Welcome to the Little Cuba of the Sahara Desert
21.09.2023 - 18:38
/ atlasobscura.com
/ Fidel Castro
Out in a flat plain of reddish sand against a wide blue sky, a group of men set up a baseball field. The home base is made from a green plastic crate propped on a tire, and the players stand in an outfield, stark figures against an expansive horizon. Spanish phrases interlay the general chitchat in Arabic. The batter crouches, ready for the ball, as the pitcher pivots his leg to throw. His ball strikes the ground far ahead of the plate, and the batter stands straight as if to say, ‘Come on? Really?’
This game is just one of Cuba’s influences on a number of refugee camps at the border of Western Sahara in Africa, 4,580 miles from Havana in the Caribbean. These camps are home to the Sahrawi people, who have been waging a war for independence against Morocco since the 1970s and have long-found comrades and collaborators in Cuba. Tags of Che Guevara pop up on odd corners of Smara refugee camp, and a few miles away, children study at the Simón Bolívar school staffed by Cuban teachers.
The Sahrawis are indigenous to Western Sahara, but soon after the end of Spanish colonialism, they found their phosphate-rich land occupied by neighbors Morocco and Mauritania. They formed a Marxist guerrilla movement called the Polisario Front, and since then, a close relationship has formed between the Caribbean island and the Sahrawi fighters.
Many Sahrawis had to flee to Algeria due to the fighting between Western Sahara and Morocco, which began in 1975. Fidel Castro was a close ally of Algeria during the war of independence against France. The Polisario, propped up and sheltered by Algeria, immediately got Castro’s sympathies for their fight against what they called the “neo-colonizer” Morocco. Over the decades, Cuba has sent weapons, doctors, and teachers to the refugee camps, while thousands of young Sahrawis went to study in the Caribbean country. To this day, Cuban professors and doctors from the Brigada Medica Cubana live and work in the camps. When Castro died in 2016, the Polisario ordered three days of national mourning.
Film producer Dah Salama is part of the group that plays baseball on Fridays in the Hamada, a flat, rocky desert in southwestern Algeria. He was 14 when he left the camps and took a plane to Cuba. That day was the last time he was able to speak directly to his family until 2005, when he was 17. In those pre-Whatsapp days, they communicated with cassette tapes sent in the mail overseas. Salama studied at boarding school with other Sahrawi children, eventually focusing on accounting as he got older. He lived for a total of ten years in Cuba, spending most of his teen years and early twenties on the island. Today he feels both Cuban and Sahrawi. Salama is part of an entire generation, nicknamed the