As an African, I feel terribly ashamed that my continent, ruled by kleptomaniac plantation managers, could not even muster enough courage to utter even a symbolic diplomatic support to Cuba.
This small Island nation that stood by us in our darkest hours of need is left to stand alone, with only Russia and China offering assistance.
Damn it, Cuba sent her soldiers to die in our fights against the same imperialist forces that are today squeezing life out of the courageous people of the Caribbean Island, without a whimper from the spineless colonial-minded House Niggers in our presidential palaces in Africa.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, when Angola was ablaze, and apartheid South Africa strutted across the subcontinent like an armored deity, it was not Brussels or Washington D.C.that came to our rescue. It was not the smooth-tongued apostles of “rules-based order.”
It was Cuba.
A small Caribbean island, blockaded, vilified, and economically throttled, sent its sons across the Atlantic to fight on African soil. The Cubans did not come as contractors or as consultants with policy frameworks and governance matrices.
They came as soldiers. They came knowing they could die in a bush thousands of miles from Havana. They came because they believed that the freedom of black people in Southern Africa was not a regional matter but a moral one.
Between 1975 and 1991, more than 300,000 Cuban troops rotated through Angola. That is not a footnote of history. That is a giant commitment written in blood.
At the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, the Cubans did what the apartheid regime and its Western patrons believed impossible: they broke the back of the myth of White Invincibility.
The myth was simple and poisonous, and it was spread by all the propaganda agencies of the imperialist West. White military supremacy was invincible. The South African Defence Force, armed with Western technology and nourished by NATO indulgence, believed itself untouchable. The doctrine of racial superiority was not merely social; it was strategic. It informed every calculation, every military offensive, every sneer.
The Battle of Cuito Cuanavale put paid to all that.
The battle raged from late 1987 into 1988. Cuban pilots flew combat missions. Cuban artillery roared. Angolan and Cuban forces held ground; the apartheid army was certain it would overrun. When the dust settled, something intangible but irreversible had shifted. The apartheid war machine had been checked. Its aura of inevitability had fractured.
Namibia’s independence followed. The negotiations that would culminate in the release of Nelson Mandela gathered momentum. The edifice of apartheid began its visible collapse. History can debate the sequence; it cannot deny the significance. Cuito Cuanavale was a turning point.
And Cuba stood at the center of it.
Now, let us consider the present, because history without contemporary application remains a mere academic exercise.
For over six decades, the United States has maintained a choking blockade against Cuba, an economic siege. Banks are pressured not to conduct business with Cuba. Trade is restricted. Fuel supplies are disrupted, with ships now being pirated.
The language shifts with each administration, but the central objective remains constant: squeeze until compliance is achieved or collapse is induced.
We were not told to whom Cuba poses a threat, except to the well-connected Cuban mafia exile community in Florida. The tiny Island certainly poses no threat whatever to a superpower with military bases encircling the globe? Cuba poses no threat to an economy that dwarfs the island many times over? The claim is absurd on its face, yet the machinery of sanctions grinds on.
Unfortunately, while Cuba is being mercilessly squeezed, Africa, the continent for which Cuban soldiers bled, remain silent.
Our misrulers in Africa can’t pretend to be ignorant of the pivotal role that Cuba played in Africa’s liberation struggles. They surely know the history, and they don their best Agbadas to attend liberation anniversaries every year. They lay wreaths and give meaningless solidarity speeches.
But when Cuba is squeezed in the vice of sanctions and direct threats, when additional punitive measures are announced, our continental institutions fall mute. Our spineless plantation managers, with no mind or agency of their own, lose their tongues.
In a situation that calls for unambiguous solidarity with a country that stood with Africa in her darkest hours, our shameless presidents weigh solidarity against their standing with Washington. They measure moral consistency against access to Western credit markets. They decide, almost invariably, that it is safer to remain discreetly neutral than to risk displeasing the architects of the blockade.
This is what I have long called the plantation reflex. On the plantation, survival required anticipating the master’s mood. You learned when to speak and when to lower your eyes. You learned that defiance carried consequences. You learned that proximity to power was more valuable than solidarity with fellow laborers.
Our contemporary elite has perfected this reflex in diplomatic language. They speak of “balanced foreign policy.” They praise “constructive engagement.” They avoid “taking sides.”
In reality, they are taking a side, the side of convenience.
The hottest furnace in hell would be reserved for this crop of idiotic misrulers in Africa.
My foremost GoTo geopolitical analyst, Alistair Crooke, has observed that the post-1945 order is not eternal. The distribution of power that followed the Second World War was contingent, not divine.
Today, that structure is under strain. The West’s financial dominance is challenged, and alternative trade arrangements are emerging. The unipolar moment has passed its peak. Multipolarity is the in-thing.
Yet the geopolitical illiterates in power across Africa behave as though the Cold War never ended. They cling to Western approval as if it were oxygen. They fear sanctions more than they fear the erosion of their own moral authority. For them, national sovereignty is merely words on paper.
It is sad, painful even, to watch as Africa revealed itself to the world as a continent of cowardly ingrates with no moral agency whatever.
Where is the collective African statement that the continued strangulation of Cuba is unacceptable? Where is the coordinated economic initiative to mitigate the effects of the blockade? Where is the symbolic gesture, however modest, that signals memory and reciprocity?
As Cuba is being squeezed to death, unashamed African presidents continue to line up in Western capitals for handshakes, assurances, and approval. They speak of partnership while ignoring the suffocation of a nation that once stood with our continent when partnership was measured in coffins, not contracts.
Let us not wrap this as pragmatic diplomacy. It is not. What we witness now is deference, fear, and strategic timidity.
Understandably, ordinary Africans may not be familiar with the intricacies of sanctions policy. But those who govern cannot claim such innocence. They are educated. They are briefed. They understand the symbolism of Cuito Cuanavale and the lived reality of Cuba’s present hardship.
Yes, the moral pygmies chose caution.
Let us, for a moment, consider a different Africa. An Africa that announces a coordinated humanitarian initiative for Cuba, medical supplies, fuel agreements, and technical exchanges. An Africa that states publicly that historical solidarity carries contemporary obligations. An Africa willing to endure diplomatic friction in defense of principle.
Of course, Washington would issue threats.
But, as we have written several times in this blog, sovereignty that cannot withstand pressure is ornamental. It exists on paper, not in practice.
The tragedy of our time is not that Africa lacks resources or intelligence. It is that too many of its leaders lack nerve. They inherit the victories secured in part by Cuban sacrifice, yet they recoil from even symbolic acts of gratitude.
The title stands: Africa, the ungrateful ingrates.
Not because our people are inherently so, but because those who speak in our name have reduced gratitude to rhetoric. They commemorate yesterday’s solidarity while shrinking from today’s responsibility.
Cuba did not consult balance sheets before dispatching troops to Angola. It did not calculate the impact on investor confidence. It acted from conviction, moral conviction.
If Africa cannot muster even a fraction of that conviction now, then we must confront an uncomfortable truth: we celebrate liberation struggles whose moral courage we no longer possess.
Cuito Cuanavale was a battlefield victory. The war for African dignity continues. And in that struggle, silence is not neutrality. It is a surrender dressed in stupid diplomatic attire.
©️ Fẹ̀mi Akọ̀mọ̀làfẹ̀ (1st Dan)
(Farmer, Writer, Published Author, Essayist, Satirist, Social Commentator, Geopolitical Analyst.)
My Mission: Ignorantia et stultitia delendae sunt / Ignorance and stupidity must be destroyed.
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