The Good Die Young: The Verdict on Henry Kissinger by René Rojas & Bhaskar Sunkara & Jonah Walters

Author:René Rojas & Bhaskar Sunkara & Jonah Walters
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso

By April 1976 the Cuban troops had pushed the South Africans back into Namibia, whence they had come. US officials responded to the humiliating defeat with fury. They blasted the Cubans as Moscow’s mercenaries.

Perhaps some believed it. The image of Castro as Moscow’s proxy was comforting: it cast Cuba’s extraordinary internationalism in a squalid light. As former under secretary of state George Ball observed, “Myths are made to solace those who find reality distasteful and, if some find such fantasy comforting, so be it.”

With the passing of time, however, the evidence that the Cubans sent their troops to Angola on their own initiative and without consulting the Soviets has become too compelling to deny. In 1981, the CIA noted that the intervention “was a unilateral Cuban operation designed in great haste.” Even Kissinger was forced to reconsider—Castro had confronted the Soviets with a fait accompli, he admitted in his memoirs. Castro had sent his soldiers because of his commitment to what he called “the most beautiful cause,” the struggle against apartheid. He understood that the victory of the Pretoria-Washington axis would have tightened the grip of white domination over the people of southern Africa. Kissinger acknowledged that Castro “was probably the most genuine revolutionary leader then in power.”

The tidal wave unleashed by the Cuban victory washed over southern Africa. Two statements from across the political divide in apartheid South Africa illustrate its psychological impact and the hope it aroused. In February 1976, as Cuban troops were pushing Pretoria’s army out of Angola, a South African military analyst wrote:

In Angola, Black troops—Cubans and Angolans—have defeated White troops in military exchanges … and that psychological edge, that advantage the White man has enjoyed and exploited over 300 years of colonialism and empire, is slipping away. White elitism has suffered an irreversible blow in Angola, and Whites who have been there know it.

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