Fidel Castro Heads to Africa Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit Fidel Castro Heads to Africa By ANITA SNOW HAVANA, Aug 29 (AP)--Fidel Castro left Cuba on Wednesday for the ancestral motherland of a majority of people in this heavily black Caribbean nation, winging to Africa for a global racism conference. A heavily symbolic trip, Castro is traveling from a country where most of its 11 million citizens have some African ancestry to the continent where thousands of Cuban troops died helping free black nations from white colonialism. Although there was no official confirmation of Castro's trip in Havana, the United Nations has confirmed that the Cuban leader will speak Sept. 1, the second day of the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. He had a stopover in Brazil on Wednesday evening, where he was greeted in the city of Rio de Janiero by a delegation led by Anthony Gartinho, the governor of the surrounding state of Rio de Janeiro. Castro last visited South Africa in 1994, when he attended Nelson Mandela's presidential inauguration. His last visit to the African continent was to Algeria earlier this year. This week's visit will be the first major road trip for Castro, 75, since a June 23 fainting spell that sparked concerns about his well-being. Castro and his aides insist his health is good. Since the fainting spell, Castro's only international trip has been to celebrate his birthday with President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Communist Cuba began forming links with Africa in the first years after the Jan. 1, 1959 revolutionary triumph that brought Castro to power. As early as 1964, revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara portrayed Cuba as an advocate for black Africa in its struggle against racism and colonialism. "The brutal policy of apartheid is being carried out before the eyes of the whole world," Guevara declared at the U.N. General Assembly that year. "Can the United Nations do nothing to prevent this?" Cuba's early embrace of small African nations resounded with the Caribbean island's blacks and people of mixed black and white heritage. "I think the hand of Cuba has touched every African nation," said Nerza Ruiz, a 74-year-old retired educator. Estimates of the Cuba's racial breakdown vary somewhat, but most put the number of people with at least some African roots at about two-thirds the population. Castro first traveled to Africa in 1972. He stayed for a week in Guinea - later a staging area for Soviet-Cuban military and political influence on the continent. But even as early as 1963, Cuban troops were reportedly sent to Algeria to help in a border dispute with Morocco. Also during the 1960s, Cuban units were dispatched to Congo, where they backed a military government for more than two decades. Those early forays into Africa were minor compared with Cuban interventions in Angola and Ethiopia, beginning in the last half of the 1970s. Cuba sent several tens of thousands of troops to back Ethiopian forces after a Somali invasion in 1977-78. In Angola, tens of thousands of Cuban soldiers helped that government and the Namibian Liberation Movement defeat U.S.-supported rebels and South African government troops in the mid-1970s. The presidents of South Africa, Nambia, Zimbabwe, Guinea-Bissau and Burkina Faso have all made separate official visits to Cuba in the past two years. While reaching out to black Africa, Castro also has courted American blacks ever since he rose to power. Castro first visited Harlem in 1960, where he also met with Malcom X. His last visit there was for the U.N. Millennium Summit last year. AP-NY-08-29-01 2040EDT (c) 2001 The Associated Press ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytrc-08.30.01-00:41:57-30038