International Solidarity

From 1961 on, Cuba followed a strategy of actively supporting armed revolution and anti-colonial struggles in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The seminal Havana Tricontinental Conference of 1966 expressed this line of ideological solidarity with Third World radicals.

That policy also included support for postcolonial states against external threats, for example through military aid to defend Syria against Israel in 1973. The MPLA request in 1975 was therefore a natural step, as was Cuba’s positive response. From August, there was already a small Cuban contingent in Luanda advising on the city’s defences.

Cuba’s rapid response to the request for aid caught Moscow unawares, and Soviet leaders were embarrassed into offering logistical support despite their reservations, which echoed their previous opposition to Cuba’s insurrectionary strategy. Far from obeying the diktats of its Soviet ally, Havana was actually influencing Soviet interpretations of developments in the Global South, a pattern that was later repeated with Nicaragua and Grenada.

There was another, more domestic context for Cuba’s involvement in Angola, rooted in the country’s political culture. Solidarity with anti-imperialist forces abroad was partly an external manifestation of well-established patterns at home, as witnessed in many of the successful mobilizations and participatory campaigns since 1959.

This was all happening in a Third World that was undergoing dramatic transformations. New postcolonial governments were emerging, and many of them sought Cuban advice or assistance on the basis of past links. In Latin America, the pattern of pro-US military regimes during the 1960s and early ’70s had started to change, with more nationalist governments in many countries prepared to recognize Cuba and trade with it.

This brings into question the traditional view that Cuba ended its active support for armed struggle in the Americas after 1970 because of its economic dependence on the USSR. In fact, with the US and continental siege of the island having been loosened to some extent, Cuba could now seek allies through diplomacy rather than support for guerrilla movements.

Cuba’s regional insurrectionary strategy was not merely based on an unorthodox radical interpretation of Marxism and an ideological commitment to anti-imperialism. It also reflected the reality that Cuba had little to lose by responding in that way to siege and isolation, against the backdrop of a secret US undertaking after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis not to invade the island. Now that the isolation was easing, Havana could explore new ways of promoting Third World solidarity.

Once the MPLA and its Cuban allies had stopped the immediate military threat to Angola, Cuban aid extended into civilian areas for the construction of postcolonial infrastructure. Hundreds of technicians, medical personnel, teachers, agronomists, and even cultural workers volunteered for sustained periods. The Cuban practice of internationalism would thereafter principally express itself in nonmilitary fields, extending to more than forty countries.

Turning Point

What did all of this mean for Cuba itself? Looking back, it is clear that the country’s involvement in Angola represented a turning point in several ways.

Volunteering played an important role from the outset. The leadership in Havana made it clear that the whole enterprise would be based on that principle and called on Cuban soldiers to respond.

The scale of their response was remarkable. Indeed, many outsiders found it unbelievable, assuming that willingness to serve was the result of coercion or the promise of material benefits. Yet when academics from outside Cuba researched the phenomenon, they tended to agree that volunteering was genuine, at least in the early stages.

To understand that, we must see it in the context of popular participation in Cuba since 1959. By 1975, practical and ideological solidarity had been mobilized through mass involvement in a range of organizations — most obviously the neighbourhood Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs) — and a series of campaigns to achieve defined goals, from the promotion of literacy and health to the defense of Cuba against the threat of invasion.

Through those constant collective experiences, notions of solidarity and volunteering had become familiar parts of the Cuban social fabric and political culture. Indeed, much of the nation-building project of the 1960s and early ’70s had been achieved through those mechanisms.

There were other attractions as well. For example, many people could see working abroad as a way to break their enforced habits of looking inward under the US siege, offering them new experiences. It might also give them access to otherwise scarce goods and hard currency. In addition, there was a degree of peer pressure in the workplace, with the example of volunteers persuading others to follow suit.

Eventually, however, the strategy of sending people abroad to provide assistance became a natural and prominent strand of Cuba’s foreign policy and of the lives of ordinary Cubans. Many people either worked abroad themselves or had a friend or family member who did so.

Cuba and Africa

As for the actual military effort in Angola, an early public response was a high degree of national pride. Cuba was now seen to be acting in support of a fellow postcolonial state, against both the unpopular United States and the pariah apartheid regime of South Africa. This boosted collective self-confidence about the potential for Cuba to play a global role that was clearly honorable but had previously seemed impossible.

There was also an unforeseen but significant effect of the Angolan campaign. It brought a new focus, both popular and official, on Cuba’s ethnic make-up. From November 1975, the Cuban leadership referred to the project as “the return of the slaves,” recalling the huge numbers of Africans who the Spanish colonialists had brought forcibly from Angola to boost sugar production. The official name for the campaign was Operation Carlota, after a famous Angolan slave rebel of those times.

Angola thus reminded Cubans about Africa’s cultural impact on their society and its vital contribution to the country’s economic patterns as well as its political radicalism (in all three nineteenth-century independence rebellions). This reshaped the process of defining a Cuban identity as the base of the revolution and a way of finding a place in the world.

That was necessary because Cubans had gone through a fairly typical experience where colonialism and neocolonialism shaped their identity, prompting them to accept their own inferiority and the superiority of their colonizers, and to look northward in search of collective aspirations for a future “Cuba Libre.” That pattern had continued into the period of Cuba’s questionable independence between 1902 and 1958, reinforced by substantial Spanish immigration until the 1930s.

After 1959, new policies and US hostility toward the Cuban Revolution forced the development of a new radical affinity with Latin America. This expressed itself through active support for armed rebellion in the region but also through the seminal continental cultural protagonism of Casa de las Américas. During the early 1970s, however, Cuba’s membership of Comecon, the trading network for the Soviet-led bloc, brought an end to the austerity of the previous decade. Material improvements engendered a tendency for Cubans to see themselves as potentially forming part of the “Second World.”

Cuban involvement in Angola, along with new forms of collaboration with a radicalizing Anglophone Caribbean and a visible shift to the left in Central America, served as a powerful reminder that Africa had always made a substantial contribution to shaping Cuba’s national identity. That contribution had long been subject to questioning and contestation, in spite of social reforms and official declarations after the rebel victory.

Suddenly color was no longer a taboo subject (in a supposedly colorblind society) but represented a basic element of an identity that Cubans could be proud of. The new wave of austerity that struck Cuba after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the loss of hope that accompanied it would undermine this color awareness to some extent. Even so, such awareness now had deeper roots than before and remained a key part of the whole Cuban equation.

Legacies

In view of all this, how did Cubans continue to perceive their country’s role in Angola? The 1980s did see a slight decline in the initial enthusiasm, with an estimated death toll of around six thousand, out of more than two hundred thousand serving there. There was also a tendency in some quarters to see peer pressure as a form of state pressure, with volunteering as a means for individuals to jump queues for housing or other benefits.

After a dengue epidemic in 1980, there was a widespread rumor that it originated in internationalist volunteering. The following year, the mass boatlift of more than 120,000 Cubans at the port of Mariel, which shocked the Cuban people and their leadership alike, made complaints about Angola more audible.

However, enthusiasm and pride returned after the events of March 1988, when a force of over fifty thousand Cuban troops inflicted a major, morale-boosting defeat on South Africa’s army at Cuito Cuanavale in a standing battle.

Pride grew as the effects of the Cuban victory became clear: South African troops withdrew from Angola and Namibia shortly afterward, and the apartheid state soon began to unravel with the release of Mandela in 1990 followed by his election as the country’s president. That sense of pride even survived (and may have helped comfort people) during the crisis of the early 1990s.

Yet the same crisis also put paid to Cuba’s ability to continue with its policy of internationalism on the former scale. The provision of aid was now generally limited to assistance after natural disasters or, as in the case of Palestine, free education and training for students from the Global South.

The patience of Cubans was often strained during the crisis years, as some contrasted their daily struggles to survive on limited supplies and rationing with what they saw as Cuba’s generosity abroad. Overall, however, a commitment to the idea of international solidarity did seem to endure among many Cubans, suggesting (in the direst of dire straits) that popular belief in solidarity still had some sway.

It may also have helped that Cuba’s record of providing aid to other countries, even during crisis, elicited significant global sympathy for the country. This was on display every year starting in 1992 in the overwhelming United Nations General Assembly votes against the US embargo (ritually opposed only by the United States and Israel), fortifying a sense that Cuba was not alone. With Donald Trump having tightened the embargo even further, that sympathy might seem like a small blessing, but a blessing it was nonetheless (and perhaps still is).

The Angolan experience thus affected Cuba in several ways, mostly for the better. It enhanced many of the country’s beliefs and commitments, gained it many allies, and inspired feelings of pride (as well as complaints and resentments). Cuba after 1975 was different, and we are probably still discovering the extent and character of those differences.