Also speaking was Ana Morales, a leader of Cuba’s medical missions in Africa, who joined Dreke in a month-long speaking tour of seven cities.

For the largely student audience, this was a unique opportunity to hear a commander of the Cuban Revolution speaking firsthand about the revolution and its record of solidarity with national liberation struggles in Africa. It was the first time a Cuban leader of Dreke’s stature had spoken in Miami.

A small minority of right-wing opponents of the Cuban Revolution came to try to shout down the speakers and prevent a discussion. Because of the breadth of forces sponsoring and attending the meeting, and the preparatory work by students and faculty who were determined to hold such an event, the disrupters failed, and the program proceeded.

"This was a victory for academic freedom, for free speech," said Carole Boyce Davies, director of FIU’s African-New World Studies department, one of the sponsors.

Dreke spoke as a cadre with nearly five decades of revolutionary activity. As a teenager living in central Cuba in the early 1950s, he became involved in the popular struggle against the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship. Joining the July 26 Movement led by Fidel Castro in the mid-1950s, and then the front organized by the Revolutionary Directorate in the Escambray mountains of Central Cuba, he reached the rank of captain by the time of the revolution’s triumph in 1959. Following that victory, he commanded the forces in the Escambray mountains that successfully combated U.S.-backed counterrevolutionary guerrilla bands, which murdered hundreds of farmers and workers during the U.S.-organized dirty war there.

In 1965, Dreke served as second in command under revolutionary leader Ernesto Che Guevara in an internationalist combat mission of 128 Cuban volunteers in the Congo. He returned to Africa in 1966–68 as the head of Cuba’s military mission to Guinea-Bissau, where Cuban troops trained and fought alongside soldiers led by Amilcar Cabral in the war for independence from Portuguese colonial rule. In the past decade he has helped lead Cuba’s work assisting African development projects.

The November 13 meeting was sponsored by the ad hoc Afro-Cuban Interest Committee. Among the groups and individuals at FIU that lent their support were professors Jean Rahier of the Anthropology Department, Peter Craumer of International Relations, Ron Cox of Political Science, and Ken Lipner of Economics; the department of African-New World Studies (ANWS); and the International Relations and African-New World Studies students associations.

Also backing the meeting were the African Club at the University of Miami; Famn Aysiyan Miami (Haitian Women of Miami); Miami Coalition Against the U.S. Embargo of Cuba; and Alianza Martiana, a Cuban-American group opposed to the U.S. embargo against the island.

Several of the University of Miami students found out about the meeting from four students on campus who had gone to Valdosta, Georgia, two weeks earlier to meet Dreke and Morales, who were visiting farmers and other residents of that rural area.

James Sweet, professor of history and director of the fall lecture series of ANWS, chaired the program. Sweet introduced the discussion portion of the program by pointing to the significance for Africa of the Cuban combatants’ role in defeating the South African apartheid invaders in Angola in 1988.

Several spokespeople for different groups welcomed the speakers from the platform. Among them were Adrian Carter, president of the student government at FIU North; and Brad Brown, president of the NAACP in Miami-Dade County. Brown said that the local and national NAACP was actively involved in trying to secure contracts for U.S. Black farmers to be able to sell their produce and livestock to Cuba so that all agricultural trade with the island would not be dominated by wealthy farmers and their trade consortiums.

ANWS director Carole Boyce Davies explained that her department invited Dreke and Morales to speak because of Cuba’s role in the fight against colonialism in Africa, "its ability to challenge U.S. domination," and "the interest among students in the Afro-Cuban experience." The audience at the meeting reflected the large percentage of students on the campus who are of African, African-American, or Caribbean heritage.

Marleine Bastien of the Haitian Women of Miami condemned Washington’s policy of mass deportations of Haitian immigrants, both today and during the U.S.-backed Duvalier dictatorship. She urged members of the audience to join a November 21 protest demanding the release of hundreds of Haitian refugees being detained at the Krome Detention Center.

As Bastien spoke, a handful of would-be disrupters interrupted her with shouts of "murderer!" directed at Víctor Dreke. Two then tried to rush the stage. Kameelah Benjamin, an ANWS graduate student who was one of a dozen students acting as security monitors for the event, blocked the path of one of the rightists. After yelling for several minutes in defiance of the chairperson’s insistent requests--backed by many in the audience--to sit down and respect the speakers, the disrupters were removed from the meeting hall by plainclothes police officers.

The failure of this attempt to break up the event, which was followed by two more unsuccessful efforts, made it clear that the overwhelming majority wanted to hear what the speakers had to say. Most of the rest of the meeting took place without interruption.

In opening his presentation Dreke thanked the audience for having "made a firm decision to be here with us tonight. We are here legally in the United States, though it appears that some would like to take that away," he said, sparking laughter and easing the tensions in the room.

The revolutionary leader condemned Washington’s economic war on Cuba and called for normalization of relations between the two countries. He reported the November 12 vote at the United Nations General Assembly, which by a 173–3 margin supported a resolution calling on the U.S. government to lift its economic embargo on Cuba.

Dreke focused on the bonds between the people of Cuba and Africa and the role played by Cuban volunteers in African liberation struggles. After describing the revolutionary struggles on the island against Spanish colonial rule and then U.S. imperialist domination, he stated, "Only with the victory of the revolution on Jan. 1, 1959, did Cuba become truly free, independent, and sovereign."

Since then, Dreke noted, hundred of thousands of Cuban volunteers have joined anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles in Africa--from Algeria, to the Congo, to Guinea-Bissau and Angola.

Ana Morales described the gains of the Cuban Revolution in providing free, high-quality health care for all. Medical solidarity missions in Africa and the Caribbean "have built six medical schools to train doctors in these countries," she said. Cuba is not "rich in national resources," she added, "but we are rich in men and women who want to do something to change the world."  
 
Why Cubans fought in Angola
In the discussion period, a Black Cuban-American who told the Militant that he works for Radio Martí, a U.S. government radio station that beams counterrevolutionary propaganda to the island, acknowledged that Cuba had helped to defeat the South African apartheid forces that invaded Angola in the 1970s and ‘80s. "But what were the benefits to Cubans and Afro-Cubans in particular?" he asked. "Wasn’t Cuba’s involvement a result of the Cold War and its relation to the USSR?"

"Cuba’s solidarity in Angola and the rest of Africa was not a result of our relations with the Soviet Union," Dreke replied. "The benefit to our people was the making of millions of new friends and paying part of our debt to Africa and all of humanity."

Dreke also responded to a question on Che Guevara’s self-critical assessment of Cuba’s 1965 combat mission to the Congo, where Cuban volunteers joined Congolese national liberation fighters combating a U.S.-backed regime. When the Cuban fighters arrived they were to a large degree ignorant about the realities of Africa, he noted, "The only thing we knew of Africa then was from the Tarzan films that presented Cheeta the chimpanzee as more intelligent than the African people. How could it be otherwise? Those films were made by capitalism, by imperialism."

The 128 Cuban volunteers who went to the Congo under Che’s command left in late 1965 without a victory, said Dreke. "But the results of our participation in the Congo were not a defeat because it was there that the men who fought in other countries of Africa were initially trained and educated."

In Angola, where Cuban internationalists joined with Angolan forces to defeat successive South African invasions, the volunteers totaled 350,000 men and women over a 13-year period. "It was a victory for the oppressed peoples of the world," said Dreke.

Dreke took up the accusation by a small number in the audience that he was responsible for crimes during the fight against the U.S.-organized counterrevolutionary bands in the Escambray mountains in the early 1960s. He described with some detail the armed bands that committed murders and rapes of literacy workers, peasants, and terrorized the region. Funded and organized by Washington, they unsuccessfully attempted to lay the groundwork for an invasion by U.S. troops. Operation Mongoose, a program of assassinations, sabotage, and other counterrevolutionary terror developed by the John F. Kennedy administration was at the heart of this, Dreke said.

In the years following the triumph of the revolution, Dreke said, some "3,500 people were either killed or murdered and 2,000 were wounded by these terrorist bands. We had to apply revolutionary laws and justice in response to these crimes."

Another questioner asked whether Cuban doctors who go on missions abroad can stay on in those countries if they choose to do so. Participation in these internationalist missions is "completely voluntary," said Morales. And anyone who wishes to leave Cuba is free to do so, as long as they have a visa to go to another country, she added.

Both speakers also took up questions about how racist discrimination had been uprooted in Cuba, and there were many more hands up for questions when organizers had to end the program owing to the lateness of the hour.  
 
A blow to opponents of revolution
The success of the meeting was a defeat for rightist forces in the city that had tried to whip up a campaign to block it.

On November 10 Radio Mambí, a right-wing Spanish-language station, began broadcasting a call by the ultrarightist group Vigilia Mambisa for a demonstration outside the FIU North campus the day of the meeting. Despite two days’ publicity the picket drew only about 25 people. Following their picket line, the campus police barred these protesters from the ballrooom, saying the room was already filled to capacity. A few dozen students who wanted to hear the meeting were also turned away by the cops, citing occupancy limits.

On November 12, Ninoska Pérez, a spokeswoman for another right-wing group, the Cuban Liberty Council (CLC), made Dreke’s visit the focus of her afternoon radio show, encouraging calls from listeners accusing him of committing crimes.

The morning of the event, El Nuevo Herald, the main Spanish-language daily here, reported that the CLC had demanded that FIU president Modesto Maidique cancel the meeting. It also noted that Congress-ional representatives Ileana Ros Lehtinen and Lincoln Díaz-Balart had "been in contact with the State Department criticizing the authorization of a visa for Víctor Dreke to visit Miami."

Hostile calls bombarded ANWS and other university departments. Alex Broom-field, a student at FIU who attended the meeting, said he had answered one such call that morning while at work in the campus nursing department. He said the caller told him "this guy [Dreke] killed her cousin." Nonetheless, the student attended the meeting because "Cuba is the only country that has ever sent its people to go to Africa and help, fight and die, giving only their blood."

In face of this pressure, the sponsoring faculty members and students held firm, insisting that they had a right to invite speakers of their choice.

Hours before the meeting was to begin, FIU president Maidique announced that the university must respect the rights of the faculty that had invited Dreke to speak. The statement, which was broadcast immediately on television and radio, undercut calls for cancellation and set the scene for the campus police to cooperate with organizers of the meeting to ensure the safety of the speakers and prevent a physical confrontation by ejecting the disrupters who refused to abide by the rules of the meeting. The student monitors and other volunteers who provided the bulk of security at the meeting played a key role in ensuring the meeting proceeded and the speakers were not endangered.

The November 13 event received wide coverage in English- and Spanish-language newspapers and television over the next two days. The Miami Herald ran a news story on the event, although El Nuevo Herald did not. Callers to right-wing radio talk show hosts expressed despair and anger at the success of Dreke’s visit. "This is a national disaster," said one.

On the morning of November 16, TV Channel 51 aired an hour-long show with CLC and Vigilia Mambisa leaders denouncing the event. "There should have been 10,000 Cubans there--there were very few of us," said Vigilia Mambisa’s Laura Villanova. "Where is the exile community?"

The show ended with a debate between Max Lesnick of Alianza Martiana and rightist Francisco García. "This is not the first time, nor will it be the last time that American universities invite professors, students, and other Cubans to participate in an event like this," said Lesnick. "The exile community does not have the right to interrupt and sabotage such events."

A number of students who attended the November 12 meeting said they welcomed the opportunity to hear the facts about Cuba from the point of view of supporters of the revolution living on the island.

Kameelah Benjamin said, "It’s important that this happened on a college campus and with the community defending free speech in Miami."

"Other than the disruptions," said Kervens Jacob, a Haitian student at the University of Miami, "the meeting was great."
 
 
Related articles:
A Tampa first: the truth about ‘Cuba, Africa’
Historic visit by Cuban leader
Víctor Dreke: Cuba’s mission to Guinea-Bissau
‘Miami Herald’ covers meeting for Cuban leader  
 
 
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