Cubans in Angola: South-South Cooperation and Transfer of Knowledge, 1976-1991 by Christine Hatzky (review)

“The feelings of culture shock and rejection in this extreme social environment of violence and poverty,” Christine Hatzky writes about Cuban civilians from the education sector who were deployed to Angola in the late 1970s and 1980s, “culminated in personal crises in the forms of homesickness, illness, psychological stress, anxiety, and feelings of helplessness.” She finds evidence of such trauma, cultural shock, and personal crises from “almost all my interviewees” (p. 261).

After the 1974 military coup in Portugal, contending political and military forces fought over power in Angola, hitherto a Portuguese colony, gradually drawing South Africa, Cuba, the United States, and the Soviet Union, to varying degrees, into a classic pattern of action-reaction escalation as each supported a preferred Angolan faction. In October 1975, after a large contingent of Cuban troops landed in Angola in support for the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), the South African Defense Forces invaded Angola, and thousands of Cuban troops followed as well. On 11 November 1975, the MPLA declared Angola’s independence, and over the next four months some 36,000 Cuban troops and their Angolan allies defeated the South African invasion.

Hatzky’s book, set against the background of a war involving Cuban and South African troops alongside their Angolan partners that lasted until 1991 (and continued among Angolans until 2002), focuses on Angolan-Cuban civilian cooperation with special attention to the advisers, instructors, and teachers who worked on education in Angola. Originally published in Germany in 2012, the jewels in this book are chapters 8 and 9. In those chapters, Hatzky explores the personal experiences of Cuban civilians who worked in Angolan education at some point from 1976 to the end of the 1980s. She draws on Angolan government documents, interviews with ordinary Cubans and Angolans who were participants in the bilateral cooperation of those years, and some Cuban government documents as well as interviews with experts.

She shows that for the most part Cuban civilians in Angola lived in separate enclaves and, unless explicitly authorized to engage, were prohibited from most social interactions with Angolans outside the workplace. The Cuban government’s motivation was to police its workforce to sustain the identity of those civilians as non-defecting Cubans; in general, it succeeded. The ever-present war was also one of the secondary rationales for such management of intercultural contact and one source of the trauma noted at the outset. Hatzky also explores a double reality; namely, Angolan students valued the work of their Cuban teachers and learned from them, and the Cuban civilians blamed their own failures on the Angolans and “often used their negative impressions of Angola and the Angolans to highlight their own merits” (p. 276). Yet, Angolans and Cubans managed to find each other in violation of the rules of separation and the barriers of “otherness,” engaged in personal intimacies, and some even married, but the wider impact of the faraway deployment during war on most Cuban civilians appears to have been traumatic in the clinical sense. Hatzky argues that the main cultural impact of Angolan-Cuban cooperation on the Cuban civilians was, therefore, to foster their reidentification with Cuba.

Elsewhere in the book, Hatzky explores the disputes that in time emerged between the governments of Cuba and Angola over the education cooperation program as well as other political, diplomatic, and military issues. She demonstrates that the “image” of Cubans in Angola—and the quality of bilateral relations—deteriorated in the 1980s. Of special analytical value are four of Hatzky’s findings.

First, much has been written about the origins of the international widening of the war in Angola in 1975. Hatzky shows that the MPLA took the initiative to invite the Cuban troops and then followed up by inviting Cuban civilians. Cuban leaders had been skeptical about a civilian cooperation program. Angola cemented this civilian relationship by paying the Cuban government for Cuban education...