CUBA:
Will History Absolve Fidel Castro?
Analysis by Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO,  (IPS) - While socialist flags have been steadily disappearing from the world stage and Cuban President Fidel Castro has stepped aside, at least temporarily, anti-imperialist sentiment is likely to remain the Cuban regime's main source of internal cohesion and international influence.

Castro made his famous statement: "History will absolve me" while on trial for the failed 1953 uprising against the Fulgencio Batista regime (known as the attack on the Moncada barracks). The 27-year-old Castro was sent to prison, but six years later the revolution he was leading toppled the dictatorship.

Cuba was unsuccessful in its attempts to export its revolution through its own offensives and support for foreign armed groups, including training for thousands of guerrilla fighters in Africa and Latin America. Nevertheless, the Caribbean island's footprint on the international scene is nonetheless impressive for a small country of 11.2 million inhabitants.

This aspect is a key part of any assessment of the "Castro era", although history will primarily judge the Cuban leader, who turned 80 on Sunday, on his work within Cuba and what the future holds: the collapse, continuation or reform of the political system that has reigned for 47 years.

Cuba's best known attempt to back an armed insurrection beyond its borders was during the failed guerrilla war in Bolivia, which ended in 1967 with the death of the legendary Ernesto "Che" Guevara. The famed Argentine-Cuban gave up the posts and hero's honours he earned as a leader of the Cuban Revolution to dedicate himself to armed struggles overseas, joined by dozens of Cuban soldiers.

"Create one, two, three, many Vietnams" was the slogan to drum up support for armed resistance in a number of countries, with the aim of combating imperialism and backing the Vietnamese, who faced escalating intervention from U.S. troops.

The struggle was also against Latin American military dictatorships propped up by the United States during the 1960s and 1970s.

Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay were the settings for largely urban uprisings, based on local ideas and conditions, but inspired by the Cuban revolution. Many of the rebels were also trained in Cuba, and were convinced that "the duty of a revolutionary is to make revolution."

But the training they received was "for rural guerrilla warfare," said Efraín Martínez Platero, a former leader of the Uruguayan Tupamaro insurgents, in the book "The Impossible Revolution" by journalist Alfonso Lessa.

"You can imagine that someone trained in rural guerrilla warfare in Cuba would be completely out of his element in street clashes in Montevideo," he added.

These armed movements were crushed by military and police forces that systematically used torture, summary executions and forced disappearance. Only Nicaragua's Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) was successful, taking power in 1979. It was bolstered by broad-based opposition, even on the part of the business community, to the decades-old Somoza family dictatorship.

Cubans were directly involved in insurgencies in many Latin American countries in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, and dozens of them were killed. In addition to Bolivia, they were present in Argentina, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Nicaragua and Venezuela, according to Dariel Alarcón Ramírez, who fought under the name "Benigno" - one of the five surviving members of Guevara's Bolivia force.

Benigno fought in the Cuban revolution which began in the Sierra Maestra mountains, and spent years training guerrillas from other countries. But he broke with the Cuban regime in 1995, went into exile in France and wrote "Memories of a Cuban Soldier û The Life and Death of the Revolution", a book in which he levels serious accusations at Fidel Castro, including the suggestion that the leader sent Che to die in Bolivia.

Benigno speaks of the Cubans who died in Algeria, Angola, Ethiopia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Somalia, the Western Sahara and Uganda. The troops helped groups in these and other countries resist European colonialism and consolidate the first governments of newly independent countries.

The prime example was Angola, where thousands of Cuban soldiers (in the final stage, approximately 50,000 were fighting) helped ensure the nation's independence in 1975 by containing the South African military invasion and supporting the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) government, which fought a civil war for more than 20 years.

The Cuban troops were loyal to Angola's first president, Agostinho Neto, who died in 1979, as well as his successor, José Eduardo dos Santos. In 1977, the troops played a key role in thwarting a coup d'état organised during the Cold War by an MPLA dissident group, allegedly backed by the Soviets.

On that occasion, Havana and Moscow were in opposing camps, despite Cuban dependence on Soviet economic aid, which continued until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

One of the mysteries of the Cuban regime is the 1989 firing-squad death of General Arnaldo Ochoa, another Sierra Maestra hero, who ran the operations in Angola. Accused of drug trafficking, he was given a whirlwind trial and quickly executed.

But Benigno claims the general's illegal activities generated much-needed income for Cuba, and that his activities were condoned and even authorised by the Cuban government and the ruling Communist Party. In his book, Benigno calls the summary execution a way of placating U.S. authorities, who were allegedly getting ready to crack down on the Cuban drug trade.

Its staunch anti-imperialist position also led Cuba into relations with non-socialist, nationalist military governments that took power through coups, such as that of Omar Torrijos in Panama (1968-1981) and General Juan Velasco Alvarado in Peru (1968-1975).

Cuba has recently begun to break out of the isolation imposed by the United States' economic embargo and exclusion from the Organisation of American States, a situation it has weathered for more than 40 years, through close cooperation with governments opposed to Washington, such as those of Bolivia and Venezuela, and ties with more moderate left-leaning administrations such as those of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay.

Venezuelan oil has been a major boon for the Cuban economy, and the country has replaced its soldiers with thousands of doctors in its revamped offensive abroad. Some 20,000 Cuban medical professionals are said to be in Venezuela alone, and Castro has told the United Nations that it is willing to send 4,000 doctors to Africa to fight the spread of HIV/AIDS.