Vol. 79/No. 41      November 16, 2015

An article in the Oct. 23 issue of Granma, the daily paper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, features Cuba’s first internationalist military mission: defending the workers and farmers government in Algeria from invasion by the U.S.-backed monarch in Morocco in October 1963.

The paper is regularly highlighting such chapters in Cuba’s revolutionary history, bringing them to life for new generations. It’s a reminder of why the U.S. rulers continue to seek to overturn the Cuban Revolution, even though they’ve had to change their tactics.

The article by Gabriel Molina, who was Prensa Latina’s correspondent there at the time, describes how the mission came about. Algeria’s workers and farmers had defeated the French colonial army in 1962 after a bloody revolutionary war. Cuba had provided some assistance to the Algerian fighters in 1961. Algerian Foreign Minister Abdelaziz Bouteflika told Cuban Ambassador Jorge Serguera on Oct. 9, 1963, that Moroccan troops were about to invade. There had already been skirmishes on the border.

Morocco’s King Hassan II was a close ally of Washington. He had U.S. pilots flying Morocco’s helicopters and 40 heavy tanks bought from the Soviet Union, while Algeria had only a dozen French-built light tanks.

Serguera told Bouteflika what Cuban leader Fidel Castro had said, “For the Algerians, any assistance they may need,” and offered tanks, artillery and troops. Bouteflika relayed the Cuban offer to Algerian President Ahmed Ben Bella, who “accepted without hesitation.”

The Cubans responded despite the risk that their solidarity could jeopardize a Moroccan agreement to buy 1 million tons of sugar from Cuba, at a moment when Washington had already launched its economic war and blocked the import of Cuban sugar to the U.S.

By Oct. 14, an advance group from Cuba’s Special Instruction Group had arrived in Algiers. By Oct. 22, the first group of the Cuban contingent of 685 soldiers and officers, an anti-tank battery and 22 tanks had arrived.

“The Algerians really reminded us of ourselves in 1959” when Cuba’s workers and farmers overthrew the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, recalled Reinerio Placencia, one of the Cuban internationalist fighters. “One had a rifle, another had a shotgun, another a machine gun and so on.” The interview appears in the book Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976 by Piero Gleijeses.

The Cuban internationalists followed a strict code of conduct. No alcoholic beverages, no intimate relationships of “any kind, with women … a complete and absolute respect” for Algerian customs and religion.

“Do not boast about our Revolution, or our ideology,” Raúl Castro, head of the Cuban Armed Forces, instructed them. “Be modest at all times, share the little we know and never act like experts.”

The Cubans immediately began preparations to enter the fight, while simultaneously training the Algerian forces.

On the eve of the planned counterattack on Oct. 29 with joint Cuban and Algerian forces, President Ben Bella ordered them to wait for the outcome of negotiations he would conduct in Mali with Hassan II, Mali President Modibo Keita and Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie.

The Moroccan government backed down and agreed to a cease-fire and suspension of hostilities. The Cuban mission had helped stop further attacks without firing a single shot.

Half of the internationalist contingent soon returned to Cuba, Molina reports. The others trained the Algerian troops to better defend their homeland and revolution and to effectively use the tanks and weaponry the Cubans left behind.

In June 1965 Ben Bella and Algeria’s workers and farmers government were overthrown by a counterrevolutionary coup headed by Defense Minister Houari Boumedienne.

But the experience gained by Cuba’s revolutionary leadership laid the basis for further internationalist missions around the world and in Africa, including Cuba’s key role in defeating repeated invasions of Angola by the white supremacist apartheid regime in South Africa in the 1970s and ’80s.

In an Oct. 1 editorial the Washington Post complained that Cuban President Raúl Castro is continuing with “his brother Fidel’s old jeremiads from the 1960s, complete with a call for Puerto Rican independence and condemnation of alleged NATO encroachment on Russia,” despite the re-establishment of diplomatic relations between Havana and Washington earlier this year.

In its own way, the editorial is a backhanded tribute to the internationalism and selflessness that continues to mark the Cuban Revolution today.  
 
 
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