by Akala
This is the military background that popular Hollywood history likes to forget when discussing the fall of formal apartheid. The role of Cuba was both unique and decisive. This one fact alone, a major contribution to the fall of white supremacist apartheid, should enable most people to have at least a nuanced view of Cuba and/or even arguably rank the country as a major contributor to extending human rights struggles, but popular propaganda – in the West at least – ensures that that is not the case. Africans, Asians and Caribbeans have certainly not generally forgotten the Cuban contribution to fighting settler-colonial racism. For a long time, it was thought that Cuba was acting in Africa simply as a proxy of Moscow, but US intelligence documents told a different story and even Henry Kissinger came to admit this was not the case, saying Castro ‘was probably the most genuinely revolutionary leader then in power.’7
So if the ending of apartheid is now universally agreed to be a good thing, and Cuba played such a central role, how is it still possible to have such differing views of Castro and Mandela and of Cuba and South Africa?
The short answer is that the mainstream media has been so successful in distorting basic historical facts that many people are so blinded by Cold War hangovers that they are entirely incapable of critical thought, but the other answer is rather more Machiavellian. The reality is that apartheid did not die, and thus the reason so many white conservatives now love Mandela is essentially that he let their cronies ‘get away with it’.8 The hypocritical worship of black freedom fighters once they are no longer seen to pose a danger or are safely dead – Martin Luther King might be the best example of this – is one of the keys ways of maintaining a liberal veneer over what in reality is brutal intent.
Apartheid used racism to justify stealing enormous tracts of land by force and treating a huge black workforce like they were subhuman, with no real rights, no freedoms to travel in their own country and no real recourse to the law with respect to the abuses of their oppressors. Needless to say, this exploited black labour force, along with the fantastic mineral wealth of southern Africa, produced uncountable fortunes for transnational corporations, and some of the highest living standards in the world for most white South Africans. Given a basic understanding of apartheid’s economic underpinnings, it would not be unreasonable to ask whether that economic relationship between black and white, between large transnational corporations and black labour, has changed since 1994. If apartheid was primarily an economic system, surely to claim as we do that apartheid has ended there must then, by inference, be something resembling economic justice occurring over there in southern Africa?
Sadly, this is not the case. Yes, formal, legalised, unapologetic, political white supremacy has been defeated in South Africa, and that is a cause for celebration for any human that believes even vaguely in justice. Nonetheless, the aforementioned economic relationships have not seriously been altered in all the years since Mandela was released from prison, and this is a direct legacy of compromises that were made in those initial handover negotiations.
After the apartheid handover, the South African central bank was to be run by the same man it was run by under apartheid. The apartheid-era finance minister also kept his position. The debts incurred by the apartheid regime had to be paid off by the newly elected ANC and the ANC essentially accepted the IMF/World Bank neocolonial model that has been such a disaster for other poor countries. A newly elected black government paying back loans taken out with international creditors by a white supremacist regime; it would be laughable if its effects were not so sickening. I’m not sure there has ever been a clearer case of odious debt in history. No corporation was forced to pay reparations to the victims of murders and other abuses carried out under apartheid to benefit them. Killers and torturers were not imprisoned, as would be usual after a regime ‘fell’, but rather were invited to confess their crimes and walk free. To this day, South African whites, who are still a small minority, control a hugely disproportionate amount of all forms of capital in South Africa.
This was not justice or the end of apartheid, but rather its morphing from a system that was unapologetically racial to one that is now unapologetically economic and by inference, given South Africa’s history, still racial. This legacy leads us to the Marikana massacre of 2012, the single largest massacre in South Africa since the infamous Sharpeville massacre of 1960 – thirty-four striking miners were shot dead by police and to this day no one has been prosecuted. Lonmin, the company that the mine belonged to, is based in London. In ‘post-apartheid’ South Africa, the message is still clear – black life is expendable in pursuit of profit. A few black shareholders, CEOs and politicians do very little to alter that reality, as those in power clearly feel very little solidarity with the dead and their families. Again, I must re-state, because I don’t want what I am saying deliberately misunderstood, that the ending of political apartheid is to be celebrated. Majority rule, however flawed, is always preferable to racist minority rule, and the ANC have made some very interesting geopolitical moves that we know a settler government would not have made, such as refusing Britain’s overtures to help invade Zimbabwe (according to Thabo Mbeki at least) and sending arms to the democratically elected Lavalas in Haiti while their democracy was being destroyed by Haitian elites and their US backers.9
But when black South Africans claim the ANC and the post-apartheid order has failed them, they more than have a point. The average black South African still lives in conditions of extreme poverty, often with a lack of access to basic amenities and with little hope of real change in sight, and the country remains one of the most violent and unequal in the world. In the past few years there have been repeated waves of xenophobic anti-African attacks against African migrants from other countries, resulting in scores of deaths. These attacks have been justified in the language of bigots everywhere – ‘they are coming over here, stealing our jobs’ – and have even been encouraged by a Zulu king who described migrants as ‘head lice’. Though he insists his words were taken out of context, his repeated xenophobic remarks make this quite unlikely. That this mass mob violence is mostly directed at poor African migrants is very revealing; it seems some black South Africans have internalised the very anti-African, anti-black ideas in opposition to which their parents shed so much blood. With that said, African ethnic differences and conflict obviously pre-date settler colonialism by hundreds of years. Almost everywhere in the world, it seems people love to pick on the most vulnerable. Though it must also be pointed out that South Africans have mobilised against this xenophobia with repeated marches calling on the government to do more to protect foreigners, attracting as many as 30,000 people.
Obviously this cannot all be laid at Mandela’s door, any more than Cuba’s achievements – outlined below – can be credited to one man alone, but Nelson Mandela was more than smart enough to know the ANC’s compromises would mean continued misery, poverty and a virtual police state for most black South Africans, though perhaps he a had a longer-term vision. I would not presume to judge a man who spent almost as much time behind bars for his principles as I have spent alive, or claim that I could or would have done any better. Only time and the future of South Africa will reveal the full political consequences of Mandela and the ANC’s decisions. However, it’s worrying that the British Conservative government – formerly such a good friend to the apartheid regime – was in 2016 willing to secretly use the British Army to prop up the ANC in the case of unrest.10
---
In almost complete divergence from the hero worship of Mandela, Fidel Castro has become an almost pantomime villain in the Western popular imagination, particularly in the USA, and Cuba has been under sanctions for decades, in marked contrast to apartheid South Africa. When Castro died, even a journalist at the Guardian ran with the headline ‘Forget Fidel Castro’s policies, what matters is that he was a dictator’. But that very same journalist told us that we should ‘stop calling Tony Blair a war criminal’ and informed us that ‘the Left
should be proud of his record’. In all fairness, I was pleasantly surprised that the coverage of Castro’s death generally seemed to be far more thoughtful and balanced than I had expected – outside of the usual gutter rags. I imagine that was not so much the case in America.
With Castro frequently labelled a ‘human rights abuser’ (in marked contrast to Mandela), we have to ask where post-Castro Cuba stands in human-rights terms in comparison with post-Mandela South Africa. Seeing as both struggles were so intertwined and the popular treatment of Mandela and Castro stands so obviously juxtaposed, it would be reasonable to expect the living conditions of the average Cuban to be far worse than those of a South African – especially considering the enormous wealth and industry South Africa has and the lack of sanctions imposed on the country. That is if ‘human rights’ are really what motivates the Mandela good, Castro evil brigade.
That is not what we find, which is why Cuba’s most ardent critics avoid directly comparing Cuba to countries with similar histories and simply resort to adjectives. Once Cuba is directly compared to other former slave states of the Caribbean and South America, or to a country like South Africa, it starts to look like quite a different proposition.
In addition to playing such a significant role in the ending of apartheid, Cuba has managed to avoid the ravages that drug trafficking wrought on the rest of the region. The murder rate in Cuba is four times lower than the average for Latin America, or to put it another way, the murder rate in many US cities is ten times worse than the murder rate in Cuba. The same is true in relation to nearby Jamaica, and South Africa frequently ranks in the top ten for murder rate in the world. The kinds of massacres of workers that occurred at Sharpeville and Marikana simply have not occurred in post-1959 Cuba, and even the most ardent anti-Cuba ideologues could not try and pretend that the kind of police brutality that is so common in South Africa, Jamaica, Brazil and even the USA exists on anything like that scale in Cuba. The extreme inequality and particular history that makes Latin America the most violent region of the world is due in no small part to a long history of the United States supporting dictators in the region, and this is part of why so many of the people there look to Cuba as a source of hope and pride – it is the one nation that stood up to Uncle Sam and won out.
There is one area of achievement which even Cuba’s critics have not been able to dismiss: healthcare. While you will often hear people grudgingly admit that Cuba ‘has good healthcare’, the scale of their programme and how many other countries they support is rarely properly appreciated, so it’s worth looking at them here in length.
In 2015, Cuba became the first country in the world to eliminate the mother-to-child transmission of HIV and syphilis. More recently, even Richard Branson felt compelled to pen an article about Cuba’s extraordinary medical achievements and how the idiotic embargo prevents ordinary Americans from benefiting from Cuba’s medical innovations.11
Cuba currently has more healthcare workers in foreign countries than all G8 countries combined.12 In 2014, Cuba had 50,000 healthcare workers in sixty-five countries; that is more than the Red Cross, Médecins sans Frontières and UNICEF combined. Since 1960, over 101,000 Cuban health workers have provided care in 110 countries. There is even a history of Cuban medical outreach to countries openly hostile to Cuba, such as Nicaragua during the Somoza dictatorship, and even the USA.
To show just how far Cuba has come in this area, in 1965 Cuba had one physician for every 1,200 people, but by 2005, Cuba boasted one physician for every 167 people – a number unequalled anywhere in the world. In 2014, the island had 83,000 doctors, some 5,000 more than Canada, a wealthy country that has a population that is over three times larger. Recent World Health Organization data put Cuba’s health indicators, such as life expectancy and infant mortality, in line with the US and Canada.
In addition, Cuba has offered free – that is, the cost is borne by the Cuban people – medical scholarships to thousands of students from across the world on the condition that they return and serve the poor in their own countries. As of 2014, over 23,000 students from eighty-three countries had graduated from the ELAM campus (Cuba’s international medical school) since 2005. Cuban healthcare workers are often among the first responders in major global crises such as the Ebola outbreak in 2014 or the earthquake in Pakistan in 2005.13
These facts are recognised by such ‘Communist propaganda outlets’ as the World Health Organization and all of the national governments that Cuba helps. To anybody that actually cares about global justice, human life and human rights, Cuban medical internationalism is without a doubt one of the greatest humanitarian enterprises of the twenty-first century. Cuba does not demand that Jamaica or Haiti or Liberia sell off their water systems, or incur crippling debt or elect Communist leaders that Cuba approves of in exchange for this help, the Cuban people elect to do this work out of genuine revolutionary solidarity with other, overwhelmingly poor black and brown people in the global south. Britain offers nothing like this scale of condition-free support as far as I am aware, even to its former colonies, and ‘we’ are currently in the process of dismantling our own domestic NHS.
So if the average Cuban is several times less likely to be murdered than the average South African – either by another Cuban or by the state – has access to healthcare, housing and education to a far greater degree and can expect to live more than ten years longer, it would be quite fair to say post-Castro Cuba is faring better than post-Mandela South Africa on many important human indices.
But let’s even suppose for a moment that everything that has ever been said about Cuba was totally true, let’s even also say that Castro barbecued dissidents alive while drinking cold beer and sodomised people with knives, or banned women from driving, that still would not explain why conservatives or mainstream politicians more generally have such disdain for him, seeing as they are fine with such deeds in other contexts. When we do look at some of the regimes that our government(s) have armed and/or otherwise done business with, we see some of the greatest human rights abusers of the post -1945 world – Pol Pot in Cambodia, General Pinochet in Chile, Suharto in Indonesia, Nigeria during Biafra, Israel and the horrendous Saudi war being waged in Yemen right now. The list is long and responsible for millions of deaths and unimaginable misery.14 It takes an extremely gullible person to truly believe that ‘human rights’ is what motivates our government. Conservative and even ‘respectable’ liberal opinion has chosen to adopt Mandela as a hero and Castro as a villain because of, in my opinion, a number of factors, plain old intellectual obedience being one of them. Yet anyone that is willing to have a nuanced, even favourable view of the likes of Tony Blair and Barack Obama but unwilling to extend that nuance to Castro and Cuba is obviously not motivated by the behaviours of the men in question and how they wielded political power, but rather by ideology, nationalism, bigotry or ignorance.
To be clear, I am not one of these religious leftists who thinks St Castro can do no wrong; I’m well aware that there were mistakes, shortcomings and abuses of power in Cuba and that Cuba has many challenges still to overcome – including its own internal racism. There are many valid reasons to critique the Cuban Revolution and Castro himself. However, what I am saying is that it takes quite substantial delusions of grandeur to believe that you or I could have done a better job of running that country while under blockade from the wealthiest nation ever, having to deal with state-sponsored terrorism and being under constant threat of assassination and the coups that the US/UK have exported to so many other places.15 I have had a hard enough time writing this book, let alone trying to run a country, but if the success or failures of the Cuban Revolution are to be honestly assessed, surely they have to be looked at in comparison to other similar societies? It’s much easier to focus on the demonisation or demagoguery of an individual than actually discuss the outcomes of a political process. By focusing on the person of Fidel Castro, or of Mandela for completely opposite reasons, we can avoid any real analysis
of the legacies of the apartheid struggle and the Cuban Revolution. Of course, such a comparison would make the Cuban Revolution’s achievements – and shortcomings – vis-à-vis South Africa and other similar nations quite plain to anyone who can count.
Why is any of this important to race and class in the UK, you may ask? First, because these global anti-racist struggles were connected. Many of the same people that faced down British fascists at the ‘Battle Of Lewisham’ in 1977 were active in anti-apartheid throughout the 1980s. Second because, as a global power, Britain’s domestic politics and public opinions affect the whole world, as domestic British politics are in turn affected by global events. My childhood was shaped by the presence of the anti-apartheid struggle in the same way that my young adulthood was shaped by the invasion of Iraq – these things have informed how millions of us view our own society and its place in the world. But it’s also important because the Castro–Mandela dichotomy exposes the way the mainstream loves to worship a supposedly non-racist country as long as it leaves the accepted class hierarchies in place, but hates a society that has revolutionised some of its class relationships despite its actual material contribution to global anti-racist struggle. Either way, genuine anti-racism cannot be what motivates such favouritism.
While Cuba’s achievements might look meagre to the average middle-class liberal or conservative Briton, to the average Jamaican, Haitian, Brazilian or Indian what Cuba has been able to do for the masses of its people is impressive indeed. The average middle-class liberal Brit might be able to brush off a society not falling prey to American imperialism, attaining universal healthcare and education and even assisting many Commonwealth countries in that regard, but for those of us whose parents or grandparents came from places like Jamaica, Nigeria and India, who go ‘back home’ regularly and thus have some realistic yardstick by which to measure Cuba, the legacies of the Cuban Revolution look quite different. I have seen Cuban doctors in Jamaica training people and saving lives with my own eyes, and while it’s easy to idealise the achievements of a socialist state while living in comfort in Britain, it’s equally easy for others to ignore the fact that Cuba has made advances in some key areas that almost no other ‘third world’ country has, nor even the richest nation on Earth.