas and beyond.

“We were ready to die to bring down Batista,” Dreke says. But back then, “we didn’t know the first thing about revolution.”

From the Escambray to the Congo is the story, told with humor, without exaggeration or oversimplification, of how hundreds of thousands like Víctor Dreke were transformed from inexperienced if unflinchingly courageous revolutionary youth into seasoned proletarian internationalists and leaders of a people capable of defying the multifaceted aggressions of the Yankee rulers for half a century.

Throughout the Americas, and in the United States especially, Dreke’s story has an additional powerful message. It shows us the kind of revolutionary power of the workers and farmers that is necessary to even begin to eradicate the legacy of centuries of African slavery, segregation, and racial discrimination in our hemisphere. Whatever its imperfections, only socialist Cuba provides an example of how the discrimination that still permeates all aspects of social and economic relations in the United States and elsewhere in the Americas can be eliminated.

The desire to learn from the experience of the Cuban Revolution, to learn how to fight—and above all to learn what it takes to win—is the reason why more than 5,000 copies of the book have already been bought by workers and youth around the world, but more than anywhere else, in the United States.  
 
2002 U.S. speaking tour
The attraction of the example of the Cuban Revolution was powerfully demonstrated soon after the publication of this book, in October and November 2002, when Víctor Dreke and Ana Morales made a four-week speaking tour in the United States. Invited by dozens of university professors and student organizations to speak about “Cuba and Africa: From 1959 to Today,” they visited seven states and the District of Columbia, spoke to more than 3,000 people who attended one of the 14 meetings, and participated in 52 other events. These ranged from formal receptions, including one hosted by a Georgia state legislator, to informal gatherings with rail workers in Washington and Black farmers waging a battle to keep their land in rural Georgia.

Víctor’s first meeting was at Howard University, one of the most prestigious, historic Black institutions of higher education in the United States, located in Washington, D.C. It was an overflow crowd of some 300 students. The meeting actually had to be interrupted after it began and moved to a larger auditorium, since more than 100 students were massed in the hallway outside, loudly and insistently demanding to hear what Dreke had to say.

His last meeting was at Florida International University in North Miami where 250 students, faculty, and others successfully met every challenge by the counterrevolutionary forces there who tried to force the university to withdraw the invitation and deny Dreke the right to speak. When that failed, they made several attempts to physically assault the speakers platform but were successfully prevented by a defense line of students, workers, and professors determined that the meeting would proceed. It did. Víctor spoke and was heard.

It was a tremendous victory.

As Cuban Ambassador Dagoberto Rodríguez, the head of the Cuban Interests Section in Washington at the time, noted at the farewell reception for Víctor and Ana, not since the revolution’s triumph in January 1959 had any Cuban leader of Dreke’s stature had the opportunity to speak so widely in the United States.

Whether Víctor and Ana’s visas were granted due to administrative error or political miscalculation we will probably never know, but no similar visa has ever been granted by the U.S. State Department, either before or after. The powerful appeal of the example of the Cuban Revolution to working people and youth increasingly engaged in real struggles in the United States is too dangerous. Especially when told first hand by one of its historic protagonists like Víctor.  
 
A prior experience
I remember a few years earlier, in 1997, at the time of the 30th anniversary of Ernesto Che Guevara’s death in combat in Bolivia, General Harry Villegas, “Pombo,”4 was invited by professors and students in Los Angeles and Houston to address a number of similar meetings. When the professor in charge asked the U.S. State Department why there was a delay in granting the visa, the representative of the State Department with whom he spoke simply laughed. His response was, “You must be crazy to think we would give a visa to Harry Villegas!”

I also remember well the pride and merriment on the face of Pombo’s superior at that time, Gen. Néstor López Cuba, when he told me he had given Pombo permission to accept the invitation to speak in the United States.

“What’s the worst that can happen?” López Cuba joked. “This is a man who was able to escape one of the most ferocious manhunts in history, successfully evading encirclement organized by the CIA and the entire Bolivian Army, even in a country where the color of his skin made him an unmistakable target.

“If it came to that, I’m sure he could make himself disappear in a city like Los Angeles!”  
 
Internationalist missions
The record of the Cuban Revolution’s internationalist missions in Africa was of special interest to the audiences Dreke addressed in the United States. They came to learn about Cuba’s support for national liberation struggles from Algeria, to the Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Angola, South Africa, and beyond. They came to learn about the selfless aid of thousands of teachers, engineers, sports trainers, doctors, and other medical personnel serving in dozens of African countries today.

This is a history that many African-American youth have heard of or seen references to, but in fact know very little about. Conflicting Missions, the book by professor Piero Gleijeses, who headed the tour committee that sponsored Dreke’s speaking engagements, has been a welcome contribution to overcoming this lack of information, and the availability of a new printing of the Spanish translation of that book, presented here at the book fair this year, is welcome news.

But young people and others wanted to hear about this history, first hand, from someone who spoke with the authority of a direct participant. They came away from those meetings with a greater sense of pride, of confidence in their own political potential, of their own self-worth.  
 
Equatorial Guinea
We saw the same thing in Africa, in Equatorial Guinea, in October 2005, when the National University of Equatorial Guinea hosted the first-ever book fair in that country. It was an historic undertaking in a country where there is not even one single bookstore.

The Cuban Embassy in Malabo, where as you know Víctor Dreke serves as Cuba’s ambassador, gave its full support. Pathfinder Press, among others, was invited to participate, which we did with great enthusiasm, making available a range of titles in Spanish, French, and English—from Habla Nelson Mandela, How Far We Slaves Have Come by Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro, speeches by Thomas Sankara of Burkina Faso, and From the Escambray to the Congo, through various issues of the magazine of Marxist politics and theory, New International, to The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.

For many of the students who browsed the book tables and attended the presentations at that event, not only were Cuba’s contributions to the liberation of Africa unknown; even the struggle against the apartheid regime of South Africa was something about which they had little information. It happened before they were born, or were in primary school at most. Their thirst for knowledge of the history of the struggles of the peoples of Africa—and the descendents of Africa in the countries where millions were taken as slaves—was overwhelming. In Equatorial Guinea, as here in Cuba, books by Malcolm X were among those most in demand.

And through that book fair, even many professors and others in responsible government positions, learned more fully for the first time the kind of person the Cuban ambassador to their country really was. I remember the surprise of the university rector who was looking at the photo on the back cover of From the Escambray to the Congo, the photo of Fidel together with Che and Víctor taken just before the two of them left for the internationalist mission in the Congo in April 1965.

The rector turned to Víctor and asked, “Who is the Black guy in the middle there?” Dreke said, “That’s me.” There was stunned silence in the room for the few seconds it took for that to sink in. It gave a new resonance to the phrase, “Your Excellency, Mr. Ambassador.”
 

*****

We are proud of Pathfinder's contributions to the collective efforts that made this book possible, and especially pleased that it will now be broadly known here in Cuba.

We also want to take this occasion to express our special appreciation to our moderator here today, compañera Iraida [Aguirrechu], for her irreplaceable collaboration. Without her indefatigable efforts this book would not have seen the light of day, in either the United States or here in Cuba.

Our pledge is to continue to make From the Escambray to the Congo available as widely as possible. “Forward to the next 5,000 sold!”—throughout the United States and the world. Because this is a world in which spreading capitalist financial crisis and imperialist war will make the example of the Cuban Revolution even more compelling to a vanguard of working people and youth who are themselves each day being forced to learn more and more about how to fight and, following the example of men and women like Víctor Dreke, to win.


1. “Special Period” is the term used in Cuba to describe the economic and social crisis that exploded there in the early 1990s with the abrupt end of aid and trade on preferential terms with the former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries.

2. José Martí organized Cuba’s final war of independence against Spanish colonial rule at the end of the 19th century. He was killed in combat.

3. Ana Morales is a doctor who headed Cuba’s medical mission to Guinea-Bissau in 1985 and helped found the first medical school there. She toured the United States with Víctor Dreke in 2002, speaking on the topic of “Cuba’s Medical Missions in Africa, 1963 to Today.” At the time she was a professor at the Latin American Medical School in Havana.

4. Harry Villegas, known by his nom de guerre Pombo, is a brigadier general in Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces no longer on active duty. Villegas fought alongside Ernesto Che Guevara in internationalist missions in the Congo and Bolivia, as well as during Cuba’s revolutionary war. A leader of the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution, he is a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, a deputy in the National Assembly, and a Hero of the Cuban Revolution.
 
 
Related articles:
Havana fair features books on Cuba’s revolutionary battles
Cuba’s National Assembly to elect president  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home