Cuba in the crosshairs of Donald Trump and the Miami ‘Mafia’

There is a catastrophe that is about to be visited on an old friend of Africa, the Republic of Cuba.

Many followers of developments in the power circles of the United States of America have predicted that once the ongoing imbroglio with Iran is laid to rest, one way or another, the attention of the President and his men would be turned to Cuba.

From the moment of Fidel Castro’s Revolution, in 1959, Cuba’s superpower neighbour America has sought to intervene in its affairs, most of the time without success. There was the ‘Bay of Pigs’ invasion, for example, when insurgents, supported by the CIA, invaded the island and tried to overthrow Fidel. The CIA also tried through several ingenious ways to assassinate the Cuban President.

The word is that this time the American attack will be frontal and brutal, and that it will mark the end of Fidel’s Revolution. America has already tightened its long-standing embargo, and Cuba is unable to breathe. After Trump ‘extracted’ a sitting President Maduro from Venezuela, Cuba’s main supply of petroleum has been shut off. Many of the antiquated cars and buses that populate the streets of Havana are grounded. 80% of the population are living below the poverty line, and the Human Development Index has plummeted, despite the promise of Free Education and Free Health for its citizens.

Cuba is a small island country in the Caribbeans. It has a population of 11 million people. The official racial makeup is given as Whites 64%, Mixed Race(‘Mulattos’ 26%, and Blacks 9.2%. However, other sources claim that 62% of Cubans are people of African descent. Most of the Africans are of Yoruba origin.

The African ties run deep. Most Cubans are nominally Christians of the Roman Catholic faith, but many practise syncretism, mixing elements of Christianity with traditional Yoruba beliefs in a religion known as Santeria. A variant of Yoruba language known as Lukumi, a variant of Yoruba, is used in religious rituals, and spoken by many people. Bata drums are beaten, and there is Ifa divination.

On August 23, 2024, in Havana, Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka was honoured with the Haydee Santamaria Medal by the President of Cuba and Secretary General of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, Miguel Diaz-Canel at a ceremony in Havana.

Another African visitor, and a noteworthy event that brought the whole world to the brink of nuclear disaster, illustrate how the tiny nation of Cuba occupies a unique position in African Liberation, and how it has been punching above its weight in the affairs of the world. In addition, Cuba is one of very few countries in the world still trying to practise the ‘dead’ ideology of Communism (apologies to Nigeria’s dear, late Marxist icon, Biodun Jeyifo). This contradictory mix may help to explain why Donald Trump is so determined to take down Cuba.

In March 2001, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa led a delegation on a state visit to meet fellow President Fidel Castro in Cuba. Together they visited the African Memorial Park in Havana, where they unveiled a bust of Oliver Tambo, former leader of ANC. At the same Park was a bust of Agostinho Neto, the late President of Angola. Mbeki was informed that there were plans to install busts of other African Liberation heroes, including Abdel Gamel Nasser, Modibo Keita, Kwame Nkrumah, Patrice Lumumba, Julius Nyerere and Samora Machel. Mbeki acknowledged Cuba’s decisive role in defeating Apartheid through a crushing victory over its frontline soldiers in Angola, thereby turning back the tide of white supremacy on the African continent.

The legendary revolutionary Che Guevara, at the behest of his comrade Fidel, had, in 1964 and 1965, travelled to Algeria, Mali, Congo Brazzaville, Guinea, Ghana and Tanzania to stir liberation frenzy. The decisive impact of Cuba would come in its military support for the MPLA against its adversaries UNITA and FNLA, and their South African and Western backers in the Angolan Civil War. In ten years, 370,000 Cuban volunteers travelled to Angola to fight and work on the side of the MPLA. In 1988, the MPLA won a crushing victory over South African troops at Cuito Cuanavale. Two years later, Mandela was out of prison, and South Africa was free.

In the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, in the heat of the Cold War, the world came close to a nuclear war between the USA and the Soviet Union. Purportedly in response to a deployment of American nuclear missiles in the United Kingdom, Turkey and Italy, the Soviet Union moved nuclear missiles to its ally Cuba, on America’s doorstep. A tense standoff ensued between President Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

The crisis was eventually resolved diplomatically, with withdrawal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba, and agreement that the USA would never invade Cuba without direct provocation.

That agreement, like other agreements and assumptions undergirding the so-called ‘Rules Based International Order’, has been repudiated by Donald Trump.

Cuba is today a poor struggling Third World country, rich in African Liberation history and socialist rhetoric but low on cash, fuel and food. It is not associated with crime, terrorism or drugs. But it is an existential threat to Donald Trump, in his head, and he is determined to bring it down. He is already promising the exiled right wing Cuban millionaires ensconced in Florida that the Fidel Castro people will soon be run out of town. Perhaps he plans the Maduro treatment for President Miguel Diaz-Canel, Secretary-General of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba.

Who will save Cuba, the tiny country with a large heart? And what Cuba is to be saved – the great, creative people themselves, many with Yoruba blood? Or a romantic, collectivised political and economic system that redistributes poverty and simply does not work?

Can Africans stand up for Cuba, as it once stood up for them? Or is that too little, too late?