Motorcade in support of the Cuban people against U.S blockade
21 Monday Jun 2021
Posted South Africa
in21 Monday Jun 2021
Posted South Africa
in19 Wednesday Aug 2020
Posted South Africa
inTags
#Cuba, #Cuban water technology specialists, #South Africa, #South Africa-Cuba Relations, Solidarity
Pretoria, Aug 19 A brigade of 23 Cuban specialists in water supply and sanitation issues has been in South Africa since this Wednesday to help the country with the sensitive issue of water security.
Joint projects in this area, the diplomat said, are now being resumed after a brief interruption, marked also by the delay in travel due to the restrictive health measures established in both nations because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
In this context, Benitez Verson revealed, the South African government has highlighted the importance of the presence of these Cuban experts so that they can also support, from their specialties, the national efforts to confront the Covid-19.
03 Friday Apr 2020
Posted South Africa
inTags
#COVID-19 pandemic., #Cuba, #Cuba Saves Lives With Love, #Cubans Doctors, #South Africa, #South Africa-Cuba Relations, Solidarity
ANC Today
By Justice Piitso
THE CUBAN REVOLUTION is and remains the cradle of Human Solidarity and Internationalism
– The army of the White Gowns continues to give the world examples that cannot be erased from the pages of History
Since the birth of the modern bourgeois society which has sprouted from the ruins of the feudal society, the struggle for the liberation of humanity has been shaped by episodes of great historic significance. The outbreak of the CORONA Virus (COVID-19) is such an episode, which is not just threatening the existence of human society, but is also another pivotal event set to change the course of history.
So, the outbreak of the catastrophic CO RONA (COVID-19) pandemic is undermining the barriers of the world of capitalism, the artificial boundaries of the world of the rich and the poor. This virus is rock ing both the capital cities of the imperialist powers and the developing world.
of the people of the world. It is a revolution inspired by the generosity and the most fulfilling forms of human solidarity and internationalism.
The history of the struggle of humanity to make the world a better place has be come an exemplar of relentless struggles, of defeats, sufferings, resilience, triumphs and the victories of mankind against adversity. Humanity is building an ideal society out of its own wounds.
It is a powerhouse which seeks to live up to this highest ideal of fulfilling the aspirations rations of humanity and at the same time making the ideas the living testimonies of our historical epoch. The noblest ideas that human solidarity and international ism stands for, is the reservoir of socialist values and revolutionary consciousness.
The episode of the deadly virus is again demonstrating to all of humanity that the Cuban revolution remains the cradle of solidarity and internationalism. The Cuban internationalist brigade, the Army of the White Gowns, continues to give the world the examples that cannot be erased from the pages of our history books.
In the words of the Commander in Chief of the Cuban revolution, El Comandante Fidel Castro: “Marxism taught me what society was. I was like a blindfolded man in a forest, who didn’t know where north or south is. If you don’t eventually come to truly un understand the history of the class struggle, or at least have a clear idea that society is divided between the rich and the poor, and that some people subjugate and exploit other people, you’re lost in a forest, not knowing anything”.
The revolution is such an implacable architecture which has demonstrated that its foundation is not just from within the boundaries in which it was born, but from the fulcrum of the revolutionary struggle
Jose Marti, the hero of the Cuban revolution, in his own words before his untimely death during the war for the independence of Cuba against the Spanish colonialism said: “Homeland is all of Humanity”. He added that only with an integrating vision of reaching out universally, can we successfully confront the colossal challenges that the entire world is dealing with.
These are the great teachings which continue to inspire Dr Leonardo Fernández, a renowned intensive care specialist, who a moment before departure from Jose Marti International Airport to undertake one of the most complex humanitarian missions to help combat the coronavirus pandemic in Lombardy, one of the regions of the Republic of Italy.
la, when the revolution sent three hundred and thirty thousand combatants (330.000) which ultimately suffered two thousands fatalities (2000), a mission which begun in 1975, culminating in triumph in 1991. This mission propelled the victory of the struggle of our people during the battle of Cuito Cuanavale, which heralded the defeat of the racist Apartheid regime in the southern tip of the African continent.
08 Monday Jul 2019
Posted South Africa
in04 Thursday Jul 2019
Posted South Africa
inTags
#Cuba, #Dan Chiorboli, #South Africa-Cuba Relations, #The South African musician condemns the blockade imposed on Cuba
By Ilsa Rodríguez Santana Pretoria, (Prensa Latina) South African percussionist and music producer Dan Chiorboli will organize concerts in Cuba with the participation of musicians from both countries, as part of the support for the island during times of greater pressure from the United States.
When offering his considerations on the new measures of the United States against Cuba, he described them as shameful and reflected ‘on the contrary to what we want in the current world’.
‘We are not politicians, but from the artistic point of view we need to project and support Cuba,’ he said after recalling the important role of artists worldwide against apartheid in South Africa and his assurance that the time has come to repeat those actions in support of Cuba.
It is very important to help Cuba as musical activists, in addition to making young people understand what is happening, what is the culture of the United States blockade against that nation and what we must do to achieve its elimination, he added.
Meanwhile, Chiorboli pointed out that his connection with Cuban music is maintained through two of his main friends; the British producer and guitarist Phil Manzanera and the Cuban Juan Marco González, of the Buenavista Social.
In his statements he recalled that he returned to South Africa with the aim of producing a CD with 12 or 14 songs linked to the liberation struggles and finished with 57 songs and the participation of 142 musicians from 18 countries, among them the young Cuban jazz musician Michel Herrera, who last March recorded in Johannesburg a title dedicated to the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale.
24 Monday Jun 2019
Posted South Africa
inTags
# Ambassador of Cuba to South Africa, # Cuba denounces the government of the United States from South Africa, #Blockade, #Cuba, #Genocidal blockade, #Imperialism, #South Africa-Cuba Relations, #Suth Africa, Eswatini and Lesotho
Since he took office in January 2017, Donald Trump has been erasing the path towards the normalisation of relations between Cuba and the United States outlined by his predecessor Barak Obama. Instead of dialogue and cooperation, his government has promoted hostility and confrontation against our nation.
Last April 17, the current administration announced its decision to escalate even more the aggressive behavior against Cuba. The new unilateral sanctions include allowing hereinafter that action is taken in US courts against Cuban and foreign entities outside the jurisdiction of the United States; and to harden the impediments for entry into the US of the executives of companies that legally invest in Cuba and their relatives in properties that were nationalised.
Likewise, remittances which Cuban residents in the US send to their families and next of kin will be limited; trips by US citizens to Cuba will be further restricted; and additional financial sanctions will be applied against our country.
Those sanctions reinforce the blockade, flagrantly violate international law and directly attack the sovereignty and interests of third countries. The declared goal is to suffocate the Cuban economy, in order to achieve a “regime change”.
Washington intends to justify these measures by accusing Cuba of being responsible for the current situation in Venezuela, and a threat to the national security of the United States. False!
The current US government is known, in its own country and internationally, for its unscrupulous tendency of using lies as a resort in domestic and foreign policy matters.
The accuser has a GDP 200 times greater than that of our country, its territory multiplied by 89 that of the Island and its population is 30 times larger. It is also the only country in the world that keeps over 250 000 soldiers on 800 military bases abroad.
The US Department of State recently sent a secret memo to its embassies, instructing them to take steps in the capitals with the aim of obtaining public condemnation of the alleged presence of thousands of Cuban troops and security forces in Venezuela, influencing and determining what is happening in that sister country. It is another vulgar slander.
Cuba does not have troops or military forces, nor does it participate in operations in Venezuela. The nearly 20 thousand Cuban collaborators in that Latin American sister nation, more than 60% of them women, fulfill the same tasks that are currently performed by 11,000 other professionals of our country in 83 nations: contributing to provide basic social services, mainly health care.
It’s just ridiculous that the US accuse Cuba of being responsible for the soundness and steadfastness shown by the Bolivarian government and the people of Venezuela, in defense of the sovereignty of their nation.
02 Monday Apr 2018
Posted South Africa
inWinnie Madikizela-Mandela, who first emerged as the dignified anti-apartheid struggle figure and then came to represent the liberation movement’s worst excesses, has died at the age of 81 after a long illness.
As the then wife of the idolised Nelson Mandela, the imprisoned African National Congress (ANC) leader, she was readily seen as a champion of the oppressed.
It was a role she was encouraged to play.
According to former president Thabo Mbeki, the ANC deliberately profiled Mandela “as the representative personality of the [jailed leadership], and therefore to use his personal political biography, including the persecution of his then wife, Winnie Mandela, dramatically to present to the world and the South African community the brutality of the apartheid system”.
Frustratingly for the authorities, such measures only served to heighten Madikizela-Mandela’s international popularity and shore up her position as a leader of South Africa’s disenfranchised masses.
By the mid-1980s, however, she had become a public relations disaster for the mass democratic movement.
Imperious, aloof and a law unto herself, the renegade Madikizela-Mandela not only endorsed such brutal acts as the “necklacing” of suspected police informers, but was revealed as having been personally responsible for the murder, torture, abduction and assault of a number of men, women and children through the infamous Mandela United Football Club.
Led by her bodyguard, Jerry Musivuzi Richardson, these thugs conducted a reign of terror over parts of Soweto as resistance to apartheid intensified.
Throughout this murderous period, and despite the fact that community leaders and anti-apartheid activists had publicly denounced her, Mandela, then still a prisoner, remained seemingly oblivious of the stories in circulation about his wife.
With his release in February 1990, it was immediately apparent that he remained fiercely loyal to his wife and — much to his discredit, some said — still clearly idolised her.
But whatever hopes he’d harboured of a future together came to nothing following reports of her infidelity while he was still in prison and afterwards. They separated in April 1992 and were divorced in March 1996.
So ended a greatly mythologised union that began in 1957.
Winnie Nomzamo Madikizela was just 21 and working as the first black female social worker at Baragwanath Hospital, when she was introduced to the 39-year-old lawyer and ANC activist by Oliver Tambo and his future wife, Adelaide Tsukudu.
At the time, Mandela was in the throes of divorcing his first wife, Evelyn Mase. He was immediately struck by Winnie’s beauty and spirit, and later recalled in his autobiography: “I cannot say for certain if there is such a thing as love at first sight, but I do know that the moment I first glimpsed Winnie Nomzamo, I knew that I wanted to have her as my wife.”
Within days of their first meeting, he’d told her as much. Theirs was a whirlwind romance — and a difficult one. At the time, Mandela was one of the 156 accused in the mammoth Treason Trial, which began in 1956 and would drag on until all defendants had finally been acquitted.
The couple saw each other whenever they could. To Winnie it was if she was dating both the man and the movement. Years later, she recalled that their first date had, in fact, been a disaster. Mandela had taken her for a quick lunch at his favourite Indian restaurant, but the food was too spicy for her. Her inability to eat the curry, she told Carte Blanche in 1992, had greatly amused him.
Afterwards, he’d told her that he had really called to ask her to raise money for the ANC. “Politicians,” she added, “are not lovers.”
They were married on June 14, 1958. With that, so began Winnie Mandela’s encounters with the security police. Later that year, she and thousands of other women were arrested for demonstrating against the pass laws. At the time she was a member of the national executive of the ANC Women’s League.
She was also pregnant. During her two-week detention at the overcrowded Old Fort prison in Johannesburg, she began to haemorrhage. It was only through the intervention of fellow cellmate Albertina Sisulu, a trained midwife, that the pregnancy was saved and Zenani, the Mandelas’ first daughter, was born in February 1959.
The arrest also cost Mandela her Baragwanath job — a blow to a family expecting their first child. A further setback came when, along with thousands of others, Nelson Mandela was detained in the aftermath of the March 21 Sharpeville shootings, and the ANC banned. He would be released almost five months later, and the couple’s second daughter, Zinzi, was born in December 1960.
By then, however, Mandela had gone underground and thrown himself into establishing Mkhonto we Sizwe, the ANC’s armed wing. He was arrested on August 5, 1962, and would remain in custody until his release in February 1990.
Winnie Mandela was served the first in a virtually uninterrupted series of banning orders in 1962, preventing her from working, living and socialising like other citizens.
In the years that followed, she was barred from publishing or addressing more than one person at a time, subjected to house arrest, harassed by police, subjected to arbitrary arrest and detention, and held in solitary confinement. On May 17, 1977, she was taken from her Orlando, Soweto home and summarily banished to rural Brandfort in the then Orange Free State.
During this time, Winnie Mandela had been left to raise two children without a source of income. Although she had visitation rights, she was denied physical contact with her jailed husband for more than two decades.
“That is part of one’s life one does not even want to remember,” she later said. “I could only visit him once in six months. We had to keep [a] link through letters and through visits when they were increased. At the end of [the prisoners’] stay on Robben Island, we could visit them two times a month. And it would be a visit of two people at a given time. That helped a lot to keep the family ties and to sort of keep that link between him and the children. Before that, all they did was read about their father.”
Mandela’s international standing rose dramatically in the eight years she spent in Brandfort, and she received many foreign visitors at her home in this backwater. Far from languishing in obscurity, she threw herself into community work, setting up a nursery school, a soup kitchen for schoolchildren, a mobile clinic, and several self-help projects that ranged from growing vegetables to sewing school uniforms.
She openly defied her banning orders. She was in Soweto, during one such contravention, in August 1985 when her Brandfort home was firebombed. She blamed the government for the attack, and flatly refused to return to the Free State. Her next banning order allowed her to stay anywhere in the country except in the Johannesburg and Roodepoort magisterial districts. She ignored that, too.
The authorities officially lifted all restrictions on Mandela in 1986. By then it was clear that she was fast becoming her own worst enemy — and a liability to the anti-apartheid movement.
In April that year she endorsed the horrific wave of vigilante “necklace” killings, telling a rally in Munsieville, “With our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country.”
Then came accusations that she had ordered Jerry Richardson, the “coach” of the football club that acted as her personal security detail, to carry out the kidnappings which led to the murder of a 14-year-old activist, James “Stompie” Sepei.
On December 29, 1988, Richardson abducted Sepei and three other youths from the Johannesburg home of Reverend Paul Verryn. Mandela suspected the Methodist minister was sexually abusing them. Once inside her home, they were beaten to force an admission that Verryn had slept with them. Sepei was further accused of being an informer and a week later his body was found in a field with stab wounds to the throat.
Richardson and three other Mandela United bodyguards were arrested in February 1989, convicted of murder and jailed for life. Mandela was also later charged with four counts of kidnapping and four counts of assault. Her husband was in court throughout her trial. In 1991, she was convicted of kidnapping and being an accessory to assault. Her six-year prison sentence was reduced to a two-year suspended sentence and a fine on appeal.
In 1992, she was accused of ordering the murder of Dr Abu-Baker Asvat, a family friend who had examined Sepei at her home shortly before his death. Asvat was gunned down in his surgery on January 27, 1989, because, it was claimed, he had knowledge of the many assaults that took place at Mandela’s home. One of his assassins later claimed that Mandela had supplied the firearm and paid him R20 000 for the killing.
The Sepei case resurfaced in 1997 when Mandela told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) that claims she had been involved in at least 18 human rights abuses, including eight murders, were “ridiculous”; her main accuser, activist Katiza Cebekhulu, was a “former mental patient” whose allegations against her were “hallucinations”, she said. At one stage the hearings were adjourned when it emerged that witnesses were being intimidated on Mandela’s orders.
The TRC later ruled that the abductions had been carried out on her instructions and that she had “initiated and participated in the assualts”. But, with regard to Sepei’s murder, the commission found that she had only been “negligent”. In its final report, the TRC found her “politically and morally accountable for the gross violations of human rights committed by the MUFC” and that she “was responsible, by omission, for the commission of gross violations of human rights”.
Mandela was at her husband’s side, holding his hand, when he walked out of Paarl’s Victor Verster Prison and into the world spotlight. But the image of a dutiful wife was a sham. She had taken several lovers during her husband’s incarceration.
She continued her affair with her latest paramour, the lawyer Dali Mpofu, a man 30 years her junior, after her husband’s release. At the time Mpofu was in a relationship with Terry Oakley-Smith, a lecturer in educational psychology at Wits University who was shortly to give birth to their son, Sizwe.
The two women became embroiled in a bizarre, if unseemly battle for Mpofu’s affections. In addition to the strain of dealing with a new-born baby, the humiliated Oakley-Smith endured threatening, late-night telephone calls from her rival. Winnie would be drunk, slurring her words, warning her to keep away from Mpofu.
The Mandelas separated in 1992 after details of the affair appeared in newspapers. Suing for divorce, an embittered Mandela told the then Rand Supreme Court in March 1996: “Can I put it simply, my lord? If the entire universe tried to persuade me to reconcile with the defendant, I would not . . . I am determined to get rid of this marriage.”
Life with Winnie after his release had been a miserable disappointment; not once had his wife shared his bed with him in the two years following their reunion. “I was the loneliest man,” he said.
She would later respond that she, too, had been lonely. “I have never lived with Mandela,” she said. “I have never known what it was to have a close family where you sat around the table with husband and children. I have no such dear memories. When I gave birth to my children he was never there, even though he was not in jail at the time.”
A year earlier, in March 1995, Mandela, as president of the first post-apartheid government, had fired her from his Cabinet. Her tenure as the country’s first Deputy Minister of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology had lasted just 11 months and ended amid allegations of corruption, shady business deals, mismanagement and insubordination.
After the divorce, Winnie adopted the surname Madikizela-Mandela. She remained popular among ANC supporters. In April 1997 she was re-elected president of the ANC Women’s League but, at the ANC’s national conference in December that year, withdrew her candidacy for deputy president of the party.
06 Monday Nov 2017
Former President Motlanthe praises Cuban leader Fidel Castro for contributing to the development of communism
Former President, Kgalema Motlanthe has praised Fidel Castro for his contribution to the development of communism in Cuba and around the world. Motlanthe addressed a Fidel Castro Commemoration and the role he played in the liberation struggle, at Lilly’s Leaf farm, north of Johannesburg. Castro, was a Cuban revolutionary leader who built a communist state on the doorstep of the United States.
Motlanthe says Cubans like Castro are people of sacrifice.
01 Wednesday Feb 2017
Posted Cuba-Sudafrica
in01 Thursday Dec 2016
Posted AFRICA, US & EUROPE
inSouth African Communist Party deputy secretary general Solly Mapaila says the ANC-led tripartite alliance should not allow South Africa’s freedom to ‘be captured’. (Delwyn Verasamy, M&G).
South African Communist Party (SACP) deputy general secretary Solly Mapaila has called on the ANC-led tripartite alliance to free itself from corporate capture by the Gupta and Rupert families – and emulate the example set by late Cuban Revolution leader Fidel Castro.