Piero Gleijeses' International History of the Cold War in Southern Africa, Omnibus E-Book: Includes Conflicting Missions and Visions of Freedom by Piero Gleijeses

Author:Piero Gleijeses [Gleijeses, Piero]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Americas, Latin America, Social & Cultural Studies, Political Science, International, International Relations
ISBN: 9780807861622
Amazon: B00P1A9MQW
Goodreads: 24736433
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2011-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

Africa: The Beginnings

I was among those stunned by the sudden outpouring of thousands of soldiers from a small Caribbean island which, in 1975, seemed more like a tropical Bulgaria, a well-behaved Soviet client, than a fiery revolutionary outpost. “You can’t understand our intervention in Angola without understanding our past,” a Cuban official later told me. He meant that the Cubans who went to Angola were following in the footsteps of those who, over the previous fifteen years, had gone to Algeria, Zaire, Congo Brazzaville, and Guinea-Bissau.23 He also meant, very gently, that my mental construction of Cuba as a tropical Bulgaria was, simply, nonsense.

History, geography, culture, and language made Latin America the Cubans’ natural habitat, the place closest to Castro’s and his followers’ hearts, the first place they tried to spread revolution. But Latin America was also where their freedom of movement was most circumscribed. Castro was, the CIA observed, “canny enough to keep his risks low” in the U.S. backyard.24 Hence, fewer than forty Cubans fought in Latin America in the 1960s, and Cuba exercised extreme caution before sending weapons to Latin American rebels.

In Africa, Cuba incurred fewer risks. Whereas in Latin America Havana challenged legal governments and flouted international law, in Africa it confronted colonial powers and defended established states. Above all, in Africa there was much less risk of a head-on collision with the United States. U.S. officials barely noted the Cubans in Africa—until 36,000 Cuban soldiers landed in Angola.

Moreover, the Cuban leaders were convinced that their country had a special empathy for the Third World beyond the confines of Latin America. The Soviets and their East European allies were white and, by Third World standards, rich; the Chinese exhibited the hubris of a great and rising power and were unable to adapt to African and Latin American culture. By contrast, Cuba was nonwhite, poor, threatened by a powerful enemy, and culturally both Latin American and African. It was, therefore, a unique hybrid: a socialist country with a Third World sensibility. This mattered, in a world that was dominated, as Castro said, by the “conflict between privileged and underprivileged, humanity against imperialism,”25 and where the major fault line was not between socialist and capitalist states but between developed and underdeveloped countries.

If this were a play—“Cuba’s African Journey”—the curtain would rise at Casablanca where a Cuban ship, Bahía de Nipe, docked in December 1961. It brought weapons for the Algerian rebels fighting against French colonial rule, and it departed with precious cargo: wounded Algerian fighters and war orphans from refugee camps. This represented the dual thrust of Cuban internationalism: military aid and humanitarian assistance. In May 1963, after Algeria had gained its independence, a fifty-five-person Cuban medical mission arrived in Algiers to provide free health care to the Algerian people. (“It was like a beggar offering his help, but we knew that the Algerian people needed it even more than we did, and that they deserved it,” explained the minister of public health.)26 In October 1963, when Algeria

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