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NELSON MANDELA & FIDEL CASTRO
How Far We Slaves Have Come
PREFACE BY MARY-ALICE WATERS
KWELA BOOKS
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Preface
MARY-ALICE WATERS
On 26 July 1991, Nelson Mandela, president of the African National Congress (ANC), and Fidel Castro, president of Cuba, spoke together for the first time on the same platform. On this historic occasion, they were addressing a rally of tens of thousands in Matanzas, Cuba, marking the thirty-eighth anniversary of the opening of the Cuban revolution.
The pages that follow contain the complete text of the speeches by Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro at the Matanzas rally, as well as the resolution of Cuba’s Council of State awarding Mandela the José Marti medal, the highest honour conferred by the government of Cuba. Here Mandela and Castro explain why the two struggles of which they are central leaders – the battle to build a revolutionary democratic movement in South Africa capable of uprooting the apartheid system and the battle to strengthen the internationalism and communist direction of the Cuban revolution – have been closely intertwined for the past three decades. Through their words, we can better understand why the struggles being waged by the working people of South Africa and Cuba are today the most important examples for fighters everywhere who want to rid the earth of racism and exploitation and chart a road forward for all humanity.
In November 1975 the Cuban government, in response to a request from the government of Angola, sent thousands of volunteer troops to that country to help defeat the invading armed forces of South Africa’s apartheid regime. Pretoria was determined to block the Angolan people from realising their hard-fought independence from Portugal, set for 11 November 1975. The apartheid rulers recognised that the crumbling of the Portuguese empire, the last bastion of European colonialism on the African continent, would provide impetus in South Africa itself to struggles to end white minority rule.
The Cuban government named its internationalist mission in Angola ‘Operation Carlotta’, after the slave who led an 1843 rebellion in Cuba’s Matanzas Province – the site of the 26 July rally. When the Cuban volunteers arrived, South African troops had already pressed more than four hundred miles into Angolan territory and anti-government forces had reached the outskirts of the capital city of Luanda. By late March 1976, however, the last invading forces had been pushed back over Angola’s southern border into Namibia, at that time still a South African colony.
This initial defeat of apartheid’s army gave new impetus to the struggle for a nonracial, democratic republic inside South Africa. In June 1976 young people took to the streets in Soweto and other Black townships across the country. In the years that followed, the surge of protests gave birth to a new network of popular committees and anti-apartheid organisations on both the local and national level. Super-exploited workers waged strikes and formed trade unions in defiance of government bans.
The new rise of struggles reinforced the African National Congress, which had been banned in 1960 and many of whose leaders, including Mandela, were imprisoned for their anti-apartheid activities. The advancing struggle inside the country increased the pariah status and international isolation of the apartheid regime. In limited and uneven ways, imperialist governments in Europe, North America, Asia, and the Pacific acceded to mounting demands by anti-apartheid forces to impose economic, sports, cultural, and other sanctions against South Africa.
Over the next twelve years the apartheid rulers repeatedly conducted military operations penetrating deep into Angolan territory. Together with the bipartisan government in Washington, Pretoria armed and financed the forces of UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola), which carried out counter-revolutionary terrorist operations in southern Angola.
In November 1987, however, in the face of a critical situation in which South African troops had encircled Cuito Cuanavale in southeast Angola, Cuba made the decision to send thousands of volunteer reinforcements and massive amounts of weaponry and supplies. By March 1988 the South African troops had been dealt a decisive military defeat at Cuito Cuanavale by the combined forces of the Cuban volunteers, the Angolan army, and fighters from SWAPO (South West Africa People’s Organisation). The South African invaders were forced to withdraw from Angola; in subsequent negotiations the apartheid regime ceded independence to Namibia, which celebrated the end of racist colonial domination and the establishment of its own government in March 1990.
By puncturing once and for all the myth of the white supremacists’ invincibility, the outcome at Cuito Cuanavale gave another impulse to the battle against apartheid inside South Africa. The self-assurance of South Africa’s capitalist rulers took heavy blows, and tactical divisions among them deepened. On 2 February 1990, the government of Prime Minister FW de Klerk announced the unbanning of the African National Congress and several other anti-apartheid organisations. Nine days later, on 11 February, Nelson Mandela triumphantly walked out of Victor Verster Prison near Cape Town, free for the first time in twenty-seven and a half years.
In his speech to the Matanzas rally, Mandela paid tribute to the unparalleled contribution that Cuba’s internationalist volunteers made to the African peoples’ struggle for independence, freedom, and social justice. “The crushing defeat of the racist army at Cuito Cuanavale was a victory for the whole of Africa!” Mandela said. “The defeat of the apartheid army was an inspiration to the struggling people inside South Africa! Without the defeat of Cuito Cuanavale our organisations would not have been unbanned! The defeat of the racist army at Cuito Cuanavale has made it possible for me to be here today! . . . Cuito Cuanavale has been a turning point in the struggle to free the continent and our country from the scourge of apartheid!”
Responding to Mandela’s tribute, Castro explained that revolutionary Cuba had staked everything – including the existence of the revolution itself – in committing such major military forces to the battle at Cuito Cuanavale. In doing so, said Castro – repeating a theme that has run through many of his speeches in recent years – the Cuban government and people once again showed in practice why internationalism is blood and bone of the revolution, and why any retreat from aiding those fighting for national liberation or socialism elsewhere in the world would be the death knell of the Cuban revolution itself.
As Castro explained in a December 1988 speech to a rally of half a million people in Havana, including many men and women from the Cuban armed forces and Territorial Troop Militia: “Whoever is incapable of fighting for others will never be capable of fighting for himself. And the heroism shown by our forces, by our people in other lands, faraway lands, must also serve to let the imperialists know what awaits them if one day they force us to fight on this land here.”
The internationalist course charted in Angola is central to the life-or-death questions confronting the Cuban revolution today that are addressed by Castro in the speech printed here. Washington has never forgiven the Cuban people for their declaration of independence from US neocolonialism proclaimed in 1959; it has never forgiven them for the social revolution they began three decades ago. Castro describes some of the lasting social gains and political conquests of that revolution, and he explains why the leadership of the Cuban revolution will continue along the historic line of march charted almost 150 years ago by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels – toward a world where human beings live and work together as brothers and sisters, instead of being forced to prey on each other like wolves.
From the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s, internationalist missions such as those carried out by hundreds of thousands of Cubans in Angola – as well as in Grenada, Nicaragua, and elsewhere – were the main social and political force helping to mobilise and politically inspire working people in Cuba. Internationalist commitment stood counterposed to the political disorientation fostered by the policies, institutions, and priorities that had begun to be systematically implemented in Cuba in the early 1970s, largely copied from the Soviet Union