AFRICAN STUDENTS IN CUBA AND THE WAR IN ANGOLA

In Fidel’s travels throughout Africa in the 1960’s visiting with newly independent states and their leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana and Sekou Toure in Guinea, he offered to take their brightest students and educate them in Cuba. It wasn’t long before Africans started showing up in Havana and, by the early 1970’s, Cuba was graduating African doctors, agricultural engineers, architects, biologists, chemical engineers, etc.

In the summer of 1975 Cuba sent military advisers to assist the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). A few months later, Fidel gave a speech at the famous Plaza de la Revolution to announce that he had decided to send troops to the newly independent Angola because the apartheid South African government had sent its army to invade Angolan territory.

There were many African students in the crowd at the Plaza that day and they could not believe that Cuba would send troops to fight and die for Africans. As Fidel’s speech went into high gear, the revolutionary fervor started building among the African students and, out of solidarity and brotherhood with their Angolan brothers, many decided to volunteer to fight along side the Cubans in Angola.

Later in the evening the African students circulated volunteer forms among themselves to present to the Cuban government the next day. But, before they had the chance to do so, Fidel appeared on State TV to say he had heard about the African students’ determination to fight in Angola. He thanked them for their revolutionary spirit, but said that he could not allow their blood to be shed. He said he had made a promise to return them as educated men and women to Africa, not to fight, but to build the revolution in their own countries.

My husband, who was one of those students, told me this story.


If interested in knowing more about Cuba in Africa, I highly recommend:

"Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976," by Piero Gleijeses,

Gleijeses got unprecedented access to the Cuban archives while doing research for this book.

It's amazing to learn they were already organized enough to undertake this program only after a decade or so had passed in the newly formed government.

In the last years, perhaps almost 10, Cuba has also been accepting American medical students with the condition that when they return home they use their educations to help in areas where people truly don't have access to medical treatment due to poverty.

Your husband was a witness to history, wasn't he? That account of what happened is so moving. There is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that the students' communication about returning with the Cuban soldiers made a lasting impression there. The President's response seems very much like him, doesn't it?

I read one man in government in Africa said that when Cubans came to fight in Africa, unlike other people, the only thing from Africa they took away with them when they left were the bodies of their soldiers.

Concerning the book you mentioned, the author's name rang a bell instantly. I had seen it mentioned in reading multiple times, but never read the book. Looks like a very useful book to get. We need honest information like this because we have been fed a steady diet of well polished filthy lies.

Here's one place I've seen Piero Gleijeses' name, from several years ago:

SECRET CUBAN DOCUMENTS ON HISTORY OF AFRICA INVOLVEMENT

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 67
Edited by Peter Kornbluh

NEW BOOK based on Unprecedented Access to Cuban Records;
True Story of U.S.-Cuba Cold fear Clash in Angola presented in Conflicting Missions
Washington D.C.: The National Security Archive today posted a selection of secret Cuban government documents detailing Cuba's policy and involvement in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. The records are a sample of dozens of internal reports, memorandum and communications obtained by Piero Gleijeses, a historian at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, for his new book, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976 (The University of North Carolina Press).

Peter Kornbluh, director of the Archive’s Cuba Documentation Project, called the publication of the documents “a significant step toward a fuller understanding Cuba’s place in the history of Africa and the Cold War,” and commended the Castro government’s decision to makes its long-secret archives accessible to scholars like Professor Gleijeses. “Cuba has been an important actor on the stage of foreign affairs,” he said. “Cuban documents are a missing link in fostering an understanding of numerous international episodes of the past.”

Conflicting Missions provides the first comprehensive history of the Cuba's role in Africa and settles a longstanding controversy over why and when Fidel Castro decided to intervene in Angola in 1975. The book definitively resolves two central questions regarding Cuba's policy motivations and its relationship to the Soviet Union when Castro astounded and outraged Washington by sending thousands of soldiers into the Angolan civil conflict. Based on Cuban, U.S. and South African documents and interviews, the book concludes that:

• Castro decided to send troops to Angola on November 4, 1975, in response to the South African invasion of that country, rather than vice versa as the Ford administration persistently claimed;
  
  
• The United States knew about South Africa's covert invasion plans, and collaborated militarily with its troops, contrary to what Secretary of State Henry Kissinger testified before Congress and wrote in his memoirs.
  
  
• Cuba made the decision to send troops without informing the Soviet Union and deployed them, contrary to what has been widely alleged, without any Soviet assistance for the first two months.

Professor Gleijeses is the first scholar to gain access to closed Cuban archives—a process that took more than six years of research trips to Cuba—including those of the Communist Party Central Committee, the armed forces and the foreign ministry. Classified Cuban documents used in the book include: minutes of meetings with Fidel Castro, Che Guevara's handwritten correspondence from Zaire, military directives from Raul Castro, briefing papers from intelligence chieftain, Manuel Piniero, field commander reports, internal Cuban government memoranda, and Cuban-Soviet communications and military accords.
In addition to research in Cuba, the author also worked extensively in the archives of the United States, Belgium, Great Britain, and West and East Germany, teaching himself to read Portuguese and Afrikaans so that he could evaluate primary documents written in those languages.

Gleijeses also interviewed over one hundred fifty protagonists, among them the former CIA station chief in Luanda, Robert Hultslander who spoke on the record for the first time for this book. "History has shown," Hultslander noted, "that Kissinger's policy on Africa itself was shortsighted and flawed." He also commented on the forces of Jonas Savimbi, the rebel chief recently killed in Angola: "I was deeply concerned ... about UNITA's purported ties with South Africa, and the resulting political liability such carried. I was unaware at the time, of course, that the U.S. would eventually beg South Africa to directly intervene to pull its chestnuts out of the fire."

In this first account of Cuba's policy in Africa based on documentary evidence, Gleijeses describes and analyzes Castro's dramatic dispatch of 30,000 Cubans to Angola in 1975-76, and he traces the roots of this policy—from Havana's assistance to the Algerian rebels fighting France in 1961 to the secret war between Havana and Washington in Zaire in 1964-65 and Cuba's decisive contribution to Guinea-Bissau's war of independence from 1966-1974.

"Conflicting Missions is above all the story of a contest, staged in Africa, between Cuba and the United States," according to its author, which started in Zaire in 1964-65 and culminated in a major Cold War confrontation in Angola in 1975-76. Using Cuban and US documents, as well as the semi-official history of South Africa's 1975 covert operation in Angola (available only in Afrikaans), this book is the first to present the internationalized Angolan conflict from three sides—Cuba and the MPLA, the United States and the covert CIA operation codenamed IAFEATURE and South Africa, whose secret incursion prompted Castro's decision to commit Cuban troops.

Conflicting Missions also argues that Secretary Kissinger's account of the US role in Angola, most recently repeated in the third volume of his memoirs, is misleading. Testifying before Congress in 1976, Kissinger stated "We had no foreknowledge of South Africa's intentions, and in no way cooperated militarily." In Years of Renewal Dr. Kissinger also denied that the United States and South Africa had collaborated in the Angolan conflict; Gleijeses' research strongly suggests that they did. The book quotes Kissinger aide Joseph Sisco conceding that the Ford administration "certainly did not discourage" South Africa's intervention, and presents evidence that the CIA helped the South Africans ferry arms to key battlefronts. The book also reproduces portions of a declassified memorandum of conversation between Kissinger and Chinese leader Teng Hsiao-p'ing which shows that Chinese officials raised concerns about South Africa's involvement in Angola in response to Ford and Kissinger's entreaties for Beijing's continuing support. The memcon quotes President Ford as telling the Chinese "we had nothing to do with the South African involvement." Drawing on the Cuban documents, the book challenges Kissinger's account in his memoirs about the arrival of Cubans in Angola. The first Cuban military advisers did not arrive in Angola until late August 1975, and the Cubans did not participate in the fighting until late October, after South Africa had invaded.

In assessing the motivations of Cuba's foreign policy, Cuba's relations with the Soviet Union, and the nature of the Communist threat in Africa, Gleijeses shows that CIA and INR intelligence reports were often sophisticated and insightful, unlike the decisions of the policymakers in Washington.

Summaries of the Cuban documents, and several declassified U.S. records relating to Cuba and Africa, follow:

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB67/