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Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976

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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.

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.

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.

This magisterial, first-rate study sheds important light on a fascinating and much-neglected chapter of the cold war and authoritatively reveals the decisive contributions of Cuba to liberation movements in Africa. Extremely well-written and documented. Brilliant!!!

This superb book is based on research in Cuban, American, Belgian, German and British archives. Piero Gleijeses is an expert on the USA's role in Latin America. He has written The Dominican crisis, the best account of the US invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965, and Shattered hope, the classic account of the US overthrow of the elected Guatemalan government in 1954.

Gleijeses stresses Cuba's internationalist role in Africa, from sending teams of doctors to Algeria in 1963, to the 2000 doctors in 21 African countries today. It is a unique example of a country's selfless aid.

By contrast, US and British foreign policy in Africa has been squalid and self-interested. In 1964, in a secret CIA operation, assisted by MI6, the US state armed, organised and transported 1000 mercenaries (mostly South African and Rhodesian) into the Congo. The mercenaries raped, pillaged, tortured and killed the Congolese people. Cuba provided valuable aid to the national resistance.

Belgium, Britain, France and the USA all backed Mobutu's coup there. Henri Spaak, the Belgian Prime Minister, one of the key figures in the founding of the EEC, at US orders allowed Zaire's government to recruit mercenaries in Belgium, breaking Belgian law.

The USA and South Africa cooperated in arming and training terrorist UNITA forces in Angola in 1975. In October 1975, South African armed forces invaded Angola. The US, British and French governments all pressed the South African government to keep going, to capture Luanda, Angola's capital.

Cuban forces entered Angola in November, and played the decisive role in turning back the invaders - a historic defeat for apartheid, which should never be forgotten. In 1976, Britain's Labour government aided the recruitment of mercenaries to support UNITA's efforts to destroy Angola and its newly elected government, allowing 200 of them to leave Britain, many without passports.

In 1991, Nelson Mandela visited Cuba and rightly said, "We come here with a sense of the great debt that is owed the people of Cuba. What other country can point to a record of greater selflessness than Cuba has displayed in its relations with Africa?"

An excellent look at Cuba's actions in Africa, from its partnership with Algeria in Ben Bella's time, aid to rebels in Congo/Zaire, the independence struggle in Guinea-Bissau, to Angola.

Supremely well-documented. Definitively settles a number of disputed issues: Cuban troops did not go to Angola because the USSR told them to; in fact, the USSR was not even informed until they were on their way. "Benigno" was not, in fact, in the Congo as he claimed. Savimbi did, in fact, collaborate with the Portuguese before independence.

Particularly good on Angola 1977: a lot of stuff I didn't know about independence, and about the joint U.S./South African/Mobutu covert ops culminating in the invasion by regular South African forces. And about how the Cuban response stopped that invasion and drove them out, doing irreparable damage to the image of invincibility, self-confidence, and internal stability of the apartheid regime.

Includes, for background, a good short look at the early history of the Cuban revolution and U.S. response to it.

The author went through the archives of Cuba, the U.S., the former west and east Germanies, and a number of other countries, and obtained a large number of declassified documents.

Outstanding. Gleijeses sets the record straight on many issues and offers critical, insightful analysis of the actions taken by the Cuban, US, and Soviet governments with regards to Africa.

The major feature of this books is Gleijeses' unprecedented access to Cuban archival records, allowing him to present the internal workings of the Castro administration and the general Cuban view of world events with regards to Africa in the period 1959-1976.

Like a true scholar, Gleijeses respectfully and carefully presents the arguments of other authors, historians, journalists, and government officials in an unbiased way; lays out the evidence offered in support of their arguments; lays out the new evidence; and draws a conclusion. Sometimes new research decisively concludes the debate, other times there are still areas of uncertainty and Gleijeses clearly states this, and still other times he refrains from drawing a conclusion (for too little evidence or too much uncertainty), even explicitly stating "I cannot solve the puzzle" (p. 271).

Often, an author of a work on Castro's Cuba is branded as biased because a reader, whether pro- or anti-Castro, does not feel the author is criticizing or praising Castro enough. In this respect, Gleijeses clearly goes to great lengths to be unbiased: he is very careful to note his suspicions of bias in a certain interviewee's, author's, journalist's, etc. account of a historical event. That is, Gleijeses may refer to a statement made by an interviewee, but will then immediately after (and not in the footnote, but in the main text), explicitly state that he suspects this account may be biased because the person defected from Cuba/still lives in Cuba/etc.

Gleijeses also tackles the controversial questions about the motivation and extent of US and Soviet intervention, and if Cuba was acting merely as a Soviet puppet in Africa. Again, this is done in an extremely careful and fair manner, adhering strictly to government documents and archival records, comparing other historical analyses, and drawing conclusions based solely on the facts.

"Conflicting Missions" is a rigorous, comprehensive history of an aspect of certain African independence movements is often overlooked: the Cuban contribution. This books shines because of its use of newly available documents and its critical, impartial analysis of what actually happened, absent of the ideology, propaganda, and bias that so often surrounds these issues.

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.

i first read this book when i was 17 or 16. It was awesome. I studied it twice. As a historical document, it shows the truth of what went down there. The bibliography provides a great deal of sources, which I used and tells you which ones are bias or not. This indeed is the way LA history must be written: unbiased record.

A wonderful account of Cuba's role in Africa. Few if any books exist describing the epic of the Cuban missions to Africa which cost thousands of lives and impacted a continent. Che's diary and `Guerrilla Prince' are the few books that detail this important facet of Cuban Policy. This book goes a step further from analyzing Che's first failed mission to the Congo to the final victory over South Africa in the Congo. The author describes the Battles as well as the diplomatic missions to such diverse places as Algeria. Everything is covered, from the breakup of the Portuguese empire to the revolutions in Guinea-Bissau. A wonderful singular account that will make you respect Cuba's exporting of revolution and introduce you to many interesting figures, especially opening up the void of African politics, which is all too often ignored.

Seth J. Frantzman