There’s something about the tiny island of Cuba that causes even the sanest heads in the ANC to get positively dizzy with sentiment. A few weeks ago, former finance minister Tito Mboweni gushed: “Friendships that last forever — Cuba and the ANC, OR Tambo and Fidel Castro.”
So what is it about the Caribbean island of 11.3m people, 12,000km from SA, that causes our government leaders to lose their minds?
In July 1991, months after Nelson Mandela had been released from Victor Verster prison, one of his first overseas visits was to Castro, where he spoke of how Cuba had “made a contribution to African independence, freedom, and justice unparalleled for its principled and selfless character”.
But recognising Castro’s support during the struggle is one thing; compromising SA’s tenuous fiscal position by chucking billions of rands at Cuba is quite another.
The FM calculates that SA has stumped up more than R1.5bn in loans and debt relief for Cuba — including a R1.1bn debt write-off in 2010, an economic assistance package of R350m in 2021, and an R84m loan last year.
And that’s only the surface: add in the amounts that SA pays for “exchange programmes”, to bring out Cuban doctors, engineers and teachers to this country, and the cost runs into the billions.
Last year, for example, SA spent R239m to bring Cuban doctors and nurses to SA, ostensibly to fight Covid.
That’s besides the long-running programme under which Cuba has been training SA doctors and nurses since 1996, at an estimated cost of R2.1m each — more than double the estimated R900,000 it would cost to train them in SA.
You can hardly kick a can down the hallways of Luthuli House without hitting some starry-eyed ANC official with a plan to throw millions more at Cuba. Take the ludicrous Operation Thusano, under SA’s department of defence.
A few weeks back, the department told parliament that its “military exchange programme” with Cuba has cost taxpayers R1.3bn since its inception in 2015. And, Brig-Gen Benny Mtsweni added, the department is planning to spend another R1.2bn before the contract runs out in 2024/2025.
Under that programme, military medical students study in Cuba, officers take advanced staff courses, and air force student pilots receive training. Cuban mechanics also repair military vehicles, while training army apprentices — only, their qualifications are reportedly not recognised by SA’s qualifications authority.
Embarrassingly, SA’s defence department spent more than R200m bringing the unregistered drug Heberon Alpha R 2B into SA in 2020, supposedly as a remedy for Covid. But the drug wasn’t registered with SA’s medicines regulator, which means 500,000 vials had to be shipped back to Cuba.
Every contract concluded under Operation Thusano is irregular, SA’s auditor-general has found.
Then there are the 24 Cuban water experts, brought in last year at the behest of then water & sanitation minister Lindiwe Sisulu, to “enhance and improve” government’s water delivery — at a cost of at least R65m.
The ANC has a costly and irrational obsession with Cuba, based on wholly outdated sentiment
— What it means:
The project has been widely criticised by, among others, the SA Institute of Civil Engineering, which said: “Our engineers are world-renowned ... but we don’t seem to be having the same favour here in SA.”
The water engineering project was a particularly bitter pill for local engineers, as the lockdown had left many of them without work.
Trade union Solidarity has now taken the matter to court, and it will be heard as soon as a date is set, says Solidarity CEO Dirk Hermann.
There are also the 20 Cuban “maths and science specialists”, hired by the department of basic education under a five-year agreement that runs to this year. Last year, each earned an annual salary of about R733,000.
Finally this year, when the government said it would donate R50m to Cuba from the government-run African Renaissance & International Co-operation Fund (ARF) for “humanitarian aid”, South Africans had had enough. It sparked a huge outcry — and a court interdict.
‘SA has no real foreign policy’
John Steenhuisen, leader of the opposition DA, says the R50m donation is a manifestation of the ANC’s irrational obsession with Cuba, based on wholly outdated sentiment.
“How is it that we’re sending R50m to Cuba for ‘humanitarian assistance’ when here at home, [thousands of] children under the age of five die every year from malnutrition. SA is lower on the global ranking for food security than Cuba, so how does that make sense?” he asks.
To Steenhuisen, it speaks to a broader problem: SA has no cohesive foreign policy, but is stuck in a time warp where it’s playing Cold War politics, as if the Berlin Wall hadn’t fallen.
This is just as evident in SA’s myopic decision to support Russia, he says — abstaining from a vote on Russia’s human rights violations last week.
“We say we’re guided by human rights, but we fail to enforce the global arrest warrant for Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir when he was in SA in 2015; we fail to act on the Russian atrocities; and we fail to act when Ukraine’s sovereignty is threatened. It’s irrational and inconsistent and it stands to hurt us in terms of investment.”
This week, international relations & co-operation minister Naledi Pandor refused to even describe Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as an act of “aggression” — despite the deaths of more than 1,800 Ukrainian civilians, including 150 children.
It speaks to how the ANC’s sentiment for former Cold War era friends has blurred its ethical lines, and led to a soft-brained moral relativism.
It’s a romanticism with hard financial implications too.
Steenhuisen tells the FM of rumblings from US senators he’s spoken to about possibly jettisoning the African Growth & Opportunity Act, which guarantees preferential access to US markets for African countries, in retaliation for SA’s stance on Russia’s human rights atrocities.
“We’re happy to throw our biggest trading partners under the bus on Russia, just as we’re happy to send millions to Cuba. Both are self-defeating,” he says.
To Steenhuisen, it shows a deep cognitive dissonance, illustrating how many of our ministers live in a bubble — where the effects of 46.2% unemployment, soaring food prices, fuel price increases of 26.5% in the past year, and power price hikes of 9.6% are less of a priority than indulging Cold War sentiment for a country halfway across the world.
The Citizen quoted Efficient Group chief economist Dawie Roodt as saying: “It’s all good and well you have to support your comrades in the liberation struggle in the old days, but that’s ancient history. You have to spend money where it matters the most: your country.”
A ‘special relationship’
As much as the ANC won’t admit it, this is all about diverting taxpayer money to reward its allies during the struggle. And Cuba desperately needs it. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, Cuba lost its biggest patron. Since then, the world’s last truly communist regime has fallen into abject poverty. And so, over the past 10 years, it has held out its begging bowl to SA, where one of its former beneficiaries, the ANC, is now in charge.
The ANC, for its part, has been most accommodating, recalling Cuban support during the anti-apartheid struggle.
One ANC leader who has been effusive in his praise for Cuba is former SA president Kgalema Motlanthe.
Speaking in 2018, he gushed about the “enduring friendship between Cuba and SA”, epitomised by the relationship between Castro and Mandela. This friendship, he said, was a consequence of Cuba’s “selfless assistance” during the liberation struggle.
“Such a diplomatic bond is therefore founded on decades of solidarity, premised on a shared history of slavery and domination, and anti-imperialist ideology.”
Motlanthe said that when Cuba “finds herself in need, be it through natural disasters or other emergencies, [SA] must immediately mobilise our resources”.
This week, Motlanthe tells the FM that the training quid pro quo dates back to a pact made between Mandela and Castro in the early 1990s.
“Cuba would offer this training to the kids, and it would be a great qualification. And, of course, some [students came from SA’s] rural communities and households ... Cuba was doing the same thing for many other sister countries on the continent up to Burkina Faso,” he says.
While he admits it has been “a bit of a struggle” to integrate the Cuban doctors into SA, he defends their deployment, arguing that “their training, because it’s preventive, would be more effective in the rural areas, because they use simple methods”.
Motlanthe says many of the Cuban doctors as well as the SA doctors trained in Cuba “would never be doctors in this system, because the entry requirements just in terms of the degree grades are prohibitive — only a straight A [student] gets to be admitted.”
Needless to say, the US state department sees it differently. Last year it released a report warning that Cuban doctors have been “trafficked” to SA.
“The Cuban government may have forced its citizens to work in SA, including at least 187 Cuban doctors and medical staff sent to all provinces to combat the pandemic,” the report said. “These agreements typically require payment directly to the government of Cuba, which gives the medical workers between 5% and 15% of the salary only after they have completed the mission and returned home.”
Already, some South American countries — including Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador — have refused to take Cuban medical professionals for this reason. In one case, a Cuban doctor, Ramona Matos, described how Cuban security agents took away their passports when she worked in Bolivia and Brazil.
“We [were] exploited by the Cuban government,” she said.
And Cuba makes a mint from this. In 2018, for example, it said it had earned $6.3bn from these “medical dispatches”, which it used to fund its own health-care coverage.
And that’s not the only problem.
‘Sold a dream’
About 40% of SA’s future doctors are trained in Cuba, before returning home to complete the last leg of their degrees and be integrated into the SA medical community. But on their return they say they find themselves stigmatised at local universities.
These are the main findings of a 2020 doctoral thesis by Buhle Maud Donda, of the University of KwaZulu-Natal school of clinical medicine, focusing on a cohort of 700 Cuba-trained doctors who returned to SA in 2018.
In Cuba, medical students are trained in the practice of preventive, community-based care — mostly attending to poor patients. Back in SA, they need to pivot to a system that prioritises curative, often quite expensive forms of treatment in urban areas — a system Donda believes is more aligned to the health needs of countries in the global north than those of SA.
The issue, she says, lies not with the students or the academic staff, but with “the diverging philosophies underlying the Cuban and SA health systems”.
For some, the experience — and the parallels between ubuntu and Cuba’s focus on social commitment — is positive. But not all students feel this way.
In 2018, the SA National Defence Force (SANDF) selected 36 medical students who had already qualified as nurses and in other medical fields to train as doctors in Cuba. They were apparently told they would train at Cuban universities, but instead were stationed at an infantry base as part of a project to establish a military medical school. They later realised the school was not accredited by the Health Professions Council of SA, so their six-year qualifications would be meaningless.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, the students tell the FM their accommodation was “primitive”, lacking the most basic of amenities. There was no hot water, toilets did not function, and their personal possessions were stolen.
Their training school was in a remote village about 6km from the nearest town, they say, and they had to apply for a pass to leave the base. Their closest support was more than 1,000km away, at the SA embassy in Havana.
In addition, they apparently had to learn Spanish from a tutor who didn’t speak any English, and had to depend on one another for support when they suffered emotionally.
When they protested, they were repatriated to SA — where the SANDF promptly dismissed them. (Their case against unfair dismissal is set to be heard in the Constitutional Court, after the high court and appeals court found against them.)
“We were sold a dream back in SA — to realise our dreams of becoming doctors in a country which shared an ideology with Mandela,” one says. “We were so proud when we left, and so defeated when we returned.”
Cuba trained us militarily and academically. It supplied us with food such as sugar, beans and rice. Such friends should never be forgotten or discarded to please newfound friends during sunshine
— Omry Makgoale
‘No ANC member would want to live there’
Yet the ANC, in its romanticism over Cuba, can’t seem to see the problems.
As ANC veteran Omry Makgoale tells the FM: “Cuba gave us support when we [the ANC] were not wanted by Western governments. We were called terrorists and pariahs.
“Cuba trained us militarily and academically. It supplied us with food such as sugar, beans and rice. Such friends should never be forgotten or discarded to please newfound friends during sunshine.”
Western Cape ANC leader Cameron Dugmore says South Africans can learn a lot from Cuba.
“Many of us are inspired by how much Cuba has managed to achieve with very little money in the education and literacy of its people,” he tells the FM.
“The gratitude towards Cuba for its thousands of soldiers who died in liberation wars in Angola and elsewhere has no boundaries.”
However, this lack of a boundary is particularly damaging when it means the party is paying off its historical debts using taxpayer money.
Abner Mosaase, who serves on the ANC NEC subcommittee on international relations, says it’s more than history; every country has a responsibility towards needy countries.
“The ANC stated in its 1969 manifesto that SA cannot exist on an island and be deaf to help others in need,” he says.
Cuba has suffered the consequences of sanctions instituted by the US for the past 60 years “based on the fact that it is a communist country”. “But the very same US sees nothing wrong in its trade dealings with China or Scandinavian countries under socialist parties’ rule,” he adds.
However, in a rare moment of criticism, another ANC veteran, who spoke to the FM on condition of anonymity, points out that Cuba has also offered lessons in how not to do things, like nationalisation.
He recalls how Castro told Oliver Tambo in 1988 that the party shouldn’t make the same mistake as the Cubans when implementing its Freedom Charter.
“Here in Cuba we nationalised most things and that was a huge mistake,” Castro apparently told Tambo, admitting some decisions “didn’t work” because the Cubans didn’t understand “the complexity of the international community”.
He cites the story of Bacardi rum, which was first created in Cuba, but eventually set up operations outside the country after it was nationalised in 1960. The Bacardi family held international copyright on the name, and became successful outside Cuba after that.
The party isn’t entirely blind to Cuba’s shortcomings. While many in the ANC seek to emulate Cuba, they realise that the choices of that country’s leaders have worked out badly for Cuban people themselves, the veteran says.
“If you ask anybody in the ANC if they want to go live in Cuba, they would say no. Because life is hard in Cuba.”
The R50m furore
SA’s recent R50m donation — at a fiscally tough time — has brought this matter to a head, reverberating not just within parliament, but also in civil society. While opposition parties were scathing in their criticism, a coalition of more than 60 nonprofit organisations handed a petition to Pandor’s department, pleading that the government should look instead to put the money towards resolving hunger in SA.
Finally, nonprofit group AfriForum got an interdict from the Pretoria high court, halting the donation.
Critics say this is a donation that’s out of touch with reality, given the hardships people face locally, and they want to know when SA’s historical “debt” to Cuba will finally be paid.
The donation was made under the ARF, which is administered by the department of international relations & co-operation (Dirco) and is meant to enhance co-operation between SA and other countries, particularly in Africa, by promoting factors such as democracy and good governance. It has also benefited Palestinians in Gaza, the Sahrawi in Western Sahara, and Cuba.
“In 2006 and 2011 the elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo [DRC] would not have happened without the ARF’s funding,” says Chris Landsberg, professor of politics and international relations at the University of Johannesburg.
Of course, the government ought to ensure that the beneficiaries of these funds don’t waste money through shoddy governance — or they should be cut off from further funding.
For example, in 2018 Dirco donated R16m to Eswatini to fend off hunger among its most vulnerable citizens. Yet in that same year, King Mswati III splurged R700m on a business jet for himself, complete with a R2bn hangar at the new King Mswati III International Airport.
Still, Landsberg finds criticism of the R50m donation to be disingenuous.
“I am fascinated why AfriForum is gunning for Cuba, but it has not approached the court regarding any of the other donations from the fund. Is it because so many SA companies have business interests on the continent which might be jeopardised should the fund cease?”
University of Fort Hare deputy vice-chancellor Oscar van Heerden says one shouldn’t see SA’s position towards Cuba as a historical debt, but as an act of solidarity.
“Solidarity can be endless and even though SA is facing severe economic challenges of its own, its solidarity towards countries like Cuba, the Palestinians in Gaza and the Western Sahara is continuing. It is mostly towards countries who are being suppressed, similar to what South Africans faced under apartheid,” he tells the FM.
Imagine what Imtiaz Sooliman and the Gift of the Givers could do with R50m, to help malnutrition in this country with that money
— John Steenhuisen
For critics like Steenhuisen, this ignores the crisp financial realities that SA faces — taxpayer funds aren’t bottomless, and splurging millions is economically inefficient when there are more pressing priorities at home.
“Imagine what Imtiaz Sooliman and the Gift of the Givers could do with R50m, to help malnutrition in this country with that money,” he says. But the government leaders don’t seem to care that this is the trade-off that has to be made.”
The ANC-led government, from the statements made by Pandor, Sisulu and others, has given no indication that these economic realities even feature in its thinking.
As Mosaase says: “Our destiny and that of Cuba are inextricably intertwined and we will remain one in spirit as long as the ANC is still in power in SA.”
The irony is that the inconsistency with which SA applies its foreign policy, and its yen for economically irrational decisions like its sentimental support for Cuba, may hasten the end of the ANC’s time in power.
Additional reporting by Carien du Plessis and Sam Mkokeli
Cuba in context
On September 4 1998, then president Nelson Mandela extolled the Cuban role in advancing the agenda of the global south at a banquet in honour of Cuba’s president, Fidel Castro.
“The defeat of apartheid demonstrated what can be achieved when we join hands with purpose and conviction,” he said. “SA is committed to working with Cuba to help build a better life for millions of people across both our continents and beyond.”
During apartheid and at the height of the Cold War, Agostinho Neto, leader of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, had asked Russia and Cuba for assistance in its battle in Angola against the SA Defence Force and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola.
SA, for its part, justified its involvement on the grounds that it was defending the country against communism.
While Russia didn’t contribute fighting forces and instead sent military advisers to the front, Cuba sent about 36,000 soldiers to Angola.
The result was a bitter border war, which culminated in the Cuito Cuanavale campaign of 1987-1988. An estimated 10,000 Cuban soldiers died in Angola.
The campaign ended in a negotiated settlement, which resulted in SA withdrawing its forces from Angola. The independence of Namibia and unbanning of the ANC followed.
Even though no SA liberation movement’s combatants fought at Cuito Cuanavale, the “battle victory” is still claimed by the ANC, as it signified a victory against apartheid.
Bad medicine
Since 1994, SA’s helping hand towards its Caribbean brothers and sisters has never been far from controversy, making headlines for all the wrong reasons. These included Cuban doctors in SA being unable to communicate with patients; Cuban water specialists brought to SA when local engineers are unemployed; and importing a hocus-pocus Covid drug for soldiers that hadn’t been approved by the medicines regulator.
In 2020, the department of defence collaborated with its Cuban counterpart to order 1.2-million vials of Heberon, an antiviral drug manufactured by the Centre for Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology in Havana. Only, the drug isn’t registered with the SA Health Products Regulatory Authority (Sahpra), which means the SA National Defence Force (SANDF) effectively “smuggled” an illicit substance into the country, bypassing even customs control.
By law, no-one can import medicines into SA unless they come through an approved port of entry. Waterkloof Air Force Base in Pretoria, where the drug was brought in, is not one of them.
The total value of the contract was about R230m, including clinical trials to test the drug on soldiers. At the time, the SANDF said it was desperate to protect its soldiers against Covid, and preliminary studies conducted by the Cubans indicated that the drug may help.
Sahpra seemed to be doing the bidding for the dominant pharmaceutical monopolies or oligarchies
— SANDF officials' motivation for the Heberon deal, according to a task team report
Subsequent peer-reviewed studies, however, found the drug to be of no benefit in treating Covid.
It was the auditor-general who first raised the red flag, calling the contract “irregular” and referring other problems to the Hawks for further investigation.
A second investigation was conducted by a task team appointed by the then defence minister, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula. That task team found that one of the motivations offered by the SANDF was that “Sahpra seemed to be doing the bidding for the dominant pharmaceutical monopolies or oligarchies that consistently seek to stifle any competition, especially one that unconventionally comes from the likes of the Republic of Cuba and any other source outside of the dominant Western axis led by US and European pharmaceuticals”.
It smacks of outdated Cold War paranoia, replete with wild conspiracy theories.
The two central figures in the deal, SANDF chief Gen Solly Shoke and surgeon-general Lt-Gen Zola Dabula, both went on pension shortly after the investigation. In January, a consignment of 500,000 vials was returned to Cuba.
SA’s trade with Cuba
SA’s R350m economic assistance package to Cuba in 2012 was supposed to stimulate trade between the two countries. But 10 years on, SA is still a lowly 33rd on the list of Cuba’s trading partners, according to Western Cape trade, tourism and investment promotion agency Wesgro. And trade with Cuba is a tiny fraction of SA’s total exports and imports.
According to SA Revenue Service (Sars) figures for 2021, SA’s merchandise exports to Cuba were worth R10.36m, against imports of R23.2m. It’s a fraction of the country’s merchandise trade, given that Sars puts total merchandise exports for 2021 at R1.8-trillion and imports at R1.4-trillion.
According to Sars data, top exports to Cuba in 2021 included prepared foodstuffs (R18.5m) and chemicals (R3.8m); top imports included machinery (R2.7m) and chemicals (R1.9m).
The department of international relations & co-operation insists that Cuba has become an “established strategic partner for SA in the Latin American region”.
But Abner Mosaase, who serves on the ANC’s national executive committee subcommittee on international relations, tells the FM that imports from Cuba to SA are very expensive, making mutual trade unfeasible. For this reason, he says, it’s “cheaper” for SA to donate money to the country than to link such funds to trade agreements.
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