A Luta Continua

Mandela, Obama, Castro & Kennedy

You are no doubt aware of the Republican and Cuban ultra-right’s upset over a handshake between Obama and Raul Castro at Mandela’s memorial.  This was the highlight the corporate media focused on in their reporting of the rain-soaked memorial at a soccer stadium in Soweto, where Mandela gave his first speech after prison.

Obama’s hostile policy towards Cuba will not change because of a handshake, as pathetic government spokesmen immediately made clear.  His policy is no different from any other U.S. president.  On this issue, as on so many others, the U.S. is almost unique in the world in its reactionary position – similar to its stance on Israel.  Obama should have apologized for the long U.S. role in propping up the Afrikaner dictatorship.  He did not. 

However, our corporate press has the memory of a mouse – on purpose.  Do you think the ex-Cuban gusano fascists in Miami who complained about this handshake are supporters of the fight against apartheid?  Or of Mandela?  Au contraire.  Yet what was the position of Cuba on apartheid, the ANC and Mandela?  Why was Raul Castro even at the memorial?

Asking the question answers it, for those who know a bit of history.  Cuba sent soldiers and hardware to Angola in the 1980s in support of Neto’s MPLA, allowing them to defeat an invasion of Angola by South African armed forces allied with Savimbi’s UNITA.  Che Guevara himself went to Angola to help provide military direction.  This internationalist effort also allowed Cuba to make direct contact with Mandela’s ANC, which was using Angola as a base area.  Cuba supplied military training and hardware to the ANC’s military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe, an organization founded by Mandela. They also helped the guerrilla struggle in nearby Namibia led by SWAPO.  Namibia at the time was occupied by the South Africans.  Cuba backed the ANC when the U.S. government, Democrats and Republicans were still calling them ‘terrorists.’  Cuba backed the ANC and opposed apartheid and never wavered.   Mandela praised Cuba in 1991 as the only government that actually treated the ANC with respect, and introduced him to real 'internationalism.'

As far as the U.S. went, that great freedom-loving honky, Ronald Reagan, supported the apartheid state.  The CIA even played a role in getting Mandela arrested.  Only later did some forces in the U.S. decide that perhaps apartheid was a bad idea, EVEN IF the ANC was supported by the USSR and its allies. 

Of course, this issue was the rock that broke the pro-imperialist theory of “Three Worlds” put out by the Chinese Communist Party, originated by Mao Tse Tung.  Many U.S. leftists turned from adulation of the bureaucracy in China when the impact of this theory became even more obvious.  If the USSR (and by extension Cuba) was the ‘main enemy’ in the world, then clearly the USSR’s actions  in Angola and southern Africa (supporting national liberation fronts in Namibia, which was under South African control, in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, in Mozambique, in Guinea Bissau, in the Congo, in Tanzania, etc.) where all ‘imperialist’ efforts.  Clearly the Chinese didn’t have a Marxist definition of ‘imperialism.’

The corporate media is now defanging Mandela just as they have done with ML King, hoping to make their only message that of a grandfatherly ‘peace.’  They have conveniently forgotten the support the U.S. gave to South Africa for many years, just as they cover up the government assassination of King by the CIA.  They will remember Kennedy’s “Camelot,” but not Kennedy’s opposition to nuking Cuba or invading Cuba; not his support of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with the USSR; not his intention to withdraw troops from Vietnam; not his constant communications with Khrushchev.  All of this led to his assassination (and his brothers) in a campaign organized by James Jesus Angleton of the CIA.  Fidel Castro recently pointed out that Cuba had nothing to do with killing Kennedy.    The killing of the Kennedys amounted to a coup by the military-industrial complex in the U.S.  If the cold-war policies of Lyndon Johnson had not been followed, the U.S. might have cut South Africa loose long before they finally did, and maybe even made trade agreements with Cuba.  The world might be a slightly different place, with slightly less blood. 

What a tangled web.  Clearly the Cuban lovers of Batista and other clients of the U.S. government have no right to denounce a handshake at Mandela’s memorial … or even a kiss.  Nor does our rotten press deserve the title of ‘journalists’ when they are unable to give some perspective to their hypocritical comments. Even paying attention to their fascist braying is significant.  

Perhaps the real issue is that Raul Castro should have not shaken Obama's hand!

In South Africa itself, Mandela’s death signifies the start of a new struggle, this time against the white capitalist system that was completely left in place by ANC concessions after the end of apartheid.  Economic conditions for the black working class, farmers and poor of South Africa have deteriorated since the removal of the Botha regime.  A Luta Continua.

Red Frog

December 13 2013