5Shortly before Angola’s independence from Portuguese colonial rule was to be formally celebrated on 11 November 1975, the country’s new government – led by the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) – was attacked by South African and Zairean troops. The invading forces were allied with the Angolan National Liberation Front (FNLA) and the Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA).
6The 1913 Natives Land Act reserved for White ownership the vast majority of the land in South Africa. It was used to drive 3.5 million African farmers off the land and effectively deny them the right to farm.
7The Freedom Charter was adopted in 1955 by the Congress of the People, a gathering of nearly three thousand delegates held in Kliptown, near Johannesburg. The meeting was convened by the ANC together with the South African Indian Congress, the Coloured People’s Organisation, and the Congress of Democrats. The Freedom Charter has served for decades as a guide to action in the battle to bring down apartheid.
8Inkatha, which was based in Natal Province, is an organisation led by KwaZulu Bantustan Chief Minister Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi.
9Just one week before this speech, it was revealed in the South African press that the apartheid government had secretly funded Inkatha and fomented armed attacks on anti-apartheid activities in an attempt to undercut mass support for the ANC.
10The National Party, which was lead by President FW de Klerk, had been the ruling party in South Africa since 1948 and was the architect of the apartheid system.
11The US government imposed an economic, commercial, and financial embargo on Cuba in the early 1960s.
12To deal with the economic shortages and disruptions brought about by a sharp reduction in the amount of trade and by new trading terms with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Cuba’s National Assembly adopted a major food programme in December 1990. At the heart of the programme is the mobilisation of thousands of Cubans in volunteer work brigades and contingents to meet the labour shortage in agriculture and to help create the conditions for self-sufficiency in food production.
13The “special period” instituted in 1990 refers to a programme of measures designed to help Cuba adjust in an organised way to the consequences of the sharp reduction in trade with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. These measures include substantial cutbacks in fuel consumption, a halt to most new construction of housing and social projects, especially in the cities, and the extension of rationing to almost all consumer goods, together with a reduction of the quantities available. The goal of the special programme is to equalise the burden of the cutbacks as much as possible while giving priority in the allocation of available resources to food production and economic activities that generate hard currency to pay for needed imports.
14Earlier at the 26 July rally, the workers at thirteen enterprises were awarded certificates of recognition for their contributions to the social and economic development of Matanzas Province. Beginning in 1987 special large-scale volunteer construction contingents have been organised to take on major civil-engineering projects such as roads, dams, and other construction work.
15The Pan American Games were held in Cuba 2-18 August 1991.
16Mario Munoz (1912-1953) was one of the revolutionary combatants who participated in the attack on the Moncada garrison. He was captured and murdered by the dictatorship’s troops.
17Nicolás Guillén (1902-1989) was one of Cuba’s leading poets.
18Following the conclusion of the war over colonies between the US and Spanish governments in 1898, US troops occupied Cuba and helped install a pro-US neocolonial regime. Mambí was the Cuban name for that country’s independence fighters during Cuba’s three wars of independence from Spain during the period 1868-98.
19Antonio Maceo (1845-1896), José Marti (1853-1895), Máximo Gómez (1836-1905), and Ignacio Agramonte (1841-1873) were leaders of Cuba’s independence struggle from Spain during the late nineteenth century. Che Guevara (1928-1967), Camilo Cienfuegos (1932-1959), Abel Santamaria (1927-1953), and Frank País (1934-1957) were leaders of the struggle against the Batista dictatorship that culminated in the victory of the Cuban revolution on 1 January 1959.
20The First Ibero-American Summit was held in Guadalajara, Mexico, 17-19 July 1991. The event was attended by the heads of state from the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, plus Spain and Portugal. This was the first time that Cuba had been invited to participate in a gathering of Latin American heads of state since Cuba’s expulsion from the Organisation of American States in 1962 at the instigation of Washington. Castro headed Cuba’s delegation to the meeting.
21One of the most important measures of the Cuban revolution was the agrarian reform law of 1959, which granted share-croppers, tenant farmers, and squatters deeds to use of the land they tilled, and set a limit of 1,000 acres on individual holdings. Implementation of this law resulted in the confiscation of the vast estates and sugar plantations in Cuba – many of them owned by US companies; this land passed into the hands of the new government. A second agrarian reform law in 1963 set a maximum limit on holdings of 167 acres.
22Simón Bolivar (1783-1830) led the armed rebellion that helped win independence from Spain for much of Latin America.
23This is a reference to the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, GATT is one of the international institutions that was created at the initiative of the US capitalist class, following its victory in the Second World War, in order to help maintain its dominant industrial and trading position vis-à-vis its imperialist rivals, and to enforce imperialist domination over the colonial and semicolonial world.
The Uruguay Round, which began in 1986, had originally been scheduled to end in December 1990. However, the talks broke down without an agreement being reached and were suspended.
“We will ensure that sooner rather than later the poor and rightless will rule the land of the birth.” – NELSON MANDELA
“Where did injustice and inequality come from? Where did poverty and underdevelopment come from? Where did all these calamities come from, if not from capitalism?” – FIDEL CASTRO
TWO WORLD-RENOWNED revolutionary icons, Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro, meet for the first time in Cuba in 1991, and speak together at a rally. Their speeches from that historic day are contained in this book. Mandela praises Cuba’s assistance to incapacitate the US-backed South African army, accelerating the end to apartheid. Castro in turn acknowledges the particular contribution of South Africans to the world wide fight for freedom from oppression.
Mandela and Castro regarded each other as mentors. The world regards them as heroes.
Born in 1918, NELSON MANDELA joined the African National Congress in 1944. Together with Walter Sisulu, Oliver Tambo, and others, he helped form the ANC Youth League and was elected its general secretary.
In 1952 Mandela was arrested and received a nine-month suspended sentence for his role as central organiser of the mass Defiance Campaign, in which thousands defied the apartheid regime’s internal passport laws and other measures. That same year he was elected ANC deputy national president. In 1956 Mandela and 155 others were arrested on charges of high treason; after five years the defendants were acquitted.
Mandela continued his anti-apartheid activities after the ANC’s banning in 1960 and was forced to cease public activity in April 1961. That year he helped found Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) to organise military training and armed operations against the apartheid regime.
In August 1962 Mandela was arrested. Charged with incitement to strike and leaving the country without a passport, he was convicted and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. After other ANC leaders were arrested at Rivonia in 1963, Mandela – a
lready in prison – was tried for sabotage. He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment along with seven others.
Held at the notorious Robben Island prison until 1982, Mandela was then transferred to Pollsmoor and later Victor Verster Prison. After refusing Pretoria’s offers for his conditional release, he was released without conditions on 11 February 1990.
Elected ANC deputy president shortly after his release, Mandela was chosen the organisation’s president at the ANC’s 1991 congress. He was president of South Africa from 1994 to 1999.
Born in eastern Cuba in 1926, FIDEL CASTRO began his political activity while attending the University of Havana in the mid-1940s.
After Fulgencio Batista’s coup d’état of 10 March 1952, Castro organised a revolutionary movement to initiate armed struggle against the US-backed dictatorship. On 26 July 1953, he led an unsuccessful attack on the Moncada army garrison in Santiago de Cuba. Many participants were captured and murdered in cold blood; Castro and other survivors were imprisoned. Originally sentenced to fifteen years, he was released in 1955 together with his comrades as a result of an amnesty campaign. Following his release, the 26 July Movement was formed.
In July 1955 Castro left Cuba for Mexico, where he organised a guerrilla expedition to return to Cuba. On 2 December 1956, along with eighty-one other fighters, he landed in southeastern Cuba aboard the yacht Granma. For the next two years, Castro directed the operations of the Rebel Army and its expanding network of mass popular support from a base in the Sierra Maestra Mountains. On 1 January 1959, Batista was forced to flee Cuba and shortly thereafter Rebel Army units entered Havana.
In February 1959 Castro became prime minister, a position he held until December 1976. He was president of the Council of State and Council of Ministers from 1976 to 2008, commander in chief of Cuba’s armed forces from 1959 to 2008, and first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba from its founding in 1965 to 2011.
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Copyright © Pathfinder Press 1991
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Available in print:
First edition in 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7957-0767-4
Epub edition:
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How Far We Slaves Have Come Page 7