Mandela: The Authorized Biography
by Anthony Sampson (1999), pp.414-5 (excerpt)

[1960]
It was a time when many revolutionaries around the world appeared to be triumphant—Mao in China, Ben Bella in Algeria, Castro in Cuba. Mandela studied the rebellions throughout Africa—in Ethiopia, Kenya, the Cameroons and particularly in Algeria, which the ANC saw as a parallel to their own struggle. But it was the Cuban revolution which most inspired him and many of his colleagues. It was a dangerous model, a freak victory, but they were fired by the story of how Castro and Che Guevara, with only ten other survivors from their ship the Granma, had mustered a guerrilla army of 10,000 in eighteen months, and had marched on Havana in January 1959.  Mandela was especially interested in the account by Blas Roca, the Secretary of the Cuban Communist Party, which described how it was Castro, not the Party, who had realized that the moment of revolution had come. He would never lose his admiration for Castro.

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[1990]
Mandela showed a special fondness for Fidel Castro, who had inspired the ANC radicals with his daring revolution in 1959; on Robben Island he had been thrilled to hear that Cubans had intervened in Angola. He visited Cuba in July 1991 and gave an emotional speech thanking Cuba for helping the ANC, and recalling how Cuban troops had helped to defeat the South African invaders in Angola in 1988. That defeat, he said, "enables me to be here today." Castro replied by calling Mandela "one of the most extraordinary symbols of this era," explaining that "apartheid is capitalism and imperialism in its fascist form." Castro spoke for three hours without a piece of paper, to Mandela's amazement, and no one left except to go to the toilet. Mandela found Castro "a very happy chap": when they drove through Havana, "he just sat down, folded his arms, and I was the person waving to the crowd."'

Despite such embarrassing friends, Mandela was embraced by Western governments with an enthusiasm which amazed him after their previous coolness toward the ANC. It was partly of course because of the geopolitical transformation: the global communist bogey had evaporated, and the West no longer had to fear a hostile black South African government backed by Moscow. Cold Warriors who had built up Mandela as a communist ogre were disarmed -- sometimes with pangs of guilt -- to meet the genial old man with a conservative style and a close interest in Western democracies. And Western governments began competing belatedly to make friends with a possible black president.

But the ecstatic welcomes could not be explained by political science. Mandela's basic appeal was not as a man of power, but as a moral leader who had stood out for fundamental principles and who gave hope for the future to all oppressed people and all countries torn by racial divisions. His dignity and wish for reconciliation gave him an influence beyond ordinary politics, which was the more surprising because he was not religious. He had never offered himself as a spiritual leader, and he dismissed the label of saint: "I'm just a sinner who keeps on trying." "I am not particularly religious or spiritual," he told the professor of theology Charles Villa-Vicencio. "I am just an ordinary person trying to make sense of the mysteries of life."'