“But now we are not interfering,” Castro finally indicated in February 1974. Partly this was because he felt uneasy about the MIR people: “They had conflicts with Allende, and Allende was right.… They had really extremist positions.” The Havana– Santiago axis was therefore in ruins. “The situation is difficult, the persecution is great, the struggle is hard.… If there is no energetic resistance, Unidad Popular will not win another electoral victory in twenty years’ time,” he concluded, with near-prophetic foresight.40
In 1975 Cuba was gradually drawn into the civil war in Angola. After left-reformist army officers overthrew the dictatorship in Portugal in 1974 and announced that the Portuguese colonies of Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and the Cape Verde Islands would be give independence, the three parties to the Angolan civil war signed an agreement in January 1975 at the Portuguese town of Alvor (the so-called Alvor Accords), which envisaged free elections and full independence for Angola by November. “One would have expected the US to back it to the full,” wrote the former diplomat and State Department Cuba expert Wayne S. Smith. “Instead – incredibly – the Ford administration moved to do the exact opposite, to shred the Alvor agreement.”41 The reason soon became clear: namely, that Agostinho Neto’s Marxist MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) would emerge as victor from the elections. Thus, at a moment when Washington was finally giving up Vietnam as lost, the CIA pumped in money, weapons, and mercenaries and got Holden Roberto’s rival FNLA (National Front for the Liberation of Angola) to break the agreement. It was not long before the conflict had turned into a surrogate war between the United States, China, and South Africa on one side, and the Soviet Union and Cuba on the other.
In the spring of 1975, the MPLA sent a request to Havana for military assistance, and in May Cuba responded with 250 advisers. Then in late September, after the hostilities had spread, Castro launched “Operation Carlota” (so called after the black female leader of a Cuban slave revolt in the nineteenth century) to send equipment and troops to Angola. By early October 1,500 Cuban troops were already stationed there; by February 1976 the figure was ten times higher, 15,000; and after 1977 as many as 36,000 were there at any one time. Castro announced that his troops would stay for as long as they were needed. Ten years later they were still there. More than 200,000 Cuban soldiers had been sent out in rotation for a period of duty.
Castro himself created a kind of command post in Havana, interfering in strategy and tactics in ways that were not always to the liking of Cuban officers. It is true that the Cubans were largely responsible for the rapid victories that followed, but the war dragged on until the late eighties because of the military and political inability of the Angolans. For Cuba, which in the seventies gained a high degree of self-confidence from the military engagement, the Angola campaign in the eighties took a growing toll economically, politically, and socially. No charge was made for the support given to the Angolans. And it was not only heroes who came back alive and well from the faraway African country: there were also coffins and young cripples making the 7,500-mile crossing.
In 1984, when Cuba had 40,000 soldiers there, Castro feared that the Angolans would want to “prolong their presence indefinitely.” In late July, in Cienfuegos, he told GDR Politbureau member Hermann Axen of disunity, lack of principle, moneymaking and corruption among the Marxist leadership of the African country, and even of acts of violence against the civilian population. Moreover, “experienced Cuban advisers and experts who had been active there for years were being dismissed, and advisers brought in from Western countries [with whom] private money-making deals” could be struck. Without the Cubans, the opposition UNITA would for long have been ruling the country. In his secret report, Axen further quoted Castro as saying: “Incapable of stabilizing the internal political situation, … [the MPLA leadership] was seeking compromises with the enemy and even making a bargaining chip of the Cuban troops in order to create ostensible advantages for themselves.” There was no unity in the Politbureau and government; it was impossible to rely on them. Yet, despite these accompanying phenomena, the Cuban troop presence was to last until 1991.42
Castro always stressed that the military aid to Angola corresponded to his own estimate of the situation, and that his troops had in no sense been sent as Cuban “gurkhas of the Soviet empire,” as Washington claimed. “The Soviets absolutely did not ask us. They never said a single word on the subject. It was exclusively a Cuban decision,” he said in a television interview to US journalist Barbara Walters.43 To Tad Szulc he declared: “The Angolans asked us for help.… Angola was invaded by South Africa.… Therefore we could never have done anything more than just to help Angola against an external invasion.”44 Soviet sources confirm this account: “The idea for the large-scale military operation had originated in Havana, not Moscow.”45 Even black African states not well disposed to Angola or Castro show him respect for the operation. “The West had underestimated the extent to which Blacks in general, and Africans in particular, abhorred the Nazi-like apartheid regime in South Africa,” writes Carlos Moore in his study of “Castro, the Blacks and Africa.”46
In his engagement against underdevelopment and imperialism, in Africa’s struggle of South against North, black against white, the “white” Castro knew how to use the fact that the cultural roots of colonial Cuba lay in Africa, and that a majority of the Cuban population was descended from African slaves. It was mainly black troops and black generals who once fought Cuba’s war of liberation against Spain. “We are a Latin-African nation,” Castro once said. “African blood flows through our veins.”47 This makes it clear why he did not necessarily need an impetus from Moscow to go ahead. “In keeping with the duties rooted in our principles, our ideology, our convictions and our very own blood, we shall defend Angola and Africa.”48
The Swiss sociologist Jean Ziegler made a key point when he wrote: “In November 1975, Cuban regiments, three-fourths of which were made up of black troops, disembarked at the port of Luanda and pushed the invaders back.… Black Cubans had blocked the way of white South African tanks and paratroopers.”49 Castro was convinced, then, that the Cuban Revolution had a chance of survival only if it exported its political and moral principles and worked to achieve prestige, respect and therefore restraint in the international community, most of which was composed of Third World states. Against this background, “Operation Carlota” established Castro’s reputation as a leading Third World figure more securely than ever before.
Subsequently, Castro and his diplomats spun a dense global web of relations with Third World states. With the Soviet Union and a modest economic prosperity at its back, Cuba was even able to afford to elaborate its own concept of development aid. For Cuban diplomats brought with them not only military advisers and secret service experts, but also teachers and doctors. Thousands of volunteers fanned out to help Cuba’s new friends overcome underdevelopment through literacy campaigns, the building of a health system, and other social institutions. By the end of the millennium, according to Castro, Cuba had sent more than 25,000 doctors alone to the Third World. He has always stressed the idealistic character of these expensive missions: “Our homeland is not just Cuba; our homeland is also humanity.”50 But they were not quite as selfless and idealistic as all that: Castro’s medium-to-long-term aim, after all, is the construction of a worldwide anti-imperialist front against the United States. Only if the Third World and the newly developing nations are united among themselves and speak with a single voice, will they be able to change in their favor the terms of trade with the First World. That was their only value for the Soviet Union. Seen in this light, its financial and economic aid to Cuba was rather like an investment of political capital expected to yield a high rate of return.
In 1976 Cuba’s engagement in Africa led to fresh tensions with the United States. At first, the new Carter administration continued the talks begun under his predecessor Gerald Ford to bring the two states closer together. These talks even surv
ived acts of terrorism by anti-Castro exiles, evidently directed by the CIA: for example, the bomb explosion on board a Cuban airplane soon after it took off from Barbados, on October 6, 1976, which caused the death of 73 people. Those who took part in the attack – including the well-known Cuban exile and CIA collaborator Orlando Bosch – were soon discovered and, in some cases, arrested in Venezuela. Four years later, however, the charges against them were dropped because of “lack of evidence;” they walked free in the interests of US “national security.”
Despite these and other operations originating in Florida, semidiplomatic relations in the form of “representations of interests” were restored between Cuba and the United States in September 1977, 16 years after the closure of their respective embassies. But as Cuba was meanwhile increasing instead of reducing the number of its military personnel in Angola, the Carter administration suddenly issued an ultimatum making the continuation of secret talks between the two governments dependent upon a Cuban withdrawal from Angola – a condition which for Castro was unworthy of discussion. His response combined derision with delusions of grandeur:
What moral basis can the United States have to speak about Cuban troops in Africa? What moral basis can a country have whose troops are on every continent? … when their own troops are stationed right here on our own national territory, at the Guantánamo naval base? It would be ridiculous for us to tell the United States government that, in order for relations between Cuba and the United States to be resumed or improved, it would have to withdraw its troops from the Philippines, or Turkey, or Greece, or Okinawa, or South Korea.51
In fact, the Cubans soon found themselves present in another African theater of war. Early in 1978 Cuba intervened in the war between Ethiopia and Somalia, this time – unlike in Angola – expressly at the request of the Soviet Union. By February 15,000 Cuban troops were waging a counter-offensive and driving Somali forces out of Ogaden.
It was a precarious business. Originally Somalia and the Soviet Union had been allies: the USSR had a military base at Berbera in the strategically important Horn of Africa, while the USA supported the military regime that took over after the fall of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1974 – that is, until Mengistu Haile Mariam emerged from the ruling junta in February 1977 to seize power for himself. In the wake of the brutal repression that ensued, the Carter administration withdrew support from Mengistu, the self-declared Marxist, who thereupon sought a rapprochement with the Soviet Union. Moscow found itself in a doubly awkward position. On the one hand, both it and Havana had always supported the striving for independence of the Ethiopian province of Eritrea, and now they were expected to make a U-turn and stand up for the territorial integrity of the Ethiopian state. On the other hand, they were allied with Somalia, precisely because Ethiopia had for long had designs on Ogaden in the Horn of Africa. This alliance soon broke down, of course, and Somalia’s President Mohammed Siad Barre also felt compelled to change camps. He made enquiries in Washington, received military support, invaded Ethiopia to support the independence movement there, and drove the ruler in Addis Ababa into such a tight corner that he had to turn to the Soviet Union for military help. Moscow, as we have seen, then delegated to Castro the task of dealing with the Somalis.
The following year, Castro was able to count on new friends and allies in his own hemisphere. In March 1979 Maurice Bishop took power through a putsch on the Caribbean island of Grenada, and in July the Cuban-supported Sandinista Liberation Front succeeded in overthrowing and driving into exile the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza. In both cases, Castro sent technicians, doctors, teachers, and military advisers. Remarkably, he warned his Nicaraguan comrade Daniel Ortega not to install a Cubanstyle Marxist system but to preserve a mixed economy. He also advised him – in vain – to develop good relations with the United States.
In the autumn of 1979, the now 53-year-old Castro was at the height of his international reputation, an “elder statesman” of the Third World, so to speak. His country was a respected member of the international community, and 35 countries were receiving civil and military support from Havana. In September Castro acted as host to the Sixth Non-Aligned Conference in Havana, with the participation of 94 member-states and liberation movements. This automatically made him official spokesman of the organization for the next four years – a goal which he and Cuban diplomacy had long been working to achieve. His close ties of dependence on the Soviet Union meant that this was not an uncontroversial decision, and Yugoslavia’s head of state, Josef Broz Tito, as well as representatives of the People’s Republic of China, were especially hostile. His answer to the Chinese was that they were betraying the cause of the Third World by supporting United States policy against the Soviet Union.
“We have many close friends at this conference, but we don’t always agree with the best of them,” he said at the opening session. And he tried to allay doubts about his role by assuring delegates: “We will work with all member countries – without exception – to achieve our aims and to implement the agreements that are adopted. We will be patient, prudent, flexible, calm. Cuba will observe these norms throughout the years in which it presides over the movement.”52 Castro bridged the ideological differences by setting out the main problem for all those present: the combination of the underdevelopment of poor countries with their dependence on the financial policy of the world’s major economies. The next month, as spokesman of the Non-Aligned Movement, he presented the decisions of the Havana conference to the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York, demanding an end to the arms race and a redistribution of the resources thereby freed for development of the poorer countries of the world. He laid special emphasis on what would become his main political plank in the following years: that is, the search for a way out of the “debt trap.”
In his view, the international financial organizations bore the main blame for the fact that the developing countries had accumulated a debt mountain of $300 billion. In 1978 alone, the debt was estimated by the World Bank to have been in excess of $51 billion. “The international monetary system prevailing today is bankrupt,” he said. “It must be replaced! The debts of the least developed countries … must be cancelled!”53 Less than a quarter of a year later, however, his moral authority and credibility as Third World spokesman would be severely damaged when Soviet troops marched into Afghanistan. The country was not only a member but a co-founder of the Non-Aligned Movement. Castro suddenly found himself between two stools, for when the Non-Aligned Movement voted on a UN Resolution on Afghanistan, Cuba lined up with eight other members against a majority of 56 countries (with 26 abstentions) which condemned the Soviet invasion. He thereby lost the chance to take a seat on the UN Security Council on behalf of the non-aligned countries. His role as spokesman then unfolded in an unspectacular manner over the next few years.
The revolution devours its children
In the late 1960s, after attempts to bring forth the “new man” in Cuba came to an end with the death of Che Guevara, the fearless poet Heberto Padilla, well known for his biting irony, caricatured such efforts in a piece called “Instructions for Joining a New Society:”
One: Be optimistic.
Two: Be well turned out, courteous, obedient.
(Must have made the grade in sports.)
And finally, walk
as every member does;
one step forward
and two or three back:
but always applauding, applauding.54
Padilla’s book Outside the Game, with its criticism of the development of a revolution he had once celebrated, provoked the supreme guardians. But he went on regardless. They left him alone a while longer, partly because he had influential friends at home and abroad, and partly because Fidel evidently held a protective hand over him. In March 1971, however, he suffered the fate he had already predicted in another poem:
Cuban poets no longer dream
(Not even at night).…
Hands seize them by the sh
oulders
Turn them about.55
Men from the G-2 secret police arrested him and threw him in jail.
Thirty-two days later he was set free, after a sharply worded open letter to Castro from noted European and Latin American intellectuals had been published in the French daily Le Monde.
With the same vigor with which we defended the Cuban Revolution from the first day, seeing it as exemplary because of its respect for human beings and its struggle for freedom, we now ask you to spare Cuba the dogmatic obscurantism, the cultural xenophobia and the repressive system that Stalinism has imposed on the socialist countries, and which bear an alarming similarity to the things that are currently reported to be happening in Cuba.56
Among the signatories were Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Susan Sontag, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alberto Moravia, Alain Resnais, and Gabriel García Márquez.
Padilla’s release on Castro’s orders had a price: the insubordinate poet had to make a public “self-criticism” and call upon other writers to follow his example. His obsequious confession, however, turned into a parody of actually existing socialism: “I have committed many, many errors, that are really inexcusable.… And I feel … truly happy … with the possibility of beginning my life over again with a new spirit.” His humiliating period behind bars, he now characterized as an opportunity for “reflection.” And what he said about his interrogators has the ring of scorn and derision: “If I have learned anything from the state security comrades, it is because of their humility, their simplicity, the sensitivity and warmth with which they carry out their humane tasks.” He also regretted his description of the Writers’ Association as a “hollow shell of pretentious nobodies,” and castigated the malicious demon that was still within him. He had even been unfair and ungrateful toward Castro, and he would “never tire of repeating this.” Then the poet mentioned “similar errors” he had committed, which, thanks to the “generosity of our revolution,” had not landed him in the same trouble. “Let us then be soldiers!” he concluded. “For, comrades, we live … in the glorious trench of the present-day world, in the trench facing imperialist penetration of our country and of Latin America.” And finally, repeating Castro’s own favorite formula so that it had a subtly servile effect: “Fatherland or death! Venceremos!”57
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