Vol. 76/No. 15 April 16, 2012
Below is an excerpt from Fidel Castro Speeches: Cuba’s Internationalist Foreign Policy 1975-80, one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for April. The selection is from the closing speech given by Castro at the First Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba in December 1975. Copyright © 1981 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission. The footnotes are by the Militant.
BY FIDEL CASTRO
[The U.S. government was] already indignant at the holding of the Conference of Solidarity with Puerto Rico, claiming that it seriously affected any possibility of improving relations. But if we must renounce this country’s dignity, renounce this country’s principles in order to have relations with the United States and improve relations with the United States, how can we possibly have relations with the United States?
Apparently, according to the mentality of the U.S. leaders, the price for improving relations, or for having trade or economic relations, is to give up the principles of the revolution. And we shall never renounce our solidarity with Puerto Rico. [Applause]
What kind of people do they think we are? What country do they think they are dealing with? The old Cuba? No! This is the new Cuba, and this is a different country! [Applause] And until they get this fact into their heads, I cannot see any possibility of improving relations, because we shall never desert our Puerto Rican brothers and sisters even if there are no relations with the United States for a hundred years. [Applause]
Now it is not only Puerto Rico; now it is also Angola. In all our revolutionary process we have always followed a policy of solidarity with the African revolutionary movement. One of the first things the revolution did was to send arms to the Algerian combatants who were fighting for their independence. This impaired our relations with the government of France, which was indignant at the fact that we were sending arms to the Algerian combatants and supporting them in the United Nations and in every international forum. But we were firm in that policy and we helped them.
After the victory of the revolution, when the new Algerian state had to face certain risks and certain dangers, we did not hesitate in sending them our help, and we did send it. …
We have given our support to the progressive governments and revolutionary movements in Africa since the very moment of the victory of the revolution. And we will continue supporting them! [Applause]
This assistance has taken different forms: sometimes we have sent weapons, or on other occasions we have sent men; we have sent military instructors, or doctors or construction workers, and sometimes we have sent all three: construction workers, doctors, and military instructors. [Laughter] Loyal to its internationalist policy, what the revolution has been doing since the beginning is to help wherever it can help, wherever it may be useful and, moreover, wherever this help is requested. …
When the Angolan people were about to attain independence—just as Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Cape Verde, and other countries attained their independence—imperialism worked out a way to crush the revolutionary movement in Angola. They planned to take hold of Cabinda, with its oil, before [independence day,] November 11; to seize Luanda before November 11. And to carry out this scheme, the U.S. government launched South African troops against Angola.
You know that South Africa is one of the most hated and most discredited states in the world, for three million whites oppress fourteen million Black Africans. And there they have established one of the most ignominious, shameful, and inhuman regimes that could ever be thought of. …
And the U.S. government, absolutely devoid of all scruples, launched the South African regular troops against Angola. Thus Angola was being threatened on the north by the FNLA1 and was attacked on the south by regular troops organized into armored columns. Everything was ready to take over Angola before November 11. And the plan was very solid; it was a solid plan; the only thing was that the plan failed. They had not counted on international solidarity.2 … [Applause]
On November 8 they launched an offensive against Cabinda and were crushingly repelled. What they went through in Cabinda was a sort of Girón3: in three days, in seventy-two hours, the invaders were annihilated. In Luanda, they were twenty-five kilometers from the capital on November 10; they attacked with armored columns; now they are more than a hundred kilometers from Luanda. …
That is, the heroic struggle of the Angolan people, supported by the international revolutionary movement, has made the imperialist plan fail.
And that is why the imperialists are irritated with us, among others. Some of them wonder why we help the Angolans, what interests we have there. They are accustomed to thinking that whenever a country does something, it is in pursuit of oil, or copper, or diamonds, or some other natural resource. No! We are not after material interests, and, logically, the imperialists do not understand this, because they are exclusively guided by chauvinist, nationalist, and selfish criteria. We are fulfilling an elementary internationalist duty when we help the Angolan people! [Applause] We are not looking for oil, or copper, or iron; we are not looking for anything at all. We are simply practicing a policy of principles. We do not remain passive when we see an African people, a sister people that the imperialists all of a sudden want to swallow up, and that is brutally attacked by South Africa.
2. In November 1975 the Cuban government, in response to a request from the Angolan government, sent massive military aid to help defeat the invading armed forces of South Africa’s white supremacist regime. More than 375,000 Cubans took part in the Angola campaign, which ended in May 1991.
3. On April 17, 1961, 1,500 Cuban mercenaries, organized, financed and deployed by Washington, invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. In less than 72 hours, they were soundly defeated.
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