Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976 [Paperback]

Piero Gleijeses (Author)

Book Description

Release date: December 2, 2002 | ISBN-10: 0807854646 | ISBN-13: 978-0807854648

This is a compelling and dramatic account of Cuban policy in Africa from 1959 to 1976 and of its escalating clash with U.S. policy toward the continent. Piero Gleijeses's fast-paced narrative takes the reader from Cuba's first steps to assist Algerian rebels fighting France in 1961, to the secret war between Havana and Washington in Zaire in 1964-65--where 100 Cubans led by Che Guevara clashed with 1,000 mercenaries controlled by the CIA--and, finally, to the dramatic dispatch of 30,000 Cubans to Angola in 1975-76, which stopped the South African advance on Luanda and doomed Henry Kissinger's major covert operation there.

Based on unprecedented archival research and firsthand interviews in virtually all of the countries involved--Gleijeses was even able to gain extensive access to closed Cuban archives--this comprehensive and balanced work sheds new light on U.S. foreign policy and CIA covert operations. It revolutionizes our view of Cuba's international role, challenges conventional U.S. beliefs about the influence of the Soviet Union in directing Cuba's actions in Africa, and provides, for the first time ever, a look from the inside at Cuba's foreign policy during the Cold War.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Gleijeses (Sch. of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins Univ.; Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944-1954) offers a Cold War study not of two superpowers but of Third World policy in Third World countries. This book looks at U.S. and Cuban foreign policies in Africa, a continent generally ignored by American foreign policymakers but highly important to Castro's Cuba. In examining small engagements in Algeria and Guinea-Bissau, as well as larger engagements in Zaire and Angola, Gleijeses argues that, contrary to American belief, Cuba did not merely act as a Soviet pawn in Africa but pursued its own interests. Castro viewed Africa as an important battleground to combat "capitalist imperialism," usually contrary to Soviet policies. Gleijeses conducted extensive research in writing this book, including gaining unprecedented access to Cuban archival material and oral histories. There is little material available on Cuban-African relations, and nothing this comprehensive. Recommended for academic libraries. Mike Miller, Dallas P.L.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

Admirable.
(The Economist)

After reviewing Dr. Gleijeses's work, several former senior United States diplomats who were involved in making policy toward Angola broadly endorsed its conclusions.
(New York Times)

A necessary corrective to past misinterpretations of how and why the Cubans intervened in Africa.
(Los Angeles Times)

Rich and provocative.
(Washington Post Book World)

Gleijeses gained remarkable access to Cuban documents, and his major contribution lies in what he has discovered there.
(Foreign Affairs)

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 576 pages
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press (December 2, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807854646
• ISBN-13: 978-0807854648
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1.3 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #527,504 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 39 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellently researched May 11, 2002

By [e-mail]

Format: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.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Informative, but hardly unbiased. April 21, 2011

By Historicool

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

Conflicting Missions takes a detailed and academic (and make no mistake this is an academic book) look at Cuba's decision-making process and actions in intervening in Africa. It begins with it's assistance to newly liberated Algeria and moves on from there to a look at the Simba Uprising in the Congo, Cuba's aid to the PAIGC in Guinea-Bissau and finally their armed intervention in Angola in 1975-76.

As others have noted, the author draws on a number of Cuban and American documents as well as newspaper articles and second-hand sources. He provides a typical level of citations and quotations in the book to back up his points, and there can be little mistake about how much effort he put into researching this book. For the most part it is engagingly written and interesting to read, particularly where it discusses Cuba's dispatch of doctors to revolutionary movements, and their influx of scholarship money, weapons, and other items at no cost to the rebels is indeed a testament to Cuba's revolutionary fervor - particularly in light of its small size and economic weakness.

The issues that I have are two-fold, however. Firstly, Gleijeses tends to get a bit bogged down in the minutae of proving some of his points as to who said what or what really happened on relatively minor points. These asides can go on for pages and tend to make the reader forget the point he was trying to make in the first place. Secondly, he spends a lot of time discussing the US and Cuba's butting of heads in other parts of the world leaving some chapters a bit light on actual discussion about events in Africa. A notable exception to this is the Guinea-Bissau and Angola chapters.

My second issue, though, is his analysis. The book clearly paints the Cubans in a relatively courageous and intelligent light though with a few missteps due to inexperience. In contrast, the US is portrayed as an aloof, imperialistic, and venial group who constantly backs the "bad guys". He tends to gloss over the excesses of the Simbas that the Cubans supported, their support for the dictatorship of Equatorial Guinea, and provides a scant paragraph to the failures of the MPLA to win the peace in Angola. Not only this, but his analysis of Angola, where both side intervened with advisors at the same time, and where South Africa (who certainly had its national security threatened much more so than the Cubans) intervened only slightly ahead of masses of Cubans, tends to portray the Cubans as, again, idealistic revolutionaries fighting the good fight and winning against the evil white South Africans. Such a conclusion is poor at best, and does nothing to even nod to the fact that might see Cuban advisors thousands of miles from home assisting a semi-Communist rebel group as somewhat troubling.

Such a one-sided analysis of Cuba's interventions into Africa are imperfect at another level as well. While Gleijeses touts the righteousness of the Cuban cause, he neglects to really focus on the results. With the exception of the PAIGC victory (which the Cubans had little part in from what it seems) Cubas only real successful assistance was to Angola, and that is even questionable considering the South Africans came back later and the civil war the Cubans tried to help the MPLA win did not end. In this sense, the author gets so entrapped in the specifics that he fails to reflect on the end result, which was mixed.

Overall, it is an intriguing and in-depth look at a very esoteric subject, and unlikely to be surpassed for years in completeness. I believe in my very much layman's opinion, that the analysis and overall structure/use of asides could use some amendments, though.

13 of 17 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An important contribution to Cold War History May 3, 2006

By Jane Risker

Format:Paperback

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.