The University of Massachusetts (UMB) meeting was sponsored by a broad range of faculty and students--the Africana Studies Department, the College of Public and Community Service, Students Arts and Events Council, Trotter Institute, Black Student Center, Casa Latina, and the Feminist Majority, as well as the July 26 Coalition, a Cuba solidarity organization in Boston.

Prior to the meeting, the Black Student Center hosted a lunch and reception in Dreke’s honor, attended by two dozen professors and students.

Prof. Robert Johnson, chair of the Africana Studies Department, welcomed the audience and introduced fellow Africana Studies professor Marc Prou, who moderated the event. Riché Zamor Jr., head of the Black Student Center, and María Moreno from Casa Latina greeted the Cuban guests.

In welcoming Dreke, Prou explained that at the nearby John F. Kennedy Library, which holds the former president’s papers, "we hear voices from the U.S. point of view. This time we have voices from Cuba."

Prou spoke about Dreke’s record of revolutionary struggle, and said he had recently read Dreke’s book From the Escambray to the Congo, In the Whirlwind of the Cuban Revolution.

Dreke joined the popular struggle against the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship in the 1950s, reaching the rank of captain in the Rebel Army. Following the 1959 revolutionary victory, when workers and farmers took power, he was one of the commanders of the forces that combated and eventually defeated the U.S-financed and directed counterrevolutionary guerrilla bands that murdered and terrorized peasants in the Escambray mountains of central Cuba.

In 1965 Dreke was second in command, under Ernesto Che Guevara, of a unit of 128 Cuban volunteer combatants who fought alongside Congolese national liberation fighters against a pro-imperialist government. Later, in 1966–68 he served as head of Cuba’s military mission to Guinea-Bissau, where Cuban troops trained soldiers led by Amilcar Cabral in the fight for independence against Portuguese colonial rule.

At the University of Massachusetts, Dreke took note of Cuba’s recent diplomatic victory at the United Nations General Assembly, which condemned the U.S. trade embargo against the island in a vote of 173 to 3--with only the governments of the United States, Israel, and the Marshall Islands voting against the resolution. Washington has maintained its aggressive policy for more than four decades because of revolutionary Cuba’s example in the world, including its history of extending solidarity with national liberation struggles around the globe.

In 1953, after Cuban revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro launched an assault on the Moncada army garrison in Santiago de Cuba, marking the opening of the Cuban Revolution, Castro laid out the goals of the revolution in a speech at his trial, known today as "History Will Absolve Me." The goals of that program have been largely achieved since the revolution’s triumph, Dreke said. He challenge anyone to read the speech and "underline what hasn’t been carried out."

When he and other Cuban combatants went to the Congo in 1965 at the request of supporters of Congo president Patrice Lumumba, who had been assassinated by U.S. and Belgian-backed forces, Dreke said, "Africa was standing up. After the murder of Lumumba, most of the Congo rose up, arms in hand, to fight for true independence," he said. Resistance to imperialism was also rising in Ghana, Mozambique, South Africa, Guinea-Conakry, as well as in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde.

More than a decade later, at the request of the government, Cuba sent volunteers to aid Angolan forces in repelling an invasion of the South African army, Dreke said. "Cubans went to help Angolans defend their independence," Dreke explained, "when South African troops were barely 25 kilometers outside of Luanda [Angola’s capital], with all the weapons these racists had--including tactical nuclear weapons." The defeat of the South African army "was a crushing defeat for that racist force, helping bring down apartheid."

Asked the next day at the Brown University meeting about South Africa’s nuclear weapons, Dreke replied, "The United States was very much responsible for this situation. The force the U.S. government had prepared in the region was the racist South African army. When South Africa was defeated, the U.S. government felt the defeat, too." Dreke recommended those interested in the subject read Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 by Piero Gleijeses, which describes the internationalist record of Cuba in southern Africa.

The meeting was covered favorably by the campus weekly Mass Media.

After the UMB meeting, Dreke spoke at a dinner and reception in nearby Jamaica Plain attended by some 50 people, including a number of Cuban-Americans from the area and many from the Boston area Cuba solidarity organization, the July 26 Coalition.

On the following day, Morales and Dreke were given a tour of the Boston University Medical Center by Dr. Alan Meyers, an assistant professor in the Pediatric medicine department, and introduced to other medical personnel.

The next day at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies, Prof. Anani Dzidzienyo hosted a lunch discussion with Dreke for interested students and faculty. Dzidzienyo, born in Ghana, is a professor of Africana Studies as well as Portuguese and Brazilian studies.

The meeting at Brown University was a standing-room-only event attended by more than 120 people. The crowd, made up in its majority of Brown students, included people from the Providence area, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey. Dzidzienyo chaired the event, which was sponsored by the Africana Studies Department, the Center for Latin American Studies, and the Francis Wayland Collegium for Liberal Learning.  
 
Anticolonial struggles
In his talk Dreke described some of the challenges confronted in the anticolonial struggles in Africa. In what is now the Republic of Guinea, a French colony until 1958, the national liberation struggle led by Ahmed Sekou Touré wrested independence from Paris. The colonial rulers tried to undercut the movement by holding a plebiscite, but the majority voted solidly for independence. The French rulers responded viciously, seeking to punish the Guinean people and warn others of the consequences of winning independence. "They took everything with them; they even ripped out the electrical wires and telephone poles and threw them into the ocean. That was their answer to the cry of freedom of these people," Dreke said. Despite the obstacles, the peoples of Africa won their independence and there was no going back, so Paris, London, and other imperialist powers changed their method from direct colonial rule to other forms of imperialist domination. "They would seek out Africans in each country to act in the interests of the imperialists," Dreke explained. "They tried to train Amilcar Cabral with the hope that he would become the newest exploiter of the peoples of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. People in the United States have seen these kinds of methods--finding people who will sell out and betray their own people," he said.

Instead, Dreke said, Cabral remained loyal to the cause of the sovereignty and independence of his country. Cabral was the founder and central leader of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde (PAIGC), which in 1963 took up arms against Portuguese colonial rule, winning independence for Guinea-Bissau in 1974 and Cape Verde in 1975. Cabral was assassinated in 1973.  
 
Congo mission
Dreke described how the unit of Cuban combatants commanded by Guevara arrived secretly to escape detection by U.S. intelligence. During the time that Guevara had dropped out of sight, he said, Washington spread slanders about the Cuban revolutionary leadership. "The U.S. government and others claimed that Che had been assassinated, or that he was fighting in the Dominican Republic with revolutionaries there."

Dreke was asked about Cuba’s relationship with Francisco Caamaño, a military officer in the Dominican Republic who ended up leading the mass resistance in that country to the 1965 invasion by some 40,000 U.S. marines. "Caamaño is one of the most respected and beloved leaders in Cuba," Dreke replied. "At one point, Caamaño’s forces almost succeeded in taking over Santo Domingo, but victory for the anti-imperialist forces was blocked by the U.S. troops." With the defeat of the 1965 Dominican revolt, Cuba granted Caamaño refuge.

Ana Morales was asked about the treatment of the elderly and the mentally ill in Cuba. She explained that in Cuba mental patients are treated like human beings, not prisoners as they were in pre-revolutionary Cuba. In the hospitals they are free to move around, organize cooking and cleaning, participate in productive work such as furniture workshops, and play in musical groups.

Morales also described day-care houses organized for the elderly in the communities they live in, and morning exercise programs that many senior citizens participate in.

A Community College of Rhode Island student asked, "What steps can Americans take to provide health care and education to everyone?"

"Every country has its own conditions and character," Morales replied, "and you yourselves will have to figure out what to do here. But what was needed in Cuba was a socialist revolution," she said, to applause.

Dreke urged those in the audience to learn about the five Cuban revolutionaries--Gerardo Hernández, René González, Ramón Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, and Fernando González--who have been framed up and imprisoned by the U.S. government. The five, convicted of a range of charges including conspiracy to commit espionage and murder conspiracy, were on an internationalist mission to defend their country and revolution by gathering information on U.S.-based counterrevolutionary groups that have launched attacks on Cuba with U.S. government complicity. Committees around the country are taking up their defense and demanding their release.
 
 
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