From the Escambray to the Congo – In the whirlwind of the Cuban Revolution –

“We were ready to die to bring down the Batista dictatorship,”says Victor Dreke, “but we didn’t know the first thing about revolution.”

In this account of how easy it became after the 1959 victory of the Cuban Revolution to “take down the rope” that for decades had segregated blacks from whites at dances in town squares, yet how enormous was the battle to transform the social relations underlying this and all the other “ropes” inherited from colonialism, capitalism, and Yankee domination – Victor Dreke captures the historical challenge of our epoch. At the heart of this book lies the willingness, determination, and creative joy with which Cuba’s working people have, for more than forty years, defended their revolutionary course against the imperialist empire to the north.

Victor Dreke has been a leading participant in Cuba’s revolutionary movement for half a century – as a high school student activist, cadre of the July 26 Movement and then the March 13 Revolutionary Directorate, Rebel Army fighter, a commander of the volunteer battallions that defeated the counterrevolutionary bands in the Escambray mountains of central Cuba, internationalist combatant at the side of Che Guevara in the Congo, political leader, educator, and representative of the Cuban Revolution throughout Africa.”