Listen, Yankee! by Tom Hayden

Author:Tom Hayden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Cuba, United States, foreign policy, relations, Cuban Missile Crisis, Che Guevara, Regis Debray, C. Wright Mills, Cuban Five, Barack Obama, Fidel Castro, Elián González, activism, nation-state, revolution, politics
Publisher: Seven Stories Press

This was not “normal” behavior for a nation-state. Cuba faced violent attacks internally, remained under US pressure ninety miles away, and was allied with a Soviet Union seeking détente with Washington. Fidel, nonetheless, became preoccupied with defeating the United States and South Africa in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and Namibia. That he did so was a military achievement that shook the continent. Americans were engaged in covert military operations against the transitional administration, sending weapons and trainers to the FNLA and UNITA.45 For the racist South Africans, it was vital to shore up their border client, Namibia, then controlled by a white minority and sandwiched between Angola and the apartheid state’s border. For the United States, it was important to keep American support for apartheid as discreet as possible, while framing the conflict as one of stopping the advance of the Soviet Union in Africa. Whatever the Cold War rationale, the contradiction for Washington was being on the side of Portugal and South Africa during the time of a new civil rights era at home.

On October 14, South African troops invaded Angola; on November 4, Fidel decided to intervene with Cuban troops to stop the South Africans from reaching Luanda, the Angolan capital. The South Africans had troops, tanks, and planes, and might have broken the MPLA’s defense perimeters. According to official documents, Cuba made its decision without first consulting the Soviet Union; by contrast, the South African Defense official said, “We did so with the approval and knowledge of the Americans.”46

On March 27, 1976, South African troops pulled back from Angola, rebuffed by the Cuban forces.47 It was a stunning defeat for the white regional superpower. The war for Namibian independence now was underway, since the MPLA’s Neto now could open his safe border sanctuary to the black Namibian fighters of SWAPO. The death knell also sounded for white South Africa since, for the first time, White Power had suffered military defeat. According to Gleijeses, “Cuban troops were Angola’s shield against the South Africans [and] even the CIA conceded that the Cuban presence was ‘necessary to preserve Angolan independence.’”48

The decisive battle came at a small town named Cuito Cuanavale in September 1987 when South Africa was cornering Angola’s best military units. But Fidel sent his best available units to stop the South Africans in their tracks, “stripping Cuba’s defenses at home down to the bone.”49 Cuba’s risk taking entered history in southern Africa and among third world countries, but is missing in the mainstream American narrative of South Africa. For Fidel, according to one South African general, Angola was “South Africa’s Bay of Pigs.”50

On many occasions in coming years, Nelson Mandela would bless Cuba for the “selflessness” that he declared it showed in southern Africa.51 Cuba also trained thousands of Angolan doctors, engineers, and schoolteachers; the Cubans carried out one million medical consultations and sixteen thousand surgeries in a nine-month period of 1977 alone.52

A more complex African war began with Somalia’s 1977 invasion of Ethiopia, following a leftist coup that took power there with promises of land reform and literacy campaigns.

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