Hot Wars in Cold War Africa

Piero Gleijeses. Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. 552 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

For years following the triumph of the Cuban revolution in 1959, a nightmare scenario haunted American leaders: Fidel Castro, having overthrown one government closely allied to the United States, would succeed in sparking radical movements elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere to do the same. By the early 1960s, the Kennedy administration believed that Havana was working hard at it. The Central Intelligence Agency reported in early 1963 that the Cuban government was training as many as 1,500 revolutionaries from across Latin America in techniques of political subversion and guerrilla warfare—lessons they were to take back to their home countries to ignite rebellion. Castro and his legendary collaborator, Che Guevara, seemed to take personal interest in the effort. The two men frequently appeared before the foreign trainees to give "personal pep talks," the CIA noted. ¹

American officials could have rested easy. Over the remainder of the Cold War, the Cuban government scored few successes in its bid to challenge U.S. hegemony in Latin America. "Another Cuba" failed to materialize, not least because the Castro government shied away from actions that would seriously challenge Washington. The threat of U.S. retaliation against Cuba, even an invasion of the island, was simply too great to risk anything forceful. During the 1960s, fewer than forty Cubans participated in guerrilla struggles elsewhere in Latin America, and Havana showed little enthusiasm about sending weapons to support rebel movements. When Cuba did act, the results were disastrous. Most famously, U.S.-backed paramilitary forces crushed Guevara's 1967 foray into Bolivia, killing him and demolishing his vision of spreading grassroots revolution across the continent.

The story of Cuban efforts to promote revolution abroad does not, however, end in the Bolivian mountains. As Piero Gleijeses makes clear in his stunning book, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976, it was Africa, not Latin America, where Castro's Cuba acted boldly on its dream of supporting leftist liberation struggles against the United States and its allies. Moreover, Gleijeses shows, Havana sometimes did so with impressive results, achieving what proved impossible closer to home. The book demonstrates in meticulous detail that Cuban soldiers and medical personnel helped safeguard the Algerian revolution in the early 1960s and, much more decisively, assured the triumph of progressive nationalist movements that vied for power in two nations emerging from Portuguese colonialism, Guinea-Bissau and Angola. In the latter case, Gleijeses asserts that thousands of Cuban troops pulled off no less a feat than beating back the combined power of the South African army and the CIA, dealing the United States a major Cold War setback.

Perhaps most significantly for historians of the Cold War, Gleijeses demonstrates that the Cuban government undertook all of these operations on its own initiative, for its own reasons. During the 1960s and 1970s, U.S. policymakers viewed the Castro government as a mere proxy of the Soviet Union. More recently, memoirists and scholars, lacking much evidence, have usually avoided strong claims. ² Gleijeses attacks the issue squarely, arguing that the Castro government showed little subservience to—and sometimes even acted against—Moscow's dictates. Rather, Gleijeses contends, Cuba acted out of genuine revolutionary solidarity with likeminded African nationalists. "The Cuban leaders were convinced that their country had a special empathy for the Third World and a special role to play on its behalf," writes Gleijeses. Like Africans struggling to be free of colonial rule, Cuban leaders saw the "major fault line" in international politics as lying "not between socialist and capitalist states but between developed and underdeveloped countries" (p. 377).

By demonstrating Cuba's autonomy, Conflicting Missions builds convincingly on the emerging view among international historians that small powers, often assumed to have been mere "satellites" during the Cold War, sometimes enjoyed a...