How Far We Slaves Have Come – Nelson Mandela

Now it is we who cultivate the land, who harvest the fruit. Now it is we who create the wealth. This is the activity of a free people; this is socialism. It is not the activity of the poor, the outcast, the immigrants who replaced the slaves; it is not the unemployed who lined up outside the sugarcane plantations. It is we, all of us, to a greater or lesser extent, because in these times we have also seen engineers, doctors, and scientists participating in the agricultural mobilisations.12 And because every year we see our students, hundreds of thousands of students, participating in the programme where the schools go to the countryside and studying at the schools in the countryside, or working in factories, or assembling bicycles, or producing spare parts.

We see all of our young people participating in these physical efforts that the slaves and later the outcasts, the poor, the disinherited, the unemployed, or the underemployed used to do. This also has great historical significance. When one talks about the work that the people of Matanzas have done, one talks about what they have created and are creating with their hands, everywhere.

Let us not emphasise now that we’re imperfect, which we already know. Let us not emphasise that we have many deficiencies; we know that and we’re not going to forget it. Let us emphasise instead the efforts that our people are making today; let us emphasise their virtues, their capacity for sacrifice, the fruits of their efforts. We should note that in 1990 – a difficult year and the year in which the special period began13 – and in the first part of 1991, the residents of Matanzas completed 232 construction projects, some of a social and others of an economic nature, primarily economic ones.

They range from the small port for supertankers to the highway between Matanzas and Varadero being completed, to dams, mini-dams, irrigation and sewage systems, rice irrigation systems, a steel foundry, light industry factories, food industry facilities, hog-farming centres, pasturing areas, and an infinite number of projects on which the residents of Matanzas have been working with special fervour in the last few months – because we should also include the special efforts they have made for the 26 July celebration – but it added up to 232 projects. There are also polyclinics, new hospital wings, and daycare centres – programmes that were in progress and that are now completed.

We cannot forget that the most important petroleum deposits in the country are found in Matanzas and that Matanzas produces about half a million tons of petroleum. This is heavy petroleum with quite a bit of sulfur, but it solves a lot of problems.

The layout of this digital edition of How Far We Slaves Have Come may differ from that of the printed version, depending on the settings on your reader. The layout displays optimally if you use the default setting on your reader. Readers can experiment with the settings to have the pages displayed differently. OceanofPDF.com Preface MARY-ALICE WATERS On 26 July 1991, Nelson Mandela, president of the African National Congress (ANC), and Fidel Castro, president of Cuba, spoke together for the first time on the same platform.

On this historic occasion, they were addressing a rally of tens of thousands in Matanzas, Cuba, marking the thirty-eighth anniversary of the opening of the Cuban revolution. The pages that follow contain the complete text of the speeches by Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro at the Matanzas rally, as well as the resolution of Cuba’s Council of State awarding Mandela the José Marti medal, the highest honour conferred by the government of Cuba. Here Mandela and Castro explain why the two struggles of which they are central leaders – the battle to build a revolutionary democratic movement in South Africa capable of uprooting the apartheid system and the battle to strengthen the internationalism and communist direction of the Cuban revolution – have been closely intertwined for the past three decades.

Through their words, we can better understand why the struggles being waged by the working people of South Africa and Cuba are today the most important examples for fighters everywhere who want to rid the earth of racism and exploitation and chart a road forward for all humanity. In November 1975 the Cuban government, in response to a request from the government of Angola, sent thousands of volunteer troops to that country to help defeat the invading armed forces of South Africa’s apartheid regime.

Pretoria was determined to block the Angolan people from realising their hard-fought independence from Portugal, set for 11 November 1975. The apartheid rulers recognised that the crumbling of the Portuguese empire, the last bastion of European colonialism on the African continent, would provide impetus in South Africa itself to struggles to end white minority rule. The Cuban government named its internationalist mission in Angola ‘Operation Carlotta’, after the slave who led an 1843 rebellion in Cuba’s Matanzas Province – the site of the 26 July rally.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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• Unique ID: 24d4e446da184b64
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 697,942 bytes (0.666 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• ISBN: 9780795707674, 9780795707681, 9780795707698
• Pages: 75
• Language: English (en)

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