Reviewed by: Cuba and Angola: Fighting for Africa’s Freedom and Our Own ed. by Mary-Alice Waters Jennifer Lambe (bio) Cuba and Angola: Fighting for Africa’s Freedom and Our Own By Mary-Alice Waters, ed. New York: Pathfinder Press, 2013. 150 pp. isbn 978-1604880465 The political, diplomatic, and social implications of Cuba’s engagement with African liberation struggles have just begun to receive the scholarly attention they deserve. Piero Gleijeses’ Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976-1991 (U of North Carolina P, 2013), a continuation of his Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976 (U of North Carolina P, 2002), will undoubtedly become the definitive diplomatic work on the topic. Gleijeses has consistently advanced the once heterodox view that Cuban forays into Algeria, Guinea-Bissau, Zaire, and Angola took place largely on Cuban, not Soviet, terms. Indeed, much of the new diplomatic scholarship on the topic, which posits Cuban “idealism” on one hand and African “gratitude” on the other, highlights the profoundly ideological nature of these campaigns. That Cuba undertook its most extended African intervention in Angola at a moment of budding political rapprochement with the United States appears to lend weight to the primacy of idealistic over geostrategic motivations, in sharp contrast to Henry Kissinger’s cynical realpolitik. On both sides, however, the ideological stakes of the Angolan conflict, which became a critical testing ground of Cold War alliances, were unmistakably weighty. The struggle against Portuguese imperialism in Angola had simmered for over a decade before Cuban involvement. Anti-colonial resistance directly contributed to the fall of the dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal in the 1974 Carnation Revolution, which ultimately impelled Portuguese withdrawal and independence in Angola. Nevertheless, the realization of independence also gave rise to inter-factional struggles between the three groups principally responsible for its achievement: the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). The Angolan civil war quickly became a battleground in the global Cold War, with the United States, apartheid-era South Africa, and Zaire supporting the FNLA and UNITA after the early withdrawal of Chinese and North Korean support, and Cuba and the Soviet Union bolstering the MPLA. Many of these contacts predated Angolan independence, but quickly escalated in a context of civil war. The Cuban entrance into the conflict at the personal solicitation of MPLA leaders was initially to be limited to military training. Ultimately, however, over the course of more than a decade, 375,000 Cuban volunteers, along with 50,000 additional civilian participants, would make their way to Angola. Early successes in beating back the South African advance depended in no small measure on Cuban support, and Cuban participation would also prove crucial at the 1988 victory over South African troops at Cuito Cuanavale, which led to the final attainment of Angolan and Namibian independence and the decisive weakening of apartheid in South Africa. Two years later, Nelson Mandela would also be freed, and, in a widely publicized speech, he personally thanked the Cuban “internationalists,” who had “done so much to free our continent” (73). Cuba and Angola: Fighting for Africa’s Freedom and Our Own (New York: Pathfinder, 2013), an edited volume of speeches and firsthand accounts from the Angolan intervention, also proffers this vision of Cuban idealism and African gratitude. It is thus somewhat difficult to assess the compilation in scholarly terms, given its non-academic framing and its unabashed admiration for the Cuban leadership of the campaign. The book’s aims thus diverge notably from the nuanced, if still largely positive, account presented by Piero Gleijeses, which marshals an impressive array of previously classified documentation from six countries, including Cuba. Nevertheless, the historical documents compiled in the volume do contain information of scholarly value, providing a useful lens onto the significance of Angola in Cuba itself. As a result of the campaign, for example, inter-nationalism was increasingly claimed as an integral part of the Cuban revolutionary project. The invocation by many participants...
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Jan 2, 2021
John Agbonifo 
Open Access