By Carlos Alberto (Beto) Almeida, January 2021
Photo: Minsap
This is another article in a series we are bringing you on the significance of the Cuban Revolution written by members of the Network in Defense of Humanity. -editorial
It is always difficult to write objectively about the universal significance of the Cuban Revolution, especially when its achievements are respected, recognized and valued. An article is just an opportunity to choose between so many noble pages and also the risk of forgetting others, thinking to do justice to this revolution.
It is possible to talk about the Cuban Revolution on the basis of concrete and badly publicized facts, deliberately biased or distorted, so as not to reveal that, in the final analysis, humanity owes a debt to this Revolution.
Facts: in 2009, I was in President Lula’s delegation that went to East Timor when, on behalf of the Brazilian Committee for Solidarity with Timor, we donated and installed a community radio station for East Timor with 300 CDs of popular music, including sambas by Martinho da Vila, Beth Carvalho and Zeca Pagodinho, among many others. The idea was to nurture Brazil-Timor solidarity through journalism and radio, in Portuguese.
There we met a Cuban medical brigade of 600 professionals, and it was President Xanana Gusmão himself who told us that he had been pressured by the US ambassador in Timor not to accept Cuban medical solidarity. It was then when Xanana asked the gringo: “How many US doctors are there in Timor?”; to his surprise, the gringo replied: “We have only one, he works at the embassy”, and Xanana, with his oriental wisdom, answered: “Then you must agree that the Cuban doctors are to attend to the Timorese people, which the US is not willing to provide, right? The Cuban doctors stayed, on the other side of the world, bringing not only medicine but also solidarity and example, which is what makes Cuba stimulate a leap in the consciousness of the people who, directly or indirectly, come into contact with the fruits of the revolution, such as the medical brigades. We, on that occasion, brought a radio; Lula was a witness to its donation, and we brought a Cuban presence from the other side of the world.
Here in Brazil, the presence of Cuban doctors, through the More Doctors Program, was in itself an argument to encourage Brazilian society, even the most politicized segments, to reflect on and understand what a revolution is. Of the 14,000 Cuban doctors, more than half were women, mostly black, as were the male doctors. Like Brazil, Cuba also suffered the tragedy of slavery. However, here we had a great capitalist development, of state enterprises and social rights in the Vargas era; but with all the wealth that has been accumulated, the industry that was built up concentrates enormous wealth in a few hands. With one of the highest GDPs in the world, Brazil has almost no black doctors.
Only under Lula did it become easier for blacks to go to university. But there are still illiterate people. And the Cuban doctors worked alongside the Brazilian people, so much so that during a very destructive flood in the province of Espírito Santo, the television recorded Cuban doctors, in the midst of the dirty water, carrying the sick, mattresses and refrigerators, so that they could be safe from danger. There are always those who do not want to understand that in this gesture there is a revolution, a consciousness, an ideology of serving the human race, which is the aim of those who will fight and will fight for the socialist transformation of humanity. Doctors in the middle of nowhere, carrying all the dignity of a revolution, which from the beginning, when a large number of Cuban doctors left their country and their people, fearing to lose their social privileges, even so, the first Medical Brigade was formed to help the Algerian Revolution which was just taking place. It is a principle that must be known to all humanity: we distribute what we have, not what we have to spare. This is a motto of the Cuban Revolution, which sets it apart, which makes it even more respected. How many doctors has the United States distributed around the world to help the poor? How many did the so-called Scandinavian socialism distribute around the world? Who exactly practices the defense of human rights?
Here in Brazil, the Cuban doctors were mistreated by the media, by the medical corporations; but they never stopped treating the people in regions where Brazilian doctors refused to work, and for this dedication they received the respect, affection and recognition of the Brazilian people, which was reflected in the Fiocruz surveys, indicating that support for the More Doctors Program was over 93%. Now, with the pandemic, the mortality rate has increased, because the poor populations have lost, with the absence of the Cuban doctors, the much-needed preventive care that kept a number of diseases under control and that have worsened with their departure. In other words, the Cuban Revolution had lowered the mortality rate in Brazil.
Cuba’s episode of solidarity with Angola, when it was criminally invaded by the murderous South African army, is one of those pages that the history of humanity will keep forever as proof of true solidarity, of real and concrete commitment to the much-maligned human rights and the fight against racism. For Brazil, it is an issue that will never be discussed. First, because in those years, President Ernesto Geisel recognized Agostinho Neto’s government, provoking fury in Washington. Henry Kissinger rushed to Brazil to put pressure on Geisel, but found him unyielding. When Kissinger said that Brazil was playing into the hands of the communists by supporting the MPLA government and Cuba, Geisel simply replied: “Our foreign policy is not on the agenda of this meeting”. With deep historical and cultural ties to Angola, in addition to language, Brazil had all the potential to have offered the African nation a bridge of solidarity across the Atlantic. Artists and intellectuals tried to do so. Martinho da Vila, Chico Buarque de Hollanda, Beth Carvalho and Clara Nunes crossed the Atlantic several times for this purpose. And with the Geisel government’s support for Agostinho, including Cuba’s presence there, the opportunity opened up in civil society to organize the trade unions, the universities, and above all, the Brazilian black movement, an effective solidarity action that did not happen. So solidarity came from Cuba, from the Cuban Revolution, from the government, the armed forces, the party, the trade unions, the universities, the people as a whole. In Cuba they don’t speak Portuguese, but they speak the language of internationalist solidarity, of being in solidarity with any people that rises up against oppression, anywhere on the planet, as stated in the Cuban Constitution itself.
This historical episode also revealed another of the many qualities that sprout from the fertile soil of the Cuban Revolution: great political knowledge and intelligence and a rebelliousness against mechanistic political formalism. Around this time, the Commander of the Revolution, Fidel Castro, analyzing the nature of dictatorships in Latin America, pointed out that “while the military dictatorship in Argentina is oligarchic, deindustrializing and privatizing, the dictatorship in Brazil is nationalist and industrializing”. It was very difficult in Brazil, in intellectual circles, even on the left, to understand what Fidel was arguing, because in reality, in economic matters, the military governments in Brazil maintained part of the static policy that had been in place since the Vargas era, of which Ernesto Geisel was one of the leaders. Moreover, Fidel essentially grasped the reasons that led Geisel to pursue a Third World foreign policy, resuming relations with the People’s Republic of China, Romania and Bulgaria, expanding relations with the USSR, supporting Iraq, Libya, Syria and Mozambique, and encouraging Brazilian state and private companies to participate in the construction of very important infrastructure throughout the Middle East, in defiance of the US, with whom he broke the Military Cooperation Treaty.
This political intelligence that Fidel expressed was a conquest of the Cuban Revolution, which broke several parameters, sometimes taboos, in the left themselves. For example, Fidel maintained deep and cooperative relations with all the presidents of revolutionary nationalism in Latin America: Perón, Goulart, Alvarado, Torres, Torrijos, Cárdenas; while the communist parties of these countries expressed great incomprehension of the transformations they had implemented. The communists in Argentina went so far as to participate in the coup that deposed Perón in 1955, as well as in the coup that drove Getúlio Vargas to suicide in 1954 in Brazil, also supported by the PCB. On the contrary, Fidel had constructive relations with these revolutionary nationalist movements, which paved the way for the deepest relationship with Comandante Hugo Chávez, understanding his revolutionary gigantism from the beginning, when many sectors of the left turned their noses up at the Bolivarian. For some it was just pragmatism; but, centrally, it was the awareness of acting as a public good of history, conquered and built by the Cuban Revolution. Fidel was unable to meet Vargas. But he was very moved when, in prison, he read Vargas’ Letter Testament, when he said “I leave life to enter history”.
After the victory in the battle of Cuito Cuanavale, when Cubans and Angolans defeated and expelled the South African Army from Angola and Namibia, there was a test where the Cuban Revolution demonstrated, once again, all the strength and depth of the revolutionary consciousness of a people. As the only country in the world to take up arms to defeat the Apartheid regime, the Cubans acted in Angola in the name of humanity, so that racism, which was far more aggressive and murderous than it is today, could be defeated in South Africa. But the black movements in several countries ignore the gigantic Cuban effort and take as a reference the racial struggle in the USA as if it were a model. In the United States, in the most popular neighborhoods, Harlem and Brooklyn, there are many young people from poor black families who can only study medicine in Cuba, and for free. “I could never have studied medicine in the US,” a young black woman who had trained as a doctor at the Latin American School of Medicine in Cuba told me. She said her brothers were dead or imprisoned because of drug trafficking, as is the fate reserved for most young people in these poorer neighborhoods. Cuba does not offer scholarships for brain drain, as universities in the US and England do, imposing brain drain on the native nations of the peoples of the south.
Going back to Angola, it was when it became known that Israel threatened the murderous government of South Africa to drop an atomic bomb on Cuban troops, because they imagined they could reach South African territory. Dramatic times. And as had happened before, in the Missile Crisis in October 1962, once again the conscience built by the Cuban Revolution acted on behalf of the human race, of all humanity. Cuba presented the real risk to the troops in Angola, asking whether they wanted to continue or pull back. There was no turning back. On a par with the gigantism of the Stalingrad masses, who acted in defense of the human race. Like the communards of the Paris Commune, who, encircled for 71 days, eating rats and drinking their own urine, defended the human race, even though they could not triumph then. The same can be said of the Paraguayan masses, who undertook an industrializing and democratic Revolution, with agrarian reform, elimination of illiteracy, and in the end, were crushed by troops from Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina, acting on behalf of British imperialism and its financial tyranny; only the women and children were left to fight alongside Solano Lopez against the aggressors. Paraguay resisted a blockade for more than 60 years, and was bombed even by the US Navy; but it industrialized, had no foreign debt, no foreign banks, was setting its own path of development, and this was unbearable for the British Empire, which made war a way of imposing underdevelopment and, also, foreign debt on Brazil.
Nelson Mandela’s phrase, “we owe the end of Apartheid to Cuba”, should inspire many songs, poetry, films and theatre, because it is proof that, through the Cuban Revolution, humanity can overcome the problems posed by history, as Marx argued. Internationalism is an ideology necessary to life, just as humanity deserves and needs Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, whose 250th birthday we have just commemorated. Just as the retaking of Palmyra in Syria, formerly in the hands of imperialist terrorists, merited a concert by the Red Army Orchestra, playing Beethoven; so it can be said that living, defending, supporting and advancing the Cuban Revolution is a permanent Beethovenian ode to humanity, played every day as music that vindicates the right of mankind to a future without any kind of oppression or brutalization.
“With its honesty, dignity and unselfish libertarian internationalism, the Cuban Revolution is completing another year, defeating all the plans that wanted it destroyed, suffocated and crushed”.
This consciousness radiated by the Cuban Revolution, the messages it sends to the present and the future by means of vaccines, such as the Soberana, special medicines, medical brigades, teachers, literacy teachers who reach and benefit even the indigenous tribes in New Zealand, are messages in defense of life itself, of civilization, of the beautiful task of building, with Cuba, a place where what is necessary to live is shared, where the rights of nations that want a world without inequality, without misery, without insane accumulation of wealth, without wars that are made to plunder and oppress are respected. With its honesty, dignity and libertarian internationalism, the Cuban Revolution is completing another year, defeating all the plans that wanted it destroyed, suffocated and crushed. And alongside the nations that have the courage and the mission to build a just world, without imperial and colonialist pressures – Russia, China, Vietnam, Iran, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Syria, North Korea – Cuba completes another year of Revolution, communicating to the world its “right to live in peace”, as Victor Jara sings, and sharing its luminosity of justice in a world with so many shadows, but which needs not only to breathe, like Floyd; but also, with the clarity of this Island, to illuminate the path of humanity to ensure a just and united future.
Carlos Alberto (Beto) Almeida, Brasil: Journalist, international political analyst and geopolitical expert. President of Ciudad Libre, Brasilia Television. Co-founder of TeleSUR and presenter of the program Latitud Brasil. Founding member of the Network in Defense of Humanity