28-11-2016, 09:32 PM
We spend today looking at the life and legacy of the Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, who died on Friday at the age of 90. We're joined by three guests.
Bill Fletcher Jr. is a longtime labor, racial justice and international activist, editorial board member and columnist for BlackCommentator.com, founder of the Black Radical Congress, his recent piece headlined "Black America and the Passing of Fidel Castro."
Peter Kornbluh is also with us, director of the Cuba Documentation Project at the National Security Archive. He's the co-author with William LeoGrande of Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana.
And joining us via Democracy Now! video stream, Lou Pérez Jr., professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, author of several books, including Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos and Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution.
We welcome you all to Democracy Now! Peter Kornbluh, let's begin with you. Your reaction to the death of Fidel Castro?
PETER KORNBLUH: Well, the world has lost one of the most famous leading and dynamic and dramatic revolutionaries who ever lived. He's going to have a very controversial legacy, but it is indisputable that he took a small Caribbean island and transformed it into a major actor on the world stage, far beyond its geographic size. He stood up to the United States. He became the David versus Goliath, withstood all of the efforts to kill him, overthrow him. And that is what he will go down in history for, in many ways.
Cuba is in a very difficult situation today, with an extraordinary transition in terms of the Cuban leadership and in terms of the leadership in the United States. It's not clear where the relationship between Washington and Havana is going to go under Donald Trump. And in that respect, the death of Fidel now iscomes at an extremely delicate moment. But, you know, the world is going to, I think, remember Fidel as somebody who really stood for independence and sovereignty and brought a great pride and nationalism to the Cuban people.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Bill Fletcher, your immediate response when you heard that Fidel Castro had died? I mean, he was no longer the actual president; he had handed over power in 2006 to his younger brother, Raúl, who's actually 85, and then formally ceded that power in 2008, so it's been about a decade.
BILL FLETCHER JR.: Much asAmy, as Peter just said, we lost a very audacious leader, an outspoken champion of national liberation, national independence. And while there are, you know, in the mainstream media many, many criticisms that are being made of Fidel Castroand there are certainly legitimate criticismswhat the U.S. media misses is why is it that most of the world mourns his passing. It's not just the mourning of a historic figure, but a figure who actually shook up the planet.
AMY GOODMAN: In what way?
BILL FLETCHER JR.: He did things that were reallyit's just interesting, Amy. He took ahe took a country that had been turned into a whorehouse and gambling casino for the United States, and gave that country dignity. He turned a country that was poorremains poorinto a major location for the production of medical personnel, who have gone around the world and made themselves available to countries that could never afford that kind of assistance. Heas Peter mentioned, he combated the apartheid regime in South Africa, but, in addition, provided all sorts of assistance to forces that were fighting Portuguese colonialism and white minority rule. He helped to construct the idea of Latin American independence, working very closely with the late President Chávez of Venezuela. And this is one of the reasons that he has a special place for much of black America, that he stood up to the United States. The United States did everything that they could possibly do to destroy him, to bring him down and to bring down his government, and it did not work.
AMY GOODMAN: Lou Pérez, talk about your interest in Fidel Castro and your response to this latest development, the death of Fidel Castro.
LOUIS PÉREZ JR.: Good morning. I think it's important to contextualize Fidel Castro. What resonates in the world, at least as much as Fidel Castro, is the Cuban revolution. And the Cuban revolution itself is a historical process that comes out of 100 years of struggle. The Cuban revolution represents the culmination of Cuban history. And behind Fidel Castro, or perhaps even ahead of Fidel Castro, are a people, a people who have been struggling for self-determination and national sovereignty for the better part of a century. So Fidel Castro happens to be the person who has the capacity to summon and bring to fruition, in culmination, a long historical process. It happens that this process culminates in the early '60s at the same time that the decolonization of Africa and Southeast Asia and the Middle East is undergoing. And all of a sudden Cuba becomes emblematic of a global phenomenon and that there isthat probably no country in the world bore the imprint of American domination more than Cuba did in the 20th century, and so thatthat Fidel Castro, with 6 million other Cubans, assumed the political position of challenging the American presence, of minimizing American influence, of expelling American capital, of breaking diplomatic relations and then withstanding, as your guests have indicated, 60 years of one failed invasion, years of covert operations, multiple assassinations and a highly punitive embargo, speaks to the resolve not only of Fidel Castro, but the resolve of the Cuban people.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Professor Pérez, the dominant discussion in the U.S. corporate media is that he was a dictator, that he was a killer, that he killed many and imprisoned dissidents. Your response to that description?
LOUIS PÉREZ JR.: I don't know how to respond to that. There is, I thinkthis is an authoritarian system. This is a system that is not reluctant to use repressive means to maintain power. This is a system that has spawned a fairly extensive intelligence system, surveillance systems. And in many ways, I think Cuba offers us a cautionary tale. For 30, 40, 50 years, Cuba has been under siege from the United States. And once that idea of national security enters into the calculus of governance, you are aware that civil liberties and the freedoms of the press and freedom of political exchange shrinkand we're experiencing this here since 9/11so that Cuba becomes a national security state, with justification if one believes that the duty of a government is to protect the integrity of national sovereignty. And so, for 50 years, Cuba, 90 miles away from the world's most powerful country, struggles to maintain its integrity, its national sovereignty, and in the course of these years increasingly becomes a national security state. Ironically, the United States contributes to the very conditions that it professes to abhor.
AMY GOODMAN: Peter Kornbluh, you had a chance to meet Fidel Castro. I'd also like you to give us a thumbnail sketch, a biography, if you will, of Fidel Castrowhere he was born, what were the influences on his life, and how it was, 60 years to the day before he died on Friday, he made that trip, leaving Mexico with Che Guevara and his brother Raúl to begin the Cuban revolution.
PETER KORNBLUH: Well, I did have the extraordinary opportunity to spend some real time, quality time, with Fidel Castro, if you will. We organized two major conferences, one on the 40th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion and one on the 40th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, brought all the surviving Kennedy administration officials to Havana, retired CIA officials, and in the case of the Bay of Pigs invasion, we even brought former members of the CIA-led brigade that had invaded Cuba to sit at a conference room table and discuss this rather extraordinary history with Fidel. And over the course of time, we had four private lunches and two state dinners, and I was able to kind of sit in front of him and listen to the history that he embodied and that he was a part of and that he changed, with the power of his personality and the force of his leadership. And we have lost a historical figure, and with him goes tremendous amount of history that only he knew and only he could share. And so, the movies and the books to come, I think, are going to be extremely important for us to evaluate and think more about the history that he helped to make and dominated, in many ways, over the last 50, 60 years.
You know, he was born to a Spanish immigrant who became a major land owner in the provinces of Cuba. He grew up a relatively privileged life. He became a lawyer. And he began to oppose the Cuban dictator, Fulgencio Batista, leading a kind of overthrow attempt on July 26, 1953, at the Moncada Barracks. That's why his movement was called the July 26 Movement. That effort failed miserably, and he was thrown in jail. He miraculously was actually released under an amnesty and exiled to Mexico, where, as we know, he organized the Cuban revolution.
He received a lot of credit for sparking the revolution, but as Lou Pérez would be the first to say, there was tremendous opposition to Batista in the urban sectors, organized independently of Fidel Castro. But his landing in Cuba on December 2nd, 1956, in a small boat, the Granma, with 88 guerrillas to go into the mountains, started kind of the process going forward in a big way. You know, it was an improbable revolution. The landingthe landing party led by Fidel was attacked almost immediately, and he lost the vast majority of his men. Only 12 members of the landing group, the guerrillas that he was bringing to Cuba, survivedamong them, him and Raúl andhis brother, and Che Guevara and just a handful of others. Andbut he, for the force of his personality, managed to broaden the appeal, hook up with the urban revolutionaries and opposition and bring about this extraordinary revolution.
He survived assassination attempts. He might have actually been killed at the Bay of Pigs; he wasmembers of the brigade had him in their rifle sights. He survived there. He survived the missile crisis, in which the Kennedy administration was almost ready to obliterate Cuba to take out those Soviet missiles. And along the way, he, you know, turned his country upside down. There's going to be a lot of debates, and is debate right now, over the legacy of his repression, of his economic decisions. Even he, later in life, acknowledged that the model that he had set forward wasn't successful in the end for Cubans over the long term.
But he will be remembered for his emphasis on healthcare, education and certainly his uncompromising commitment to independence and sovereignty. And the legacy of his discussions with the United States shows this extraordinary commitment. At one point, the Carter administration sent a secret negotiating team down to talk to him, and they basically said, you know, "We'll lift the embargo, if you get out of Africa." And he said, in response, "You know, I don't accept that the United States gets to operate by one set of rules, and Cuba, smaller country, is being told to operate by a second set of rules. The revolution meant independence for our governance and our foreign policy, and that is what we are going to pursue." And he pursued that until the very end.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to the relationship between Castro and Nelson Mandelaof course, the South African president imprisoned for decades himself. In 1991, a year after he was freed and a few years before he became president, Nelson Mandela visited Cuba to thank President Fidel Castro. This is when they first met.
BILL FLETCHER JR.: Well, you know, it's interesting, Amy, because there was a special relationship that existed between the Cuban revolution and Africa from almost the beginning. The Cubans were very supportive of the Algerian struggle against the French, which succeeded in 1962. They went on to support the various anticolonial movements in Africa, including in particularly the anti-Portuguese movements in Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique. And they were unquestioning in their support for the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa.
It's the Angolan struggle that receives a lot of attention. And one of the things that was not understood at the time by many of us in the United States, including many of us on the left, was that when Cuban troops went to Angola, they did not go at the behest of the Soviet Union. In fact, the Soviet Union was not in favor of Cuban troops going there. The Cubans went there out of a sense of solidarity. I mean, they actually believed in solidarity. And they went there to stop the invasion that was in the process of taking place betweenby the South African apartheid troops and their allies in the FNLA and UNITA. And so, this relationship has been very, very strong.
And you could tell in the words of the late President Mandela that this bond, this love for the Cuban people and for the Cuban revolutionthat bond also translated into a feeling in black America of a certain kind of bond, a certain support for the Cuban revolution, feeling that this was a revolution that paid attention to Africa but also paid attention to the struggle around racism within Cuba, although, obviously, there were certain limitations to that, but I would say that Cuba probably made the greatest advances in the struggle around racism of any country in the Western Hemisphere.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn Cuba's role in Angola. This is a clip from the 2001 documentary Fidel: The Untold Story, that was directed by Estela Bravo. You hear the narrator Vlasta Vrana first.
BILL FLETCHER JR.: There's a story that I heard, Amy, about what happened in Angola on the night of independence. And there was panic in the capital. South African troops and their allies were approaching, and no one knew what was going to happen. And then, at midnight, people went down to the docks. And out of the darkness came Cuban troops, Cuban ships, that then landed troops. And the look on the face of the person who told me this story, who witnessed this, was something that I'll never forgetthe sense that they had been saved at a critical moment in an act that had not been driven by the Soviet Union, but had been driven by a belief in solidarity and a particular relationship between Cuba and Africa. And that's something that the U.S. mainstream media is completely ignoring at this moment.
AMY GOODMAN: And Che Guevara would be in Africaright?fighting for
BILL FLETCHER JR.: Correct.
AMY GOODMAN: leading Cuban forces, before he would ultimately die in Latin America.
BILL FLETCHER JR.: That's correct. He went to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and was fighting a neocolonial regime thatironically, he was working with Kabila, Laurent Kabila, in the beginning. But the forces there were very poorly organized. They weren't really ready to carry out a revolution, and the Cuban advisers withdrew, ultimately, because the conditions were not right.
AMY GOODMAN: Speaking about Che, I thought I would turn right now to Che Guevara. I want to turn to another clip from the film Fidel: The Untold Story, directed by Estela Bravo. This is Fidel Castro talking about Che Guevara following his execution in Bolivia in 1967.
Professor Lou Pérez Jr., talk about the effect of Fidel Castro in Latin America. We just left this conversation about Che Guevara, his death. Talk about what Che Guevara was doing there, what he was doing for Fidel, and what Fideloverall, Fidel Castro was doing in Latin America beyond Cuba.
LOUIS A. PÉREZ JR.: The power of Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution stands as a phenomenon of resisting the American pushback against the Cuban revolution. That is, in a region that had beenthat had been repeatedly intervened militarily, in Mexico and the Central Americain Central America, political intermeddling, economic intervention in South America. The example of Cuba, especially, I thinkespecially with the failed invasion of the Bay of Pigs, which contributed powerfully to the consolidation and then centralization of power, and the Cubans celebrated the Bay of Pigs as the first defeat of imperialism in the Americas. And that projection, that boast, that victory, just reverberated across Latin America and, perhaps anymore than anything else, suggested that a people resolved, with a leader resolved, with a capacity to resist intervention, perhaps it was indeed possible. And when the Cubans exhort Latin America to make the Andes the Sierra Maestra of the New World, that ideathat idea of being able to affirm autonomy, agency, self-determination, national sovereignty, just resonated across the Westernacross Latin America. And Che Guevara takes the model of the Cuban guerrilla war, the foco theory, the idea that a small handful of people who inter themselves in the interior, the hinterland, of a Latin American country can create what we call the subjective conditions of revolution, and from that guerrilla foco would expand a revolutionary movement that would eventually prevail and proclaim victory. The Che Guevara model of revolution essentially is the replication of the Cuban guerrilla war during the'57 and '58.
AMY GOODMAN: And talk about what happened with Che Guevara in Bolivia and what that meant to Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution.
LOUIS A. PÉREZ JR.: Well, the defeat of the guerrilla foco in Bolivia, the capture and the execution of Che Guevara really dealt a body blow to the whole idea of armed struggle in Latin America. It would not be until the Sandinista victory in 1979 where you do have, indeed, a triumph of a guerrilla movement. But after 19the defeat of the guerrilla foco and the death of Che Guevara, the Cubans turned more toward domestic issues. These are the years of the big push for the economy. This is the year of the disastrous 10 million ton crop. And between the death of Che Guevara and the 10 million ton crop of 1970, it's possible to take a look at those set of years as really determining moments that altered the trajectory of the Cuban revolution
Bill Fletcher Jr. is a longtime labor, racial justice and international activist, editorial board member and columnist for BlackCommentator.com, founder of the Black Radical Congress, his recent piece headlined "Black America and the Passing of Fidel Castro."
Peter Kornbluh is also with us, director of the Cuba Documentation Project at the National Security Archive. He's the co-author with William LeoGrande of Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana.
And joining us via Democracy Now! video stream, Lou Pérez Jr., professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, author of several books, including Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos and Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution.
We welcome you all to Democracy Now! Peter Kornbluh, let's begin with you. Your reaction to the death of Fidel Castro?
PETER KORNBLUH: Well, the world has lost one of the most famous leading and dynamic and dramatic revolutionaries who ever lived. He's going to have a very controversial legacy, but it is indisputable that he took a small Caribbean island and transformed it into a major actor on the world stage, far beyond its geographic size. He stood up to the United States. He became the David versus Goliath, withstood all of the efforts to kill him, overthrow him. And that is what he will go down in history for, in many ways.
Cuba is in a very difficult situation today, with an extraordinary transition in terms of the Cuban leadership and in terms of the leadership in the United States. It's not clear where the relationship between Washington and Havana is going to go under Donald Trump. And in that respect, the death of Fidel now iscomes at an extremely delicate moment. But, you know, the world is going to, I think, remember Fidel as somebody who really stood for independence and sovereignty and brought a great pride and nationalism to the Cuban people.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Bill Fletcher, your immediate response when you heard that Fidel Castro had died? I mean, he was no longer the actual president; he had handed over power in 2006 to his younger brother, Raúl, who's actually 85, and then formally ceded that power in 2008, so it's been about a decade.
BILL FLETCHER JR.: Much asAmy, as Peter just said, we lost a very audacious leader, an outspoken champion of national liberation, national independence. And while there are, you know, in the mainstream media many, many criticisms that are being made of Fidel Castroand there are certainly legitimate criticismswhat the U.S. media misses is why is it that most of the world mourns his passing. It's not just the mourning of a historic figure, but a figure who actually shook up the planet.
AMY GOODMAN: In what way?
BILL FLETCHER JR.: He did things that were reallyit's just interesting, Amy. He took ahe took a country that had been turned into a whorehouse and gambling casino for the United States, and gave that country dignity. He turned a country that was poorremains poorinto a major location for the production of medical personnel, who have gone around the world and made themselves available to countries that could never afford that kind of assistance. Heas Peter mentioned, he combated the apartheid regime in South Africa, but, in addition, provided all sorts of assistance to forces that were fighting Portuguese colonialism and white minority rule. He helped to construct the idea of Latin American independence, working very closely with the late President Chávez of Venezuela. And this is one of the reasons that he has a special place for much of black America, that he stood up to the United States. The United States did everything that they could possibly do to destroy him, to bring him down and to bring down his government, and it did not work.
AMY GOODMAN: Lou Pérez, talk about your interest in Fidel Castro and your response to this latest development, the death of Fidel Castro.
LOUIS PÉREZ JR.: Good morning. I think it's important to contextualize Fidel Castro. What resonates in the world, at least as much as Fidel Castro, is the Cuban revolution. And the Cuban revolution itself is a historical process that comes out of 100 years of struggle. The Cuban revolution represents the culmination of Cuban history. And behind Fidel Castro, or perhaps even ahead of Fidel Castro, are a people, a people who have been struggling for self-determination and national sovereignty for the better part of a century. So Fidel Castro happens to be the person who has the capacity to summon and bring to fruition, in culmination, a long historical process. It happens that this process culminates in the early '60s at the same time that the decolonization of Africa and Southeast Asia and the Middle East is undergoing. And all of a sudden Cuba becomes emblematic of a global phenomenon and that there isthat probably no country in the world bore the imprint of American domination more than Cuba did in the 20th century, and so thatthat Fidel Castro, with 6 million other Cubans, assumed the political position of challenging the American presence, of minimizing American influence, of expelling American capital, of breaking diplomatic relations and then withstanding, as your guests have indicated, 60 years of one failed invasion, years of covert operations, multiple assassinations and a highly punitive embargo, speaks to the resolve not only of Fidel Castro, but the resolve of the Cuban people.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Professor Pérez, the dominant discussion in the U.S. corporate media is that he was a dictator, that he was a killer, that he killed many and imprisoned dissidents. Your response to that description?
LOUIS PÉREZ JR.: I don't know how to respond to that. There is, I thinkthis is an authoritarian system. This is a system that is not reluctant to use repressive means to maintain power. This is a system that has spawned a fairly extensive intelligence system, surveillance systems. And in many ways, I think Cuba offers us a cautionary tale. For 30, 40, 50 years, Cuba has been under siege from the United States. And once that idea of national security enters into the calculus of governance, you are aware that civil liberties and the freedoms of the press and freedom of political exchange shrinkand we're experiencing this here since 9/11so that Cuba becomes a national security state, with justification if one believes that the duty of a government is to protect the integrity of national sovereignty. And so, for 50 years, Cuba, 90 miles away from the world's most powerful country, struggles to maintain its integrity, its national sovereignty, and in the course of these years increasingly becomes a national security state. Ironically, the United States contributes to the very conditions that it professes to abhor.
AMY GOODMAN: Peter Kornbluh, you had a chance to meet Fidel Castro. I'd also like you to give us a thumbnail sketch, a biography, if you will, of Fidel Castrowhere he was born, what were the influences on his life, and how it was, 60 years to the day before he died on Friday, he made that trip, leaving Mexico with Che Guevara and his brother Raúl to begin the Cuban revolution.
PETER KORNBLUH: Well, I did have the extraordinary opportunity to spend some real time, quality time, with Fidel Castro, if you will. We organized two major conferences, one on the 40th anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion and one on the 40th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, brought all the surviving Kennedy administration officials to Havana, retired CIA officials, and in the case of the Bay of Pigs invasion, we even brought former members of the CIA-led brigade that had invaded Cuba to sit at a conference room table and discuss this rather extraordinary history with Fidel. And over the course of time, we had four private lunches and two state dinners, and I was able to kind of sit in front of him and listen to the history that he embodied and that he was a part of and that he changed, with the power of his personality and the force of his leadership. And we have lost a historical figure, and with him goes tremendous amount of history that only he knew and only he could share. And so, the movies and the books to come, I think, are going to be extremely important for us to evaluate and think more about the history that he helped to make and dominated, in many ways, over the last 50, 60 years.
You know, he was born to a Spanish immigrant who became a major land owner in the provinces of Cuba. He grew up a relatively privileged life. He became a lawyer. And he began to oppose the Cuban dictator, Fulgencio Batista, leading a kind of overthrow attempt on July 26, 1953, at the Moncada Barracks. That's why his movement was called the July 26 Movement. That effort failed miserably, and he was thrown in jail. He miraculously was actually released under an amnesty and exiled to Mexico, where, as we know, he organized the Cuban revolution.
He received a lot of credit for sparking the revolution, but as Lou Pérez would be the first to say, there was tremendous opposition to Batista in the urban sectors, organized independently of Fidel Castro. But his landing in Cuba on December 2nd, 1956, in a small boat, the Granma, with 88 guerrillas to go into the mountains, started kind of the process going forward in a big way. You know, it was an improbable revolution. The landingthe landing party led by Fidel was attacked almost immediately, and he lost the vast majority of his men. Only 12 members of the landing group, the guerrillas that he was bringing to Cuba, survivedamong them, him and Raúl andhis brother, and Che Guevara and just a handful of others. Andbut he, for the force of his personality, managed to broaden the appeal, hook up with the urban revolutionaries and opposition and bring about this extraordinary revolution.
He survived assassination attempts. He might have actually been killed at the Bay of Pigs; he wasmembers of the brigade had him in their rifle sights. He survived there. He survived the missile crisis, in which the Kennedy administration was almost ready to obliterate Cuba to take out those Soviet missiles. And along the way, he, you know, turned his country upside down. There's going to be a lot of debates, and is debate right now, over the legacy of his repression, of his economic decisions. Even he, later in life, acknowledged that the model that he had set forward wasn't successful in the end for Cubans over the long term.
But he will be remembered for his emphasis on healthcare, education and certainly his uncompromising commitment to independence and sovereignty. And the legacy of his discussions with the United States shows this extraordinary commitment. At one point, the Carter administration sent a secret negotiating team down to talk to him, and they basically said, you know, "We'll lift the embargo, if you get out of Africa." And he said, in response, "You know, I don't accept that the United States gets to operate by one set of rules, and Cuba, smaller country, is being told to operate by a second set of rules. The revolution meant independence for our governance and our foreign policy, and that is what we are going to pursue." And he pursued that until the very end.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to the relationship between Castro and Nelson Mandelaof course, the South African president imprisoned for decades himself. In 1991, a year after he was freed and a few years before he became president, Nelson Mandela visited Cuba to thank President Fidel Castro. This is when they first met.
NELSON MANDELA: Before we say anything, you must tell me when you are coming to South Africa. You seeno, just a moment, just a moment, just a moment.
PRESIDENT FIDEL CASTRO: [translated] The sooner, the better.
NELSON MANDELA: And we have had a visit from a wide variety of people. And our friend, Cuba, which had helped us in training our people, gave us resources to keep current with our struggle, trained our people as doctors, and SWAPO, you have not come to our country. When are you coming?
PRESIDENT FIDEL CASTRO: [translated] I haven't visited my South African homeland yet. I want it, I love it as a homeland. I love it as a homeland as I love you and the South African people.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Nelson Mandela imploring Fidel Castro to come to South Africa. And this is Fidel Castro speaking in South Africa in 1998.PRESIDENT FIDEL CASTRO: [translated] Let South Africa be a model of a more just and more humane future. If you can do it, we will all be able to do it.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Fidel Castro speaking in South Africa, and, before that, Nelson Mandela, just after he got out of jail, visiting Castro in Cuba to invite him to South Africa. Bill Fletcher, talk about the relationship of Cuba, Fidel Castro, with the continent of Africa and liberation struggles there.BILL FLETCHER JR.: Well, you know, it's interesting, Amy, because there was a special relationship that existed between the Cuban revolution and Africa from almost the beginning. The Cubans were very supportive of the Algerian struggle against the French, which succeeded in 1962. They went on to support the various anticolonial movements in Africa, including in particularly the anti-Portuguese movements in Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique. And they were unquestioning in their support for the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa.
It's the Angolan struggle that receives a lot of attention. And one of the things that was not understood at the time by many of us in the United States, including many of us on the left, was that when Cuban troops went to Angola, they did not go at the behest of the Soviet Union. In fact, the Soviet Union was not in favor of Cuban troops going there. The Cubans went there out of a sense of solidarity. I mean, they actually believed in solidarity. And they went there to stop the invasion that was in the process of taking place betweenby the South African apartheid troops and their allies in the FNLA and UNITA. And so, this relationship has been very, very strong.
And you could tell in the words of the late President Mandela that this bond, this love for the Cuban people and for the Cuban revolutionthat bond also translated into a feeling in black America of a certain kind of bond, a certain support for the Cuban revolution, feeling that this was a revolution that paid attention to Africa but also paid attention to the struggle around racism within Cuba, although, obviously, there were certain limitations to that, but I would say that Cuba probably made the greatest advances in the struggle around racism of any country in the Western Hemisphere.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn Cuba's role in Angola. This is a clip from the 2001 documentary Fidel: The Untold Story, that was directed by Estela Bravo. You hear the narrator Vlasta Vrana first.
VLASTA VRANA: Right from the beginning, Cuba's revolutionary ideals not only spread throughout Latin America, but also forged strong ties with national liberation leaders, such as Sékou Touré, AmÃlcar Cabral, Julius Nyerere, Samora Machel and Agostinho Neto.
PRESIDENT FIDEL CASTRO: [translated] When the regular South African troops invaded Angola, we couldn't stand by and do nothing. When the MPLA asked for our help, we offered them the help they needed.
VLASTA VRANA: In 1975, as Angola moved towards independence from Portugal, the CIA, along with the apartheid government of South Africa, tried to bring down the new Angolan government. At the request of the Angolan president, Fidel sent 36,000 troops to keep the South African forces from attacking Rwanda, the capital. For many Cubans, whose ancestors were African slaves, the fight in Angola was a way to repair a debt to history. In 14 years of war, over 300,000 Cubansdoctors, teachers and engineers, as well as soldiersplayed an important role in Angola. More than 2,000 lost their lives. In 1988, Fidel sent in more Cuban troops for the decisive battle at Cuito Cuanavale and directed operations from Cuba. The defeat of the South African army drove a large nail into the coffin of apartheid and helped advance the struggle of the South African people.
AMY GOODMAN: That's a clip from the 2001 documentary Fidel: The Untold Story, directed by Estela Bravo. Now let's go to the film CIA & Angolan Revolution. In this clip, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger explains why the U.S. was concerned about the Cuban troops that Fidel Castro had sent to fight in Angola. After Kissinger, you hear Fidel Castro himself.HENRY KISSINGER: We thought, with respect Angola, that if the Soviet Union could intervene at such distances, from areas that were far from the traditional Russian security concerns, and when Cuban forces could be introduced into distant trouble spots, and if the West could not find a counter to that, that then the whole international system could be destabilized.
PRESIDENT FIDEL CASTRO: [translated] It was a question of globalizing our struggle vis-Ã -vis the globalized pressures and harassment of the U.S. In this respect, it did not coincide with the Soviet viewpoint. We acted, but without their cooperation. Quite the opposite.
AMY GOODMAN: That from the film CIA & Angolan Revolution. Bill Fletcher, as we wrap up this section on Cuba in Africa?BILL FLETCHER JR.: There's a story that I heard, Amy, about what happened in Angola on the night of independence. And there was panic in the capital. South African troops and their allies were approaching, and no one knew what was going to happen. And then, at midnight, people went down to the docks. And out of the darkness came Cuban troops, Cuban ships, that then landed troops. And the look on the face of the person who told me this story, who witnessed this, was something that I'll never forgetthe sense that they had been saved at a critical moment in an act that had not been driven by the Soviet Union, but had been driven by a belief in solidarity and a particular relationship between Cuba and Africa. And that's something that the U.S. mainstream media is completely ignoring at this moment.
AMY GOODMAN: And Che Guevara would be in Africaright?fighting for
BILL FLETCHER JR.: Correct.
AMY GOODMAN: leading Cuban forces, before he would ultimately die in Latin America.
BILL FLETCHER JR.: That's correct. He went to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and was fighting a neocolonial regime thatironically, he was working with Kabila, Laurent Kabila, in the beginning. But the forces there were very poorly organized. They weren't really ready to carry out a revolution, and the Cuban advisers withdrew, ultimately, because the conditions were not right.
AMY GOODMAN: Speaking about Che, I thought I would turn right now to Che Guevara. I want to turn to another clip from the film Fidel: The Untold Story, directed by Estela Bravo. This is Fidel Castro talking about Che Guevara following his execution in Bolivia in 1967.
PRESIDENT FIDEL CASTRO: [translated] I dream about him often. I dream that I'm talking to him, that he's alive. It's a very special thing. It's hard to accept the fact that he's dead. Why is that? I'd say it's because he's always present, always present everywhere.
AMY GOODMAN: In 1997, three decades after he was killed, Che Guevara's remains were found and returned to Cuba. Fidel Castro talked more about him in the film Fidel.PRESIDENT FIDEL CASTRO: [translated] I dream about him often. I dream that I'm talking to him, that he's alive. It's a very special thing. It's hard to accept the fact that he's dead. Why is that? I'd say it's because he's always present, always present everywhere.
We're speaking with Bill Fletcher, who is the founder of the Black Radical Congress, Peter Kornbluh of the Cuba Documentation Project and Professor Lou Pérez Jr., author of Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos.Professor Lou Pérez Jr., talk about the effect of Fidel Castro in Latin America. We just left this conversation about Che Guevara, his death. Talk about what Che Guevara was doing there, what he was doing for Fidel, and what Fideloverall, Fidel Castro was doing in Latin America beyond Cuba.
LOUIS A. PÉREZ JR.: The power of Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution stands as a phenomenon of resisting the American pushback against the Cuban revolution. That is, in a region that had beenthat had been repeatedly intervened militarily, in Mexico and the Central Americain Central America, political intermeddling, economic intervention in South America. The example of Cuba, especially, I thinkespecially with the failed invasion of the Bay of Pigs, which contributed powerfully to the consolidation and then centralization of power, and the Cubans celebrated the Bay of Pigs as the first defeat of imperialism in the Americas. And that projection, that boast, that victory, just reverberated across Latin America and, perhaps anymore than anything else, suggested that a people resolved, with a leader resolved, with a capacity to resist intervention, perhaps it was indeed possible. And when the Cubans exhort Latin America to make the Andes the Sierra Maestra of the New World, that ideathat idea of being able to affirm autonomy, agency, self-determination, national sovereignty, just resonated across the Westernacross Latin America. And Che Guevara takes the model of the Cuban guerrilla war, the foco theory, the idea that a small handful of people who inter themselves in the interior, the hinterland, of a Latin American country can create what we call the subjective conditions of revolution, and from that guerrilla foco would expand a revolutionary movement that would eventually prevail and proclaim victory. The Che Guevara model of revolution essentially is the replication of the Cuban guerrilla war during the'57 and '58.
AMY GOODMAN: And talk about what happened with Che Guevara in Bolivia and what that meant to Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution.
LOUIS A. PÉREZ JR.: Well, the defeat of the guerrilla foco in Bolivia, the capture and the execution of Che Guevara really dealt a body blow to the whole idea of armed struggle in Latin America. It would not be until the Sandinista victory in 1979 where you do have, indeed, a triumph of a guerrilla movement. But after 19the defeat of the guerrilla foco and the death of Che Guevara, the Cubans turned more toward domestic issues. These are the years of the big push for the economy. This is the year of the disastrous 10 million ton crop. And between the death of Che Guevara and the 10 million ton crop of 1970, it's possible to take a look at those set of years as really determining moments that altered the trajectory of the Cuban revolution
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass