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Vol. 72/No. 50      December 22, 2008

 
Film shows Cuban role in African freedom fight
(feature article)
 
BY BETSEY STONE  
Important chapters in Cuba’s long history of support to liberation struggles in Africa are brought to life in the documentary film Cuba, An African Odyssey.

Directed by Lebanese-born film maker Jihan El-Tahri, the film describes internationalist missions in which hundreds of thousands of Cuban volunteers—combatants and military trainers, as well as doctors, nurses, teachers, and construction workers—gave decisive aid to struggles in Africa against colonialism, neocolonialism, and apartheid.

The three-hour film is divided into two parts. In part one we see Ernesto Che Guevara, the Argentine-born leader of the Cuban Revolution, on a three-month tour of Africa in 1964-65. Guevara met with anticolonial fighters and laid the groundwork for Cuba’s internationalist missions in the Congo (later Zaire), Congo-Brazzaville, Guinea Bissau, and Angola.

Guevara is also shown speaking at the United Nations in December l964, condemning the criminal complicity of the Belgian and U.S. governments in the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the Congo’s first prime minister after independence.

The film includes several interviews with Lawrence Devlin, head of the CIA station in the Congo. Devlin quotes from the message he received from U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower ordering the CIA to eliminate Lumumba “physically.” Exuding imperialist arrogance, he even jokes about being supplied by a CIA operative with poisoned toothpaste to do the job, toothpaste he hid in his safe so that the wrong person would not use it.

The film’s narrator describes how UN “peacekeeping” troops sent to the Congo blocked attempts by Lumumba’s followers to defend themselves from Belgian troops and their Congolese collaborators, yet allowed Lumumba’s pro-imperialist opponents to capture, torture, and later execute him.

A column of Cuban fighters led by Guevara arrived in the Congo in April 1965. By that time, Lumumba’s supporters had already suffered devastating defeats at the hands of U.S.-backed mercenary troops, including Belgian and South African mercenaries.

With the Lumumbist forces too weakened and divided to mount a serious struggle, the Cuban contingent left the Congo after seven months. U.S.-backed dictator Mobutu Sese Seko was able to consolidate his long rule over the Congo, one of Africa’s largest and most strategically located nations.

The struggle in Congo was a learning ground for the Cubans and, despite the defeat, helped sow the seed for future victories. Many of the fighters in Che’s column went on to aid other struggles in Africa and Latin America.

In l967, Víctor Dreke, second in command to Che Guevara in the Congo mission, headed back to Africa to lead the Cuban participation in the independence struggle in Guinea-Bissau, a Portuguese colony in Western Africa.

Dreke tells how Cuban veterans of the Congo were moved by the seriousness of the fighters of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde (PAIGC) and its leader, Amilcar Cabral.

Cuban support to the struggle in Guinea-Bissau included sending doctors, technicians, and supplies as well as weapons experts, who fought side by side with the PAIGC troops. This made it possible for the liberation fighters to stand up to the modern weapons provided to the Portuguese by Washington.

The success of the PAIGC in wearing down the Portuguese troops in Guinea-Bissau dealt a mortal blow to the Portuguese empire. In 1974, officers in the Portuguese military, exhausted by the African wars, overthrew the Portuguese dictatorship, opening the way to independence for the colonies of Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, Mozambique, and Angola.

Part two of the film focuses on Cuba’s role in Angola, the longest of Cuba's missions in Africa, where more than 375,000 Cuban volunteers, starting in 1975, helped defeat repeated invasions by the South African apartheid army.

After independence was won in Angola, the U.S. and South African governments intervened to prevent the emergence of a government led by the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). There were two rivals to the MPLA, the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), which was backed by the Mobutu regime and the CIA and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), that fought alongside South African apartheid troops that invaded Angola.

When the MPLA-led government asked for help to repel the South African invasion in 1975, the Cuban government responded with “Operation Carlota,” airlifting thousands of Cuban troops to Angola, arriving just in time to help halt the advance outside of Luanda, Angola's capital. Cuba’s combat mission in Angola was named after the woman who led an 1843 slave revolt in Cuba.

U.S. government officials defended their efforts to block the MPLA from becoming the governing party in Angola, charging that the Cubans were “surrogates” for the Soviets and they had to prevent a Soviet presence there.

Soviet officials appear in the film, making it clear that the Cubans acted independently. “When the Cubans arrived, they took us by surprise. It was a shock," Karen Brutens, director of foreign policy for the Political Bureau of the Soviet Communist Party, says in the film. "We weren’t happy, because they acted without informing us first. It was very imprudent.”

For 15 years Cuban forces helped push back repeated South African army advances, culminating in the apartheid regime's decisive defeat at Cuito Cuanavale in l988.

The film ends with a section on the diplomatic negotiations following that battle. Under the pressure of its battlefield defeats, the South African delegation was forced to agree to withdrawal from Angola and the granting of independence to Namibia.

As Fidel Castro explains in the film, and Nelson Mandela told the Cuban people when he traveled to the island to thank them in l991, the battle of Cuito Cuanavale was a turning point in the history of Africa. Breaking the back of the South African army on the battlefield accelerated the fall of the apartheid regime.

An important result of Cuba’s solidarity with Africa was its impact in strengthening the Cuban Revolution. This is reflected in an interview with René González, one of five Cubans in U.S jails for defending the island against attacks by U.S.-based rightists. González explains that his participation in the mission to Angola helped prepare him for the fight he is part of today.
 
 
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