Gleijeses was addressing a group of 40 students, professors, and others at an April 7 lecture at Sarah Lawrence College here on the theme of “Cuba and Africa.” His book traces the history of Cuba’s internationalist aid in Africa beginning in Algeria in 1961 to the Congo and Guinea Bissau. It ends with the first two years of Cuba’s mission to help defend newly independent Angola in 1975. The book also documents Washington’s foreign policy in Africa during the same period, contrasting it to that of Havana.

Gleijeses—a professor of American Foreign Policy at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C.—said that he is currently writing a second volume on the subject, which will focus on the Cuban mission to Angola from 1975 to 1988. This was the high point of Cuba’s aid to African liberation struggles, involving some 300,000 Cuban volunteers who helped defend the independence of the former Portuguese colony from a U.S.-backed South African invasion aimed at strengthening the white-minority regime’s grip in southern Africa.

Gleijeses drew on a treasure trove of original documents and interviews to back up his account. These documents—both from U.S. intelligence agencies and the Cuban archives—consistently confirm the fact that the policies the Cuban leadership pursues around the world flow from the proletarian internationalism of the leadership of Cuba’s socialist revolution. They refute Washington’s official propaganda argument that Cuba acted as a “Soviet satellite” or out of narrow self-interest.

Henry Kissinger, the U.S. secretary of state who helped lead the joint U.S.-South African operation in Angola, confirmed this fact, Gleijeses said. He quoted Kissinger’s 1999 memoirs where he admits that he erred in assuming that the Cuban government was acting as “a Soviet surrogate” there. “We could not imagine that he [Castro] would act in such a provocative manner so far from his country unless Moscow pressured him…. Evidence now available suggests the opposite was the case…. Castro,” Kissinger concluded, “was probably the most genuine revolutionary in power in those moments.”

In 1975, the Cuban leadership acted contrary to the course of the Stalinist Soviet leadership of seeking “peaceful co-existence” with U.S. imperialism in sending troops to defend Angola, Gleijeses said. Cuba organized—without assistance from Moscow—a massive, slow, and perilous airlift of soldiers using Cuban planes and boats to come to the assistance of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the leadership of the independence struggle there. In the weeks leading up to this Cuban operation, a powerful South African military column, acting with Washington’s support, entered Angola, cut through MPLA resistance, and was penetrating deep into the country.

“In terms of realpolitik it was not in the interests of Cuba to send the troops,” Gleijeses said. The Cuban leadership risked trade relations with European governments, he said, as well as sharpening the conflict with Washington. The biggest risk, he said, was that if the South African regime rapidly increased the invasion force the small Cuban contingent—which was only slowly increasing because Cuba did not have enough planes and boats to ship troops quickly—could face a bloody military defeat before Cuba had time to get enough of its forces on the ground.

“It wasn’t just to help Angola, to help the MPLA,” Gleijeses noted. “The significance of the Cuban victory went beyond Angola.”

The initial defeats the apartheid army suffered were a tremendous boost to the confidence of workers and peasants fighting against colonial and white-minority rule in southern Africa. In Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Cuba’s victories in Angola helped propel the collapse of the white-minority regime there in 1980.

But the biggest blow to Washington and Pretoria’s plans for the region was yet to come. “In September 1987, South Africa launched a devastating incursion in southeastern Angola and they cornered the best units of the Angolan army in a small village called Cuito Cuanavale,” Gleijeses explained. Their aim, he said, was to weaken the MPLA, which was providing safe haven for independence fighters from neighboring Namibia—then ruled as a colony by the white-minority government in South Africa.

“The only government that reacts to this offensive is Cuba, which sends its best units and most sophisticated hardware,” he added. “The South Africans attack, attack, attack, and their last major attack is on March 23, 1988, but they fail again and again.”

A few days after the final South African assault, a force of 10,000 Cuban troops begins moving in the direction of the Namibian border.

“The Cubans moved with such dispatch and on such a scale that an immediate South African military response would have involved serious risks,” Gleijeses explained. So the South Africans withdrew.

The defeat of the racist South African invaders at Cuito Cuanavale paved the way for the safeguarding of Angola’s independence and winning the liberation of neighboring Namibia. It also led to the unbanning of the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa, the release of Nelson Mandela, and eventually the victory of the ANC-led struggle to uproot apartheid.

Namibia’s independence was formalized in July 1988 in a pact called the New York Agreement. Newspaper reports at the time cited Washington’s negotiators as the force behind the agreement. Gleijeses, however, described a different story. As the Cuban troops were advancing toward Namibia, Ronald Reagan’s deputy secretary of state for African affairs sought out Cuban representative Jorge Risquet, who at the time was leading Cuba’s policy in Africa. The U.S. official asked if the Cuban troops planned to cross the border into Namibia and come to the aid of the independence movement.

“I am neither going to threaten you nor reassure you,” Gleijeses quoted Risquet as saying in response. “If you want a guarantee that we will not enter Namibia, the only guarantee is the independence of the country.” By the end of the year, the South African government withdrew from Namibia and recognized its independence. Within a few years, the apartheid regime itself collapsed.

This is why the Cuban Revolution remains “a bone in Washington’s throat,” said Gleijeses. “Cuba has achieved something that no American threats and no embargo can ever silence and this is reflected in the words of [South African leader] Nelson Mandela when he visited Havana in 1991: ‘We come here with a sense of the great debt that is owed the people of Cuba. What other country can point to a record of greater selflessness than what Cuba has displayed in its relations with Africa.’”

In the discussion that followed, Gleijeses was asked about Cuba’s role in Ethiopia and its relationship with the Eritrean movement for independence from Ethiopia. The Cuban leadership sent soldiers to Ethiopia in 1977 to defend it from a U.S.-sponsored invasion by Somalia. At the time, the Ethiopian government, which had come to power following the popular overthrow of the feudal regime of Emperor Haile Selassie, was a particular target of the imperialist powers. Opponents of the Cuban Revolution, however, have often accused Cuba of aiding the Ethiopian regime’s reactionary war against the Eritrean independence movement. Gleijeses said the facts prove otherwise.

“Somalia invaded Ethiopia in July 1977,” Gleijeses said. “By November, the Cubans decide to send troops to stop the Somali invasion. The Cubans never gave the least assistance to the Ethiopians against the Eritreans. All they did was stop the Somali invasion and push them back to the Somali border…. Even U.S. intelligence reports never say that the Cubans intervened against Eritrea.” Cuban leaders have repeatedly made this point and the facts back it up, Gleijeses said.  
 
 
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