Addressing a public meeting October 27 in this town in southern Georgia, Dreke said, "The revolution that triumphed in Cuba on Jan. 1, 1959, was carried out to give land to those who work it. We made health care free for all. We carried out a literacy campaign so all would be able to read and write. We ended discrimination against blacks.

"Cuba sent combatants to take part in liberation struggles throughout Africa--in the Congo, Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, Angola, Ethiopia, and Congo-Brazzaville," he said. "In all those countries Cuba came at the request of the people fighting for their liberation." The Cubans asked for nothing in return, he said, "leaving only our blood."

That internationalist solidarity has been a central theme of the monthlong speaking tour in several U.S. cities by Cuban revolutionary Víctor Dreke on "Cuba and Africa: 1959 to Today." Accompanying him was Ana Morales, a doctor and leader of Cuba’s medical missions to Africa. The meeting in Valdosta was sponsored by the People’s Tribunal, a civil rights organization in southern Georgia founded in 1999 in response to the police killing of Willie James Williams in Lowndes County.

"Here are two people who are history makers," said People’s Tribunal leader Willie Head in introducing the invited speakers to the meeting, which drew 50 people. "Víctor Dreke," he noted, "has been a leader of the Cuban Revolution for half a century."

Dreke joined the revolutionary movement against the U.S.-backed Batista dictatorship as a teenager in the mid-1950s. After the revolutionary victory in 1959, he was one of the commanders of the fight against counterrevolutionary bands in the Escambray mountains of central Cuba. In 1965 he served as second in command to Ernesto Che Guevara of a column of Cuban internationalist combatants in the Congo. He headed Cuba’s internationalist mission in Guinea-Bissau, fighting alongside Amilcar Cabral in the war for independence from Portugal. Since then he has helped lead Cuba’s internationalist work in Guinea-Bissau, the Republic of Guinea, and other African countries. He is also a leader of the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution.

Head introduced Ana Morales, a doctor and professor at the Latin American School of Medicine in Havana. She led the Cuban medical mission in Guinea-Bissau in 1985 and helped found the Cuban-donated medical school there.

"I myself am a product of the Cuban revolution," said Morales, whose father was a dockworker in Havana. "Only because of the Cuban Revolution could I become a doctor and participate in bringing medical aid provided by Cuba to the African people."

In the discussion session, one person remarked that the big-business media hopes "that after Fidel Castro is gone the revolution will be over. What can you tell us about the ability of the younger generation in Cuba to carry on the revolution?"

"I have complete confidence in the younger generation," said Dreke. "After Fidel’s generation and my generation are gone, our children and grandchildren will fight to defend the land, and the imperialists will not be able to bring back discrimination and oppression--just as the children and grandchildren of farmers here continue the fight to keep the land on the farms we visited today."  
 
Visits to two farms
Dreke was referring to visits to two farms earlier that day. In the morning, Willie Head welcomed more than 30 people to his vegetable and hog farm. They included students and workers from Miami, Tampa, and Atlanta, as well as members of the Atlanta Africa-Cuba Speakers Committee. Among them was Dr. Kwame-Osagyefo Kalimara, a member of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement.

Gladys Williams, a representative of the People’s Tribunal, assured Dreke and Morales that they would meet a warm welcome among working people in Valdosta. However, she said, "you may not find the U.S. government as friendly as we found Cuba’s."

Williams was referring to her visit to Cuba in February 2000 with Head and four other farmers from the United States. The National Association of Small Farmers (ANAP) organized the fact-finding trip. In May of that year Head returned to Cuba along with other U.S. farmers to participate in ANAP’s national convention.

"As you drive around in the countryside you will notice that some farms look a lot nicer than others," Head observed. That is one sign, he said, "of the U.S. government’s discriminatory practices against Black farmers. There has been a long struggle in this area by Black farmers to hold onto the land.

"It’s a struggle to own land here and be Black," he said.

Head is active in the fight by farmers to retain their land and in opposition to the discriminatory practices of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

"My name is written on the land," he said. "This farm belonged to my grandfather, my father, me, and hopefully my children."

Government officials, by their practices, "deliberately do not allow us the opportunities to farm," he said. Becoming indebted, "we lose the land to them and become peasants without land. What we do plant is out of our own sheer will. This has been our fight for the last 20 years."

Over the past century, the debt squeeze and government-sanctioned discrimination, along with racist lynchings and other terror campaigns, drove many farmers off their land. In 1920, Black farmers owned 15 million acres of land; today they own 2 million.

Some working farmers in the South have formed cooperatives to pool resources to organize the sale of their produce as well as to try to control the cost of farm inputs. Head noted the contrast between cooperatives in the United States and those in Cuba, which are formed voluntarily by small farmers under the agrarian reform laws.

Cooperatives in the United States are "driven by capitalism," he said. "The system will allow a cooperative of Blacks limited access to markets and funds. But the large white land owners dominate the markets and funding to pay for labor, packaging, machinery. We can create a cooperative but the pace of improvement is slow."

Pointing to 40 acres of unplanted land on his farm, Head explained, "In Cuba, as long as you work the land you are able to stay on the farm. Here you may own the land but often you can’t plant it because you don’t have the funds."

He added, "We need a revolution in this country. We know you made one in Cuba and that we need to learn how you did it."

Cuban revolutionaries, said Dreke, "don’t consider ourselves to be the teachers of the world. But some of us come from the time when peasants were mistreated, when Batista’s army burned their houses to force them off the land, when peasant women were not able to give birth in hospitals, when both black and white peasants suffered."  
 
Land for those who work it
"Cuba broke from that past in 1959 with the triumph of the revolution," Dreke said. "The agrarian reform stated, ‘The land is for those who work it’ and gave land to the peasants. In this fight skin color didn’t matter--they all united to defend the land."

The Cuban agrarian reform law of May 1959 set a limit of 1,000 acres on individual holdings, and resulted in the confiscation of vast estates, a large percentage of which were owned by U.S. families and corporations. Some 100,000 peasant families received title to the land they tilled. The second agrarian reform law, passed in October 1963, confiscated landholding above 165 acres from the remaining 10,000 capitalist farmers in Cuba, bringing property relations on the land in line with those already established through the expropriation of capitalist-owned industry in the latter half of 1960.

After a tour of Willie Head’s farm, the Cuban visitors and their entourage traveled in a 10-car caravan to the farm of Rosa Lee Murphy, 88. She gave Dreke and Morales a brief history of the Dry Lake farm community where her land is located. At one time, she said, "They wouldn’t sell cars to Blacks, so the children couldn’t go anywhere. We couldn’t do anything but buy land next to our relatives. Then the county government realized Blacks might own all of Brooks County, and they started to sell us cars so we would leave--this was to help the plantations and the wealthy people. This is our history."

Several of the youth who took part in the two events of the day commented on how much they had learned from being part of this exchange between Cuban revolutionaries and U.S. farmers. Nils Arrington, a music student at the University of Miami, and others had found out about the trip the previous day at a demonstration protesting the U.S. war moves against Iraq. "I’ve had more education in the last couple of hours," Arrington said, "than in the last two years of college."
 
 
Related articles:
Cubans: ‘We go to Africa to pay our debt to humanity’
Atlanta daily interviews Víctor Dreke  
 
 
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