Vol. 79/No. 10      March 23, 2015

Dreke, second in command of that column, spoke Feb. 20 at one of two meetings during the Havana International Book Fair that presented books by Pathfinder Press that help tell the story of the Cuban Revolution’s unparalleled record of internationalist support to struggles for African freedom and development.

Welcoming the audience of 60, Alberto Granado, director of Casa de Africa, noted that 50 years later, Cuban doctors are in West Africa combating Ebola.

Casa de Africa is a cultural center and museum that illustrates the history and culture of Africa and Cuba’s African roots. It includes archives on revolutionary Cuba’s internationalist solidarity with the struggles for African liberation. Introducing the panel, Granado expressed appreciation for the donations of Pathfinder books that have been made to the center’s library over the years.

Two of these books — How Far We Slaves Have Come, by Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro, and From the Escambray to the Congo: In the Whirlwind of the Cuban Revolution, by Dreke —were featured at the meeting. Sharing the platform with Granado and Dreke was Mary-Alice Waters, Pathfinder president and editor of both titles.

Dreke is president of the Cuba-Africa Friendship Association. As a youth he joined the urban underground and Rebel Army in the popular struggle that led to the 1959 revolutionary victory in Cuba. In the early 1960s Dreke commanded the volunteer battalions of working people that defeated U.S.-backed counterrevolutionary bands in the Escambray mountains of central Cuba. After the 1965 Congo mission, he headed the Cuban military mission in Guinea-Bissau, training independence forces fighting Portuguese colonial rule. These experiences are described in From the Escambray to the Congo.

When the Cuban internationalists went to the former Belgian colony of the Congo in 1965, “it was an important time in the revolutionary struggles in Africa,” Dreke said. “Liberation battles were taking place in the Congo as well as in Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, Angola and Mozambique.”

Dreke noted that the Cuban volunteers in the Congo joined national liberation fighters — followers of Patrice Lumumba, the assassinated leader of the Congolese independence struggle — who were combating the pro-imperialist regime. In neighboring Congo-Brazzaville, a former French colony, another unit of Cuban combatants, led by Jorge Risquet and Rolando Kindelán, trained independence fighters of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA).

These struggles, Dreke said, “culminated in the great battles in Angola” in 1975-91, when Cuban internationalists helped defend newly independent Angola against invasions by the South African apartheid regime. Victory in that 16-year mission also led to the independence of Namibia and the end of white-supremacist rule in South Africa.

It is because of those advances, which also strengthened the Cuban Revolution, that “our commander-in-chief could say, ‘How far we slaves have come,’” Dreke said.

He was referring to a speech that Cuban President Fidel Castro gave when South African revolutionary leader Nelson Mandela visited Cuba in 1991. Mandela called the Cuban-led defeat of the apartheid forces in 1988 at the battle of Cuito Cuanavale a “milestone in the history of the struggle for southern African liberation.” The Pathfinder book How Far We Slaves Have Come contains the speeches by Mandela and Castro.

Waters said the books “are not about the past. They help to prepare working people, faced with the assaults of the propertied rulers driven by capitalism’s world crisis, for the battles ahead.”

More than 21,000 copies of How Far We Slaves Have Come have been sold, the bulk in the United States. Waters also recalled the 3,000 people who heard Dreke speak about the Cuban Revolution and its support for African freedom struggles during a 2002 tour of U.S. cities.

Waters pointed to the consistency of the Cuban Revolution’s solidarity in Africa, from aid to the Algerian Revolution in the early 1960s to the Congo and Angola to “confronting the challenge of the Ebola crisis,” in West Africa today.

Neighborhood meeting
The following day, three dozen people attended a street meeting in Cojímar in East Havana on Capitalism and the Transformation of Africa. The book, by Waters and Martín Koppel, was a product of visits to Equatorial Guinea in 2005 and 2008.

The meeting was hosted by the new African cultural center and restaurant Africa Mía (My Africa). It drew people from the neighborhood, including an elementary school teacher who brought her students who have been studying the history of precolonial peoples of Cuba and slavery in colonial times.

The audience was welcomed by Ana Morales, director of Africa Mía. Morales served as a doctor in Guinea-Bissau and later as first secretary at the Cuban Embassy in Equatorial Guinea from 2003 to 2008, when Víctor Dreke, her husband, was ambassador to that country.

Joining Waters were Col. Alain Hernández, who was an internationalist volunteer in Nicaragua in 1981–83 and currently is an elected delegate to the municipal assembly; and Iraida Aguirrechu, who in 1971–74 served in the Cuban diplomatic mission in Equatorial Guinea.

Waters noted that the title of Capitalism and the Transformation of Africa is designed to make readers stop and think. “Hundreds of books have been written about the imperialist rape of Africa,” she said. “What this book addresses is how the social force that can put an end to imperialist domination and exploitative capitalist social relations — the working class — is being born in countries such as Equatorial Guinea.

“More than once we’ve been asked by a reader, ‘Aren’t you socialists, communists? Why do you give capitalism credit for the transformation of Africa?’” It’s important for working people to recognize that “every step that narrows the gap between semicolonial Africa and the imperialist world — in health, sanitation, education, communications, electrification — strengthens the struggle against imperialist domination,” Waters said. “It makes it harder to drive a wedge between working people in Africa and the imperialist world.”

Jumping into the lively discussion after the presentations, Ali, a medical student from Chad studying in Cuba, asked, “What can I do to advance the struggle in Africa?”

“I don’t pretend to know a great deal about Chad,” Waters replied. “But for all of us, two things are important. Take advantage of your opportunity to travel and read. Study and learn from the accumulated lessons of the working class internationally, the history and lessons you will find in many of the books available here today. And second, to paraphrase José Martí, ‘Join your fate to that of the oppressed and exploited’ — to the working class, which has the power to transform the world, as the Cuban Revolution has taught us.”
 
 
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