Happy birthday, Fidel Castro, friend of Africa and the enemy of Apartheid

At the beginning of every year, The Economist magazine runs a series of predictions about what to expect in the 12 months ahead.

One of them is always amusing but repeatedly fails to materialise. They keep predicting that Fidel Castro, the great Cuban revolutionary, will “finally” die.

It’s usually done tongue-in-cheek but it is easy to see why Castro would be so unpopular with much of the right-wing Western media. He is one of the most remarkable figures of the 21st century, a man who toppled a corrupt and oligarchic American-backed government in his homeland in 1959 and survived numerous attempts to assassinate him in the decades that followed, successfully keeping his country from the clutches of American imperialism.

It was his 90th birthday last week and a question I posed to several reasonably well exposed Kenyans we were meeting with showed what a poor job our education system does to inform us about African history.

What comes to mind, I asked, when you think about Castro and Africa? The question drew a blank with one wag only quipping that the best they could come up with was the fact that former Prime Minister Raila Odinga named his son after the great Cuban.

This is astonishing considering the huge investment Castro made to supporting liberation movements in Africa from the 1960s. In fact, no foreign leader made a greater contribution to breaking the Apartheid regime than Castro.

In the 1970s, the racist Apartheid government was in a strong position, enjoying the quiet patronage of the Americans and much of the West because the African National Congress was viewed as left wing and, therefore, seen as being more sympathetic to the Soviet Union than to Washington.

In 1975, the South African government was alarmed at the prospect of Angola claiming independence from Portugal, understanding that the MPLA which was poised to take power would be an ally of the freedom movement in South Africa and Namibia and that it would offer bases for the ANC and Namibia’s liberation struggle movement, Swapo.

With the encouragement of President Gerald Ford, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and a young hawk named Donald Rumsfeld, who would later earn infamy for his role in the Iraq war, South Africa sent its troops to fight the MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola) and its leader Agostinho Neto who was firmly anti-Apartheid.

That’s when Castro made his move. In a development that shocked the Americans and surprised even Moscow, the Cuban revolutionary sent more than 36,000 troops to fight the South Africans and prevent them from colonising Angola in aid of the Apartheid system.

SAVAGE INJUSTICE

Castro’s astonishing decision made news around the world and elevated the struggle against Apartheid into a global issue, highlighting the savage injustice of minority rule in a system in which delegitimising and dehumanising the black majority was official policy.

The writer Jeremy Harding, in an excellent 14,000-word review of several books on Angola in the London Review of Books, illustrates how decisive — and completely unexpected — Castro’s move was and what an impact it had in rolling back Apartheid.

Castro had absolutely nothing to gain from this war and it came at a great cost to the Cuban economy.

But he was driven by the principle that colonial rule is unjust and that it was Cuba’s responsibility, as a symbol of revolutionary success against Western-backed exploitative governments, to help freedom movements around the world.

Harding also notes the shameful role of the West in backing Apartheid and, remarkably, in even labelling Cuba as the villain in the Angolan struggle: “From (1976) no senior US figure would admit that a Cuban fighting force had deployed to defend a postcolonial government-in-waiting: For the next 13 years, as far as policy statements in Washington were concerned, Cuba was the paramount regional aggressor, working on Moscow’s behalf, and the central obstacle to Namibian independence.

Apartheid counted for nothing, and South Africa’s illegal administration in Namibia was a secondary issue.”

The Americans proceeded to heavily back Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA movement which was ranged against the MPLA leading to a long, nasty civil war that left Angola in an incredibly weak position when the civil war eventually ended after Savimbi was killed.

The MPLA has been a disappointment after taking office and José Eduardo dos Santos has stayed in power too long. But Castro’s glorious role in the liberation struggle is something more Africans need to learn.

[email protected] @mutigam