Vol. 77/No. 37      October 21, 2013

The event was hosted by the Caribbean Studies Program and sponsored by a broad array of academic and other organizations, including the Canadian Network on Cuba, Canadian Union of Postal Workers and United Steelworkers.

One of the featured speakers was Jorge Risquet, who was Cuba’s chief diplomat at negotiations that ended South Africa’s occupation of Namibia.

Some 200 people turned out for a Friday evening showing of two documentaries on Cuba’s 16-year-long internationalist mission. Between 1975 and 1991 some 425,000 Cubans volunteered for duty in Angola, helping defend the newly independent nation against repeated South African invasions, which were backed by its allies in Washington London, Paris and Ottawa.

Saturday was devoted to four panels on the battle of Cuito Cuanavale by Risquet; Maria Elena Alvarez, professor of African History at the University of Havana; Piero Gleijeses, professor at John Hopkins University in Washington, D.C.; and Isaac Saney, teacher at Dalhousie University and Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Gleijeses is author of Vision of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976-1991, to be released this fall. Saney is the author of From Soweto to Cuito Cuanavale: Cuba, the War in Angola and the End of Apartheid, to be released in 2014.

In the second half of 1987, South Africa’s forces launched a major invasion. “Angola was on the verge of a military disaster,” Saney said.

The Cuban government decided to send 50,000 reinforcements and Cuba’s best weapons to Angola. In a matter of a few months, the Cubans bogged down the South African forces at Cuito Cuanavale and built a major outflanking force that took control of Angola’s airspace and moved decidedly toward the Namibian border.

At that point, the South African government sued for peace as it was unable to wage simultaneous wars in Namibia and in South Africa’s Black townships, which were by that time swept by mass mobilizations against the apartheid regime.

In December 1988 the Angolan, Cuban and South African governments signed a peace accord in New York. As a result of Cuito Cuanavale, the speakers stressed, South African troops had been driven out of Angola, the Namibian people achieved their independence and a powerful boost was given to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Nelson Mandela was freed after 27 years in jail and in April 1994 he was elected South Africa’s president in that country’s first democratic elections.

“Don’t be overenthusiastic about Cuito Cuanavale,” argued John Saul, a political science professor at York University in Toronto. “By the early 1980s, global capitalism had already concluded that white-minority rule was no more useful to defend its interests in southern Africa.”

Gleijeses answered by quoting from a 1991 speech that Nelson Mandela gave in Cuba to thank the Cuban people for its contribution to the liberation of Africa.

“Your presence and the reinforcement of your forces in the battle of Cuito Cuanavale was of truly historic significance. The crushing defeat of the racist army at Cuito Cuanavale was a victory for the whole of Africa,” Mandela said. “Cuito Cuanavale was a milestone in the history of the struggle for southern African liberation! Cuito Cuanavale has been a turning point in the struggle to free the continent and our country from the scourge of apartheid!”

“Never has a small country done so much for another,” Cuban professor Alvarez said in her talk. “We are very proud of it!”
 
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