TOPIC: Democratic South Africa and the USA Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a dangerous diplomatic entanglement: How democratic South Africa was caught up in a massive tsunami inside Secretary Marco Rubio's Cuban teacup.

09 June 2025.

“No one – including responsible leaders of black Africa – challenges the right of white South Africans to live in their country.” Henry Kissinger, Address to the Urban League, South Africa, 02 August 1976, The Renewal Years: The Concluding Volume of His Memoirs, Touchstone, 2 000, page 963.

“It is very strange that in Africa there has been genocide of blacks by whites and of blacks by blacks but never of whites by blacks – massacres yes, but never genocide.” Andrew Kenny, “Genocide and non-genocide – Sudan’s silent slaughter v SA’s manufactured myths,” BizNews article, 25 May 2025.

“He said tonight [1981], without blinking a Blimp eyelid, that all Afrikaners were liars.” Nadine Gordimer quoting the former Anglo American Chairman Julian Ogilvie Thompson, Harry Oppenheimer’s successor, on 18 February 1981, as quoted by Ronald Suresh Roberts in his Cold Kitchen: A Biography of Nadine Gordimer, STE Publishers, 2005, page 363.

INTRODUCTION.

It would be natural and understandable if South Africans experienced a quiet sense of schadenfreude at the very public, sudden, dramatic and very messy unspooling of the erstwhile strong political bromance between USA President Donald J. Trump and apartheid South Africa-born and democratic South Africa-hating tech billionaire Elon Musk. 

This billionaire pair’s assiduous global promotion of the outright lie about a so-called “white genocide” in democratic South Africa represents the biggest external threat democratic South Africa has faced since 1994.

Will the presumptive end of this most dangerous for South Africa political alliance between Trump and Musk presage the collapse of their despicable lie - a ”disgusting abomination”, if there ever was one , to paraphrase Musk - about a so-called “white genocide” in South Africa?

Only the fullness of time will reveal, as in the Holy Bible’s Galatians 4:4.

But as long as the Cuban-American Marco Rubio, Donald Trump’s Secretary of State and acting National Security Advisor, retains his ongoing enormous influence over the foreign policy establishment of the non-consecutive second term Trump administration, it would be premature to celebrate the rumoured demise of this infamous of political bromance, I think.

Marco Rubio, perhaps even much more than President Donald Trump himself, looms large as an impeccable diplomatic and political foe of democratic South Africa who is likely to continue to give life and fuel to the decidedly ruinous lie about a so-called “white genocide” in democratic South Africa.

Trump’s Vice President JD Vance may also in the near future emerge to vie for the title of the most virulent hater of democratic South Africa in the Trump administration, given allegations that his closeness to Peter Thiel, his very wealthy and influential billionaire patron and benefactor who spent part of his childhood in apartheid South Africa and colonial-era South West Africa (Namibia today), is part of white South African emigres in America fiendishly promoting the bogus “white genocide” claim. 

The closeness between JD Vance and Peter Thiel makes the former prone to continue Musk and Rubio‘s dirty and baseless propaganda offensive against democratic South Africa.

But like Trump, JD Vance is not as much invested in hating and slandering democratic South Africa at a deep personal level the way both Rubio and Musk are.

This alone makes it supremely important for us as a country to understand who Marco Rubio is, especially in light of a possible scenario in which Donald Trump may, after the upcoming midterm elections in the USA and to promote White House palace intrigues, decide to promote Rubio as his successor, instead of JD Vance who once referred to Trump as “America’s Hitler.” 

It is true that Marco Rubio too once blasted Trump as a “con artist,” as reported by The Texas Tribune of 26 February 2016 in an article under the title “Rubio Eviscerates ‘Con Artist’ Donald Trump,” a thoroughly see-through heading. 

Whatever transpires in the future politically for Rubio, he is today the most powerful USA Secretary of State since Henry Kissinger by virtue of being simultaneously the Secretary of State and the acting National Security Advisor, two positions which Kissinger also occupied in the 1970s.

Rubio seems particularly determined to stamp his fingerprints all over Trump’s bilateral relationship with democratic South Africa the way Henry Kissinger before him did with his ‘Africa shuttle diplomacy’ in the 1970s, which remains to this day official American diplomacy’s most activist engagement with the African continent. (See Henry Kissinger, Years of Renewal: The Concluding Volume of His Memoirs, Touchstone, 1999, Part Nine, Southern Africa, pages 903 – 1016)

FROM COLD WAR TO THE HOAX ABOUT A SO-CALLED “WHITE GENOCIDE.”

Like Henry Kissinger before him, Marco Rubio undoubtedly sees South Africa through the lens of presumed Cuban influence over the affairs of democratic South Africa, past and present. 

What complicates matters greatly for South Africa, in my view, is what is highlighted by Lawrence Davidson’s Consortium News article of 26 May 2025 under the title “Rubio, Cuba & the Zionist Model.” 

In this article Davidson reveals the close connection between Rubio, the Miami, Florida-based Cuban American lobby, in particular the Cuban American National Foundation founded by Mas Canosa and the powerful Israel lobby in the USA which acts as a model for the anti-Castro Cuban-Americans in Florida, USA, Rubio’s birthplace.

Writes Lawrence Davidson:

“Rubio was born in 1971 to a Cuban exile parents residing in Florida. That means he was born into a community and culture that was overtly opposed to the rule of Fidel Castro and his successors. One cannot emphasize enough that this was a relatively closed, yet highly organized community, where to challenge the prevailing anti-Castro stance was tantamount to ‘treason’. It was also a politically influential community when it came to lobbying the federal government on foreign policy relative to Cuba. For instance, politicians like Rubio pushed for the economic embargo of Cuba without regard to either the increasing poverty of the Cuban people, or the friction this approach caused with U.S. allies involved in trade with Cuba.”

The almost mythical power of the Israel lobby in America was perhaps best exposed by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their book The Israeli Lobby and Foreign Policy (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2007). 

In the book, as in their London Review of Books article of March 2006 on the same theme, these top shelve American academics meticulously detailed instances of what they termed the Israel lobby’s “…almost unchallenged hold on Congress” in the USA.

In an Al Jazeera’s #Reframe dialogue this past week with Kenneth Roth, formerly the head of Human Rights Watch and now  the programme’s anchor, Stephen Walt opined that much of what he and Mearsheimer postulated in the book about the powerful Israel lobby has held up pretty well, like a well-maturing wine, since the book’s publication.

The Cuban lobby in America sought and still seeks to emulate the Israel lobby with regard to such a hold on the American Congress in so far as America’s policies towards Communist-ruled Cuba are concerned, as Lawrence Davidson makes clear.

There is the added complexity layer of racial tensions between black and white Latino communities in the Florida milieu in which Marco Rubio grew up, an Irish coffee of sorts, which is politically dominated by white Cuban emigres like Marco Rubio, with white Hispanics often siding with the dominant white Republican political establishment against the interests of their fellow black Latinos, as alluded to in Nicolas C. Vaca’s fascinating book The Presumed Alliance: The Unspoken Conflict Between Latinos and Blacks and What It Means (HarperCollins, 2004).

As if to complicate the already very fraught and complex situation further for South Africa regarding Marco Rubio, there is a deeper level of some messianic fever to Marco Rubio’s anti-Communism, particularly his anti-Fidel Castro Cuban Communism, his identification with the dominant white American Republican and Christian fundamentalist notions and networks and his fervent support for apartheid Israel on the basis of some distorted, highly self-serving and habitually misquoted biblical scriptures.

Alon Mizrahi, an Arab Israeli Jew very active on X and very critical of apartheid Israel, recently wrote a fascinating Substack piece on 31 December 2024 which he titled “It’s All In The Bible And The Fabricated Identity.”

In it Mizrahi argued that European settlers in America viewed themselves as God’s chosen people, just as the Hebrews/Jews in the Bible did. He claims that this opened the door for these European settlers in America to allow themselves to fabricate historical narratives and that the fabricated identities of Jews in the Middle East and of European settlers in America were constructed to justify conquest and colonialism.

Further wrote Mizrahi:

“America was founded as a simulacrum of a lie…a lie that allows it to steal, deceive, exterminate and enslave millions under a special licence from God.”

This is also how the Spanish conquerors across South America and what is today much of America’s Deep South, colonised and plundered with the express religious blessing of the Catholic Church and evidently of their God as well. 

It is also how the British and Dutch colonial settlers operated in South Africa under their slave-ownership and colonialism.

This also forms the bedrock of Marco Rubio’s worldview of unquestioning and uncritical support for apartheid Israel and his embrace of the lie about a so-called “white genocide” in democratic South Africa.

The bogus “white genocide” in democratic South Africa claim has a long and inglorious pedigree in the official American diplomatic theory and praxis.

Rubio’s predecessor Henry Kissinger wrote the following about white Afrikaners in South Africa in the 1970s:

“…Dutch Calvinists had first landed in the then nearly empty Cape of Good Hope to begin life unconstrained by the religious wars and persecutions of seventeenth-century Europe. They brought with them a stern fundamentalism which turned its back on all the subsequent movements of intellectual change in Europe. The Boers, or Afrikaners as they came to call themselves, developed an identity unique in the history of European colonialism. Cut off from the mother country, they remained unaffected by the rationalistic heritage of the Enlightenment or by the democratic dispensation of the French Revolution.

“So distinct was their sense of identity that when Britain annexed the Cape Province during the Napoleonic wars, the Afrikaners packed up and moved nearly a thousand miles to the north. They did this not as individual settlers but as an entire people, taking with them their governmental institutions, churches, schools, and prejudices. In their new home, the Afrikaners encountered large black populations whom they treated with condescension derived from their special sense of religious mission. Theirs was less the sin of colonialism than a kind of spiritual pride which, in the process, absorbed from the stark soil of that beautiful and brooding land a very special, almost mystical devotion to Africa.” (Ibid, page 961 -962)

Put aside Kissinger’s absolute nonsense about “the nearly empty Cape of Good Hope” and his equally empty waffle about the white Afrikaners’ Great Trek being “less the sin of colonialism”, what Kissinger stated about the white Afrikaners’ so-called “very special, almost mystical devotion to Africa” is today undermined by Trump and Marco Rubio’s bizarre refugee dispensation offer to the same white Afrikaners to settle in America, where white Afrikaners so obviously and completely lack “very special, almost mythical devotion” to the USA and where their mother tongue Afrikaans, forged on the African soil, is not recognised as an official language as it is in democratic South Africa.

It is relevant here to remind ourselves that, as quoted by the author Ronald Suresh Roberts in his No Cold Kitchen: A Biography of Nadine Gordimer, the white South African Jewish Nobel Prize for Literature winner Gordimer made short shrifts of the self-serving colonial and racist fallacy that white South Africans can have this “very special, almost mythical” attachment to Africa whilst at the same time they lack such an attachment and devotion to the Africans, the natives of Africa. 

Roberts quoted Gordimer as writing that:

“”[I]n relation  to this country, attachment to the land is regarded by the Afrikaners as proof of some kind of right that is entirely separate from behaviour, social behaviour. Whereas the only attachment that makes claims valid in human terms is some sort of attachment to the people: you cannot be ‘attached’ to soil and thorn trees, because these do not respond, you can kiss the earth in bliss or be hanged from one of the trees in terror – the landscape is totally unaffected by either.” (Ibid, page 369)

[It’s possible albeit unacknowledged that this formulation of Nadine Gordimer would later influence a similar formulation in Freeman Vines’ Hanging Tree Guitars (The Bitter Southerner, September 2020) on the lynching of innocent African Americans by racist white American hoodlums in Jim Crow America.] 

Of course Henry Kissinger did further refer to pre-1994 South Africa as “pariah South Africa, the citadel of apartheid.” (Ibid)

[One wonders how Kissinger, like Hannah Arendt, the author of the influential The Origins of Totalitarianism, and both of them Jews, would make of the genocide being committed by apartheid Israel, today’s “pariah and the citadel of apartheid”, in Gaza, Palestine.]

To his eternal credit Kissinger referred to the national liberation movements of southern Africa, including Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC), as “resistance movements.” (Ibid, page 909), something of a novelty for a high-ranking American official at the time. 

Subsequently the administration of President Ronald Reagan would regress from this forward-leaning Kissingerian definition and scandalise the national liberation movements, including Nelson Mandela, as “terrorist.” 

Even more noteworthy, Kissinger recognised that the national liberation movements of southern Africa were not “satellites of their patrons” in the Communist bloc, bur that they would request and receive any help they could get from any international quarter for the prosecution of their glorious national liberation struggles against western European colonialism and white Afrikaners’ apartheid system. 

This contrasts sharply with the Reagan administration’s subsequent characterisation of the national liberation movements in southern Africa, including Nelson Mandela’s ANC, as mere pawns in a ruthless Soviet expansion across Africa, which seems to be the core of Marco Rubio’s attitude towards South Africa today vis-à-vis South Africa’s close diplomatic relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran, the People’s Republic of China and evidently lesser so with the Russian Federation.

It should be highlighted that this rather sophisticated reading of our sub-region’s political dynamics in the 1970s by Henry Kissinger rhymes well with President Donald Trump’s almost unique - in America’s power circles - appreciation of Communist Cuba under Fidel Castro, at least as Donald John Trump articulated in his book Think Big and Kiss Ass: In Business and Life (HarperCollins, 2007). 

Answering the question “what do you think about the United States and Cuba?” Trump stated:

“That’s a very dangerous question. Every country in the world is in Cuba now, except the United States. Castro is old and sick. I looked at him the other day on television. I said, ‘Man, that guy is tough. He doesn’t die!’ Cuba is going to be an amazing story in the coming years. I think it’s about time we start thinking a little bit differently about Cuba, because certainly every other country in the world is.” (Think Big And Kiss Ass: In Business And Life, ibid, page 315)

This statement of Trump on Communist Cuba under Commandant Fidel Castro is something Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the ultimate anti-Communist hawk, would frown upon and would never bring himself to utter, I suspect.

However, as Guy Arnold makes clear in his opus Africa: A Modern History, Henry Kissinger was no high-minded diplomatic player nor a mighty moral force bestriding the globe out to spread goodness and chewing gum regarding either southern Africa or the apartheid question at the time. 

Arnold noted that “in 1970 Henry Kissinger, the US Secretary of State under President Nixon, had favoured maintaining the political balance in Southern Africa in support of the whites…Kissinger needed to implement a new policy and essentially this was to sacrifice Smith’s Rhodesia to buy time for South Africa…” (Atlantic Books, 2006, page 587)

To be clear, in no uncertain terms, Arnold meant that Kissinger was interested in sacrificing colonial and racist white minority rule in Rhodesia (today’s Zimbabwe) in order to buy time for another and more vicious quasi-republican, racist white minority rule in apartheid South Africa.

Like Trump and Rubio today, Kissinger’s primary preoccupation in his diplomatic shuttle engagements with southern Africa was to support minority white communities and to see what it is the USA could do and achieve in order to extend the lifespan of white rule in apartheid South Africa.

That was Henry Kissinger’s bottom line regarding southern Africa. 

Both President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher would later elevate this shameful and deceitful Kissingerian diplomatic manoeuvre in support of racist minority white regimes in southern Africa into some art form in their vehement opposition to international sanctions on apartheid South Africa and in their deeply immoral support of apartheid Prime Minister and President PW Botha in the 1980s.

GHOSTS OF RECENT SOUTHERN AFRICAN HISTORY AND THE “WHITE GENOCIDE” HOAX: NEW COLD WAR BATTLES.

Donald Trump and Marco Rubio have elevated that diplomatic art form of Reagan and Thatcher into an open campaign to delegitimise, and where possible isolate, democratic South Africa on the international stage by weaponising a blatant and totally discredited hoax about a so-called “white genocide” in post-apartheid, democratic South Africa.

This from two white American men wielding huge political power and influence but with no record whatsoever of ever opposing racist white minority rule in southern Africa, in a clear contrast to Genocide Joe Biden, the USA President, who valiantly did so in the American Congress, to his eternal credit.

Incredibly the wily Henry Kissinger would nevertheless subsequently engage in nauseating self-flattery and self-deification regarding his “Africa shuttle diplomacy” as it related to post-apartheid South Africa.

In a self-praise on par with what we have come to expect from President Donald John Trump, Kissinger wrote thus unabashedly, and I quote him at some length:

“And yet, when as a professor I first visited South Africa in 1962 to speak at workshops organised by European Lutheran churches, I became convinced that, when all was said and done, this beautiful and melancholy land would not end in the catastrophe that reason and history predicted. Even more oddly, I began to believe that it would ultimately be the Afrikaners, ostensibly the more repressive element of the white population, and not the seemingly more liberal English community, which would lead the way. Somehow through some hidden instinct I could not describe and which the Afrikaners vociferously denied, it seemed predestined that they would find a way, albeit after much turmoil, whereby the very depth of the common suffering – the fear giving rise to oppression and the strength required to survive it – would be distilled into some new form of South African identity, and that it would come about not by way of Western liberalism but by an arrangement brokered between South Africa’s white and black tribes.” (Ibid, page 963) 

It is quite possible that even Trump and Rubio will in some distant, misty future also claim that “through some hidden instinct” they would be in no position to describe, their utterly disgusting bogus claim about a so-called “white genocide” in democratic South Africa somehow saved our democracy and constitutional order from self-harm.

However a key question remains:

Why does 47th USA President Donald John Trump (X’s @realDonaldTrump) choose to refer to the killings of some white Afrikaner farmers in South Africa by criminals - meaning not democratic South African State-sanctioned - as a so-called “white genocide,” but does not refer to the brutal lynching by white American hoodlums of African Americans made to hang from tree branches as “tree guitars” during Jim Crow, to paraphrase Freeman Vines, as “a black genocide”?

Why the double standards on the part of the 47th President of the USA D.J.T?

But it is particularly with regard to the question of democratic South Africa’s highly laudable, outstanding and warranted international solidarity with Cuba, the Cuban people and the Cuban government under the Cuban Communist Party (CCP) which likely most animates the zoological animus of and deeply riles Rubio in relation to democratic South Africa.

And about this there really is very little democratic South Africa can do to assist Marco Rubio to overcome his diplomatic meanness and petty mindedness towards South Africa.

Marco Rubio’s uncritical embrace of the bogus and unfounded claim about a so-called “white genocide” in democratic South Africa is another apt illustration on a global stage of the veracity and power of apartheid Israel’s  philosopher Yuval Noah Hariri’s postulation about the tremendous influence of a story and a myth on the onward march of human affairs.

Wrote Hariri:

“We can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the nationalist myths of modern states. Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers.” (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Chapter 2, www.ynhariri.com, Power & Cognitive Imagination: The Cognitive Revolution)

Cuba’s unstinted material, military, diplomatic and political support to the national liberation movements of Angola, Namibia and South Africa in their fight for freedom and against apartheid South Africa is undoubtedly comparable to the unstinted and massive material, military, diplomatic and political support which France gave to the Continental Army of America during America’s War of Independence (1775 -1783) against imperialist and colonial Britain.

No sensible person would advocate for the rapture in Franco – American friendship so forged in French and American blood during America’s War of Independence, albeit that at the time France was a monarchy supporting basically a Revolution advancing Republican ideals, just as Communist Cuba supported the freedom and democratic ideals of national liberation movements of Namibia and South Africa.

The similarities between what France provided to America’s Continental Army and what Commandant Fidel Castro’s Cuba provided to southern Africa’s national liberation movements are startling.

Both forms of assistance were delivered across the Atlantic Ocean. 

France provided no less than 12 000 troops to fight alongside the American Revolutionary Army, blockaded the imperialist British army from reaching certain critical battlegrounds during the American War of Independence and even engaged the colonial British army across oceans far from the American continental theatre of war to divert British troops from the Continental Army’s home front battles.

Similarly apartheid South Africa was forced to deploy over 6 000 troops to the Angolan theatre to battle the Cubans, thus momentarily providing some relief to black South Africans back in South Africa suffering under the brutal apartheid regime, especially following the 1976 Soweto Uprising when the South African Defence Force (SADF) was deployed in black townships to crush the Uprising.

Arnold Guy reveals something even many combatants of southern Africa’s national liberation movements do not know, which is that for three months Cuba supported the new government of MPLA in Angola secretly, without the knowledge of even the Soviet Union, carrying the costs of the operation on its own shoulders and that when the Soviet Union was subsequently informed by Cuba and requested to back up the operation, it agreed only on condition that it supported the Cuban troops with only 10 cargo flights for Cuban troops’ military needs. (Ibid, page 589) 

Michael Morris in his gripping book Apartheid: An Illustrated History (Jonathan Ball, 2012) states that following Prime Minister John Vorster’s launch of Operation Savannah against the newly installed post-colonial MPLA government in Angola in 1975, apartheid South Africa came within 12 kilometres to capturing Luanda, Angola’s capital, which objective was foiled only by the failure of the Angolan collaborators of apartheid South Africa to defeat the army of MPLA in the battle for Luanda. (Ibid, page 103)

Crucially, as Michael Morris makes clear, what also contributed to apartheid South Africa’s ignoble military defeat at the hands of the heroic Cuban army in Angola was that the glorious American Congress’ Senate, reacting angrily to the fact that it was not consulted by President Gerald Ford’s administration on its covert  military support for apartheid South Africa’s Savannah Operation against newly independent Angola, immediately halted all military assistance by the USA administration to anti-MPLA forces of Angola. (Ibid)

This act on the part of the American Senate was another finest hour of the USA Congress with regard to southern Africa and the freedom struggle against apartheid South Africa.

 claims that Cuba committed 20 000 soldiers to this project to defeat apartheid South Africa in Angola in support of the freedom-loving national liberation movements of southern Africa. (Ibid, page 713)

For his part Henry Kissinger in his Renewal Years book claims that “for a considerable period, there was no MPLA army to speak of; the decisive fighting was done almost exclusively by Cubans, assisted by Soviet combat advisors.” (Ibid, page 908)

Kissinger claimed that the Cubans would be stationed in Angola for more than fifteen years. (Ibid)

Arnold wrote that at its peak Cuba had a total of 50 000 troops in Angola, a huge number by any quantum from a small and developing island located across a vast Atlantic Ocean. (Ibid, page 715). 

By any either measure this was a massive military commitment by the Cuban government of Commandant Fidel Castro driven not by a desire to suborn and to turn Africa into a warren for hunting black African slaves, as Karl Marx and Frederick Engels once opined about America’s slave hunts on the African continent, not driven by a desire to colonise Africa, as was the case with Portugal, Britain, France, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and other brutal and greedy western European colonial powers at the time, and not driven by a desire to extract cheap African labour and minerals, as has always been the case with America and some powerful  European Union (EU) countries over the centuries and which continue to be the case even today, but by the pure desire on the part of Commandant Fidel Castro, his Cuban government and the Cuban people to see southern Africa freed from apartheid South Africa’s cruel and racist colonial diktat.

Magashe Titus Mafolo, the former Political Advisor to South Africa’s former President Thabo Mbeki, in his book African Odyssey, Vol 3, devotes a whole cogent Chapter 13 to “How Europe and the USA encouraged and empowered African dictators.”  This the USA and western Europe did so that they could continue to be in a position to abuse and exploit our African continent, its natural resources and its peoples whilst preaching human rights, democracy and the rule of law based on un-African Roman-Dutch law. 

For his part Guy Arnold marshals impressive figures in his book to convincingly demonstrate how the West benefited from the apartheid system in South Africa, especially the business community of the USA. (See Ibid, “Economic support for the apartheid State, page 337 - 343).

Arnold summarised the gain to American business from the apartheid system and the brutal exploitation of cheap black labour this way:

“USA involvement in South Africa, both as investor and trader, grew substantially through the 1960s; in particular the USA was interested in the country’s wide range of minerals. Between 1960 and 1970 the average world rate of return on overseas investment was 11 per cent but in South Africa US capital earned 18.6 per cent…The rates of return on US South African investments during the 1960s were phenomenally high, roughly double those elsewhere…Like British companies in South Africa,  US companies paid their Africans abysmally low wages…These major powers might ritualistically condemn apartheid; this did not deter them from providing the South African regime, by trade and investment, with the economic support to its survival.” (Ibid, pages 342 - 343)

Besides the USA and the UK, Arnold mentioned West Germany, France and Japan as the other major western countries which massively benefited from trading with and investing in the apartheid economy at the height of racist apartheid rule in South Africa.

 Yet to this day the West, especially the USA and the UK, flatly refuse to pay any reparations for such benefits which accrued from a cruel system of apartheid in South Africa which the United Nations (UN) declared a crime against humanity.

And this is a historical fact which neither President Donald Trump nor Secretary of State Marco Rubio recognises as they go about promoting on the global stage the hoax about a so-called “white genocide” in democratic South Africa. 

Even in doubting Thomases of today there must be no lingering doubt that the severe military defeat which the Cuban army inflicted on apartheid South Africa’s war machine at the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, Angola (December 1987 – March 1988), which is considered rightly as post-colonial Africa’s largest direct military confrontation, was a game changer in the fortunes of southern Africa, just as French troops’ direct participation in the Battle of Yorktown during the American War of Independence, where the French troops are said to have made up to half of the fighting force of America’s Continental Revolutionary Army, was.

The road towards the independence of Namibia led directly from the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale, as even President Ronald Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Chester A. Crocker conceded in his book High Noon in Southern Africa: Making Peace in A Rough Neighbourhood. (W.W. Norton, 1992) by way of Crocker’s “linkage” between the withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola and the withdrawal of the troops of apartheid South Africa from Angola.

After Namibia under SWAPO secured its independence from apartheid South Africa in 1990, maintaining apartheid in South Africa became increasingly untenable, just as colonial Britain’s imperialistic hold on Continental America became untenable after the Battle of Yorktown during the American War of Independence, in which France too played a glorious and memorable military role.

The very close and friendly relationship between democratic South Africa and Cuba was forged during the difficult era of the anti-apartheid national liberation struggle. 

It is an epic story for the ages, written in the annals of history with the South African and Cuban blood of freedom fighters who fought, with the military support of Cuba, the apartheid system and apartheid South Africa’s colonisation of Namibia to a standstill, just as the close and friendly relationship between the USA and France was forged during the American War of Independence, the Americas’ biggest military confrontation before the American Civil War (1861 – 1865).

Developments in southern Africa since Angola consolidated its post-colonial nationhood, since Namibia attained its independence from apartheid South Africa and since South Africa achieved post-apartheid freedom in April 1994 have all belied the canard which Henry Kissinger and subsequently the Reagan administration spread that Cuba’s involvement in southern Africa would lead to a strong Soviet expansionism or a threatening and continuous Cuban influence in our region. Their anti-Cuban and anti-Soviet propaganda has been exposed by history as a pure hoax as today both Russia and Cuba have the lightest of diplomatic touches on southern Africa of any international players, if any, compared to the continuing and mounting overbearing, suffocating and dominant political, economic, cultural, soft power and diplomatic influence of the USA, the UK and EU countries on southern Africa, especially on neoliberal democratic South Africa since 1994.

As Arnold Guy put it “…the Soviet threat or ‘total onslaught’ was always exaggerated by the South Africans,” in reference to apartheid rulers. (Ibid, page 729)

So if an anti-Communist Cuba sentiment is what drives USA Secretary of State Marco Rubio in his harsh and unjustified dealings with democratic South Africa, especially the born-again fever with which he is loud hailing across the world the ruinous myth about a so-called “white genocide” in democratic South Africa, he is exposing himself, diplomatically speaking, to be a tenderfoot rodeo rider from America’s Deep South unable to tame his wild diplomatic rodeo horse, grabbing a diplomatic tornado of a “white genocide” hoax  by his legs and thus destined to crush hard against the chutes of international diplomacy, so to speak in rodeo slang.

As a result when Secretary of State Rubio seeks to continue to adopt a very hawkish anti-democratic South Africa posture, such as when he openly relished his recent startling public and vindictive announcement that he would be boycotting the G20 Foreign Ministers’ meeting which South Africa hosted in preparation to the G20 Summit later this year in South Africa, on account of a blatant lie about a so-called “white genocide” in democratic South Africa, he revealed himself to be not only what a recent New York Times article by Michael D. Shear termed as “Trump’s loyal foreign policy foot soldier” and ”a reliable echo of the president’s agenda,” but also as a fossilised throwback to the dark age of anti-Communist McCarthyist America of the Second Red Scare in the late 1940s and the 1950s, in which pro-apartheid President Ronald Reagan played more than a cameo role. (See Michael D. Shear’s New York Times article of 02 May 2025 titled “How Rubio Proved Himself as Trump’s Loyal Foreign Policy Foot Soldier.”)

Secretary Marco Rubio is nothing if not a lifelong and highly dedicated anti-Communist lusting for the overthrow of Cuba’s Communist regime and quick to inflict severe pain on weak countries he perceives as being too closely aligned with Communist Cuba, such as Venezuela and seemingly democratic South Africa as well.

However given the highly mature and nuanced take of Donald J. Trump on Fidel Castro’s Cuba which he ventilated in his book Think Big and Kick Ass: In Business and Life, Rubio is unlikely to get much traction and succour from his boss regarding a very hostile American policy towards Cuba, or even possibly on taking on democratic South Africa on account of our close, historic, warm and mutually beneficial bilateral relationship with Cuba.

The non-racism of Cuba which South Africans feel in their dealings with the island nation, indirectly confirmed by Henry Kissinger in his Years of Renewal book when he wrote that leaders of Latin America were wont to warning him that Communist Cuba was out to create “a black Caribbean” on their doorstep, is what makes Cuban people so attractive to South Africans.

However in his unprovoked confrontation with democratic South Africa, Marco Rubio maybe be counting on the oldest tool in the West’s toolbox in its dealings with the countries of the Global South, recently publicly vented by Alex Karp, the now motor-mouthed CEO of the American tech giant Palantir, a company founded by another South Africa nemesis Peter Thiel and which the Trump administration recently sub-contracted to create a vast techno surveillance apparatus in the USA.

Karp recently gleefully quoted Samuel P. Huntington writing in his Clashes of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order book that: 

“The rise of the West was not made possible by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion…but rather by its superiority in applying organised violence.”

Karp then added:

“Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”

Of course Alex Karp was dead wrong on this score!

Many black South Africans and many Africans across our magical continent often forget this fact, with lifetime and devastating consequences for themselves personally, for their countries and for their nation-states.

Yet what Alex Karp highlighted represents the core, immutable raison d’etre for the West’s incurable addiction to forever wars, whose sole purpose is to constantly intimidate, suborn and subjugate the countries of the Global South. 

Instead of allowing themselves to be reminded of this harsh truth of today’s geopolitics and geostrategy by the likes of Palantir CEO Alex Karp, black South Africa would rather be lulled into some false la la land by either Francis Fukuyama’s book The End of History and The Last Man or by Thomas Freidman’s book The Lexus and The Olive Tree, in which both authors spew saccharine and sanctimonious odes to the seemingly unsurpassable superiority of the values of western civilisation, to the extent that Thomas Friedman slanders the Global South, including our entire amazing African continent, by referring to it as “fourth…the developing-country gas station,” which compares very poorly, according to him, with the first, second and third gas stations of Japan, America and Western Europe. (Thomas Friedman, ibid, HarperCollins Publishers, 2000, page 380)

What is clear though is that Trump and his Secretary of State Marco Rubio are no shrinking violets. 

If anything the two powerful American statesmen no Thomas Friedman’s Lexus but are rather in-your-face porcupines on the global stage, using America’s quills to devastating effect.

Democratic South Africa too is catching the chills from their flailing on the global stage.

But no country in the world has been lied about by President Donald John Trump and his Secretary of State Marco Rubio as much as democratic South Africa. 

Thus democratic South Africa has become President Donald Trump and Secretary Rubio’s Pavlovian whistle to the Make America Great Again (MAGA) and America First delirious multitudes looking for any Global South nail to hammer hard.

Trump and Rubio are certainly no blind and faithful disciples of either Francis Fukuyama or Thomas Friedman.

They appear to be membership card-carrying disciples of Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s advocacy of a brutal use of superior organised violence of the West across the globe. 

In fact the non-consecutive second term administration of President Donald J. Trump is nothing short of a stentorian denunciation of the spurious theorising of Joseph Nye, former USA Assistant Secretary of International Defence and Security under President Bill Clinton, on “soft power” and a similar stentorian denunciation of Chester Crocker, Assistant Secretary of State for Africa under President Ronald Reagan, on “smart power”.

The velvet glove has come off America’s iron fist under the administration of President Trump.

In a recent interview with CNN’s John Vause on 15 May 2025 an eminent American professor declared that it seems that “cruelty is the whole purpose” of the non-consecutive second term of the Trump administration.

Perhaps nowhere is this truer than with regard to the Trump administration’s perpetuation of an utterly bogus claim about a so-called “white genocide” in democratic South Africa.

To quote the great Soviet and Russian author Aleendra Solzhhnitsyn:

“We know they are lying,

They know they are lying,

They know we know they are lying,

We know they know we know they are lying,

But they are still lying.”

The Trump administration is firmly determined that no good reason or facts or empirical evidence to the contrary or superior argument or logic will sway them away from embracing and from their macabre enjoyment of their international promotion of a bogus and highly destructive  “white genocide” claim.

So one must strongly disagree with the Financial Times (UK)’s columnist Robert Armstrong regarding his neologism of “Trump Always Chickens Out (TACO)” of 02 May 2025, in reference to Donald Trump’s pendulum-swing use of tariffs in his mindless trade wars with much of the world.

In as far as President Donald J. Trump and his Secretary of State and acting National Security Advisor Marco Rubio’s almost unbreakable surface adhesion to the abominable bogus claim about a so-called “white genocide” against white Afrikaner farmers in democratic South Africa, there is anything but TACO, sadly.

If anything democratic South Africa is experiencing Trump Always Doubles Down (TADoDo) syndrome in relation to Donald Trump’s mendacious claim about a so-called “white genocide” in democratic South Africa.

And this has unfortunately landed democratic South Africa into a fatal bear hug of the current Trump administration, with Secretary of State Rubio being the sharp end of the dagger pointed at democratic South Africa’s heart.

It would be no exaggeration to regard Secretary of State Marco Rubio as democratic South Africa’s Number One Diplomatic Opponent on the international scene on account of this bogus “white genocide” claim he peddles with gleeful abandon around the world, assisted of course by President Donald Trump’s supportive and powerful megaphone, the Truth Social platform.

President Trump and Secretary of State Rubio vindicate Henry Kissinger’s witty remark that “diplomacy can be deadly business, all the more so for being clothed in conciliatory forms.” (Ending the Vietnam War, Simon & Schuster, 2003, page 337).

President Trump and Secretary Rubio do not even pretend to cloth their diplomacy towards democratic South Africa in conciliatory forms, simulacrums and gestures.

Theirs is the crudest, middle-fingered, iron-fisted and buccaneer form of international diplomacy of an imperial global hegemon towards puny democratic South Africa which does not augur well at all for the flourishing of our mutually beneficial bilateral relationship between our two democracies in which millions upon millions of Americans heavily invested during their glorious campaigns in opposition to the apartheid system in South Africa before 1994.

By:

Isaac Mpho Mogotsi

Historian (MA, History), Economic Diplomat, former senior South African career diplomat, former Teacher, CEDIA Researcher-in-Chief, former freedom fighter, former political exile and Editor-in-Chief of CEDIA African Times.

Author of the award-winning novel The Alexandra Tales (Ravan Press, 1994) and the self-published book Whispering against the Wind: Democratic South Africa’s Search for National Identity, 2011 -2022 (CEDIA Publications, 2024.)

Founder & Executive Chairman

Centre for Economic Diplomacy in Africa (CEDIA)

https://centreforeconomicdiplomacyinafrica.com

isaacmogotsi@centreforeconomicdiplomacyinafrica.com

info@centreforeconomicdiplomacyinafrica.com

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