Cuba and Angola: The War for Freedom by Harry Villegas (review)

In recent years there has been an outpouring of scholarship on the role Cuba has played in revolutionary struggles in Africa. Pioneering work by scholars in Cuban archives, particularly by Piero Gleijeses, has revealed new dimensions of the internationalist efforts of leftist movements during the Cold War. Cuba's unique position as a bastion of communism off the coast of the United States and its willingness to send its fairly powerful military across the Atlantic meant that sons and daughters of the Cuban Revolution fought across the African continent for almost twenty years. From 1975 to 1991, when the Cold War ended, Cubans aided fellow anti-imperialists. Responding to what they viewed as imperialistic aggression by US-backed governments, Cuban soldiers and doctors went to multiple African countries, including Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Angola, to fight alongside revolutionary groups, successfully turning the tide in many of these conflicts.

As the title suggests, Cuba and Angola: The War for Freedom is about Cuban efforts to aid the Angolan government. Angola achieved its independence from its colonial ruler Portugal in 1974, when the Portuguese government was overthrown in a popular uprising, the Carnation Revolution. Practically overnight, Portugal's African colonies found themselves freed of colonial control. Angola, however, was in the unenviable position of being close to South Africa. The apartheid regime in Pretoria, fearful of the implications of a free African state on its figurative doorstep and desiring more territory and power, launched a concerted invasion of Angola with its ally, Zaire, in October 1975, beginning a conflict that would last until 1991. Cuba and Angola is the account of these war-torn years by one of the main Cuban military leaders, Harry Villegas, who was a central figure in the Cuban defense of Angola.

In the months after the invasion, 36,000 Cuban volunteers, including soldiers, doctors, and electricians, flooded into Angola to stymie the South African invasion. What followed was a decade of intermittent, but vicious, warfare between Cuban and Angolan forces and South African invaders. Tens of thousands of Angolan soldiers and civilians were killed, and over 2,000 Cuban volunteers perished as the conflict dragged on. In 1987, South Africa, increasingly desperate as apartheid's hold began to crumble, launched a large-scale assault, hoping to crush the Angolan forces once and for all. The Cuban-backed Angolan military persevered, and in 1988 in the village of Cuito Cuanavale, they halted the apartheid regime's momentum, throwing the South African forces back. The defeat of the South African invasion had wide- ranging effects: it hastened the downfall of the apartheid government as the illusion of white South African military dominance was broken and led directly to the freedom of Namibia from colonial control.

Villegas served as a regimental commander and later, during the 1980s, as the main liaison between Cuban forces in Angola and those back in Havana. Mary-Alice Waters has extensively interviewed Villegas, affectionately known around the world as "Pombo" (a Swahili nickname gifted to him by Che Guevara), and these interviews constitute the bulk of the book. In addition to co-editing Cuba and Angola, Waters is the president of the publishing company that released the book. She compiled and edited seven years of recorded interviews with Villegas for this book. However, Cuba and Angola is a surprisingly slim volume. The main text, which is almost entirely transcripts of interviews with Villegas, is only sixty-six pages long. The rest of the book has a great number of pictures, maps, and bibliographic and chronological resources that provide a wealth of context for the struggles being described.

On the whole, though, and perhaps somewhat ironically, Cuba and Angola is not meant to be a revolutionary book. Villegas does not provide stunning new testimony about the decisions between Castro and the Angolan government, nor does he radically alter the established narrative of Cuba's internationalist efforts in Africa. He does, however, provide a healthy nuance to this story, replete with interesting details and diplomatic minutiae that...