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31 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellently researched, May 11, 2002
This review is from: Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976 (Hardcover)
Before going into greater detail about this fascinating history of Cuban-African relations, let's start off by noting the dimensions of Gleijeses' research. His work uses the archives of six pages, including unprecedented access to the Cuban ones, and he studied more than forty sets of papers in the American ones. (This is espeically impressive since many papers from that time have yet to be fully declassified.) He looked at the newspapers from thirty countries and he conducted well over a hundred interviews. The result is an impressive work of research, and while not as thorough or as revelatory as Gleijeses's book on the Guatamelan Revolution, is still the most useful work on the subject and is now the book one will look at to understand the 1975 Angolan crisis. Gleijeses' thesis is rather simple. Castro's Cuba was sincerely motivated to encourage revolution in Africa, and from the early sixties onward sought to encourage it by sending advisors, soldiers, desparately needed doctors and other assistance. In doing so Cuba acted out of its own concerns and not as a puppet of the Soviet Union. The first major action was when Cuba helped Algeria ward off Moroccan aggression in 1963. A larger intervention was to assist rebels in Congo/Zaire against the corrupt Tshombe and Mobutu governments. Although not very skillful themselves the Simba rebels were able to repel the hopelessly demoralized army. As it happened the United States secretly arranged for white mercenaries to buck up the Congolese. By the time that Che Guevera went over personally to assist the rebels in 1965, the mercenaries' brutal actions had essentially won the war. Gleijeses is particularly good on the sources for this affair, about how the United States managed to keep their sponsorship of the mercenaries out of the press, and how the media gave these brutal thugs an astonshingly free ride. ... Gleijeses also shows that Jon Lee Anderson is probably wrong in suggesting that Guevera was pushed into going to Zaire, and he ably shows that Dariel Alarcon's own controversial account is vitiated by the fact that he was never in Zaire. Gleijeses also discusses Cuba's awkward arrangements with the pseudo-radical government of Congo (Brazzaville) and the crucial assistance it gave to the liberation movement of Guinea-Bissau. Gleijeses helpfully reminds us of the Nixon policy's support of white supremacy: in the November 1972 vote that declared the PAIGC the legitimate government of Guinea-Bissau there were only six opponents. One was Portugal, the occupying power. The rest were militarist Brazil, quasi-fascist Spain, apartheid South Africa, and oh yes, Edward Heath's Britian, and Richard Nixon's America. But it is Gleijeses' account of the Angolan crisis that makes this book so valuable. It contains a point by point refutation of Kissinger's account in the latter's Year of Renewal. Very simply, when Portugeuse dictatorship collapsed in 1974, there were three rebel groups in Angola struggling for power. There was the quasi-Marxist MPLA, and the anti-Marxist FNLA and UNITA. American intelligence noted that the FNLA was "totally corrupt", "subservient" to the vile Mobutu regime, and it paid him a generous subsidy. Although Jonas Savimbi, the head of the UNITA became something of a conservative hero in the eighties, Gleijeses points out that he collaborated with the Portuguese before 1974. We also get to see him double-talking, approaching the South Africans to assist him. He fully agreed to sell out SWAPO, the liberation movement of Namibia, which links Angola to South Africa and at the time was illegally occupied by the latter. Once South African intervention could not be concealed Savimbi pretended to be defending Angola along with the MPLA and SWAPO. As for the MPLA although it was at time militarily weak and time and the stresses of war would enhance its corrupt and authoritarian features, the Portuguese army stated "it remained the most important movement in Angloa." Those Americans who were actually in Angola (and whose advice was ignored by Kissinger) agreed that it was "the only Angolan organization that had any national representativeness, that could be considered an Angolan-wide organization." The same Americans agreed that it had the support of the most intelligent and politically conscious people in the country. And so Gleijeses refutes arguments that Russian and Cuban aid for MPLA before October 1975 massively swamped aid for the FNLA and UNITA. Contrary to the arguments of UNITA supporters, American intelligence agreed that the Portuguese officials in the transition to independence were not supporting the MPLA. Gleijeses also reminds us that the MPLA was winning before either South Africa or Cuba intervened. He also points out that the problems Kissinger was having with detente in 1975 over SALT, the Middle East, Italy and Portugal had nothing to do with Russian aggressiveness, but that intervening in Angola would strengthen his hand in Republican Party infighting. All in all, this is a superb autopsy of a callous and ill-thought out policy, and should be read by anyone who admires Kissinger.
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12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An important contribution to Cold War History, May 3, 2006
CONFLICTING MISSIONS is a brilliant, impressive, and important book. It not only teaches us about the dramatic differences between US and Cuban policies in Africa during the Cold War (until 1976), but it also stretches our minds to see the Cold War "from below." Virtually all Cold War history has been written from the US (or Western)perspective, based on US archives. Gleijeses is the only scholar to have gained access to the Cuban archives; the result is that CONFLICTING MISSIONS contains not only new information but also a new perspective. Gleijeses challenges the reader to reconsider established truths. In his narrative -- which is voluminously supported by research not only in Cuba but also in US, Belgian, West German, East German, and British archives, as well as almost 200 interviews -- Fidel Castro, not the Americans, is shown to be the leader pursuing an idealistic foreign policy.
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10 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
You gotta read this book:, May 8, 2005
From page 271,
"U.S. intelligence reports shed some light on the issue. In January 1976 Kissinger told Congress that "In August [1975], intelligence reports indicated the presence of Soviet and Cuban military adviser, trainers and troops, including the first Cuban combat troops." He was rewriting history: in the summer of 1975 U.S. intelligence told a different story. (d) An August 20 CIA report concluded, "What seems ....likely is that the Soviets have asked Cuba to help out with advisers and technicians....[sanitized] Officials of the Ministry of Information, which is controlled by the MPLA, have tried to pass them off as tourist." On September 22, an INR report claimed that "the Soviet and other allied countries, notably Cuba, have provided technicians and advisor to assist in military planning and logistics. While most are based in the Congo, there is increasing evidence that some foreign advisers are present with MPLA units inside Angola." On October 11 the CIA National Intelligence Daily specified that "a few Cuban technical advisers have been operating with Popular Movement [MPLA] inside Angola for time." There was no mention Cuban troops, or even of large numbers of instructors, until early October, when a significant number of Cuban advisers did indeed arrive."
(d) Kissinger, Jan. 29, 1976, U.S. Senate, Committee on Foreign Ralations, Subcommittee on African Affairs, Angola, p. 10. In his memoirs, Kissinger cites one of my articles to support his claim that the Cuban intervention "began in May, accelerated in July, and turned massive in September and October," which is precisely the opposite of what my article said. (Kissinger, Renewal, p.820)
As to the likelihood that Cubans were following Soviet orders, we hear on page 307 from "Arkady Shevchenko, who was an adviser of Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko in 1970-73 and then undersecretary-general of the United Nations until 1978, when he defected to the United States, [and who] writes that in 1976 Vasily Kznetsov, acting foreign minister, asked him to join a group reviewing Soviet policy in Africa.. Shevchenko asked Kuznetsov, ""How did we persuade the Cubans to provide their contingent?'...Kuznetsov laughed ...and told me that the idea for large-scale military operation had originated in Havana, not Moscow.""
Evidently, the Cubans were acting in Africa at great cost to themselves at least in part from a humanitarian concern for the dignity of Angolans. The historical record shows no such concern on the part of the United States of America.
well-documented, well-reasoned, and suspenseful. Great scholarship.
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