The Cuba-Africa tour by Víctor Dreke and Ana Morales offers a rare opportunity to learn about the Cuban Revolution and its internationalist role in Africa’s freedom struggles. Several hundred students have already heard Dreke and Morales speak in Washington, D.C., their first stop, including 300 who participated in a meeting at Howard University. The speaking series continues through Valdosta and Atlanta, Georgia; Birmingham, Alabama; Tampa, Florida; and Boston.

Víctor Dreke has been a leading cadre in Cuba’s revolutionary movement for half a century. Dreke became politically active in central Cuba in 1952 as a 15-year-old, when he and other youth took to the streets to protest the U.S.-backed coup of Fulgencio Batista. By the end of 1957 he had been forced underground by the dictatorship’s repression and joined the guerrilla front of the Revolutionary Directorate. After the triumph of the revolution he was one of the commanders of the operations in the Escambray mountains of central Cuba that crushed U.S.-sponsored counterrevolutionary bands who were sowing terror among working people there.

In 1965 Dreke served as second in command under Ernesto Che Guevara of the Cuban internationalist combatants in the Congo. The volunteers went to that country at the request of leaders of the national liberation movement there who were followers of Patrice Lumumba, the assassinated leader of the Congo’s fight for independence. They blazed a trail for hundreds of thousands of Cuban internationalist volunteers who later joined liberation forces in Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, and elsewhere over the following years and decades.

Dreke returned to Africa in 1966–68 to head Cuba’s military mission in Guinea-Bissau--at that time fighting for its independence from Portugal--and the Republic of Guinea. Dreke’s talks on "Cuba and Africa: 1959 to today" draw on his life experience as a leader of Cuba’s internationalist missions.

Dreke’s example shows the caliber of revolutionary leadership that was forged through the struggle that ushered in a workers and farmers government in Cuba. That leadership waged an enormous battle to transform the social relations on which capitalism is built, including centuries of racism, reached out to other peoples fighting to break free of the chains of colonial and imperialist domination, and through four decades has successfully stood up to U.S. imperialist aggression.

Today Dreke joins with other revolutionary leaders and cadres in Cuba who are seeking to draw the new generations of Cubans into revolutionary activity and win them to a communist perspective. His book, From the Escambray to the Congo: In the Whirlwind of the Cuban Revolution, tells the story of the kind of men and women who made the Cuban Revolution and how that revolution transformed them.

The potential interest in Dreke’s powerful message can be seen in an interview with him that appeared in the October 30 Atlanta Journal Constitution, which highlighted his description of Che Guevara’s revolutionary leadership. "Some people have tried to mystify Che, but for us, he was flesh and bones," Dreke is quoted as saying in the interview.

Also speaking is Ana Morales, a doctor and professor at the Latin American School of Medicine in Havana who headed the Cuban medical mission in Guinea Bissau in 1985. She helped found the first medical school in that country, donated by Cuba. Speaking on "Cuba’s medical missions in Africa," she gives a vivid description of Cuba’s internationalism today.

Students, young workers, and others who want to know the truth about the Cuban Revolution and its internationalist example in Africa will not want to miss taking part in--and helping publicize and bring others to--these meetings.

The speakers offer more than simply pointing to the moral integrity and the example of the Cuban Revolution. Their experiences point to the need for--and capacity of--working people here to build a movement capable of following that example.
 
 
Related articles:
‘Cuba and Africa are bound by solidarity’  
 
 
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