Castro says end of US 'blockade,' Gitmo return needed to normalize ties
Source: AFP
Havana (AFP) - Cuba's Communist President Raul Castro on Monday stood next to Barack Obama and hailed his opposition to a long-standing economic "blockade," but said it would need to end before ties are fully normalized.
Setting out the conditions for ending long-standing Cold War enmity, Castro said ending the US embargo and returning Guantanamo to Cuba were necessary steps.
"There are profound differences between our countries that will not go away," he said, while vowing to focus on "those things that bring us closer."
Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/castro-says-end-us-blockade-gitmo-return-needed-182747287.html;_ylt=AwrC1C4SPvBWZEcA04XQtDMD;_ylu=X3oDMTByOHZyb21tBGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNzcg--
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...if indeed he has any say in dealing away Guantanamo Bay.
Fidel Castro And The Cuban Role In Defeating Apartheid
February 26, 2015 by Matt Peppe @PeppeMatt
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In this black and white photo, Nelson Mandela holds up a fist while embracing Fidel Castro with an arm around his shoulder during the celebration of the “Day of the Revolution” in Matanzas Saturday, July 27, 1991. Cuba’s intervention was critical to allowing South Africa to overthrow the racist apartheid regime.
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Until the fall of the Portuguese dictatorship in 1974, apartheid in South Africa was secure. There was no substantial resistance anywhere in southern Africa. Pretoria’s neighbors comprised a buffer zone that protected the racist regime: Namibia, their immediate neighbor which they had occupied for 60 years; white-ruled Rhodesia; and the Portuguese-ruled colonies of Angola and Mozambique. The rebels who fought against minority rule in each of these countries, operating without any safe haven to organize and train, were powerless to challenge the status quo. South Africa’s buffer would have remained intact for the foreseeable future, solidifying apartheid and preventing any significant opposition, but for one man: Fidel Castro.
In October of 1975, South Africa invaded Angola at the behest of the U.S. government to overthrow the left-wing Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) in the soon-to-be independent country. Without Cuban assistance, the apartheid army would have easily cruised into Luanda, crushed the MPLA, and installed a puppet government friendly to the apartheid regime.
Cuba’s intervention in Angola managed to change the course of that country and reverberate throughout Africa. By ensuring independence from the white supremacists, Angola was able to preserve its own revolution and maintain its role as a base for armed resistance groups fighting for liberation in nearby countries.
In the American version of Cold War history, Cuba was carrying out aggression and acting as proxies of the Soviet Union. Were it not for one persistent and meticulous scholar, we might never have known that these are nothing more than dishonest fabrications. In his monumental books “Conflicting Missions” and “Visions of Freedom,” historian Piero Gleijeses uses thousands of documents from Cuban military archives, as well as U.S. and South African archives, to recount a dramatic, historical confrontation between tiny Cuba and Washington and its ally apartheid South Africa. Gleijeses is the only foreign scholar to have gained access to the closed Cuban archives. He obtained thousands of pages of documents, and made them available to the Wilson Center Digital Archive, which has posted the invaluable collection online.
More:
http://www.mintpressnews.com/MyMPN/fidel-castro-and-the-cuban-role-in-defeating-apartheid/
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Why South Africa Loves Cuba
The history behind Raul Castro's prominent billing at Mandela's funeral.
Piero Gleijeses
January 14, 2014
While the American news media recently focused on “the handshake” between President Obama and Raúl Castro, it is worth pondering why the organizers of Nelson Mandela’s memorial service invited Raúl Castro to be one of only six foreign leaders—of the ninety-one in attendance—to speak at the ceremony. Not only was Raúl Castro accorded that honor, but he also received by far the warmest introduction: "We now will get an address from a tiny island, an island of people who liberated us ... the people of Cuba," the chairperson of the African National Congress (ANC) said. Such words echo what Mandela himself said when he visited Cuba in 1991: “We come here with a sense of the great debt that is owed the people of Cuba ... What other country can point to a record of greater selflessness than Cuba has displayed in its relations to Africa?”
Many factors led to the demise of apartheid. The white South African government was defeated not just by the power of Mandela, the courage of the South African people, or the worldwide movement to impose sanctions. It was also brought down by the defeat of the South African military in Angola. This explains the prominence of Raúl Castro at the memorial service: it was Cuban troops that humiliated the South African army. In the 1970s and 1980s, Cuba changed the course of history in southern Africa despite the best efforts of the
In October 1975, the South Africans, encouraged by the Gerald Ford administration, invaded Angola to crush the leftwing Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). They would have succeeded had not 36,000 Cuban soldiers suddenly poured into Angola.
. . .
As the CIA noted, Castro had not consulted Moscow before sending his troops (as is clear from later tense meetings with the Soviet leadership in the 1980s.) The Cubans, Kissinger confirmed in his memoirs, had confronted the Soviets with a fait accompli. Fidel Castro understood that the victory of Pretoria (with Washington in the wings) would have tightened the grip of white domination over the people of southern Africa. It was a defining moment: Castro sent troops to Angola because of his commitment to what he has called “the most beautiful cause,” the struggle against apartheid. As Kissinger observed later, Castro “was probably the most genuine revolutionary leader then in power.”
More:
http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/why-south-africa-loves-cuba-9705
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The Military Defeat of the South Africans in Angola
by Horace Campbell
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Ten years after United Nations Resolution 435 laid the basis for an independent Namibia, the South Africans agreed to withdraw from the territory they still occupied in defiance of international opinion. In a ceremony at UN headquarters in New York on December 22, 1988, an agreement was signed by Angola, Cuba, and South Africa, with the United States ostensibly acting as mediator. This accord was a major step toward self-determination for the peoples of Southern Africa, for it finally gave the United Nations Transitional Group the go-ahead to implement steps for the withdrawal of South African troops from Namibia and the return of refugees, elections, and independence to the former Portuguese colony. This historic agreement came not because of the tenacious negotiating of U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Chester Crocker, but because of the decisive military defeat of the South African forces at Cuito Cuanavale in Angola (see map on page 43).
Between October 1987 and June 1988, in the fiercest conventional battles on African soil since Erwin Rommel was defeated at El Amien, the South African Defence Forces (SADF) fought pitched tank and artillery battles with the Angolan army (FAPLA, the People’s Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola) and its Cuban supporters at Cuito Cuanavale. This small base located in southeastern Angola became important in the military history of Africa, for there the South African army, supposedly the best on the continent, was trapped with its tanks and artillery and held down more than 300 miles from its bases in Namibia. Failing to take Cuito Cuanavale with over 9,000 soldiers, even after announcing that it had done so, losing air superiority, and faced with mutinies among black troops and a high casualty rate among whites, the South Africans reached such a desperate situation that President Botha had to fly to the war zone when the operational command of the SADF broke down.
With Cuban reinforcements, the Angolans withstood major assaults on January 23, February 25, and March 23. The South Africans were repulsed with heavy losses, and the Angolan/Cuban forces seized the initiative. For the first time since 1981, the Angolan army was able to reoccupy the area adjacent to Namibia. So confident were the Angolans and Cubans, that in the space of less than three months they built two air strips to consolidate their recapture of the southern province of Cunene. Trapped by the rainy season, bogged down by the terrain, and encircled, the South Africans made one desperate attempt to break out on June 27 and were again defeated. One South African newspaper called the defeat “a crushing humiliation.”
These episodes of war were followed by diplomatic initiatives that the South Africans had previously been able to block. After the March 23 reversals at Cuito Cuanavale, the South Africans started talks that culminated in the December 22 agreement. For the Angolans, who had been fighting continuously since 1961, the war and diplomacy were focused not only on the limited question of the South African withdrawal from Angola, but also on ending South African destabilization of the region and on independence for Namibia. Diplomatic initiatives accelerated after the South Africans failed to break out of their encirclement at Tchipa on June 27. Only then could the frontline combatants and the United States agree on the basis for withdrawal of the South Africans from Angola.
More:
http://monthlyreview.org/2013/04/01/the-military-defeat-of-the-south-africans-in-angola/
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Censored: Why the media hides Cuba's role in the end of apartheid
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Fidel Castro peers out of the bars of Nelson Mandela's former cell on Robben Island during a recent visit.
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By Ian Dunt
Tuesday, 10 December 2013 9:37 AM
Inconvenient figures have been whitewashed from the coverage of Nelson Mandela's death. The photo pull-out sections show the South African leader with Bill Clinton, with Princess Diana and Naomi Campbell and the Spice Girls. But his close friendship with Fidel Castro and the two men's habit of calling each other 'brother' is written out of history.
At his memorial service today, the presence of figures like Cuban leader (and Fidel's brother) Raul Castro is treated as an example of Mandela's ability to straddle political and ideological divides. After all, something has to explain the presence of these evil figures at a service for a saint.
But Castro is not being given pride of place as a sign of Mandela's ability to straddle divides. He is given pride of place because black South Africans, unlike Brits or Americans, recognise Cuba's proud role in the end of apartheid. While Britain was supplying arms and military equipment to the apartheid regime, Cuba was sending its men to fight it, securing key military victories and crippling its room for manoeuvre.
For decades, Cuba supported the armed struggle liberation movements in South Africa, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique. In 1961, when Che Guevara attended a summit in Geneva as industry minister, he attacked "the inhuman and fascist policy of apartheid" and demanded the expulsion of South Africa from the UN, all decades before Britain could bring itself to challenge the racist government.
More:
http://www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2013/12/10/censored-why-the-media-hides-cuba-s-role-in-the-end-of-apart
and George W Bush blew them off at that time, even though they were ready to go.
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Cuban emergency doctors were summoned and prepared to leave immediately
to the US to assist in procedures wherever they could be used right here in the US.
All dressed up, with nowhere to go.
Their work on Ebola was nothing short of heroic, as acknowledged around the world.
Their work in Haiti was ongoing before the earthquake and cholera,
they were already working when it happened, and stayed afterward. [/center]
