In June 1974, I accompanied former Peace Corps officials Frank Mankiewicz and Kirby Jones on a filmmaking mission to Cuba. In October 1974, the documentary, featuring a long interview with Cuban President Fidel Castro, appeared on CBS with Dan Rather narrating. Prior to our departure, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had asked Mankiewicz to carry a sealed note to Castro. He agreed. Weeks later, we had watched in awe as Fidel opened and read the letter inviting him, we subsequently discovered, to engage in secret negotiations.
For Kissinger, a surprise announcement of an entente with Cuba would have amounted to the equivalent of another China, well, mini-China achievement. Castro, for his part could claim victory as well, having held out for fifteen years without making concessions to Cuba’s intimidating neighbor.
The undisclosed talks that began in the autumn of 1974 continued for a year until Kissinger abruptly canceled them in response to two Cuban moves. Castro had initiated an anti-US drive for Puerto Rican independence at the United Nations and, more dramatically, sent thousands of Cuban combat troops to Angola.
A new book by Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington and Africa, 1959-1976, The University of North Carolina Press tells the story of how Cuba and the United States competed for control of Angola in what became a major battle for third world territory -- as well as hearts and minds in Africa.
Imagine, in the fall of 1975, as the high level US-Cuban discussions proceeded, how Kissinger must have responded when informed that Fidel Castro had sent troops to fight in Angola. Indeed, unbeknownst to the public, Kissinger had previously launched a covert military action to prevent the pro-Soviet and pro-Cuban MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) from assuming power. The United States was paying two rival Angolan factions.
The CIA plan involved coordinating US actions with the South African defense force, which would invade Angola from the South, pretending -- so that it didn’t look like an official apartheid white army invading a black country again -- that the troops were working with an anti-MPLA, tribal-based group called UNITA, which supposedly had recruited a mercenary force of white irregulars. Jonas Savimbi took both South African and CIA money as he and his rag tag UNITA troops latched on to the disciplined apartheid army.
Simultaneously, the FNLA, another rival "independence" group led by Holden Roberto, another well paid CIA agent, hit Angola from Zaire in the North -- with help from the Zairean government. Both armies advanced rapidly on Angola’s capital, and experts were taking bets on how many days it would take them to defeat the fragile and inexperienced armed forces of the MPLA.
In a 1977 interview, Castro explained in great detail how MPLA President Agostino Neto had telephoned him and asked him to send troops in order to save Angolan independence. Castro claimed that he had favored the idea and discussed it with top Politburo comrades, who also assented.
But, asked Castro rhetorically, how would we get our troops to Angola rapidly, since there was no time to send them by sea? Castro said that he phoned Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley, who also backed the idea of sending troops to help stave off a South African takeover of Angola, but that Jamaica being only 80 miles from Cuba offered little logistical help. Together, they had come up with the idea of asking Guyana’s Prime Minister Forbes Burnham for permission to refuel Cuban troop transport aircraft in his capital. Burnham, who had enjoyed CIA ties himself at one time, surprisingly agreed and within less than a week. Manley confirmed this conversation to me. Gleijeses offers a slightly different version, which he garnered from other Cuban sources.
But the facts show that as Raul Castro, Fidel’s brother and head of Cuba’s armed forces took off for Moscow to plead for weapons support, the Cuban troops were already heading for Luanda, Angola’s capital. The Soviets came through and with the recently acquired weapons, the Cubans and Angolans fighting together defeated both invading armies, pushing them back across the borders.
It would have been difficult at that time, Gleijeses concludes in discussing the pusillanimous role of the media in covering -- or not covering -- the war in Angola, for even an avid newspaper reader to know that "without the Cuban intervention, the South Africans would have seized Luanda [Angola’s capital] before anyone reported that they [South Africans] had crossed the border. The CIA covert operation in Angola would have succeeded."
When it failed Kissinger went ballistic. What right, Kissinger must have ranted, did a puny island nation like Cuba have to play a role in world history! A country lacking serious resources (oil, uranium, diamonds) and without a developed industrial base! Kissinger, we now know, took extreme umbrage over the fact that Fidel Castro, an upstart third world revolutionary, had dared to interfere in the Cold War, a world sized game played between major nuclear powers. Only great powers make history, he had told a former UN official.
Castro’s decision to intervene in Angola rather than pursue détente with the United States both angered and baffled Kissinger. According to Gleijeses, Kissinger had earlier chosen "Angola as the place to show America’s resolve in the wake of Vietnam. In Angola, he would take the offensive; he would send a signal." Kissinger was looking for ways to assure allies and enemies alike that Washington possessed the resolve to respond to communist aggression and he had defined Moscow’s tepid attitude toward the MPLA as a major anti-western initiative.
Gleijeses shows, however, that Soviet support for the MPLA government was both reluctant and meager and that Castro, not Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev, played the decisive role in escalating the stakes of the Angola outcome. Washington, as Gleijeses demonstrates by citing hundreds of newly declassified cables from CIA and State Department officials, often had poor information on which to make decisions and when high officials did have accurate facts, they frequently ignored them in order to purse their ideological bents.
Kissinger, the supreme ideologue and expert at ignoring evidence, was already annoyed over Castro’s opting for intervention in Angola rather than détente with Washington. He must have felt absolutely beside himself when the CIA informed him later that fall that Cubans and Angolans had kicked the butt of the white South African forces that had surreptitiously invaded Angola.
The CIA’s covert action plans had failed on both fronts. The white South Africans until then had wrapped themselves in an invincible aura. In a series of battles in southern Angola, they took heavy casualties and learned some humility. Third world armies of color, it turned out, could stand up to white first world armies.
Gleijeses offers this fascinating slice of Cold War history, Cuba’s military interventions in Africa, from the 1960s through the 1980s, and the various African clash points where Cuban and US interests collided, as an answer to official distortions of that period, like the reporting in Kissinger’s Memoirs.
Historians have also repeated the myth of Cuba acting as Soviet puppet or else they’ve neglected this area. Piero Gleijeses has helped to fill the twin holes of distortion and neglect. Until this book, little has been written about Cuba’s decisive aid to the Algerian liberation effort both during and after its successful war for independence in the early 1960s. Similarly, Gleijeses makes accessible some of the key factors in Che Guevara’s 1964 vain attempt to foster revolution in Zaire in 1964. Che and the Cuban leaders, he writes, overestimated "the revolutionary potential in Africa and in Zaire in particular."
Gleijeses also tells how "one thousand mercenaries, armed and transported by the United States and assisted by the CIA air force," effectively countered the efforts of Che’s valiant combatants. The CIA had enjoyed yet another successful covert operation against revolutionary and independence movements in the Third World while Che Guevara took the defeat personally. "I lacked the willpower to make the necessary effort," he wrote in his Africa diary.
Gleijeses insightfully concludes that Che’s "greatest mistake in Zaire [was] his excessive optimism [which] led him to condemn the realism of others as weakness." But Gleijeses perhaps underestimates the pluck of the Cuban revolutionaries, whose lack of realism had initially led them to do battle in Cuba with a much larger and better-armed force.
So too in Africa did Cuba’s warriors, even after their humiliating experience, keep coming back to fight with liberation movements. From his incredibly thorough research, Gleijeses reveals details about the thousands of Cubans -- including women -- who also volunteered for missions in places like Guinea Bissau where they played a decisive role in the liberation army’s defeat of the Portuguese.
Although some prior narratives existed of these affairs, Gleijeses is the first historian to cite the actual cables and memos of state, from Washington and Havana -- and from other countries as well -- to provide insight into the decision making process itself. In addition, his quotes from the historical actors offer a unique texture to the book and enrich the narrative. Two sources are glaringly absent from Gleijeses’ references, but through no fault of his. Sadly, neither Fidel nor Raul Castro granted the historian an interview. But even without those two crucial primary actors, Conflicting Missions stands out as an intensely researched and reasonably argued work that illuminates what had been an obscure tunnel of Cold War history.
Beyond the intrinsic policy and Africa analysis and arguments, the book also suggests a broader theme, one that helps to define the elusive dynamic of the Cuban revolution. When the revolutionaries took power in 1959, Cuba emerged from its role as an informal colony of the United States, a kind of appendage to the US economy, and within a few years began to play role in world history.
As Conflicting Missions makes clear, the Cuban revolution sent its soldiers to do their dance on the African part of history’s stage. Cuba’s artists, athletes and scientists had already made world reputations, but Cuba’s soldiers in Africa were dying and getting wounded in order to shape the destiny of other peoples.
Perhaps this is the part of the Cuban revolution that has eluded US understanding, that Fidel Castro led a project to turn a demoralized informal US colony into a proud nation. Obviously, Cubans have paid a heavy price for this national achievement -- divided families, political prisoners, the four decade long strain of hostile relations with the United States -- but what historical process doesn’t exact a heavy toll?
Gleijeses study ends in 1976. Thanks to Cuba’s effort, Angola won its independence. But a decade later, Cuban troops again play the key role in the second defeat of South Africa’s military in the 1987-88 battles of Cuito Cuanavale -- battles that eventually led to the apartheid government’s decision to abandon a military strategy and negotiate with the African National Congress.
I remember watching Nelson Mandela’s inauguration as South Africa’s first black president and him shaking the hands of heads of state until he came to Fidel. Mandela grabbed the Cuban President in a bear hug and whispered, audibly, "You made this possible."
The Cuban government opened some of its archives to Gleijeses so that he could better tell the story of the first stage of Cuba’s adventures in Africa. We await part two, in which Cuba’s military role in Ethiopia is explored and the full story is told of how Cuba helped make possible the independence of Namibia and the emergence of Mandela and the ANC in South Africa in the early 1990s.
Saul Landau is Director of Digital Media and International Outreach for the College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences at the California State Polytechnic University Pomona.
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