The Cuban revolutionary leader spoke about the hundreds of thousands of Cuban volunteers who over the years have joined with anticolonial and anti-imperialist fighters in Africa; about how the Cuban people have uprooted racist discrimination since the victory of the 1959 revolution; and about other social and political advances that working people on the island have made over the last four decades.

Dreke visited Florida November 11–13 as part of a seven-city speaking tour on "Cuba and Africa: 1959 to Today." After Tampa, he spoke in North Miami at Florida International University. His visit was a pole of attraction for students and others who wanted to hear a commander of the Cuban Revolution and internationalist combatant. In both cities, the failure of a right-wing minority to prevent or disrupt these meetings was a measure of the political changes that have taken place here.

Ana Morales, a professor at the Latin American School of Medicine in Havana who has headed up Cuban medical missions in Africa, shared the platform with Dreke at the Tampa meeting and other events. She was the featured speaker at a seminar earlier that day on Cuba’s medical missions in Africa hosted by the USF anthropology department.

The visit by Dreke and Morales was organized by the USF Africa-Cuba Speakers Committee with the support of the university’s Africana Studies Department; the Institute on Black Life; the Center for Africa and the Diaspora; and the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Department.  
 
Active participation by students
The Africana Studies Club and the African Students Association were among the campus organizations that supported the events. A number of students played an active role in organizing the USF meeting, including as security monitors. Several students are part of a group on campus that has been involved in protesting the deportations of Haitian immigrant workers.

At the University of South Florida, the Dean of International Affairs, Joanne McCarthy, opened the meeting, which was chaired by Dr. Trevor Purcell, chair of the Africana Studies Department.

Patrick Sandji, president of the African Students Association, greeted the two speakers and noted the contribution Cuba has made to the fight against AIDS in Africa. Africana Studies Club member Benouchka Charite spoke about the discriminatory treatment handed out to Haitian refugees by the U.S. government. Two students had been arrested during a November 2 protest against the imprisonment of 200 Haitians at Krome Detention Center in Miami, she said.

USF students formed the majority of the participants in the meeting. Others came from St. Petersburg, Daytona Beach, and other parts of central Florida.

"It is a rare occasion for us to hear from a scholar and a revolutionary combatant active for over 50 years, who fought alongside Che Guevara," said Dr. Earl Conteh-Morgan, professor of International Affairs, in introducing Dreke.

Dreke had been "a student activist and freedom fighter who represented the Cuban Revolution in Africa," he noted. "Fighting alongside Amilcar Cabral against the Portuguese colonialists," he said, Dreke "contributed to the winning of freedom for Guinea-Bissau" in the mid-1970s after a decade-long war.

Conteh-Morgan encouraged members of the audience to read Dreke’s book, From the Escambray to the Congo: In the Whirlwind of the Cuban Revolution, published by Pathfinder. In its pages Dreke describes his involvement in the revolution, from the struggle against the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship in the 1950s, to his role as a commander of the volunteer battalions that defeated the U.S.-organized counterrevolutionary bands in the Escambray mountains of central Cuba in the early 1960s, to Cuba’s internationalist missions in Africa.

Dreke described the links between Cuba and Africa going back to the struggle against the Spanish colonial power. "Many slaves fell in the first war of independence" launched in 1868, he said.

He also highlighted the important role in the 19th century independence struggle played by tobacco workers and other Cuban immigrants in Florida and other parts of the United States.

"Yesterday we visited Tampa’s Ybor City where Cubans emigrated after the defeat of the [1868–78] war of independence," he said. The exiled Cubans provided a base of support for preparations to renew the anticolonial war. "José Martí came here in November 1891 and stayed with Black revolutionaries living here," Dreke added, expressing his outrage at finding that the park in Ybor City commemorating Martí’s visit is now padlocked.

Martí founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party to oppose Spanish rule and U.S. imperialist designs on Cuba. He led the launching of Cuba’s second war of independence in 1895 and was killed in combat that year. Within three years the independence fighters had defeated the Spanish armies, only to face an invasion by Washington.

"One chain, that of the Spanish colonizers, was replaced by another, a chain of U.S. imperialism," said Dreke. With the 1901 Platt Amendment, "Washington asserted its right to invade the country to defend its interests and set up a U.S. naval base on our soil at Guantánamo, a base that still encroaches on our territory today."  
 
Dominated by U.S. imperialism
"Many working people in Cuba, including many Blacks, did not believe a true revolution was possible, that exploitation of man by man could be eliminated," said Dreke. "My father was one of those. I regret that he did not live to see the 1959 victory where we finally won our independence and began to implement the program of Moncada."

On July 26, 1953, a group of young combatants under the command of Fidel Castro launched an insurrectionary attack on the Moncada army garrison in Santiago de Cuba. Although Batista’s forces massacred more than 50 of the captured revolutionaries, and imprisoned Castro and 27 others, the assault announced the beginning of the revolutionary war that culminated in victory on Jan. 1, 1959.

In his testimony before Batista’s court, Castro laid out the revolutionary-democratic program of the movement, including demands for land reform, literacy, and national independence. The program was rapidly published under the title, History Will Absolve Me.

Dreke said, "I am explaining our history so that you will understand why we are so determined to defend the independence we won in 1959 and why we are so conscious of respecting the sovereignty of all peoples."

After his remarks Dreke called for "an open, calm discussion." A dozen or so opponents of the Cuban Revolution immediately tried to monopolize the question period, yelling out accusations at the speakers and trying to prevent others from participating in the discussion.

With the support of the student organizers and members of the audience, the chairperson insisted that everybody attending the meeting remain seated and wait to be recognized in turn. Unable to prevent the meeting, most of the would-be disrupters eventually left.

One man who interrupted Dreke near the beginning of his presentation claimed that racism had appeared in Cuba only after the revolution. During the discussion, a 64-year-old Black man said that he had lived in Holguin, the same city in Oriente Province in prerevo–lutionary Cuba as the heckler. Because of segregation and the confinement of Blacks to more impoverished areas, the two families had lived on opposite sides of the town.

"That is the real history of Cuba before the revolution," he declared as he thanked Dreke and Morales for bringing the truth about the revolution to Tampa. "Don’t lie about your past and that of Cuba," he advised the hecklers.

Prompted by questions from the audience, Dreke returned in the discussion to the gains of the Cuban Revolution, Africa, and the fight against racism. The 1959 revolution coincided with an upsurge in the struggle for independence in Africa, he said, and with the growth of the movement against Jim Crow segregation and racial discrimination in the United States. "It was a time of revolutionary fervor," he said.  
 
Imperialist carve-up
Whether it was the Congo, Guinea-Bissau, Ethiopia, or Angola, Cuban volunteers went to Africa at the invitation of liberation fighters, Dreke stressed. "We acted solely out of human solidarity," he said, contrasting this with the reality of the colonialist and imperialist powers, which "came to grab the diamonds, rubber, oil, slaves and other property as they saw it." At the 1884–85 Conference of Berlin, for example, the European powers sat down to carve up Africa, saying, in effect: "’Here, you take this country. You take that one.’ They divided the Congo in two, between Belgium and France."

At the end of the meeting, national tour director Sam Manuel from Washington, D.C., urged participants to contribute to help finance the tour. He invited those present to join the caravan going to Miami the following day to help ensure a successful meeting there. Sixteen participants from the USF Tampa meeting accompanied Dreke and Morales to Miami.

Diego Negrão-Guerra, a 19-year-old American from Cuba, commented, "It’s important that people had a chance to hear something positive about Cuba. I learned a lot about Cuba and a lot about myself, about the history of my people and about myself as a person."
 
 
Related articles:
A Miami first: meeting for a leader of the Cuban Revolution
Historic visit by Cuban leader
Víctor Dreke: Cuba’s mission to Guinea-Bissau
‘Miami Herald’ covers meeting for Cuban leader  
 
 
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