Giulia Bonacci, Adrien Delmas, and Kali Argyriadis eds. Cuba and Africa, 1959–1994: Writing an alternative Atlantic history.

Abstract

In classrooms, conferences, and dinner table discussions, I have often recounted the scene in 1980s Angola where Cuban troops defended American-owned oil installations from attack by US-backed UNITA troops, who were fighting the Angolan government in a civil war. It is a tidy example that shows US business and state interests do not always overlap. Reading Cuba and Africa, 1959–1994, a new volume edited by Giulia Bonacci, Adrien Delmas, and Kali Argyriadis, offers many other surprising and instructive scenarios. Among them is the fact that Cuban exiles (Miami-based veterans of the Bay of Pigs) fought the Cuban troops sent by Castro to support the post-Lumumba nationalists in the Congo and the MPLA (People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola) in Angola. The support the Castro government offered African states, especially its intervention in Angola, is not new to me. But learning of anti-Castro Cubans choosing Central Africa as a theater to fight Castro was. While this is the example that most surprised me, the book as a whole offers fresh perspectives on Cuban-African relations. Cultural exchanges, civil and social scientific cooperation, and religious affiliations and imaginations, read alongside histories of more familiar military and political support, enrich a literature that has focused on the geopolitics of the Cold War and Cuba’s well-known military interventions on the African continent.