Africa’s best friend, Fidel Castro

When the boxing legend Muhammad Ali died in June, I made a mental short list of the remaining towering figures of the 20th Century whose deaths would be monumental world events. Two men stood out in my short list. One was Mikhail Gorbachev, former General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union [CPSU] who dismantled the Communist bloc. The other one was Fidel Castro, who symbolised and popularised Communist revolution around the world probably more than anyone else in the second half of the Twentieth Century.

Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz, who died last Friday at the age of 90, was the 20th century’s most colourful revolutionary. During the second half of the 20th century world communism was led by leaders of the CPSU, men who looked more like over-pampered bureaucrats than revolutionaries. There was nothing inspiring about Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, Nikolai Podgorny, Nikolai Tikhonov, Andrei Gromyko or CPSU’s veteran Secretary for Ideological Affairs Mikhail Suslov. Their arch rivals, leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, were slightly more inspiring with their Mao jackets, their constant readings from the Little Red Book, and their exotic programs such as the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

In contrast, Fidel Castro’s battle camouflage, his red beret, the epaulettes of Il Comandante on his shoulder, his lush black beard [which slowly turned grey with age], the thick cigar permanently on his lips, the heavy puff of cigar smoke trailing his movement, his vigorous walk, his marathon speeches, his forceful interviews and his unbending stand against colonialism, neo-colonialism, imperialism and apartheid inspired revolutionaries, anti-colonialists and progressives all over the world. 

Fidel Castro punched far above his small country’s weight. Since coming to power in 1959 when the small band of revolutionaries he led drove away the decadent dictator Fulgencio Batista from Havana, Castro loomed on the world stage far beyond the power of his small island country with its economy based on sugar cane. Fidel Castro embarrassed the world’s medical Establishment; a man who smoke so much lived up to 90.

Fidel Castro was the man who repelled the Bay of Pigs invasion of his country in 1961. American based Cuban exiles were trained, armed and sponsored by the CIA to invade Cuba and drive out Castro’s regime. In fairness to the CIA, it had doubts about the invasion’s success. At a top level security briefing in 1960, CIA chiefs warned in coded language that the invasion could fail. Vice President Richard Nixon, who was the Republican presidential candidate that year, missed the coded warning and pushed for the invasion to go ahead so that it could give him a political fillip. President Dwight Eisenhower, a Five Star Army General, fully understood the CIA’s coded message and he pushed the invasion plan into John Kennedy’s presidency. Kennedy launched the invasion and Fidel Castro mobilised Cuban peasants who rushed to the beaches and repelled the invaders.

Fidel Castro was at the centre of the Cuban Missile Crisis when the world came very close to nuclear war in 1961. As direct fallout from Bay of Pigs, Castro allowed the Soviet Union to place nuclear missiles in Cuba, only 90 miles south of Florida. President Kennedy responded with a blockade of Cuba and for a while it looked as if the two super powers will engage in all out nuclear war. The Soviets backed down and agreed to remove the missiles from Cuba. It now looks like the Russians over-learnt their lesson.  Last year, Cuban Ambassador to Nigeria Carlos Trejo Sosa told me that Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev privately told Castro that if the US ever invaded Cuba, USSR will not defend it. I never read about this exchange in any Western publication; maybe the CIA never knew about it?

The ideological face off between the United States and Cuba since 1959 has been a live replay of the biblical story of David and Goliath. For nearly sixty years until President Obama recently softened it, the US Government waged a relentless propaganda campaign, military blockade, diplomatic isolation, trade embargo, travel bans, political harassment, inciting Cubans to revolt and active assassination plots in order to subvert the Castro regime. Latin American leaders who over the years resisted US bullying often got the Salvador Allende treatment but Fidel Castro survived every plot even after the Iron Curtain fell in 1989.

Under Fidel Castro, Cuba’s health system became an eighth wonder of the world for its efficiency and sophistication. Cuba’s educational system also became a world beater, far above what other Third World nations could achieve. Cuban athletes were another wonder of the world. Legendary Cuban boxers, basket ballers and base ball players dazzled the world and captured numerous Olympic medals, out punching huge nations such as India, Japan and Brazil. Fidel Castro held the record for delivering the longest speech by any world leader at the UN General Assembly.

Fidel Castro was one of the towering figures of the Non Aligned Movement. He stood alongside Jawaharlal Nehru, Josef Broz Tito, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Kwame Nkrumah and Sukarno. Castro hosted the movement’s epochal 1979 meeting that made the Havana Declaration. Fidel Castro halted Apartheid South Africa’s north-bound march in its tracks. During the chaotic days of the civil war that followed Angola’s independence in 1975, the CIA, through Mobutu Sese Seko, propped up Holden Roberto’s FNLA and Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA. South African troops also sneaked into Angola from Namibia in order to stop Agustinho Neto’s MPLA, which they said was Communist. Over the next 15 years Fidel Castro sent an estimated one million Cuban troops to Angola and they battled South Africans to a standstill. Last year when I interviewed Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, who was visiting Nigeria, he said in passing that he once fought in Angola. Cuban Ambassador to Nigeria Carlos Trejo Sosa, who was sitting nearby, said, “Me too.”

Africans will forever remember the epochal 1988 battle at Cuito Cuanavale in southern Angola, where 9,000 Apartheid South African troops were trapped by Cuban and Angolan troops. It led to South Africa’s hasty withdrawal from Angola and its granting independence to Namibia. This event also hastened the fall of apartheid in South Africa. It never would have happened without Fidel Castro.

Fidel Castro was the world’s greatest survivor of assassination attempts. From 1959 right until the 1990s the CIA made an estimated 600 attempts to kill him. They ranged from poison pills to sniper rifles, explosive-laden baseballs, poisoned cigars, pistols disguised as news cameras to a dive suit contaminated with disfiguring Madura foot fungus and deadly tuberculosis bacteria. Castro survived all of them.

President Obasanjo once told a story of his encounter with Castro during a visit to Cuba in the 1980s. He said Castro asked what places he had visited and when he mentioned a certain farm in the Cuban countryside, Castro asked him if he saw a cow on that farm that produced several gallons of milk a day. Obasanjo told Castro he was amazed that the leader of a country could remember a certain cow. Castro then asked him, “When you were ruling Nigeria, did you not keep a close tab on your country’s oil refineries?” Obasanjo said he did and Castro said, “That cow is my equivalent of your oil refineries.”

The world has lost Fidel Castro. One of the world’s greatest, most colourful and most principled revolutionaries has fallen. Africa’s greatest friend on the world stage has fallen. Adieu, Il Comandante.