Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976‒1991 by Piero Gleijeses (review)

Piero Gleijeses has presented yet another scholarly gift to those interested in the history of southern Africa, and in particular Cuba’s role in keeping South Africa from exerting its will in the region during the Cold War. More than that, Gleijeses provides carefully collected evidence of how the Cold War powers were forced to engage militarily and diplomatically with the Cubans over Angola. In ways that will redefine Cold War diplomacy in Africa, Gleijeses’s latest book has set the record straight in terms of American complicity with South Africa in its unsuccessful attempts to remove Cuban troops from Angola, to assist in South Africa’s support for Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA to destabilize Angola, and to intervene in Angola to keep SWAPO from gaining power in Namibia.

The scope of Gleijeses’s research on this topic is truly unparalleled. As Gleijeses explains, he visited Cuba regularly to conduct interviews with those involved in the defense of Angola. He also made expert use of Cuban, Russian, and South African archives to develop a conversation with the records he found in the Carter and Reagan presidential library archives. And he interviewed numerous American diplomats involved in the Carter and Reagan years in southern Africa, making this the most thorough treatment of the topic to date. Geographically, the book spans the major centers of the Cold War as well as the regional and local powers, but Gleijeses guides the reader on a journey beyond the usual formal moments of contact between Cold War powers and regional actors to delve into the intricacies of internal debates in Havana, Washington, and Pretoria (with occasional trips to Moscow and Luanda). It is no accident, then, that the subtitle for this volume is similar to that of Gleijeses’s previous excellent work: Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959‒1976 (UNC Press, 2002). By including the capital cities in the subtitle, Gleijeses is signaling to the reader that his subject is not particularly the wars and diplomacy in Luanda or how Angolans interacted with the Cold War powers. Rather, this is a narrative about, and a historical judgment of, Cold War power relations and how they were determined by the Cuban state’s historical agency. The villains remain the U.S. and its Western allies, first and foremost South Africa, although the latter was not subservient to U.S. power; Gleijeses gives many examples of South African leaders’ mistrust and resistance to U.S. pressures. Similarly, the Cubans, including both Fidel and Raul Castro, are shown to have been the leaders on Angolan policy and not subservient to Soviet interests and advice. Both were completely involved in Cuba’s major contribution to the defense of an African nation against South African and Western forces.

While Gleijeses is convincing in proving the resolve and commitment of the Cubans to defend Angola at a cost disproportional to Cuban resources and strategic interests, he has little room here for a moral assessment of how damaging this Cold War conflict was for Angola and the region. Ever the realist, Gleijeses is not concerned with moralizing over the human costs of the Cold War in Africa. He remains disciplined in his focus on setting the historical record straight: Cuba was the victor, South Africa and the U.S. were the losers. Perhaps diplomatic history as a genre leaves little room for moralizing, but perhaps the moments of hagiography in regard to Cuban leaders and generals are in themselves a type of moral judgment.

For example, there are points in the book where a commitment to proving the righteousness of Cuba’s role leads Gleijeses to judge Cuba’s actions positively in comparison to those of its enemies. In explaining Castro’s commitment to Ethiopian leaders and to Mengistu’s Derg government in 1977, he...