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(More customer reviews)Before going into greater detail about this fascinating history of Cuban-African relations, let's start off by noting the dimensions of Gleijeses' research. His work uses the archives of six pages, including unprecedented access to the Cuban ones, and he studied more than forty sets of papers in the American ones. (This is espeically impressive since many papers from that time have yet to be fully declassified.) He looked at the newspapers from thirty countries and he conducted well over a hundred interviews. The result is an impressive work of research, and while not as thorough or as revelatory as Gleijeses's book on the Guatamelan Revolution, is still the most useful work on the subject and is now the book one will look at to understand the 1975 Angolan crisis.
Gleijeses' thesis is rather simple. Castro's Cuba was sincerely motivated to encourage revolution in Africa, and from the early sixties onward sought to encourage it by sending advisors, soldiers, desparately needed doctors and other assistance. In doing so Cuba acted out of its own concerns and not as a puppet of the Soviet Union. The first major action was when Cuba helped Algeria ward off Moroccan aggression in 1963. A larger intervention was to assist rebels in Congo/Zaire against the corrupt Tshombe and Mobutu governments. Although not very skillful themselves the Simba rebels were able to repel the hopelessly demoralized army. As it happened the United States secretly arranged for white mercenaries to buck up the Congolese. By the time that Che Guevera went over personally to assist the rebels in 1965, the mercenaries' brutal actions had essentially won the war. Gleijeses is particularly good on the sources for this affair, about how the United States managed to keep their sponsorship of the mercenaries out of the press, and how the media gave these brutal thugs an astonshingly free ride. ... Gleijeses also shows that Jon Lee Anderson is probably wrong in suggesting that Guevera was pushed into going to Zaire, and he ably shows that Dariel Alarcon's own controversial account is vitiated by the fact that he was never in Zaire.
Gleijeses also discusses Cuba's awkward arrangements with the pseudo-radical government of Congo (Brazzaville) and the crucial assistance it gave to the liberation movement of Guinea-Bissau. Gleijeses helpfully reminds us of the Nixon policy's support of white supremacy: in the November 1972 vote that declared the PAIGC the legitimate government of Guinea-Bissau there were only six opponents. One was Portugal, the occupying power. The rest were militarist Brazil, quasi-fascist Spain, apartheid South Africa, and oh yes, Edward Heath's Britian, and Richard Nixon's America.
But it is Gleijeses' account of the Angolan crisis that makes this book so valuable. It contains a point by point refutation of Kissinger's account in the latter's Year of Renewal. Very simply, when Portugeuse dictatorship collapsed in 1974, there were three rebel groups in Angola struggling for power. There was the quasi-Marxist MPLA, and the anti-Marxist FNLA and UNITA. American intelligence noted that the FNLA was "totally corrupt", "subservient" to the vile Mobutu regime, and it paid him a generous subsidy. Although Jonas Savimbi, the head of the UNITA became something of a conservative hero in the eighties, Gleijeses points out that he collaborated with the Portuguese before 1974. We also get to see him double-talking, approaching the South Africans to assist him. He fully agreed to sell out SWAPO, the liberation movement of Namibia, which links Angola to South Africa and at the time was illegally occupied by the latter. Once South African intervention could not be concealed Savimbi pretended to be defending Angola along with the MPLA and SWAPO.
As for the MPLA although it was at time militarily weak and time and the stresses of war would enhance its corrupt and authoritarian features, the Portuguese army stated "it remained the most important movement in Angloa." Those Americans who were actually in Angola (and whose advice was ignored by Kissinger) agreed that it was "the only Angolan organization that had any national representativeness, that could be considered an Angolan-wide organization." The same Americans agreed that it had the support of the most intelligent and politically conscious people in the country. And so Gleijeses refutes arguments that Russian and Cuban aid for MPLA before October 1975 massively swamped aid for the FNLA and UNITA. Contrary to the arguments of UNITA supporters, American intelligence agreed that the Portuguese officials in the transition to independence were not supporting the MPLA. Gleijeses also reminds us that the MPLA was winning before either South Africa or Cuba intervened. He also points out that the problems Kissinger was having with detente in 1975 over SALT, the Middle East, Italy and Portugal had nothing to do with Russian aggressiveness, but that intervening in Angola would strengthen his hand in Republican Party infighting. All in all, this is a superb autopsy of a callous and ill-thought out policy, and should be read by anyone who admires Kissinger.
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