There are, of course, all sorts of other unpleasant regimes outside the walls as well - the military dictators of Latin America and the apartheid regime of South Africa.
They don't stand for anything different in South Africa than America stands for. The only difference is over there they preach as well as practice apartheid. America preaches freedom and practices slavery.
The peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America have common interest and are in the position to support each other in their anti-imperialist and anti-U.S. struggle. As long as Africa and Latin America are not free.
With the Cuban presence in Namibia it was possible to achieve the security and real freedom of that country and the end of Apartheid in South Africa, with the modest contribution of the international military presence in Africa.
My maternal family are South African and when I was small and my parents separated my mother and I went back to South Africa. So for me the emergence of my own childhood consciousness was in the context of 1970s and 1980s apartheid South Africa and the movement there.
We have introduced a rule of law. That never existed for centuries in this country [South Africa], especially under the apartheid regime, when the law was reduced into disrepute.
In South Africa, we could not have achieved our freedom and just peace without the help of people around the world, who through the use of non-violent means, such as boycotts and divestment, encouraged their governments and other corporate actors to reverse decades-long support for the Apartheid regime.
We cannot blame other people for our troubles. We are not victims of the influx of foreign people into South Africa. We must remember that it was mainly due to the aggressive and hostile policies of the apartheid regime that the economic development of our neighbours was undermined.
I was born in South Africa during apartheid, a system of laws that made it illegal for people to mix in South Africa. And this was obviously awkward because I grew up in a mixed family. My mother's a black woman, South African Xhosa woman... and my father's Swiss, from Switzerland.
Even in South Africa, the Commonwealth were not doing anything, and their attitude was to tolerate apartheid in South Africa. There was a lot of lip service being paid to the need to stop this practice, but nothing was done.
Now, of course, we know there has been an end to apartheid in South Africa, but what excited me was seeing it in the context of history.
When I started working in human rights, Eastern Europe was communist, South Africa was under apartheid and South Korea had military rule. All the changes have come about not because of the militaries or government but because small groups of people spoke out against what was unfair and unjust.
No one can compare us to the apartheid regime. It's not like in South Africa between the blacks and the whites who belong to the same nation, or in Berlin where you find parents living on the eastern side and their children in the western side.
Latin America seemed to be a land where there were only dictators, revolutionaries, catastrophes. Now we know that Latin America can produce also artists, musicians, painters, thinkers, and novelists.
I was raised in a country [South Africa] with a lot of political turmoil. I was part of a culture and a generation that suppressed people and lived under apartheid regimes. I don't know how you can come out of that and not have an awareness for the world. I think that if my life had turned out any other way and I was working in a bank, I would still feel this way about it, because there's a connection to humanity that to me is really important.
When I was growing up, it was still during Apartheid, so the country was very shielded from the outside artistic world. Anything that was too subversive was basically banned. All the music that we got from outside of South Africa was the poppiest, least subversive music that you could get.
Whether I'm trying to figure out what the U.S. military is doing in Latin America or Africa, Afghanistan or Qatar, the response is remarkably uniform - obstruction and obfuscation, hurdles and hindrances. In short, the good old-fashioned military runaround.