Following the results of the presidential elections and the election of Donald Trump, the Make the Road New York collective, followed by around thirty associations and collectives, organized a demonstration in New York City on November 9, 2024 to resist Donald Trump s second term. Picture: Claire Serie / Hans Lucas.
WESLEY SEALE
IN A symbolic visit, lame-duck US president, Joe Biden, touched down in Luanda, Angola this past week for a three-day visit.
It was a symbolic visit because on Tuesday, the second day of the historic visit, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) did not publish a single article on the US president’s visit to Africa or Angola. As Africans, we are not taken seriously by the US.
It was the first visit of a sitting US president to Angola and the first time a sitting US president has visited the continent for almost a decade.
While Biden exits office next month, the US president has come late to the party of one of sub-Saharan Africa’s fastest developing countries. In fact, during the commodity boom of the 2000s, Angola was consecutively clocking double-digit economic growth rate figures.
Yet the late arrival of the US has much to do with its role in the civil war in Angola and for supporting the anti-liberation rebels, UNITA. The People’s Republic of China also supported UNITA.
By now, after nearly 50 years of liberation in Angola, the US was probably hoping that MPLA would be out of power. Evidence suggests that they are working hard to effect regime change in Angola as they support opposition parties in Tanzania, Namibia, Zambia and Botswana.
In the latter two, they have been able to achieve ‘regime change’ through the ballot box. They are working hard to do so in Mozambique, here in South Africa and no doubt in Angola.
But Biden’s visit is largely symbolic because of the administration that will replace his come January 20th.
For example, incoming US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, from the Cuban-American community in Florida will think very little of it.
Rubio has been a vociferous opponent of the normalization of Cuban-American relations.
It was Cuba though that was on the side of freedom and the liberation movement in Angola.
While the Americans were backing apartheid South Africa’s attacks in Angola, Fidel Castro was sending Cuban troops to fight alongside other liberation movements and MPLA for the freedom of Angola.
It was at Cassinga and Cuito Cuanavale that Cuba created an umbilical cord with our continent that would remain forever.
Many commentators suggested that former US President Obama’s tribute to Madiba, at the elder statesman’s funeral, was his historical handshake with the former Cuban leader, Raúl Castro.
The handshake shook into motion the normalization process between the US and Cuba; an island suffering for more than 60 years under the yoke of an unjust US embargo.
Obama, with no re-election campaign to fear unlike Biden in 2020 and 2024, took Cuba off the so-called states sponsoring terrorism list and visited the island in March 2016.
For some, this thawing of relations with Cuba handed the state of Florida, won by Obama in both 2008 and 2012, to the Republicans with Donald Trump as their candidate.
Trump, who had long been doing business in Cuba, was benefitting from the efforts of the outgoing Democratic president.
Rubio, then the Republican senator from Florida, was “deeply concerned” in 2016 and expressed that Trump would have to “answer some questions” about reports that one of his companies had violated the US trade embargo in the late 1990s.
According to the reports, Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts had paid a consulting firm to help it “in the event the US loosened trade restrictions.” Trump, and his businesses, were ready to go into Cuba.
But Trump soon realized that to win the Republican nomination then in 2016, in 2020 and now again in 2024, he had to rope in Rubio and go hard on Cuba.
Trump went tough on Cuba and placed it again on the terror list in his final days in 2021.
In 2017, less than four months after Trump’s inauguration, Rubio reminded Trump that what he had committed on Cuba and promised to do was “never going to come from career staff.”
According to Rubio, “It’s going to have to come from the top down. You’re going to have to tell them what to do.”
Eight years later, Rubio, with Trump, is now on the top and he will no doubt tell US State Department staff to go tougher on Cuba.
In the meantime, while Biden’s bogus binge to the Benguela Peninsula was betiding, incoming president for a second time, Trump, posted on X that BRICS countries “will face 100% Tariffs [sic], and should expect to say goodbye to selling into the wonderful U.S. Economy [sic]” should they “move away from the Dollar”.
It is a storm in a teacup because the process of de-dollarization will be finalized only years after Trump has left office, Trump’s missive and the liberal media’s running with it exemplifies once again the American arrogance on Cuba as well as Africa and Angola during the fight for liberation.
The re-election of Donald Trump must only spell to the rest of us one thing: American desperation.
Ordinary Americans have discovered that they are not the only people on the planet who can travel the universe, develop the most sophisticated technology and produce the most goods and services in the world.
Since Vietnam, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan they have realized that the people of the world will simply not take their bullying and accept the destruction of their countries.
Seventy years ago, Africans may have accepted the assassination of our leaders and CIA involvement in them or the rest of the developing world simply resigning themselves to American interference in their country’s domestic politics and regime change.
This is no longer the case.
Despite the next four years being tough for Cubans, Cubans have taught humanity how to be resilient.
One can just imagine how the young cadres of the Communist Party of China reacted to Trump’s tweet: hide and bide.
“In four years, he will be gone,” they say, “for now, we just concentrate on what we have to do and, if necessary, do it in silence!”
* Dr. Wesley Seale has a PhD in international relations.
** The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the views of The African.