The fringe Cape Independence Advocacy Group (CIAG) has penned an open letter to US President Donald Trump, requesting support for a self-determination referendum in the Western Cape as a more lasting solution than the US’s Afrikaner refugee programme.
This move comes a year after the group travelled to the US to ask for support — a trip that drew sharp criticism from President Cyril Ramaphosa.
Former Cuban president Raul Castro has been indicted in the United States on murder charges, court records showed on Wednesday, in a major escalation in Washington’s pressure campaign against the island’s communist government.
The indictment against Castro, returned in federal court in Miami on April 23, charges him with one count of conspiracy to kill US nationals, four counts of murder, and two counts of destruction of aircraft, court records show. Five other people are also named as defendants in the case.
The charges stemmed from a 1996 incident in which Cuban jets shot down planes operated by a group of Cuban exiles, US acting attorney-general Todd Blanche said at an event in downtown Miami on Wednesday to honour victims of the incident.
“My message today is clear: the United States and President Trump does not and will not forget its citizens,” Blanche said to applause in a packed auditorium of government officials and Cuban Americans in Miami.
Cuba’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Castro, 94, last appeared in public in Cuba earlier this month, and there is no evidence that he has since left the island or that the government would allow him to be extradited.
The indictment comes as US President Donald Trump has pushed for a regime change in Cuba, where Castro’s communists have been in charge since his late brother Fidel Castro led a revolution in 1959.
Trump in a statement earlier on Wednesday called Cuba a “rogue state harbouring hostile foreign military” and framed his administration’s actions regarding the Caribbean island as part of a broader effort to expand US influence in the Western Hemisphere.
“From the shores of Havana to the banks of the Panama Canal, we will drive out the forces of lawlessness and crime and foreign encroachment,” Trump said at a Coast Guard Academy event in New London, Connecticut.
Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said on Monday that the island does not represent a threat.
The indictment marks a new low in relations between the longtime Cold War rivals.
After taking power, Fidel Castro struck an alliance with the Soviet Union, then seized US -owned businesses and properties. The US has since maintained an economic embargo on the nation of about 10 million.
The two sides have talked intermittently over the years. Diplomatic relations briefly improved during former Democratic President Barack Obama’s second term, but Trump, a Republican, has taken a harder line.
Rubio offers $100m in aid
Members of Miami’s large Cuban American community gathered outside the city’s Freedom Tower ahead of the ceremony.
“We all hoped for a long time, for many years, that this would happen,” said Bobby Ramirez, a 62-year-old musician who left Cuba in 1971 when he was seven years old.
The ceremony is taking place on the anniversary of the end of a four-year US military occupation of Cuba on May 20, 1902, which itself followed centuries of Spanish colonial rule. Cuba’s government does not consider the date to mark the country’s independence day, arguing that it remained subservient to Washington until the 1959 revolution.
In a post on X, Diaz-Canel said that in Cuban history, May 20 signified “intervention, interference, dispossession, frustration.”
Under Trump, the US has effectively imposed a blockade on Cuba by threatening sanctions on countries supplying it with fuel, triggering power outages and exacerbating its worst crisis in decades.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio earlier on Wednesday offered Cuba $100m in aid, and blamed Cuba’s leaders for shortages of electricity, food and fuel. Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez called that offer cynical, citing the “devastating effect” of the economic blockade.
Trump has said Cuba ‘is next’
Born in 1931, Raul Castro was a key figure alongside his older brother in the guerrilla war that toppled US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista.
He helped defeat the US-organised Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, and served as defence minister for decades. He succeeded his brother as president in 2008 and stepped down in 2018, but remains a powerful behind-the-scenes figure in Cuban politics.
He was defence minister at the time of the 1996 incident.
The two small planes that were shot down were being flown by Brothers to the Rescue, a group of Miami-based Cuban exile pilots who said their mission was to search for Cuban rafters fleeing the island.
All four men aboard were killed. Portraits of the four were displayed behind Blanche as he spoke in Miami’s Freedom Tower, which served as a refugee centre for Cubans in the 1960s.
The Cuban government has argued the strike was a legitimate response to the planes intruding on Cuban airspace. Fidel Castro said Cuba’s military had acted on “standing orders” to down planes entering Cuban airspace. He said Raul Castro did not give a specific order to shoot the planes.
The US condemned the attack and imposed sanctions. The justice department charged three Cuban military officers in 2003 but they were never extradited.
The International Civil Aviation Organization later concluded the shootdown took place over international waters.
The filing of the criminal case against a US adversary like Castro recalls the earlier drug-trafficking indictment of imprisoned former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, an ally of Havana’s.
The Trump administration cited that indictment as a justification for the January 3 raid on Caracas by the US military in which Maduro was captured and brought to New York to face the charges. He has pleaded not guilty.
Trump in March threatened that Cuba “is next” after Venezuela. Diaz-Canel said on Monday that any US military action against Cuba would lead to a “bloodbath.”
Reuters
The lobby group tried to campaign in the 2024 general elections with the Referendum Party. It gained no seats, and secured only 5,110 votes in the Western Cape, equivalent to 0.26% of the provincial vote. The party was later absorbed into the FF+.
In the letter, the CIAG praised the US government for its refugee and resettlement programme for Afrikaners, which launched last year after claims that the community faced race-based discrimination and unjust policies. However, the group suggested an alternative that they believe would be more effective.
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President Cyril Ramaphosa is weighing his legal options after Friday’s Constitutional Court ruling that parliament must reopen impeachment proceedings over his handling of the theft of cash from his game farm. Resignation, however, is reportedly not under consideration.
The issue is expected to top the agenda at a meeting of senior ANC officials on Monday.
The apex court ruled that parliament should set up an impeachment committee to consider findings by an independent panel that Ramaphosa has a case to answer over the theft of $580,000 hidden in a sofa at his Phala Phala game farm.
The Constitutional Court found parliament failed to follow due process by not considering the facts of the report when it voted against the panel’s recommendation to conduct an impeachment inquiry.
“The president is weighing his options right now in accordance with the law,” a source in the presidency told Business Day.
Lawson Naidoo, director of the Council for the Advancement of the South African Constitution, said one option would be for the president to launch a high court review application of the independent panel report, which his legal team has previously asked the Constitutional Court to set aside.
The 2022 Constitutional Court review application failed on jurisdictional grounds and could readily be revived in the high court.
“Were he to do that, it would tie parliament’s hands, because the very report it is looking at is subject to judicial review,” he said.
Alternatively, Naidoo continued, the president could allow parliament’s proceedings for an impeachment inquiry to unfold.
Such a process is unlikely to conclude before the local government elections scheduled for November 4.
“All of the parties in parliament will want to use the occasion to grandstand,” he said.
Reserve Bank report
Political analyst and former ANC MP Melanie Verwoerd said an impeachment inquiry would have to consider that the SA Reserve Bank’s investigation into the Phala Phala matter cleared Ramaphosa of exchange control violations.
The central bank’s report findings were published after the independent panel concluded its work and might give the president more confidence to weather an impeachment inquiry.
She said it is unlikely that Ramaphosa will be impeached, as it would require more than two-thirds of MPs to vote him out. Even a vote of no-confidence, which requires a 50% majority, is unlikely to succeed as most parties in parliament are satisfied with Ramaphosa as president.
The ANC has 159 seats in parliament, accounting for just less than 40% of the 400 seats in the National Assembly. It lost its parliamentary majority after the 2024 general election, marking the first time since the end of apartheid that it lacks full legislative control.
Two opposition parties — MK and the African Transformation Movement — have separately filed a motion of no confidence in the president, in terms of section 102(2) of the constitution. A vote of no confidence requires only a simple majority in the National Assembly to succeed.
MK leader Jacob Zuma survived several motions of no confidence when he was president and head of the ANC because at that stage the ANC had more than two thirds of the seats in parliament, and the party whip ensured MPs voted along party lines.
“In light of the constitutional importance of a motion of no confidence, as well as the considerable political pressures surrounding such proceedings, we have written to the speaker of the National Assembly requesting that the motion be conducted by secret ballot,” MK spokesperson Nhlamulo Ndhlela said.
“This is to safeguard the independence and integrity of members’ votes and to ensure they can exercise their responsibilities freely and effectively.”
Unlike a no-confidence vote, section 89 sets out three specific grounds on which the National Assembly can remove a sitting president, namely a serious violation of the constitution or law, serious misconduct or an inability to perform the functions of office. Removal under section 89 requires a two-thirds majority of National Assembly members.
“Our request, President Trump, is this: If you want to help Afrikaners and other minorities in South Africa in a way that offers us a multi-generational future on the African continent, we ask that the United States publicly support the democratic right of the people of the Western Cape to determine their own constitutional future through a referendum,” said CIAG leader Phil Craig.
British-born Craig urged the US to engage with both the South African government and the Western Cape provincial government to encourage such a process.
“Africa is our home. We can flee, and it is a statistical fact that many have chosen to do so, but to flee is to surrender. In all sincerity and with great respect, we don’t want your pity, we want your help and support to defend our people and our civilisation here in Africa.
Donald Trump’s big South African lie, repeated on Friday with the claim that our government is “killing white people” and specifically Afrikaners, is still being welcomed or amplified by a startling number of whites in this country, a strange state of affairs when many of them clearly know that they’re lying too.
I’ve encountered some of these people over the last few weeks, ever since I wrote a Facebook post last month, as plainly and fairly as I could, in which I attempted to explain to any Americans who might stumble across it that there was, in fact, no genocide happening here.
For better and for worse, the post took off with over half a million people reading it, mostly in South Africa; and though most approved of it (social media is, after all, an echo chamber) some of the almost 2,000 comments under the line nevertheless introduced me to a fairly good sample of those South Africans who are either still celebrating Trump’s claims or sharing them in tacit approval.
I expected the anger, as well as the lunge towards absurd ad hominems: by pointing out that Trump was lying for profit, and that black people face a greater risk of violent crime than whites, I was, wrote one respondent, confirming my reputation as a well-known ANC shill who regularly espouses communist views.
Another raged that I was a ‘hanskakie’, an antique slur describing those treacherous Afrikaners who collaborated with the British in the Boer War. (Because remember, kids, it’s entirely okay for white people to still be triggered by stuff from 1900, but black people really need to get over everything since 1948.)
The fact that poor black South Africans face far worse than white Afrikaners, and yet can’t apply for the same refugee status in the US, simply didn’t penetrate.
I was even invited to come with my family to spend a night on a rural smallholding (in the frontier province of the Western Cape, no less) where we would be butchered and taught a valuable lesson about how hard land-owning whites have it.
Most, however, reacted without insult and from a place of confusion, pain and, it must be said, a profound failure of logic, insisting that by contesting Trump’s lie and the victimhood hustle of AfriForum I was somehow trying to deny that white farmers were sometimes the victims of violent crime: just wait til it’s your family, they said, naming white victims or demanding that I watch propaganda produced by British right winger Katie Hopkins.
The fact that poor black South Africans face far worse than white Afrikaners, and yet can’t apply for the same refugee status in the US, simply didn’t penetrate.
I also expected the extent to which outrage clouded people’s ability to read for meaning: having reached the end of a piece in which I confirm that South Africa has more violent crime than most countries, a few reprimanded me for refusing to admit that South Africa has more violent crime than most countries.
What I didn’t expect, however, was how quickly many of those thanking Trump for his stance disintegrated under the slightest scrutiny, revealing that they know Trump is lying and that the South African government isn’t targeting white people for extermination, but are content to promote the lie to see the ANC shamed on the international stage.
The true believers I can understand: fear, and especially exposure to violence, can make anyone convince themselves of anything.
But there is an extraordinary moral cowardice at work among people who are willing to provide aid and comfort to American white nationalism, a project that holds the majority of their compatriots and their continent in vile contempt, just for the cheap thrill of seeing the ANC dragged through the streets.
“We stand at a crossroads. We cannot exist outside of Africa. Our languages will be lost, our cultures absorbed, our flame extinguished. We have earned our place in the history books; our fight now is to secure our place in the future.
“Afrikaners and other minority groups do not need a new home. We love the one we have, we just need to be able to make our own decisions and to decide for ourselves how we want to be governed as opposed to having that dictated to us.”
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