CPs join to stab freedom struggles

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above Angolan rally In both Angola and Ethiopia the Cuban presence is largely a military one. And in both cases it seems that the Cuban military presence has saved the very lives of the self-styled "socialist" regimes of these countries.

In Angola too, the Cuban presence involves a massive programme of technical assistance which in many cases involves the dominance of the Cuban advisors in the bureaucratic state apparatus.

Such an operation on this scale is historically unprecedented. It is crucial to the Kremlin's strategy of gaining intluence in, and controlling the revolutionary potential of the African continent.

The alliance of the Kremlin Stalinists with enormously expanded flexibility in pursuing a policy to slowly redraw the lines of demarcation between imperialism and Stalinism.

The imperialists have stood back, powerless to prevent this-but at the same time, perhaps, at least half conscious that Soviet/Cuban support for nominally left regimes like that of Neto in Angola or Mengistu in Ethiopia has been in the last year a powerful obstacle to the socialist revolution in Africa.

Other tactics in the Kremlin bureaucracy's global strategy of counter-revolution are proceeding even while the Stalinists ponder how best to fulfil their designs in Ethiopia.

They have now signed a major trade deal, which they have long craved, with the reactionary regime of King Hassan II in Morocco.

Central to this is an agreement on the exploitation of the world's richest phosphate deposits in Morocco and the Western Sahara.

For two years the Saharoui have been fighting under the leadership of the Polisario Front against Moroccan and Mauritanian troops that have occupied and divided the region.

Soviet support for the Saharoui liberation struggles has been confined in the past to guarded expressions backing their right to self-determination, so this latest action will make little material difference to the situation.

Token gesture

The move is a predictable, cynical addition to what has become a long, contorted trail of twists and turns from the Stalinist leaders on the war in the Sahara.

Along with their fellowtraitors in the social democracy, the Communist Parties in France and Spain have offered verbal support to the For this token gesture, they have been abused as 'colonialists' by Ali Yatawho is none other than the secretary-general of the Moroccan CP.

Yata's argument against Marchais and Carrillo is that they carry on the traditions of imperialism by allowing their vision to be restricted by the arbitrary political frontiers imposed on Africa by the European colonialists.

This family bickering with-. in the Stalinist ranks may soon come to an end, thanks

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Havana has given them, in situations like Africa, an