Thursday, August 10, 2006
The silver lining of Fidel Castro's illness
Newspapers are actually writing about subjects you would have never seen otherwise:
As the world wonders about Fidel Castro's health, Africa remembers him as the foreign leader who most invested his personal effort -- and Cuban lives -- to help end colonialism and apartheid.
Throughout the veteran Comandante's 47-year rule, the world's poorest continent has loomed large in his global outlook and it was the scene of his most ambitious overseas adventures.
Cuba's 16-year intervention in Angola...culminated in 1988 with 55,000 Cuban troops armed with Soviet tanks and MiG fighters battling white South African soldiers and U.S.-backed Angolan rebels in the southern bushlands.
Thousands of miles from their Caribbean home in Angola's "lands at the end of the earth," young Cuban servicemen fought in what Castro dubbed "Africa's Stalingrad," the battle of Cuito Cuanavale which blocked the South African advance north.
African leaders, and many historians, say Cuba's military muscle -- personally directed by Castro from Havana -- kept Angola free, won independence for Namibia and hastened the end of apartheid rule in South Africa.
