The Double Life of Fidel Castro by Sanchez Juan

Author:Sanchez, Juan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Amberley Publishing
Published: 2015-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

One of the characteristics of the 1980s was the proliferation of international events, from the boycott of the Olympic games in Moscow (1980) to the fall of the Berlin wall (1989), along with the Falklands war (1982); the end of dictatorships in Argentina (1983), Brazil (1984), and Uruguay (1986); and the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale (1987–1988) during the Angola war, which resulted in Cuba blocking the advance of the South African army.

The event that had the most effect on me personally was the sudden death of Leonid Brezhnev, who had presided over the USSR since 1964 and who succumbed to a heart attack on November 10, 1982.

Several days after having received news of the death, we took off for Moscow to attend the funeral of this leader of a “brother country,” leaving our tropical heat for the freezing cold of the banks of the Moskva. However, before reaching the Soviet Union on board the presidential Ilyushin-62 with its colors of the airline company Cubana de Aviación, our plane made a technical stopover at Shannon Airport in Ireland. As soon as it came to a halt, our plane was immediately surrounded by twenty or so soldiers who mounted guard, rifles slung over their shoulders. We were watching this spectacle from the windows of the plane when Fidel suddenly decided to disembark to enjoy an Irish coffee in the transit zone. It was sheer bravado: for the Comandante, it was a way of saying that nothing could stop him from making an incursion into enemy territory— on this occasion, that of Ireland, next door to British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, an indefatigable ally of Ronald Reagan.

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*Led by Jonas Savimbi and financed by the United States and South Africa, UNITA fought the Marxist-Leninist government of the People’s Republic of Angola, supported by the USSR and Cuba. Like the conflicts of Central America during the same period, the Angolan civil war from 1975 to 1992 was one of the main theaters of the armed conflict of the cold war.

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