The friendship between Zimbabwe and Cuba
The friendship between Zimbabwe and Cuba
The common experience of land reform provoking sanctions
On January 25, 2024, the Vice-President of the Republic of Cuba, Salvador Valdés Mesa, arrived in Zimbabwe for an official visit that extended to January 26. It marked the third occasion in which Valdés Mesa has visited the African nation. He was welcomed by the Vice-President of Zimbabwe, Kembo D.C. Mohadi, who declared to the Cuban delegation, “You are very far from home, but you are at home.”
Mohadi observed that Cuba and Zimbabwe have been friends for many years, which has included Cuban support for African struggles for liberation, and it continues in the present in the form of cooperation in several areas. Of special importance, he noted, is the work carried out by the Cuban medical mission, which in addition to lending medical attention, includes the formation of Zimbabwean health professionals. He declared that “the work of Cuban doctors is very much recognized among us, and the results obtained speak for themselves.”
For his part, Valdés Mesa thanked his hosts for their warm welcome, and he expressed the hope that the visit will contribute to the continuing deepening of relations between the two countries. The Cuban Vice-President expressed the importance for Cuba of the relations between Zimbabwe and Cuba, which date to the struggles of Zimbabwe for independence, born in the close friendship ties between Fidel and the leader of the Zimbabwean people, Robert Mugabe. He noted that the purpose of the visit is to stimulate and amplify commercial relations between the two nations, especially in agriculture and in technology transfer. He also expressed the will of the Communist Party of Cuba to strengthen ties with ZANU-PF (Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front).
Relations between Cuba and Zimbabwe were established in 1980. Cooperation has been developing in the areas of health and education. There are sixteen medical workers in health as well as four university professors. A total of 1,907 Zimbabweans have graduated from Cuban universities and institutions.
The Vice-Presidents of Zimbabwe and Cuba participated in the capital city of Harare in a ceremony of inauguration of the Fidel Castro Road, which included the unveiling of a plaque recognizing the role that Fidel played in the liberation struggle of Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwean Vice-President declared that “Zimbabwe will always be grateful for the support we received from Cuba during our protracted struggle.” He described the renaming of the road as a small gesture that expresses the appreciation of Zimbabwe for the special bond and relationship between the two sister countries.
Valdés Mesa observed that during the Zimbabwean liberation struggle, Cuba sent weapons and personnel. Today, as a continued expression of solidarity, Cuban sends teachers to educate and doctors to heal.
From the ninth through the nineteenth centuries, the Kingdom of Zimbabwe and other kingdoms and empires dominated the region of present-day Zimbabwe. The city-state of Great Zimbabwe was a major African trading center in the eleventh century, playing a central role in the trade developed by Arab merchants along the Indian Ocean coast.
European conquest began in the 1880s, spearheaded by the British South Africa Company of Cecil Rhodes, who obtained a concession for mining rights from King Lobengula of the Ndebele peoples and a charter from the government of the United Kingdom. In the 1890s, the well-armed British South African Police (BASP) launched two wars to overcome indigenous African resistance and establish British control of the region. The BSAP adopted the name “Rhodesia” for the territory, in recognition of Cecil Rhodes.
In 1923, Southern Rhodesia became a self-governing British colony with privileges for white settlers, administered separately from Northern Rhodesia (present-day Zambia). In 1930, the Land Apportionment Act restricted black land ownership and set aside large tracts of land for purchase by whites.
In the context of a continent-wide process of decolonization, Zambia became independent in 1964. This led the white minority in Southern Rhodesia, led by the Rhodesian Front of Ian Smith, to declare the independence of Rhodesia (dropping the adjective “Southern”), seeking to avoid a situation of black majority rule. The United Kingdom did not recognize the independence of Rhodesia. Inasmuch as its concept of white minority rule was inconsistent with the neocolonial ideology of the evolving world-system, the UK petitioned and obtained sanctions of Rhodesia by the United Nations, and the United States also imposed sanctions.
African resistance in Rhodesia was divided into two factions, the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) of Robert Mugabe and the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) of Joshua Nkomo.
In 1978, Smith reached an accord with a third African faction of accommodationists, led by Bishop Abel Muzorewa. The agreement established a “biracial democracy” that preserved white control of the Rhodesian Security Forces, the civil service, and the judiciary, and it reserved one-third of parliamentary seats for whites.
Seeing the unsustainability of the agreement for biracial democracy, the United Kingdom invited the leaders of the three African factions to a constitutional conference that would establish British-supervised elections without restrictions on the basis of race, and which would be a step toward independence. In this context, the Rhodesian House of Assembly voted unanimously to end its claim for independence and to revert to colonial status.
In the elections of February 1980, ZANU and Robert Mugabe attained a landslide victory, establishing Mugabe as the Prime Minister and the head of state. However, conflict along tribal lines emerged, until 1987, when Mugabe and Nkomo reached a unity agreement involving the merger of their respective political parties, establishing the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU–PF). ZANU-PF won an overwhelming victory in the elections of 1990. ZANU-PF has repeatedly won elections since, with Emmerson Mnangagwa succeeding Mugabe in 2017.
But the racialized distribution of farmland, a legacy of the era of white minority rule, remained. In spite of reforms in the 1980s that allows buying and selling without reference to race, whites continued to hold 70% of fertile agricultural lands, even though whites constituted 0.6% of the population, as a result of insufficient funding and financial support for black settlement.
In 1992, the government initiated a program of compulsory acquisition of land, with compensation for the owners. The program was plagued by insufficient donor support for compensation and accusations of political favoritism in the distribution of land. In 1997, Clare Short, British secretary of state for international development, informed the Agriculture Minister of Zimbabwe that “we do not accept that Britain has a special responsibility to meet the costs of land purchase in Zimbabwe.”
In 2000, the pro-Mugabe Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans, which included children and grandchildren of the veterans of the war of national liberation, marched on white-owned farmlands. Some white farm owners were violently removed from the land without compensation. Twenty years later, the government of Zimbabwe offered to return land to white farmers whose land was illegally seized.
But in spite of such conflicts, the government proceeded with the purchase of land and its division for smallholder production. As of 2011, there were approximately 300 white farmers remaining in Zimbabwe; which rose to 1,000 following the 2020 offer.
The land reform was accompanied by continuing accusations of political favoritism in the distribution of land. However, a 2012 report by the Institute of Development Studies states that “49.9% of those who received land were rural peasants, 18.3% were ‘unemployed or in low-paid jobs in regional towns, growth points and mines,’ 16.5% were civil servants, and 6.7% were of the Zimbabwean working class. Despite the claims by critics of the land reform only benefiting government bureaucrats, only 4.8% of the land went to businesspeople, and 3.7% went to security services. About 5% of the households went to absentee farmers well connected to ZANU-PF.”
Since 2002, Mugabe and the ZANU-PF leadership have been subjected to a wide variety of sanctions. The U.S. Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act, which freezes credit to the government of Zimbabwe, went into effect in 2002, as a punishment for reckless farm seizures, for the appropriation of 4,000 white farms, and for supposed election tampering.
The ideology of the neocolonial world-system proclaims support for democracy, framed as multi-party representative democracy and the protection of civil and political rights. For this reason, it was opposed to the white minority regime of Ian Smith in Rhodesia, and it favors black majority rule. However, black-ruled supposedly independent states are subjected to accusations of human and political rights violations when they take steps that are designed as structural economic transformations, and especially important are land reform programs that involve the widespread redistribution of land. With their myopic vision, the Western powers never look for sustainable win-win solutions, such as the mobilization of global financial resources to finance compensation for former owners as well as financial and technical support for a new class of small-scale independent farmers. Weak states with small economies seeking to implement land reform are on their own, with sanctions imposed.
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