For many of us who came to adulthood in the later years of the First Cold War between the United States of America and the now defunct Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and who lived in countries where proxy conflicts between the super-powers coloured much of our lives, Castro’s Cuba, from a distance, constituted a beacon of hope. In the wake of the post-1945 rise of the U.S. to the position of the world’s pre-eminent economic and military imperial power, the tiny Caribbean island nation’s revolution, which overthrew a colonial dictatorship and signaled to the world a different way to conceive of post-colonial independence, inspired our imaginations of the possible. The struggle against imperial rule was not futile, we told ourselves: look to Cuba. Of course, as the years passed, looking to Cuba became a more complicated process, but the hope sustained itself, and us.
In South Africa, specifically, the Black majority lived in the over-armed white supremacist state which practiced racist repression inside its own borders in the name of Christian capitalist nationalism for half a century, and which destabilised its neighbours in the region in the name of protecting what was signalled as the foundations of western modernity and civilisation for at least half of that. All this, of course, happened with the explicit support of the majority of western governments, despite the declaration that apartheid, the policy of racist rule by the white minority over the Black majority, was a crime against humanity.
The rapturous applause which greeted Fidel Castro when he attended the inauguration of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela as South Africa’s first democratically-elected and Black head of government and state on 10 May 1994 was hardly surprising. Here was the head of a plucky little state that had successfully defied the most powerful economic and military-industrial complex for a generation, and despite the indications of problems inside Cuba, could still boast of having the highest literacy rates in the hemisphere, and the best health improvement record.
Of course, the history of Cuba—for Cubans in the country as well as for those in exile—was infinitely more complex than we understood it then, and more than many of us still understand now. But the vilified image of Cuba perpetuated in the West and by Western identified media was complicated for many Black South Africans by the role he played in defence of Angola’s independence against apartheid South Africa’s aggression. It was a story that other oppressed people elsewhere in Africa, in Latin America, and even in Palestine, valued.
Of the Cuban missile crisis, little was actually known by many in places like South Africa, where the U.S. version for the longest time was repeated by the official state. Since then, even U.S. historians have had to revise the traditional narrative of a mischievous Cuban revolutionary government destabilising the world and bringing it to the edge of extinction in cahoots with a Soviet monster. Nikita Khrushchev, it turned out, and as Noam Chomsky has observed, was much more reasonable than the Kennedy of the Camelot myth. These were not simple times then, and they cannot be reduced to such in retrospect. Much of the Soviet system was brutally totalitarian, but much of what has passed for ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ in the West could hardly be considered as such in truth.
For those of us in Africa, the death of Patrice Lumumba, and the West’s record of cooperation with ‘benevolent dictators’ (benevolent towards Western interests, often brutal in relation to their own people), made the objections to Castro and Cuba hypocritical. Of course, by the 1980s, and because of Cuban exiles, the Castro government’s record on the rights of homosexuals, and separately on HIV/AIDS, was unacceptable. But in the 1980s, the U.S. government’s record on these matters was hardly more palatable.
In his obituary for Nelson Mandela, Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee writes of him as the last of the great men of the twentieth century, or at least, among the last. Mandela, too, had not been a palatable figure around the world prior to his domestication as ‘Tata Madiba,’ rather than the Black terrorist of the white supremacist western imaginary. Castro was never domesticated or tameable in the same way: the Monroe doctrine by which the most powerful military and economic state in the history of human existence dominated the hemisphere would never have allowed for that.
It is also significant for us that the rapprochement between Cuba and the United States happened partly because of the serendipitous meeting at Mandela’s funeral of Barack Obama, the U.S.’s first Black president, and Raúl Castro, who had taken over the leadership of Cuba when Fidel became too frail. Much work still needs to be done, and how and whether it is done will be a matter of curious interest for many of us, especially those of us in South Africa who benefited doubly from Cuba and Castro.
In a place like South Africa, the national leader who sent doctors to assist our beleaguered health care system shortly after the abolition of apartheid, and who had sent soldiers and offered public moral and morale support in the struggle against apartheid, obscures the figure who is vilified by many who live in a state which sends many more soldiers around the world and is not consistent either in its support for and denunciation of rights violations. Black South Africans need only reflect on their past, and on the declaration of their first post-apartheid president as a terrorist in those very western states which insist on un-nuanced views of Castro, and of Cuba.
Cover Image: Detail of OSPAAAL anti-apartheid poster. “26 de Junio. Dia de Solidaridad Mundial con la lucha del Pueblo de Africa del Sur.” Mederos 1970