Over the past 40 years, the Cuban revolutionary leader said, "we have gone not only with soldiers but with doctors, teachers, technical personnel, and many others."

In 1963, he noted, Cuban troops went to Algeria at the request of the revolutionary government of Ahmed Ben Bella to combat an imperialist-backed invasion by the Moroccan regime. The Algerian people had just won their independence from French colonial rule after a long revolutionary war.

Dreke, who has been involved in Cuba’s internationalist solidarity with Africa for nearly four decades, was in Alabama as part of a five-week speaking tour of half a dozen U.S. cities, speaking on "Cuba and Africa: 1959 to Today." Sharing the platform was Ana Morales, a doctor who has helped lead Cuban medical missions in several African countries and who today is a professor at the Latin American School of Medicine in Havana.

Following the victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Dreke told his receptive audience, the Cuban people responded to liberation struggles throughout Africa, Latin America, and Asia. They were also inspired by the civil rights battles that ended the Jim Crow system of legal segregation in the United States.

Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, Dreke said, "has often explained our debt to Africa, since slaves who had been brought from many countries in Africa were among the first to shed their blood in Cuba’s struggle for independence against Spain, beginning with the 1868 independence revolt. We must never forget that the cobblestone streets and beautiful buildings of Old Havana were built by the blood and sweat of slaves."  
 
Cuban combatants in Congo
Dreke described his own experiences in the Congo in 1965, where, as a 28-year-old combatant, he served as second in command to Argentine-born revolutionary leader Ernesto Che Guevara, who headed the mission.

The 128 Cuban volunteers had gone to the Congo at the request of leaders of the national liberation movement who were followers of Patrice Lumumba, the assassinated leader of the Congo’s fight for independence from Belgium. The task of the Cuban column was to help train forces combating proimperialist troops and U.S.-backed mercenaries in that country.

The meeting at the University of Alabama in Birmingham (UAB) drew a mix of students, faculty, workers, and political activists from around the city and beyond. The meeting was punctuated with applause and laughter from the audience as Dreke and Morales answered with humor one question after another on topics ranging from public health in Cuba to the impact of the U.S. embargo to the question of religious freedom.

"We cannot say there are no racists in Cuba," said Dreke, in response to a question about how the Cuban Revolution has combated racism since 1959, "because that is something that may still exist among some individuals. But discrimination and racism do not exist as a social problem today" in the way they do in capitalist countries.  
 
Revolution transformed social relations
From the beginning, the Cuban revolutionary leadership set an example by enacting laws barring racist discrimination and enforcing them. The revolution has transformed social relations and attitudes in Cuba. "There used to be an expression in Cuba, before the revolution, that someone ‘looked Congo,’ if they were dark-skinned. That is not something you hear today," Dreke pointed out.

The citywide meeting was opened by Dr. Sten Vermund, director of the Sparkman Center for International Public Health Education at UAB, one of the sponsors of the visit to Alabama.

"Among my colleagues are several doctors from Zambia," Vermund said, "and I asked them what they thought about the Cuban doctors in their country. They told me the Cuban doctors would go to parts of the country where even Zambian doctors would not go. So we have the most favorable impression of the work of Cuban doctors there."

Welcoming remarks were also made by representatives of the UAB Black Student Union and Bodypolitik, a student group that was one of the sponsors of the tour. The meeting was chaired by Niyi Coker, chair of the African American Studies Program, and Lynda Law Harrison, professor at the school of nursing.

Four students from Alabama A&M University, members of the Pan African Alliance, made the 90-mile drive from Huntsville to attend the event. A young woman and her mother made the drive up from Tuscaloosa to hear Dreke, after learning about the tour while voting two days earlier.

After the program, Dreke and Morales were swamped for another hour by people who wanted to continue discussion and ask Dreke to autograph copies of his book, From the Escambray to the Congo: In the Whirlwind of the Cuban Revolution, published by Pathfinder Press.

Earlier in the day, Ana Morales was the guest speaker at the UAB School of Nursing lunch-time lecture series. She spoke on "Medical Education and Health Care in Cuba."

"The advances we have made in health care since 1959," Morales said, "have been possible only because we have a socialist system in Cuba. In 1959, average life expectancy was 44. Today it is 76."

There was special interest in her description of Cuba’s family doctor/nurse system--in which a doctor and a nurse live and work in each community--through which primary health care is made equally available to the population in city and countryside.

That same day, Dreke spoke to a group of about 15 students and faculty organized by the UAB African American Studies Program, one of the tour sponsors. His presentation, drawing on his own experiences, dealt with the realities facing youth in Cuba in the early 1950s. "Young people grew up in the streets shining shoes or washing cars or doing other things they shouldn’t be doing," Dreke said. "Those were times when Cuba was capitalist. If your parents got sick, most people could not take them to the hospital. If they needed a blood transfusion, you would have to find friends to donate blood and you couldn’t offer that friend even a cup of coffee in return. That was what it was like in Cuba, and it was worse for Blacks."

Fulgencio Batista, the U.S.-backed dictator overthrown by the 1959 revolution, "had the features of a Black person. Some Black people used to say, ‘Now we have a Black government.’ But Batista never said he was Black," Dreke noted. "In fact, even though he was as dark as this young man"--pointing to an audience member--"his birth certificate said he was white. Batista was responsible for killing 20,000 people." He cared nothing about the well-being of Blacks in Cuba, Dreke concluded.

Dreke, who as a teenager was active in the student protests against the Batista dictatorship, described some of the challenges of organizing the revolutionary movement in the initial period. "The student struggle was not easy," he said. "You would try to organize a student strike and few would participate. Parents would be afraid that their children would get brutalized by the cops or that they would lose their jobs. But eventually we came to the conclusion that you had to protest and fight for the overthrow of the government.

"Many were exploited, but at first not many were ready to be on the front lines. So we began with a few. The most important thing is the quality of the movement that is built in the beginning stages. It may not start big. But it’s more important to be small and correct than to be large and wrong."

Several people asked how it is possible that Cuba achieved its independence and is able to move forward on a number of social programs.

"People wonder, ‘Why can Cuba do all these things when other countries that are so wealthy and cannot?’" Dreke said. "It’s because in your countries workers don’t hold power. Ordinary Blacks and whites don’t hold power. But in Cuba workers do hold the power."

On November 4, Dreke and Morales visited the Federation of Southern Cooperatives (FSC) Rural Training Center in Epes, Alabama, hosted by the center’s director, Lukata Mjumbe.

Formed in 1967, the FSC is an organization of small farmers that grew out of the civil rights movement and today involves more than 100 cooperatives, credit unions, and community organizations, including some 10,000 small farmers, most of whom are Black.

A dozen people, including two farmers and FSC staff members, attended the meeting for the two Cuban revolutionaries. Dreke gave a presentation highlighting Cuba’s first agrarian reform law, instituted shortly after the triumph of the revolution. "It was the actual implementation of these laws--fulfilling the promise made during the revolution--and the redistribution of land to the peasants" that won the trust and loyalty of the peasants, Dreke said.

A question by one farmer, on the prospect of Cubans owning the land they till, generated considerable discussion. "In Cuba all farmers have the right to use the land they work, whether on a cooperative or as individual farmers. The land was guaranteed to them since Cuba instituted the agrarian reform. No one can take the land away from them. The only requirement is that the farmers work the land they hold. All the equipment, seeds, and other things necessary to farm are provided by the government thanks to the revolution," Dreke explained.  
 
Visit with civil rights veterans
The following day, the Cuban visitors were special guests at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (BCRI), a museum devoted to the history of the civil rights movement, with emphasis on Alabama. The visit by Dreke and Morales was hosted by Odessa Woolfolk, president emeritus of the institute. Gregory Wilson, BCRI’s education director, took Dreke and Morales on a tour of the museum. Several classrooms of students--many of whose curiosity was piqued by the two Spanish-speaking visitors--were touring the museum at the same time.

The Cuban visitors were honored guests at a luncheon for veterans of the civil rights movement and other political activists in the city. The dozen or so people attending included Rev. Abraham Lincoln Woods, longtime president of the Birmingham Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Col. Stone Johnson, who served as bodyguard to civil rights leader Fred Shuttlesworth in the 1960s; Janice Kelsey, who as a high school student was arrested and jailed as part of the mass youth protests against segregation in Birmingham in 1963; Bill O’Brian, member of the Board of Directors of the BCRI, from Samford University; Ahmed Obafemi from the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement; and several representatives from Pastors for Peace, a Cuba solidarity organization.

Dreke and Morales spoke that afternoon at Miles College, a small, historically Black college in Fairfield, Alabama, hosted by the Division of Social and Behavioral Sciences.

The following day they visited the University of Alabama campus in Tuscaloosa, hosted by the Department of History. Chaired by Larry Clayton, head of the department, the meeting drew 40 students and faculty. Afterward, the Cuban visitors were given a tour of the School of Community Health Services, where Morales spoke on Cuba’s public health system.

A group of doctors and other health workers at this school are grappling with the fact that many rural counties in Alabama have few doctors or other health-care workers. They are working on a program to recruit and train young people to be doctors in these areas, a project that is slow-going at best, they explained. They were eager to learn more about Cuba’s public health system and doctor-training program.

One could have heard a pin drop as Morales explained, "In Cuba, all doctors work in the community for two years after they finish school. We believe that all human beings in Cuba have the same rights, and that people shouldn’t become doctors because of money, but rather to be of service to the community. This is the most basic principle we have of community medicine."

Susan LaMont is a textile worker in Columbiana, Alabama. Brian Taylor is a member of United Mine Workers Local 2133.  
 
 
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