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Militant/Marty Ressler |
| Víctor Dreke speaks October 23 at University of Maryland in Baltimore. |
At several speaking engagements in this area, Dreke often returned to the decisive weight that 300,000 Cuban soldiers deployed, alongside Angolan and Namibian forces, in repelling assaults by the South African apartheid army over a 13-year period, ending in the defeat of the invaders in the decisive 1988 battle of Cuito Cuanavale. This successful struggle was a benchmark of decades of Cuban internationalist work in Africa, internationalist work that continues to this day through medical and other missions, and that remains an example of the ties of solidarity that bind revolutionary Cuba and Africa.
Dreke spoke from the vantage point of a leading combatant in the Cuban Revolution who for nearly four decades has been centrally involved in Cuba’s internationalist solidarity with Africa.
The public meeting at Howard University began in a 156-seat space. The room was quickly packed with people who came to hear Dreke and Ana Morales, a doctor who has helped lead Cuban medical missions in several African countries, speaking on the theme "Cuba and Africa--1959 to the present."
Twenty minutes into the event, well over 100 more had filled the hallway outside, unable to get in. A larger space was found on the second floor, where another event was just finishing. With several participants helping to rapidly clean the room so the meeting could be held there, the audience moved to the new space and continued.
The chair of the meeting was Lorenzo Morris, head of the political science department. He was introduced by Shawntel Hebert, the head of Amnesty International at Howard and one of the students who had worked for months to build the event. The political science and history departments both endorsed the meeting and, along with the English department, hosted a reception for the two visiting Cubans beforehand. Sponsoring student organizations included the Howard University NAACP chapter, Howard Student Government, Amnesty International, and Afro-Latinos Making Alliances (ALMA).
Decades of revolutionary activity
The crowd reflected the broad support and interest that the Cuban speakers drew, especially among Blacks and Africans. A number of other groups involved in Cuba solidarity activities helped publicize the meeting, drawing people from all over the city.
Many in the audience were eager to hear about Víctor Dreke’s experiences in the Cuban revolutionary movement. In the early 1950s as a teenager in central Cuba, Dreke joined in the popular struggle against the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship. Joining the Rebel Army in the mid-1950s, Dreke achieved the rank of captain by the time of the revolution’s triumph in 1959. Following the victory of the revolution he held a number of responsibilities, including as one of the commanders of the forces combating counterrevolutionary guerrilla bands, which murdered hundreds of peasants and workers during a U.S.-organized dirty war centered in Cuba’s Escambray mountains from 1959 to 1965.
In 1965 Dreke served as second in command under Cuban revolutionary leader Ernesto Che Guevara in an internationalist combat mission by 128 Cuban volunteers in the Congo. In 1965 Cuba was responding to a request for assistance from leaders of the national liberation movement there who were followers of Patrice Lumumba, the assassinated leader of the Congolese independence struggle. Dreke returned to Africa in 1966-1968 as the head of Cuba’s military mission to Guinea-Bissau, where Cuban forces trained soldiers loyal to Amilcar Cabral, the main leader of that country’s struggle for independence from Portuguese colonial rule. In the last decade he has helped lead Cuba’s work assisting African development projects, and has been a leader of the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution.
‘Capitalists will not take back power’
At the Howard University meeting, Dreke gave a brief presentation, as did Morales. Then the question and answer period lasted for more than two hours.
One questioner asked Dreke where he saw Cuba going 40 years from today. Dreke replied, "I can tell you what we won’t do in Cuba 40 years from now. The capitalists will not take power and we will never put the rope back up that divided Blacks and whites in Cuba. That I can guarantee." In his book, From the Escambray to the Congo: In the Whirlwind of the Cuban Revolution, published by Pathfinder, Dreke describes how after the victory of the Cuban Revolution, in the town of Cruces, an officer of the Rebel Army that toppled the U.S.-backed dictatorship removed the rope that had separated Blacks and whites at dances in the park--an act that was repeated in towns across Cuba.
Answering a question by an African student who asked whether Cuba will continue to offer revolutionary solidarity to Africa after Fidel Castro dies, Dreke emphasized the leadership responsibilities already shouldered by a new generation in Cuba. "Many leaders in Cuba today are young people who weren’t old enough to be part of the armed struggle against Batista," he said.
One example he gave was of the five Cuban revolutionaries--today locked up in U.S. prisons on frame-up spying and conspiracy charges because they were gathering information on Florida-based counterrevolutionary groups engaged in assaults on Cuba.
"We have five young Cuban patriots imprisoned here in the United States who are not old enough to have fought in the revolution. They have been imprisoned for defending Cuba against terrorism that was being prepared by groups in the United States against Cuba," Dreke said.
"The U.S government has refused to allow their families to see some of them," he added. "They have dispersed them to five different prisons. They thought those conditions would crush them, but instead they have spread the struggle to five different places." Dreke urged those who attended each meeting to get involved in the fight to free them.
During the discussion period, Ana Morales replied to a number of questions on health care in Cuba, which, because there was a socialist revolution, is no longer a commodity as it is in capitalist countries. She outlined measures Cuba has been able to take in the fight against the spread of AIDS. The percentage of the population in Cuba today that is HIV-positive, she reported, is less than 0.001 percent.
By comparison, 0.3 percent of the U.S. population is HIV-positive. In South Africa, one in nine people is living with HIV.
Morales also spoke about the Latin American School of Medicine in Havana, where she teaches. This facility offers full scholarships to young people from countries throughout the Caribbean, Latin America, and Africa who want to attend medical school and meet the qualifications. The only thing Cuba asks of them is that they agree to return to their countries and neighborhoods to practice medicine. The Cuban government has offered 500 full scholarships to students from the United States. Olivia Burlingame of Pastors for Peace, a group that opposes the U.S. embargo against Cuba, staffed a literature table outside the meeting with information on how young people in the United States can apply to study there and with information on the defense of the Cuban revolutionaries imprisoned in the United States.
Following the meeting at Howard, numerous students lined up to speak to Dreke and Morales and to have Víctor Dreke autograph their new copies of his book.
Fidel Castro and Che Guevara
Earlier in the week Dreke and Morales spent a day speaking with several groups in Baltimore. The day began with speaking to a class of 30 students at the College of Notre Dame. The hour and a half long class was followed by informal discussion in a nearby lounge for another hour. They also held a noontime discussion with the sociology department faculty and graduate students at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC).
That evening the Cuban revolutionaries spoke at a meeting at UMBC sponsored by the Multi-Cultural Affairs Center, Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics, Africana Studies Department, and African Students Association. About 70 people attended, including a number of African students.
At that meeting, a student asked Dreke if Fidel Castro was involved with or knew beforehand about the death of the Argentine-born Cuban revolutionary leader Che Guevara. Guevara, who headed a revolutionary column of fighters in Bolivia, was killed in 1967 by the Bolivian Army in close consultation with the CIA.
"Many things along these lines have been written by enemies of the Cuban Revolution to try to present divisions in the leadership," replied Dreke. "This is a slander of Fidel, especially. Fidel and Che were more than brothers, they were revolutionary comrades."
Dreke pointed out that when Guevara joined the Cuban revolutionary movement in the late 1950s, he asked that, when the time came after the victory of the Cuban Revolution, he be allowed to return to Argentina to be part of making a revolution in his native country. In 1966, when Che left for Bolivia, Castro had sought to convince him not to go with the first group of combatants to Bolivia, Dreke said, to make sure the conditions were right before he joined the mission.
"It was not Fidel but the Bolivian Communist Party, with Monje at its head, who betrayed Che," Dreke explained. "With the exception of a small group of communists who joined Che, they stabbed him in the back." Dreke was referring to Mario Monje, leader of the Bolivian Communist Party, who verbally welcomed Guevara’s combat unit to Bolivia but, after it arrived, refused to support it.
"Fidel did everything he could for the fighters in Bolivia," Dreke continued, "as he did for us in the Congo, and as he has done for Cuban internationalist fighters everywhere."
Dreke and Morales spoke at American University October 24. Phillip Brenner, chair of the Interdisciplinary Council on the Americas, moderated the meeting, attended by close to 100 people. Brenner was a participant in the recent conference hosted in Cuba on the 40th anniversary of the "missile" crisis, with delegations in attendance from Russia, the United States, and Cuba. The Cuban visitors also spoke in two classes at American University the previous day.
In between campus meetings, Dreke and Morales visited classrooms at Banneker High School, where they were invited back by a couple of teachers following their first speaking engagement at the school. They also spoke to the Writer’s Roundtable hosted by TransAfrica Forum, where they contributed a copy of Dreke’s book to the Arthur Ashe Research Library. TransAfrica Forum played a leading role in opposing U.S. investments in apartheid South Africa. Hosted by TransAfrica’s president Bill Fletcher, the meeting was also attended by Josh Williams, president of the Washington-Metro AFL-CIO.
The two Cubans also met with six railworkers at a pizzeria in Union Station here. There Dreke was asked about trade unions in Cuba. He explained that he had been part of union struggles prior to the Cuban Revolution so he could talk about the unions before and after the revolution.
Before the revolution, Dreke explained, there were some militant union struggles but they were often isolated from each other, and workers had to fight the government. Since the triumph of the revolution, workers and their unions are part of governing Cuba, and workers take up a wide range of social and economic questions through them.
Dreke and Morales left for Georgia on October 26. There they will visit with farmers in Valdosta, Georgia, and will speak at Clark/Atlanta University, Spelman College, and a citywide meeting in Atlanta. Then they head to Birmingham, Alabama, where they will speak at Miles College in Fairfield, the University of Alabama Tuscaloosa, and Birmingham Southern College, as well as at a citywide meeting at the University of Alabama in Birmingham.
The six-week tour also includes visits to Boston and Tampa, Florida.
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