March 2018 marked the fifteenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, an illegal war whose perpetrators have yet to answer to justice. The Bush administration’s failed regime change and the destructive effects of the conflict across the Middle East turned Operation Iraqi Freedom into a symbol of the limits of American power and the folly of military interventionism — a lesson that Washington’s foreign policy establishment insists on ignoring.

Less remembered, but just as important, is the thirtieth anniversary of the battle of Cuito Cuanavale, which between March 1987 and June 1988 witnessed Cuban and Angolan soldiers fight against the South African Defense Force (SADF) in the largest military confrontation in Africa since the end of World War II. The clash overwhelmed the South African government, which was eventually forced to relinquish its grip on southern Angola and accept Namibian independence. These concessions, in time, helped bring about the end of apartheid rule.

Besides a decisive battle, Cuito Cuanavale also represents a climactic ending to Fidel Castro’s foreign policy in Africa, which between 1963 and 1991 witnessed an ambitious succession of interventions in seventeen countries, involving hundreds of thousands of Cuban soldiers, doctors, and social workers. While these ventures were imperfect, the overlap of both anniversaries offers the opportunity to contrast the sterile brutality of Western interventions with a striking tradition of internationalism.