Anti-Imperialism, War and Peace, Part 10
Jorge Risquet Valdés Saldaña
Liberation
Struggle
In political education, our
method is to remove ourselves in place and time. We go to the “classics” and to
authors of the intermediate period, and we study other places, in the past or
in the present.
All of these provide us with
examples. The examples provide us with a theoretical and practical “sandpit”
that gives us a “codification” or in other words a basis upon which we may have
a common dialogue.
Dialogue is where political
education happens. Anything that can provide an occasion for political dialogue
is good for education.
Our own history can be used,
but what do we find? When looking for history of our liberation struggle, and
the history of the armed struggle in particular, we find very little. The
materials about the culminating struggle in Angola assembled below will have to
suffice for now. They can also serve as a small contribution towards
recognising the Cuban and Soviet comrades who fought faithfully and often fell
for us, until victory came.
Vladimir Shubin
has written and published two books in English: “ANC: A View from Moscow” and “The
Hot 'Cold War’: The USSR in Southern Africa”. These books are presently
available from bookshops in South Africa, or they can be ordered via the
Internet.
The Soviet record of events
does not correspond in every respect with the Cuban record, and this contrast
would force the readers or students to make judgements of their own, as to what
was really the critical path that led to the final political result, which was
victory in Angola, Namibia and South Africa. Let us hope to find a suitable
Soviet or Russian article in electronic form before this course gets run again.
Fidel Castro has written a
lot. Linked below, as our main item, is the speech he made on 2 December 2005,
on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the first Cuban expeditionary force
to Angola, which became what the US Imperialist diplomat Chester Crocker called
an “unprecedented projection of power”.
Jorge Risquet Valdés Saldaña, fighter, negotiator, and currently member of the
Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, has written (in Spanish) “El Segundo frente del Che en el Congo”
(ISBN 959-210-412-3, Casa Editorial Abril, 2006) – the history of the Patrice
Lumumba Battalion, in which Risquet served. The picture above is of the same
Jorge Risquet, a great and brave hero, also famous for his friendliness and joie-de-vivre. The person seen to the
left of Risquet is Piero Gleijeses, of who more in the next item.
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Thirty
years after Angola and 49 after Granma, Fidel Castro.
