Cuba & Angola: Fighting for Africa’s Freedom and Our Own by Fidel Castro, Raul Castro, and Nelson Mandela (review)

Internationalism is a basic tenet of socialism, particularly Marxist socialism. Y et the history of the socialist movement would indicate otherwise; socialist leaders and socialist followers have often demonstrated that they can be as nationalistic as anyone else.

The intervention of Cuba in the liberation of colonies in Africa is one case where internationalism has prevailed over nationalism, and nowhere is this more evident than in the case of the Cuban presence in Angola. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans— 425,000 according to the data on the back cover of this publication, but 375,000 according to General Sio Wong, a Cuban volunteer of Chinese extraction (p. 91) participated in one or more tours during the war of liberation from South Africa and its allies. Moreover, the freedom struggle in Angola had expanding consequences: including the independence of Namibia (formerly known as South-West Africa), the end of a Fascist regime in Portugal itself (revolution of April 1974), and eventually the demise of some aspects of apartheid in South Africa itself.

While Angola is an oil-producing land (in the region of Cabinda) and has access to other mineral resources, Castro’s Cuba intervened for no material benefits other than to demonstrate its dedication to internationalist principles. Nor did the intervention limit itself to Angola proper, or to the 1970s. Granted, according to the agreement ending the conflict, signed in New York, while South Africa agreed to withdraw its armed forces from Angola and refrain from further assaults, the Cuban troops were withdrawn as well. On the other hand, there was Cuban personnel, military or medical, in other lands of Africa. When I was on an educational tour of Namibia in the summer of 1995, I met dozens of physicians and muses who were practicing their profession in various parts of the country, strictly as volunteers. The medical assistance provided by Cuba is significant in view of the facts that

1. 1. the Portuguese medical personnel withdrew from their African colonies for the most part; according to the late Nobel prize laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez (GGM), Angola had only 90 doctors under the Portuguese colonial regime, in a country of 19 million (only six million according to GGM—p. 131) over a vast land of one and a quarter million kilometers square, without an infrastructure of viable roads.

2. 2. Similarly, South African doctors were lacking in Namibia.

3. 3. Moreover, by the 1980s and 1990s, Cuban health care had not only recovered from the mass exodus of physicians in the aftermath of the Cuban revolution, but was able to establish free and universal medical care of high quality in Cuba itself.

The contents of this glossy album are organized under the following headings: Defending Angola’s Independence; Sovereignty; an unparalleled contribution to African freedom; the Cuban Revolution was strengthened; the Cuban Five in Angola; and Operation Carlota. The latter designation, we are told by one of the editors, derives from the name of a slave woman who led a rebellion near Matanza, in eastern Cuba, in 1843, and was captured, drawn and quartered “by the Spanish colonial troops” (p. 137). Indeed, the place-name Matanza means massacre in English. “Drawn and quartered” appears to be a form of punishment quite common in the Caribbean. The French colonial authorities followed the same procedure in St. Domingue (Haiti), at least in the case of Mackandal, a century earlier.

Obviously, it would be awkward for the reviewer to discuss each contribution by each of the distinguished contributors, so I will take advantage of the reviewer’s license to pick and choose a few text that were particularly meaningful to me. Since Fidel Castro is famous as a speaker, partly because of the duration of his speeches, I feel prompted to enumerate his contributions to this collection, beginning with his address delivered a speech to the first contingent of volunteers leaving for Angola in 1975: “Consolidating a...