Cuba: Victory for Free Speech in Miami Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit A VICTORY FOR FREE SPEECH IN MIAMI Hundreds Hear Cuban Revolutionaries at Florida Universities by Jon Hillson NORTH MIAMI, NOV 19 (NY Transfer)--Electricity was in the air as the overwhelming majority of a standing-room-only crowd at Florida International University (FIU) cheered Cuban revolutionaries Ana Morales and Victor Dreke, drowning out efforts by ultra-rightwing Cuban exiles to disrupt the meeting, after their frantic campaign failed to pressure the FIU administration to cancel the November 13 event. Dreke was a colleague of Ernesto Che Guevara in the administration of the revolutionary tribunals that imposed justice on captured thugs of the Batista dictatorship after the triumph of the Cuban revolution in 1959. A combatant in the guerrilla war that had earlier overthrown the U.S.-backed tyranny, he subsequently was a leader of the "lucha contra bandidos [struggle against bandits]" in the Escambray Mountains -- Cuba's 1960-1965 struggle against Washington's first contra war in the country's central highlands -- and was Guevara's second-in-command in Cuba's seven-month internationalist military mission alongside Congolese fighters in 1965. Dreke subsequently headed a similar detachment allied with legendary Guinea-Bissau rebel leader Amilcar Cabral, and later played a central role in Cuba's Africa solidarity work. Morales, a Cuban doctor who helped found Guinea-Bissau's first medical school, is an instructor in Cuba's Latin American School of Medical Sciences. The institution is currently training 6,000 students from Latin America's poorest regions and working-class neighborhoods to be doctors. The student body also includes students from three African countries and the United States. The two Cubans concluded their university-based month-long speaking tour -- during which they addressed 2,000 students, youth and political activists from Washington, DC and Baltimore, through Atlanta and Valdosta, Georgia, where they met with Black farmers, to Birmingham and Tuscaloosa, Alabama -- with events and the University of Massachusetts in Boston on November 14 and Brown University in Providence on November 15. The Africa-Cuba Speakers Committee, based at Howard University in Washington, DC, with the broad array of academic support, coordinated the project. Dreke's memoir of his key experiences, "In the Whirlwind of the Cuban Revolution: From the Escambray to the Congo," published by Pathfinder, is one of a growing series of books by veteran Cuban revolutionaries telling their stories. Enrique Oltuskis's "Vida Clandestina" (Jossey-Bass) appeared several months ago. And a new Che Guevara diary, "Otra Vez" (Grove Press), details his life from the conclusion of the "Motorcycle Diaries" through his transforming experience in Guatemala. The meetings for Dreke and Morales in Florida -- at the University of South Florida in Tampa on November 12 and at FIU in North Miami on November 13 -- provided the most dramatic encounters of the tour. "Exile community outraged at presence of Cuban torturer in Miami" blared a boxed, front-page announcement in the right-wing daily "Diario de las Amiricas" here on the afternoon prior to the event. This was part of a sustained campaign mounted by Miami's professional "anti-Castro" media, particularly radio stations, to force cancellation of the FIU meeting. Standing up to such pressure, Aileen Izquierdo, a spokesperson for FIU, told the media that it was the "common practice" of the big public university to invite "different personalities with different perspectives" to speak on campus. The sponsors at FIU were the Department of Africa-New World Studies and the International Relations Student Council, along with professors, student leaders, and community and political organizations. These included the Alianza Martiana, which brings together progressive Cuban-Americans, the pro-revolution Cuban-American Antonio Maceo Brigade and the Miami Coalition to End the Embargo Against Cuba, which worked overtime to get out the word about the meeting and built its defense on short notice. What transpired was too obvious for even the "Miami Herald" -- notoriously hostile to anything positive about Cuba -- to ignore. In a major article on the FIU event, illustrated with two photos of the meeting, the "Herald" reported that "Outside the ballroom, about 20 protesters held 'Assassin' signs, as well as one that read 'Freedom for Cuba. Helping Castro is a Crime.' But several hundred people at the forum were curious to hear what Dreke had to say and the majority of the crowd offered a standing ovation when his named was first announced. [They] were able hear [him] lambaste the U.S. embargo and tout his nation's contribution to the welfare of native Africans and Afro-Cubans." Did the accusations hurled at Dreke bother FIU student Leslie Bazin? the "Herald" asked. Not at all. "A lot of people can be held responsible for deaths everywhere," she said, "including our country." An additional 30 people who were "curious" were, like the reactionaries, unable to enter the jammed meeting room. Inside the ballroom, another 20 ultra-rightists -- all but a handful middle-aged or older -- shouted slogans and tried to disrupt the meeting. Among them was Andris Nazario Sargin, head of the Alpha 66 terrorist organization. "Mainstream" opponents of the Cuban revolution also campaigned against the meeting, but when push came to shove were nowhere to be found. Ninoska Pirez Castellsn, a former top leader of the Cuban American National Foundation and currently a spokeswoman for the Cuban Liberty Council, devoted a radio show to denunciation of Dreke, stating her intent to grill the Cuban revolutionary about stories "his victims told me" but, according to the "Miami Herald," "canceled her plans to attend Dreke's talk when a relative took ill." The rightist goon squad in the meeting was intimidated from more aggressive action by a disciplined, organized volunteer defense team of 50 -- mostly students, and including Cuban-Americans and Haitians -- that reflected the determination of the audience to hear the two Cubans. This forced campus police to escort the loudest rightists from the room. As one of them shouted "Viva Cuba!" most the crowd of 260 people boomed out the same refrain, with an utterly different meaning. Several of the exiles decided to stay and engage Dreke and Morales, a challenge the two Cuban revolutionaries solicited, and responded to with serenity. The two-hour meeting concluded with another standing ovation for the two Cubans, marking an historic victory for free speech in Miami, and a body blow to the ultra-rightist Cuban-Americans, whose real weaknesses were revealed in nationwide revulsion to their abusive conduct during the fight to repatriate Elian Gonzalez to his Cuban family. News accounts on reactionary Cuban-American radio stations termed the event a "national disaster" for their moribund decades-long anti-communist cause. Activists report that days after the event, these outlets continue to engage in hand-wringing, hair-pulling and self-recrimination for their failure to silence the voices of their mortal enemies, irrespective of the Bill of Rights. The majority student audience included scores of African-American and Haitian youth -- an upcoming protest of Immigration and Naturalization Service attacks on Haitian immigrants was repeatedly announced from the stage -- as well as dozens of progressive Cuban-Americans and political activists. Seven Haitian students from the University of South Florida were among four carloads of activists inspired by the Dreke-Morales meeting the night before in Tampa to drive 180 miles south to participate in the defense team at the Miami meeting. They had been part of a crowd of 120 at USF that cheered the two Cubans, crushing the spirits of a dozen ultra-rightists who failed to break up the previous day's meeting. The FIU event -- the largest in recent memory to listen to representatives from Cuba and the largest-ever to host a Cuban leader of Dreke's experience and rank -- was also proof of the attractive power of the ideas and example of the Cuban revolution, which the two explained in their presentations and while fielding questions from the audience. Dreke provided detailed explanations of Cuban internationalist missions in Algeria, the Congo and Guinea Bissau. Responding to an ultra-rightist who intimated that such actions were defined by Washington's "cold war" rivalry with the USSR, Dreke stated, to broad applause, that "Cuban international solidarity was never dominated by the Soviet Union." The theme of the tour has been "Cuba and Africa: 1959 to Today." "I am not saying that anybody in the audience is a terrorist," he said, but he expressed outrage that "real terrorists, like Luis Posada Carriles" -- the convicted architect of the 1976 Cuban jetliner bombing that killed all 73 passengers off the shores of Barbados -- "walk freely on the streets of this city. I could not sleep at night if I did not get this off my chest." The crowd cheered. Morales chronicled the history of Cuba's medical missions in Africa, as well as the evolution and success of Cuba's public health system. "These achievements," she said, "are possible only because Cuban doctors receive socialist training. Because medical care is a right, and organized on the basis of human need, not profit, we now have 67,000 doctors." This figure is even more impressive because, after 1959, "more than 3,000 Cuban doctors, out of 6,000, left the country," she said. When an ultra-rightist demanded to know if Cuban doctors were permitted to leave now, Morales shrugged her shoulders. "We have 67,000 doctors. If someone wants to leave, that's fine." "If people hijack a small plane and fill it up," Dreke said to applause, "they are welcomed here. But if they are Haitians, they are arrested and deported." Asked what they had learned during their stay in the United States, Dreke said he had "learned to love the North American people." "I have learned to love them even more," Morales said. Referring to several young Haitians she had met in Tampa, she said, "I have four new daughters." Afterward, at the modest home of a member of the Alianza Martiana, where 40 people celebrated with the two Cubans, Dreke told the group how they "insisted to the tour organizers that we go to Miami. We kept saying, 'when do we go to Miami?' So they agreed." He and Morales were inspired to make the request, "by young people we met in Valdosta, Georgia. And so we came to Miami. And it was the hottest meeting of the tour. But it was a victory, not just for us. It is your victory, too. And we share it together." Copyright (c) 2002 by Jon Hillson and NY Transfer News. Non-profit reproduction, with credit and without alteration, is permitted. ================================================================= 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 ================================================================= nytact-11.19.02-13:43:48-25090