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How Cuba helped defeat apartheid in South Africa
JOHN HAYLETT spotlights Cuba’s legendary spirit of internationalism

AFTER Nelson Mandela was released from 1991 in preparation for the formal interment of the apartheid system, he embarked on a world tour to thank governments and peoples who had supported the South African freedom struggle.

In Havana he extolled Fidel Castro as a “source of inspiration to all freedom-loving people.”

Later in the US, during the Ted Koppel show in front of a live TV audience, Mandela was questioned by neocon diplomat and political analyst Ken Adelman, asking whether Fidel Castro — and for good measure — Muammar Gadaffi and Yasser Arafat, the Libyan and Palestinian leaders, were “your models of leaders of human rights.”

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