Cubans: ‘We go to Africa to pay our debt to humanity’

Cubans: ‘We go to Africa to pay our debt to humanity’
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Cubans: ‘We go to Africa to pay our debt to humanity’

BY JAMES HARRIS
AND ARLENE RUBINSTEIN
ATLANTA--Imperialism’s more than century-long exploitation of the
African continent and its peoples "is the reason Cuba went to Africa.
That’s why Che went to Africa," said Víctor Dreke to an audience of
more than 100 people at Clark Atlanta University. The Cuban
revolutionary spoke there October 29 on "Cuba’s Aid to the African
Liberation Struggle."
Students were riveted by Dreke’s talk as he spoke from his experience
as a commander of the Cuban Revolution, who for nearly four decades has
been involved in Cuba’s internationalist solidarity with Africa.

Since the victory of the revolution on Jan. 1, 1959, he said, hundreds
of thousands of Cubans have joined anticolonial and anti-imperialist
struggles in Africa, from Algeria to Guinea-Bissau to Angola. In 1965
he served as second in command under Ernesto Che Guevara of an
internationalist combat mission in which 128 Cuban volunteers joined
national liberation forces in the Congo.

Over a 13-year period in the 1970s and ‘80s a total of more than
300,000 Cuban combatants fought in Angola alongside Angolan and
Namibian forces, repelling repeated assaults by the South Africa
apartheid army and finally decisively defeating the invaders in 1988.
Today Cuban doctors, teachers, technicians, and other volunteers carry
out internationalist missions in a number of African countries.

"The only thing that Cuba has brought back from Africa is our 2,000
combatants who fell in battle," Dreke said. Unlike the imperialist
powers that come to plunder the continent, "We don’t own any property
or companies in Africa. The only thing we have in Africa is our
sweat--and the hearts of the African people.

"As Fidel has said, Cuba has gone to Africa to pay part of our debt to
humanity, which in truth is unpayable," Dreke stated, referring to
Cuban president Fidel Castro. "We are indebted to the African continent
and to other peoples of the world."

Dreke replied to questions on a range of subjects, from the part played
by women in African liberation struggles, to the Cuban Revolution
today, to the role of the International Monetary Fund and other
imperialist lending institutions in the Third World.

Cuba will not go back to capitalism
When a student asked whether capitalism is being reintroduced in Cuba
today, Dreke replied that while Cuba has had to develop tourism and
other sources of hard currency, capitalist rule was overthrown four
decades ago. "Capitalism doesn’t exist in Cuba. It died on January 1,
1959--forever. And when the present generations pass away, capitalism
will continue to be dead.

"Do you know what capitalism in Cuba was?" he said. "Women did not have
rights. There was racial discrimination--whites went to one park and
Blacks had to go to another. The land belonged to the rich. The poor
did not have land. The poor did not have houses. They couldn’t
study--half a million people or more were illiterate. The army would
beat people in the streets.

"When you want to think about capitalism, think about what’s happening
in the United States," he concluded. "You are our brothers and sisters,
but capitalism is not."

Altogether, more than 700 people attended meetings in Georgia for Dreke
and for Ana Morales, who has helped lead Cuba’s medical missions in
Africa. The Atlanta Africa-Cuba Speakers Committee organized their
speaking engagements in both Atlanta and Valdosta. The committee
involved faculty members and students at Clark Atlanta University
(CAU), Spelman College, and Morehouse College. It received broad
support from student groups, including the Dark Tower Project, Meeting
of the Minds, SASSAFRAS, Spark O.N.E., and the Ujamaa Society.

Dr. Marvin Haire, the president of the National Association of Black
Political Scientists and professor of political science at Clark
Atlanta, convened weekly meetings of the local tour committee. Other
members of the body included Kwaku Danso, chair of the International
Affairs and Development at CAU; Sobukwe Shukura of the All-African
People’s Revolutionary Party; and Dr. Kwame-Osagyefo Kabackupra, a
professor at Spelman College and founding member of the Malcolm X
Grassroots Movement. Danso, formerly Ghana’s ambassador to Central
America and the Caribbean, already knew Dreke and Morales from their
work in Guinea-Bissau.

The committee organized an airport welcome by 25 people to greet Dreke
and Morales on their October 26 arrival, followed by a well-attended
reception. One activist in the committee who works as a printer at the
Atlanta Journal Constitution secured a feature interview with Dreke by
that paper (see page 10.)

Cuba’s medical missions in Africa
A high point of the tour was a presentation by Ana Morales on Cuba’s
medical missions in Africa before a packed auditorium of 300
enthusiastic young people at Spelman College. Morales was introduced by
Kathleen Phillips-Lewis, chair of the school’s African Diaspora and the
World program.

"In Africa 28 million people are infected with HIV," said Morales.
"Cuba is ready to help Africa. The main thing we have to offer is our
human resources. If other countries also help, Cuba is offering to send
4,000 doctors, medical staff, and teachers to create 20 medical schools
on the African continent that can train 1,000 doctors a year. We have
also offered to send specialists to direct a campaign for AIDS
prevention, diagnostic equipment, and anti-retroviral treatment for
30,000 patients.

"How is it possible for Cuba to offer all of this solidarity? The key
is the human capital: the cultural level Cuba has reached through our
revolution, the high level of consciousness and confidence of the
population."

Before the Cuban Revolution, Morales said, "our national health system
had the same kind of problems other countries have. But there was a
social transformation. In a discussion with medical students in the
early years of the revolution Ernesto Che Guevara explained that to be
a revolutionary doctor, first you have to make a revolution."

Before the meeting 60 people attended a reception at the Women’s
Research and Resource Center hosted by Dr. M. Bahati Kuumba, associate
director of the center, to welcome Dreke and Morales to Spelman
College. Patricia Rodney, director of the Master of Public Health
Program in the Community Health and Preventive Medicine Department of
Morehouse School of Medicine, and wife of Guyanese anti-imperialist
leader Walter Rodney, brought her class to the reception.

During the seven-day visit local Cuba solidarity activists also hosted
a dinner and meeting, which discussed the next stage in the defense
campaign for five Cuban revolutionaries who have been locked up in
federal prisons on frame-up charges of conspiracy to commit espionage.
Atlanta will be the location of the next round of legal proceedings in
the case of the five patriots, whose "crime" consisted of gathering
information on Florida-based counterrevolutionary groups that have a
history of assaults on Cuba.

Attending the meeting were a student leader from Spelman College,
activists from the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party, Atlanta
Network on Cuba, Green Party, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, National
Center for Human Rights Education, Project South Institute to Eliminate
Poverty and Genocide, and Socialist Workers Party. A planning meeting
for defense of the Cuban Five is scheduled for November 6.

Struggle against racism
At the dinner one of the questions concerned the struggle against
racism in Cuba.

Before the revolution, Dreke said, "Blacks and whites in Cuba were
segregated." Poor whites were also segregated from rich whites, he
noted.

"There were schools that were practically for whites only. Our beaches
were private beaches, our hospitals were private hospitals, our high
schools were mostly private and it was almost impossible for many poor
people to go to the public schools.

"The revolution did away with all that--and not just with laws" but in
practice, Dreke said.

Dreke pointed out that his book, From the Escambray to the Congo: In
the Whirlwind of the Cuban Revolution, describes how after the victory
of the revolution "we did away with the ropes that had been set up in
parks to keep Blacks and whites apart." But from the beginning, he
said, Fidel Castro had explained that "you could not wipe out racism
simply with laws, because it was something that was in the minds of
people. It was going to take hard work."

In a report to the Third Congress of the Cuban Communist Party in 1986,
Dreke said, Castro explained that "there was something that could still
be seen as a racial problem. Everybody had the same rights, but Fidel
was not satisfied with that," arguing that further steps were needed to
bring both Blacks and women into "leadership positions at all levels."
(The speech is printed in New International no. 6 under the title
"Renewal or Death.")

Accompanied by students and workers the two Cuban revolutionaries
visited the "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America"
exhibit at the Martin Luther King historical site. Several of the
students were originally from Haiti, Cuba, Cape Verde Islands, and
Monserrat.

Tyronne Brooks, a civil rights veteran and president of the Georgia
Association of Black Elected Officials, sponsored a luncheon for the
two Cuban guests at Paschal’s restaurant in Atlanta’s historic West End
community--a restaurant in which Martin Luther King had an office in
the early days of the civil rights movement. Others at the luncheon
included Connie Tucker of the Southern Organizing Committee for
Economic and Social Justice and Atlanta attorney Don Edwards.

Dreke and Morales also participated in a November 1 ribbon-cutting
ceremony at the grand opening of the National Center for Primary Care
at the Morehouse School of Medicine. Later they were given a tour of
the Southwest Hospital.

Ninety people attended the last meeting of the tour at the
Interdenominational Theological Center. Mack Jones, the recent
department chair of political science at CAU, introduced the two
guests. "Let me start with two of my assumptions," he said. "First,
that the most important and the most outstanding international action
in the last half century was the triumph and consolidation of the Cuban
Revolution. The Cuban Revolution demonstrated to the world and
especially to the poor countries of the world that there is an
alternate path of development. And then, that the most egregious
affront to humanity in the last 50 years has been the unrelenting
assault of the American government on the Cuban Revolution." At the
meeting, three student members of the Atlanta Africa-Cuba Speakers
Committee--Martha Ramirez, Pearl Dorga and Claressa Dubbery--urged
young people to attend the congress of the Continental Organization of
Latin American and Caribbean Students (OCLAE) that will be held in
Guadalajara, Mexico, November 29–December 2.


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