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Vol. 82/No. 17 April 30, 2018
(Books of the Month column)
Defeat of US imperialism at Playa Girón was historic
Below is an excerpt from Cuba’s Internationalist Foreign Policy,
1975-80, by Fidel Castro, one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for
April. It comes from his speech “Angola: African Girón,” given on April
19, 1976, in commemoration of the 15th anniversary of the Cuban victory
at the Bay of Pigs (Playa Girón). This year marks the 57th anniversary
of the “first defeat of Yankee imperialism on this continent.”
African Girón refers to the March 27, 1976, battle where the apartheid
South African army — which invaded Angola right before it was to
celebrate its independence from Portuguese colonial rule — was pushed
out of Angola with the help of thousands of Cuban volunteers. Over the
next 15 years hundreds of thousands of additional Cuban internationalist
volunteers joined this effort. In 1988 combined Cuban, Angolan and
Namibian liberation forces dealt a decisive military defeat to the
apartheid regime at Cuito Cuanavale in southern Angola. Copyright © 1981
by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
BY FIDEL CASTRO
Precisely fifteen years ago, at this very hour, you could still hear the
echoes of the last shots of the battle that smashed one of Yankee
imperialism’s most sinister and traitorous actions against a Latin
American people. Girón [Bay of Pigs] went down in history as the first
defeat of Yankee imperialism on this continent.
It would be useless to try to find the slightest ethical principle in a
system whose every act is characterized by exploitation, plunder,
deceit, and crime. …
Everything concerning the Girón episode was treacherous, a flagrant
violation of international law, a perfidy, and a crime. The sinister CIA
invested tens of millions of dollars to recruit, train, and equip
mercenaries: landowners, bourgeois elements, traitors, war criminals,
drug addicts, common criminals, and lumpen. Its strategy was accompanied
by hair-raising plans to assassinate leaders of the Cuban revolution, in
which they did not hesitate to use known Mafia leaders, poison,
bacteria, explosives, and the most refined criminal methods. Beforehand,
at every hour of the day and night, in planes or boats, scores of agents
and thousands of arms were systematically brought in. They established
their training bases in one Central American state and the embarkation
points and air bases in another.
One quiet, clear dawn, on April 15, 1961, Yankee bombers bearing Cuban
insignia attacked our air bases where a few rickety old planes, with
barely half a dozen pilots, constituted our air forces. With
unparalleled cynicism, the United States representative declared in the
United Nations that those planes were part of our own air force that had
rebelled.
Everything was done with the tacit complicity and in many cases with the
collaboration of the majority of the Latin American governments and the
approval and support of the loathsome and repugnant OAS. Never before in
the history of our continent were such corruption, shamelessness,
cowardice, immorality, and crime brought together to carry out a
military and political action. That is what the mercenary attack on the
Bay of Pigs symbolizes. …
The option between the past and the future, reaction or progress,
treason or loyalty to principles, capitalism or socialism, imperialist
domination or liberation, was what was decided at Girón, on April 19,
1961. Three days earlier, at the grave of the first martyrs of that
brutal aggression, the people proclaimed the socialist nature of our
revolution, and the men and women of our homeland expressed their
readiness to die for it. No one knew how many mercenaries there were; no
one knew how many Yankee marines and soldiers would come in after them,
how many planes, how many further bombings it would be necessary to
bear. Never, as at that moment, was the slogan of “Patria o muerte” more
dramatic, real, and historic. The decision to win or die, embodied in a
whole people, was stronger than all the risk, suffering, and danger.
This made that day doubly historic, because our Marxist-Leninist party
was really born at Girón; [Applause] membership in our party is
recognized from that day on; from that day on, socialism was cemented
forever with the blood of our workers, peasants, and students; from that
day on, a new and completely different destiny opened up before the
people of this continent because of the liberty and dignity that one of
them had conquered in the face of aggression from the powerful empire
that subjected all. Because, say what you will, after Girón, all the
peoples of America were a little bit freer. …
In commemorating this, the fifteenth anniversary of the heroic, glorious
victory at Girón, our people have an additional reason to be proud,
which constitutes their finest expression of internationalism and
transcends the boundaries of this continent: the historical victory of
the people of Angola, [Prolonged applause] to whom we offered the
generous and unlimited solidarity of our revolution.
At Girón, African blood was shed, that of the selfless descendants of a
people who were slaves before they became workers, and who were
exploited workers before they became masters of their homeland. And in
Africa, together with the blood of the heroic fighters of Angola, Cuban
blood, that of the sons of Martí, Maceo, and Agramonte, that of the
heirs to the internationalist tradition set by Máximo Gómez and Che
Guevara, [Prolonged applause] also flowed. Those who once enslaved man
and sent him to America perhaps never imagined that one of those peoples
who received the slaves would one day send their fighters to struggle
for freedom in Africa.
The victory in Angola was the twin sister of the victory at Girón.
[Applause] For the Yankee imperialists, Angola represents an African
Girón. At one time we said that imperialism had suffered its great
defeats in the month of April: Girón, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc. This time
the defeat came in March. On the twenty-seventh of that month, when the
last South African soldiers crossed the Namibian border, after a retreat
of more than 700 kilometers, one of the most brilliant pages in the
liberation of Black Africa was written.
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