Aghostino Neto with Fidel
“…a historical imperative to express our gratitude…”
Raul
On reaching the 20th anniversary of the formation of the internationalist combatant columns of Cubans who carried out missions in Congo Leopoldville and Congo Brazzaville [...] I am honoured to accept the task commended to me by the leadership of the Party, the Council of State and the Commander in Chief, Fidel Castro, and thus award the Order of Ernesto Che Guevara and the Medal of Internationalist Combatants to the members of those units who had the privilege to be forerunners of the struggle of the peoples of Africa and Cuba against colonial oppression; for national independence and for the triumph and consolidation of socialism.
Sending these contingents of men and women to help represented the great strategic importance that our party and our commander has always placed on African revolutionary processes in their fight against imperialism and this action demonstrates how we identify with this just cause.
The historical contribution of our people was much greater and even more significant because the combatants were commanded by the heroic and unforgettable guerrilla commander, Ernesto Che Guevarra - a universal symbol and crystalisation of internationalist feeling.
It was precisely Che, after an extensive tour around numerous African countries, and after direct contact with the most relevant, progressive and revolutionary figures on the continent, who sensed the emancipatory ferment in those countries which had recently acquired independence and in those which were still under the colonial yoke.
Che subsequently conceived of providing support for this upwelling of revolutionary feeling on the African continent and chose to begin with Zaire, immense and rich as it was, it still had not broken its links with Belgian colonialism and under the leadership of Patricio Lumumba it was refusing to submit docilely to neo-colonialism.
The former colonialists and their associates in NATO opted for assassinating this outstanding patriot and used, to do so, its ragtag puppets lead by Tshombe, Mobutu, Kasavuku and white mercenaries.
The Lumumba patriots took to the path of armed resistance, but they lacked experience and insight and El Che thought they needed to get the support they requested, of a handful of experienced and effective Cuban revolutionary combatants.
Che also had a meeting in Brazzaville, in 1965, with the high command of the MPLA lead by Agostinho Neto. It was after this historic encounter that another agreement was reached in response to the request from the Angolan patriots: to help the guerrilla movement against Portuguese colonialism.
The leadership of our party approved both proposals to make a revolutionary contribution to our brother peoples in Angola and Zaire.
That historic decision of Che to march towards other lands who needed his valuable contribution to their struggle would be a root cause and across time and distance and profoundly affect the destinies of Africa and our American continent.
Even before the arrival of the Europeans for the first time in America, the colonialist expropriation had already begun in Africa, and long before the aboriginal inhabitants of the Antilles were exterminated with fire and the the whip of the conquistadors, the Portuguese and Spanish had started up the infamous slave trade, appropriating ivory, rubber and other natural resources, and the greatest wealth of all, the African man himself.
In less than three centuries more than fifty million people were uprooted from their lands and sent to the plantations in the Americas, reduced to the condition of slavery and many of them died in the Atlantic crossing. More than five centuries of looting by the European metropolis, joined by the United States in the 19th century, has seen the construction of opulent capitalist societies, developed and erected, in good part, on the suffering, misery, hunger and of the peoples of Africa.
The actions of the European nations at the repugnant Congress of Berlin in 1985, more than a century ago, so eloquently illustrates the absolute contempt in which the colonialists held the character and destiny of the peoples of Africa; at Berlin the representatives of the main capitalist powers, without the least respect for human rights, but with an accurate geometry, distributed the continent among themselves, and in the process they willfully divided nations, peoples, ethnic groups and families.
This process of looting and colonisation which bled dry the African continent and uprooted millions of its children, was not done without encountering fierce resistance which was founded in a great fighting spirit of the African peoples and their rich traditions of patriotism; qualities which strengthened our own struggle when, with their machetes in hand, those Cubans directly descended from the peoples uprooted from Africa formed an integral part of the hosts of Mambisa, inspired by the ideal of liberty, a liberty that they helped forge in Cuba.
Towards the middle of the 20th century the exploitation of Africa took on another guise. After the First World War the African colonial possessions of the vanquished became the property if the victors, the enticing spoils of the postwar.
After the second world conflagration, however, the situation became qualitatively different the rise of the socialist community after the victory of the glorious Red Army over German fascism, together with the destruction of Japanese militarism created an international configuration of forces that propiciated national liberation struggles and social progress. This was expressed in the revolutions in Chuna, Korea, Vietnamn Cuba and Algeria, and in the collapse of the colonial system, when the majority of countries in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean gained independence.
It was precisely in this context, one of political effervescence and the active projection of the African people onto the international arena, when Che Guevara understood the need to offer solidarity and support, impede the recolonisation of Zaire and contribute to the armed struggle of the people of the Portuguese colonies at the beginning of this great and decisive fight, the liberation of the southern African people from the ignominious yoke of Apartheid and the independence of Namibia, which was also occupied the racist Pretoria.
Each of us conserves the emotion of those defining moments of our internationalist vocation, when for the first time a battle hardened contingent of Cuban combatants volunteered to march to Africa, not only out of a sense of duty, but out of an historical imperative and a feeling of gratitude towards the continent our ancestors came from; just as three decades earlier Cubans fought for the liberty of Spain, also the cradle of our ancestors.
This enthusiasm carried you through the arduous period of training that each of you had to go through properly in order to be able to be able to complete such an honorable undertaking. In undergoing this training you forged a deep fraternal and collective spirit which grew in the face of adverse conditions and which you dedicated to the difficult task of building socialism.
The column that marched in the Congo under the name of the Patricio Lumumba Battalion had multiple missions to achieve. In the first place it was Che's reserve batalion, into which it would be absorbed when the time came.
In addition it had the task of giving help to the progressive government of the Congo, threatened by aggression from the regime in Leopoldville (now Kinchasa). In order to do this, not only was the battalion ready to fight alongside the army against foreign aggression, but it set out to train several battalions of militias.
Of no less priority was the important mission to send a group of military trainers and combatants to the second guerrilla front to aid the MPLA in Cabinda, and to train columns of Angolan fighters and equip them wand help them get ready for the the First Front to the north of Luanda.
Comrades Risquet and Kindelan were responsible for carrying out this multiple mission.
The actions of the First Column, though brief, were no less heroic. In the several months that it remained in the interior of Zaire, which it reached after overcoming dangerous obstacles, it fought in many actions, often outnumbered.
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