Fidel Castro: Enduring lessons for Africa's young generation

By Odrek Rwabwogo

The US marine general, Smedely Butler, famous for subduing nations and opening doors for US imperialism in the early 1900s, had a contrite admission in a speech in 1933.

It sums up the nature and character of the enemy, Fidel Castro, who passed away November 25, stared down eyeball to eyeball, for 57 years. "I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914," Butler said.

I helped make Cuba and Haiti a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American Republics for the benefits of Wall Street.

The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China, I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. During those years, I had as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket".

In what the Army calls the ‘Commander's intent', Butler had taken a cue from his leaders. For example, in 1896, Woodrow Wilson, who would later become the 28th US President in 1913, said, "Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations, which are closed, must be battered down. [The] concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations [must] be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused".

Just how does a leader taking power in 1959 respond to a world of this nature, especially if one's calling is to shape a new kind of world opposed to this brazen robbery from weak nations of the world by the rich ones? Castro's entire life cries out to Africa, ideologically and strategically, by pointing to one answer: Resistance!

His ability to resist gave him an opportunity to re-order his society, giving him leg room to open new doors in health, education and equality for many in Cuba that had been disenfranchised. And, more than just inspire, Castro, illuminated the way by his actions, telling us how to resist.

He shows this generation of African leaders, by example, that the biggest enemy to the African people and the oppressed of the world isn't necessarily the oppressor and the immense resources at his disposal. It is instead the lack of confidence on the part of the oppressed that he can resist and hold out long enough for history to be on his side. If there is any semblance of right of Cuba's biggest adversary to criticize Castro, it is the morality and soiled conscience of the US that nullifies this right. The reader needs to look at the island's southern tip- Guantanamo Bay, where hundreds of men have been held without trial for over 16 years or those released in a crude exercise called ‘extraordinary rendition' are dumped silently in some ‘compromised' African countries. There is such tragic sense of duplicity and shamelessness by the US against a small neighbour that has stood and punched high above her weight even if she has faced a cruel world!

To understand the value of confidence in the battle for liberation that Castro's life in combat, resistance and government teaches us, we need to back up a little and help the reader with context. How was Africa deprived of her confidence and end up with more quislings/lackeys of the West in leadership than patriotic revolutionaries?

It started around 1830. King Charles X and his cousin, Louis Phillip of France, invaded Algeria when their country sold its possessions in North America. France, for example, gave up the state of Louisiana to the US in 1803 to raise money for her wars in Europe since the 1789 revolution had left the country with empty coffers.

The invasion of Africa began immediately after, with a settler colonialism movement. The old style plantation and slave model of imperialism was under question by moralists and religious groups that had supported it for centuries. Slavery, the reader should know, was very crucial to the success of capitalism before the development of the steam engine technology. Also several riots in European cities from the 1840s due to overcrowding and limited public facilities, disease and joblessness meant that the empires needed to move their people into colonies to replicate the home state there. Between 1840-1890, England allowed her people to officially migrate to Australia, which had been a reserve for her convicts to South Africa, setting the stage for the eventual African/Boer/English wars in Africa (the Dutch under Jan Van Riebeeck had established a trading post for the Dutch East India Company in 1652 at Cape Town). Russia moved her people into Ukraine. Settler colonialism eventually expanded into present day Kenya, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Namibia and in several French and Portuguese colonies.

When a foreign people settled in poor local communities, they de-populated them with new and strange diseases. For example, Algeria had 500,000 people in 1825 but by 1850, the population had reduced to about 200,000.

Settlers tended to take over fertile lands, pushing inhabitants into marginally productive areas and with no skill; this caused early genocide by hunger. Settlers also introduced a new way of life into pre-capitalist societies, making local communities very dependent and less confident of their future. Naturally, Occupation tends to destroy the spirit of a people and disable the will of self-reliance. It produces a low sense of esteem and quite often condemns generations after generations into layers of anger which when they burst, have a tendency of a volcanic eruption sweeping everything in its path.

By Castro standing firm against aggression, he proves to Africa forever, that there is a much higher sense of patriotism, one that defends the sovereignty, integrity and soul of a nation in the face of an existential threat. He internationalised this style of resistance in such romantic solidarity that shifted the theater of the diplomatic and military conflict from the Americas into Asia and Africa. This made his country hugely influential in spite of the limited resources available to him.

I have always wondered why Cuba sent military instructors, teachers; engineers, doctors and machine operators in remote parts of the world while her adversaries sent money, commission agents, helicopters and armaments. I now find, as I grow older, that People build lasting bonds, which in turn create transformational relationships for society and its institutions.

Machines, important as they are alongside technology, eventually become obsolete and are forgotten. Bonds of friendship don't rust and Castro knew this well. I suppose this is why Mbarara University of Science and Technology still receives two specialists every four years from Cuba to teach key disciplines where the university lacks personnel.  The Bible (Luke chapter 6, verse 45), says, "A good person produces good things from the treasury of a good heart, and an evil person produces evil things from the treasury of an evil heart. What you say flows from what is in your heart" and Castro's actions in Africa are a good analogy to this. He says it so well in his own words: "It is ideas that transform the world, the way tools transform matter".  President Hage Geingob of Namibia who was a young man when Fidel freed his country, recently said: "He didn't ask for fishing quotas as other countries were doing, in order to help us. He took 3,000 children from Kassinga refugee camp and educated them. He just told us, ‘I am doing my obligation".

Ugandans can never forget the gesture of solidarity extended in May 1986 when a batch of 150 men of the then NRA, led by Paul Kagame (now President of Rwanda), were sent for training in Cuba to begin the process of professionalizing what had been a rebel army. And when about 20% of this batch was tested and found with the HIV virus (Uganda at that time didn't have testing facilities), it was Fidel Castro at the 8th Non Aligned Movement (NAM) summit in Zimbabwe in September 1986, who confided in President Museveni about the need to attack the virus and warn his countrymen about its dangers.  What do you give a leader with such concern for humanity that would fill his large heart? Only, a lasting bond of friendship with his nation, perhaps, would do.

The second area that Castro's life instructs Africa is where we need more attention today. What happens when a leader leaves power? Does he go with the structures he helped create or can the structures adapt to changing circumstances and work for the next generation?

On July 31, 2006, Castro took ill and underwent a complicated surgery that denied him his usual vitality. Opportunistically as the Imperial world always acts, US President George Bush immediately called for an insurrection inside Cuba against Castro. On radio to the people of Cuba, he said, "We support you in your efforts to establish a transitional government committed to the path of democracy". Ten years later, the Cuban government and its people have held firmly that President Raul Castro, who replaced his brother Fidel, has now normalized relations with the US within the same system that Mr. Bush and nine of his predecessors, worked so hard to destroy. And what more, Raul has promised to hand over in 2018 to a younger generation led by the first vice- president, Miguel Diaz-Canel, who is 56. Castro was even more influential outside of government.

He provided an ideological home to the Latin American left at a time when they needed a large tree to nest in. From the late Hugo Chavez and Nicholas Madura after him Venezuela, all across the continent, including Nestor Kirchner and later his wife in 2007, Cristina Fernandez in Argentina, Lula Da Silva and Dilma Rousseff after him in Brazil, Tabare Vazquez in Uruguay, Martin Torrijos in Panama, Rene Preval in Haiti, Michel Bachelet in Chile, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua.

With all these many younger leaders, Castro held together the collective memory of Jose Marti and Simon Bolivar, the two South and Central American heroes of the independence movement of the 19th century. No one knows for sure what the future holds for Cuba; whether the country will adopt the China model (opening economy but keeping a lid on politics) or perhaps the Russian style (rotating leaders such as we see with President Vladimir Putin and prime minister Dmitry Medyedev) or may be the socialist republic of Vietnam way.

What we can tell is that Cuba has stayed united under a system Castro built in the face of provocations, 100 assassination attempts on his life, sanctions, threats and negative propaganda from her giant neighbour, long after Fidel had retired. The lesson for Africa? ‘Stay united around a core principle; unity is the only insurance against destruction by the greedy West. If you want some lessons, visit Libya, a nation that was once prosperous, now taken over by western corporations and providing a staging ground for people drowning in the Mediterranean sea running to the West in search of opportunity that once flourished in Libya'.

Finally, there is an inspiring lifestyle example of energy levels that anybody aspiring to lead a developing country that Castro leaves with us. "He was a leader who lived, so far as I could see, austerely, in almost Spartan conditions, says the journalist and writer, Ignacio Ramonet. There was no luxury; his furniture was sober, his food was frugal, healthy, and macrobiotic. His were habits of a soldier-monk. Most of his enemies admit that he was one of the very few heads of state who has not taken advantage of his position to enrich himself."

His work ethic? "He slept about four hours a night, and sometimes one or two more during the day, when he had a chance. His work day, all seven days a week, usually ends at five or six in the morning as the sun is rising. His assistants- all young men in their thirties, and brilliant- are drained at the end of the work day. They [are] virtually asleep on their feet, exhausted and unable to keep up with the indefatigable eight-year-old".

Next week: Can we build institutions on tribe, religion or culture identities? Is there a durable way to build?

The writer is a farmer and an entrepreneur