Cold War in the Congo: The Confrontation of Cuban Military Forces, 1960–1967 by Frank R. Villafana (review)

Frank Villafana writes about what he calls “one of the most bizarre conflicts in recent history: Cubans fighting Cubans in Congo” in 1965 (p, 129). Villafana himself left his native Cuba in 1960 in his early 20s and studied engineering at the University of Alabama. He later worked in the United States, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Villafana provides many important insights into the guerrilla warfare in the Congo by starting out with some very interesting questions. Why did Fidel Castro choose Africa, and why did the United States allow him to conduct his revolution there? Why did the Congo become “the key initial country to Castro’s apparent African strategy” and why on early did the Cuban leader send Che Guavara to lead the mercenaries? Villafana suggests that the fall of Ahmed Ben Bella in Algeria turned the Cubans south. General Enrique Líster-Forján helped Castro export the revolution, but his exact role as a top strategist must remain murky.

Where Villafana really stands out in his historiographic contribution is in gathering the memoirs and recollections of Cubans. He has interviewed many Cuban soldiers who served in Congo, and in some cases has also spoken with their family members. In addition he has sifted through many Spanish-language sources. Villafana’s oral histories and research are valuable to any historian interested in Cuba’s role in Congo. Chapter 4, for instance, outlines the background of the U.S.-trained Cuban exiles who became the Makasi pilots used by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Cuban exile navy to patrol Lake Tanganyika. Chapter 8 examines the ethnic background of Castro’s Cuban soldiers, all of whom were chosen because their ancestry linked them to the Congo. However, university students reading Villafana will crave more background about the politics that connected the mercenaries and revolutionaries to the Cold War. Castro’s actual goals are rather weakly defined as wanting to “take over” the Congo and create “many Vietnams” (p. 13) for the United States, by which he seems to mean that Castro wanted to engage the United States in as many places as possible to distract Washington from Cuba. Elsewhere Villafana suggests that Castro wanted to put his stamp on Africa. Greater use of U.S. archives in particular would have better illustrated Washington’s knowledge of the Cuban revolutionaries and would have better situated the Cuban exile force within the CIA operations and U.S. foreign policy in Africa.

In an important chapter, Villafana chronicles how Che Guevara trained a small group of about 200 Cubans to lead Congolese revolutionaries in what would become a dramatic failure along the Fizi-Baraka area of eastern Congo in June-October 1965. In a particularly good discussion, he describes the conditions and nature of fighting in Fizi-Baraka and the challenges of working in a totally new environment with a combined group of Congolese and Rwandan rebels. The Cubans had slowly built their successes on well-executed ambushes, which perhaps gave them a false sense of security. Villafana’s account shows how the only major offensive under Cuban command near Bendera helped bring the final disaster one step closer. A Cuban killed in the offensive had on his person a diary and passport, in clear violation of orders, giving Western intelligence all it needed to confirm the Cubans’ presence. Lawrence Devlin told Villafana that the CIA was unaware of the presence of Castro’s Cubans until a few weeks before Bandera did not connect Che with the operation.

By October 1965, Che’s relationship with Castro publicly soured. Piero Gleijeses, in Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa (2002), suggested skepticism about the estrangement. Villafana followed up with some hard questions, and although perhaps his answers are not always definitive they paint a darker picture of Che’s relations with Castro. Villafana maintains that Castro sent Guevara to Africa to...