Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976 (review)

This is an extraordinary book. Based on extensive archival research and interviews on three continents, Piero Gleijeses provides a comprehensive history of Cuban policy in Africa from 1959 to 1976, set within the context of United States policy toward both Africa and Cuba. The core argument is that Cuban policy was motivated by a combination of ideological mission and identification with African liberation movements, and self-interest in trying to create a bloc of revolutionary Third World states to stand in solidarity with Cuba against U.S. imperialism. There is much new information, especially about Ernesto "Che" Guevara's guerrilla war in the Congo (Zaire), Cuba's role in the Algerian-Moroccan war, and the deployment of Cuban combat troops in support of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA).

The archival research undergirding this book is unprecedented. After several years of diligent prodding, Gleijeses was able to gain access to Cuban archives for the first time. Cuban documents form the evidentiary foundation of the book, reinforced by documents from the archives of almost all the other major actors: Angola, South Africa, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), and, of course, the United States. The Soviet archives were closed, unfortunately, but Gleijeses is able to reconstruct Soviet policy from references to it in the Cuban and GDR documents, and from secondary sources based on the Soviet archives from the brief time they were open after the end of the cold war. Angola does not really have archives proper, so Gleijeses had to work from the private collections of senior Angolan officials and war veterans, who he diligently tracked down.

The interviews are equally impressive. No doubt because Gleijeses managed to gain permission to delve into the Cuban archives, Cuban officials and veterans were willing to discuss these events with him in a way they never have before. The archival work in the United States and in Africa is also supplemented by quite extensive interviewing. The result is an astonishingly thorough and well-documented narrative, no doubt the definitive account of these events.

Most of the story is told from viewpoint of Cuban combatants on the ground in Africa. The U.S. role is seen from the policymakers' viewpoint in Washington. Accounts of the Soviet role are second hand, of course, so they are less detailed. We never feel like we are in the Kremlin with the decision-makers the way we feel we are in the field with the Cubans and in the White House and State Department with U.S. officials.

Readers should not be deterred by the book's length; it is well-written, even gripping in places. Gleijeses stays very close to his evidence, rarely interjecting much interpretive material, preferring to let the facts speak for themselves. In many places, this works very well. Some of the stories—of Che's column in Zaire, and of Cuban special forces troops holding off the South African advance in Angola—are extraordinarily dramatic and need no elaboration. The technique of simply recounting what happened is perfect.

In other places, I found myself wishing that Gleijeses would be more forthcoming about his own assessment of events. He is almost certainly the most knowledgeable person in the world on these events, since not even participants have seen them from the many vantage points he has documented.

The principal disappointment is that this book ends sooner than we would like. Gleijeses concludes with the Cuban and MPLA victory in the initial phase of the Angolan civil war in early 1976. He does not explore the resurgence of Jonas Savimbi's insurgent challenge to the MPLA in the late 1970s and 1980s, fueled by covert aid from Pretoria and Washington, the ongoing Cuban combat role during those years, or the eventual negotiated withdrawal of the Cubans in 1988. Nor does he cover...