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Adrien Delmas
To what extent was Cuba responsible for the fall of apartheid? This essay
will neither try to determine the complex chain of events that brought
about the fall of apartheid in the early 1990s, nor to rehearse the role
of Cuban military engagement in Angola from 1975 in this narrative.
Instead, it presents two connected questions: in what name did Cuba
become engaged in Angola, and how does this help us understand the
global context of anti-apartheid? To tackle these questions, one could
almost ignore the outcome of the conflict itself and focus directly on the
principal motivations for Cuba to send up to 50,000 soldiers to fight in
southern Africa from 1975 to 1991. As idealistic as it may seem, it was
first and foremost in the name of non-racialism that the Cuban regime
sent its army to intervene irreversibly in the history of southern Africa.
As such, this chapter is not a political, diplomatic or military history of
the Cuban intervention in Africa. Besides the need to complete such a
narrative adding the South African views, it is rather a contribution to
the cultural history of the concept of apartheid. Based on discursive anal-
ysis of the references made to the segregationist regime from the other
side of the Atlantic, this contribution aims at rescaling the international
dimension of a concept still far too national in tone. As a matter of fact,
it was in the name of apartheid, or rather against its name, that Cuba
A. Delmas (*)
Institut Des Mondes Africains, CNRS UMR 8171, Paris, France
FNLA did not cease—on the contrary—and by January 1976 there were
no less than 3000 Cuban soldiers on Angolan soil. When Castro finally
touched down in Luanda the following year, it was primarily to nego-
tiate the withdrawal of Cuban troops.3 But faced with persistent incur-
sions by South African forces in Angola, as part of the counterinsurgency
effort against the guerrillas of South West Africa People’s Organization
(SWAPO) in South West Africa (Namibia), the Cuban leader decided
to maintain its troops and to request support from Moscow. In 1980,
the independence of Zimbabwe aggravated the confrontation. Over
the years, the military operations of Pretoria, Washington, Moscow and
Havana multiplied, transforming Angola—and southern Africa more
broadly—into one of the Cold War’s theatres of direct confrontation.
The conflict became the most deadly one on the African continent since
the Second World War, with more than 25,000 deaths. It reached its
high point during the battle of Cuito Cuanavale, from 1987, involving
no less than 55,000 combatants. Orchestrated by the United States,
peace negotiations began in May 1988 in London. Despite American
reluctance, Cuba joined the talks after the strengthening of their mili-
tary position. The diplomatic discussions moved to Cairo in June,
New York in July (where agreement was reached on the application of
UN Resolution 435, passed in 1978), then in Geneva in August. The
New York Accords were finally signed on 22 December 1988, linking
the independence of Namibia with the withdrawal of Cuban and South
African troops from the region. Set for 1 July 1989, the final troop with-
drawals took place in June 1991.
Namibia became independent on 21 March 1990, at which point
diplomatic-military histories usually conclude. Should the story be
extended to the liberation of Nelson Mandela, on 11 February 1990,
his election as President of South Africa in April 1994 and the fall of
apartheid? Although the New York Accords made no demands on South
Africa with respect to internal policy,4 it is clear that, during the negoti-
ations, the question of the future of apartheid was omnipresent. Jorge
Risquet, responsible for Cuban civil and military personnel in Africa,
and of whom each participant remembers the odour of his cigar smoke,
explains: ‘as for the withdrawal of the Cubans, we had planned to stay
until the liquidation of apartheid. But the Angolans did not want to take
things that far’.5 In Cairo, where the discussions resumed in June 1988,
attention focused on South African internal policy to a greater extent
than the military future of the region. ‘How many Blacks are there in
136 A. DELMAS
The history of Africa will know a very important moment, we will speak
of before Cuito Cuanavale and after Cuito Cuanavale. Because powerful
South Africa, the whites, the superior race, crashed against a tiny scrap of
territory defended by Blacks and Mulattos. We do not seek a military vic-
tory, but a reasonable, just and acceptable solution. South Africa may lose,
not just Namibia but also apartheid. We want this problem to be resolved
now, and we will be in the antechamber of the solution to the problem of
apartheid.8
Piero Gleijeses, who has had access to the minutes of the four-party
negotiations, has refrained from pronouncing on the speed of events
between Cuito Cuanavale and the release of Nelson Mandela.9 The
link is certainly not direct, between the Cuban military presence on the
frontier of Namibia and the decision by South African National Party to
start reforms and resume a dialogue with its former enemies—primarily
the African National Congress (ANC). From the New York Accords of
December 1988 to F.W. Klerk’s speech to Parliament in Cape Town in
February 1990, through the independence of Namibia, the year 1989
must be regarded as decisive. At the very least, an examination of the
Angolan war, which brought three continents into confrontation, sug-
gests that South Africa’s democratic transition was a process that by no
means involved South Africa exclusively.
The crushing defeat of the racist army at Cuito Cuanavale was a victory
for the whole Africa! The overwhelming defeat of the racist army at Cuito
Cuanavale provided the possibility for Angola to enjoy peace and consoli-
date its own sovereignty! The defeat of the racist army allowed the strug-
gling people of Namibia to finally win their independence! The decisive
defeat of the apartheid aggressors broke the myth of the invincibility of
the white oppressors! The defeat of the apartheid army was an inspiration
to the struggling people inside South Africa! Without the defeat of Cuito
Cuanavale our organizations would not have been unbanned! The defeat
of the racist army at Cuito Cuanavale has made it possible for me to be
here today! Cuito Cuanavale was a milestone in the history of the struggle
for southern African liberation! Cuito Cuanavale has been a turning point
in the struggle to free the continent and our country from the scourge of
apartheid!10
These men and women whom we are laying to rest today in the land of
their birth gave their lives for the most treasured values of our history and
our revolution. They died fighting against colonialism and neo-colonial-
ism. They died fighting against racism and apartheid.12
All of Africa deeply hates apartheid. All of Africa views apartheid as their
greatest enemy, an enemy that despises Africa, attacks Africa, humiliates
Africa. It is incredible up to what point the African people suffer from
apartheid, and this has turned African feelings, the African soul, into an
ally of Cuba.13
But, the link between the presence of Cuban troops on African soil
and the will to fight apartheid was actually made much earlier. In 1975,
Castro explained to volunteer soldiers and their families14:
Africa still has very serious problems. In time they’ll have to deal with the
question of racism, of South Africa, which is one of the biggest problems
the continent has. The two great problems were Portuguese colonialism
and the racism in South Africa, where a few million keep fourteen million
Africans oppressed. For all the peoples of Africa, South Africa is a problem
that touches the most sensitive nerve.15
Once again we speak out to alert the world to what is happening in South
Africa. The brutal policy of apartheid is being applied before the eyes of
the nations of the world. The peoples of Africa are compelled to endure
the fact that on the African continent the superiority of one race over
another remains official policy, and that in the name of this racial superior-
ity murder is committed with impunity.16
We have long wanted to visit your country and express the many feelings
that we have about the Cuban revolution, about the role of Cuba in Africa,
southern Africa, and the world. The Cuban people hold a special place in
the hearts of the people of Africa. The Cuban internationalists have made
a contribution to African independence, freedom, and justice, unparalleled
and selfless in character.20
The racial question, and the anti-racial position taken by the young
Cuban regime, thus appeared as an unparalleled diplomatic weapon.
It allowed them to attack the US both on their own turf and on the
CUBA AND APARTHEID 141
Shared Genealogies
Why did Cuba send two-thirds of its army to the other side of the
Atlantic? Broadly, the intervention was motivated by anti-imperial-
ism, internationalism, and first and foremost non-racialism. But such a
non-racialist endeavour, as pragmatic as it was with unique and ambitious
geopolitical strategy, had to be supported by a narrative. Reading the
speeches that sent tens of thousands of Cuban soldiers to fight on the
other side of the Atlantic, this engagement emerged with a new contem-
plation of Cuban and Atlantic history. First of all, it was launched in (or
against) the name of recent history. Thus, on the eve of his accession to
power, Fidel Castro offered a rereading of Cuban history that tended to
qualify the Batista regime as a ‘Cuban apartheid’.29 A great number of
public places were, indeed, legally reserved for the white elites: beaches,
public parks, social clubs, hotels and restaurants. Equally, it was Castro
who, in the name of anti-communitarianism, closed certain jazz clubs or
other exclusively Afro-Cuban places.30 And that ‘Cuban apartheid’ which
had been dismantled in the Caribbean should be, and could be, disman-
tled elsewhere.
If South African apartheid allowed Castro to understand the recent
past of his country, it was also necessary to produce a new history of the
island, an inverted history, a kind of Cuban counter-history of apartheid.
This narrative would begin with the history of slavery,31 from that point
assumed, claimed, even mobilized, because it allowed Cuba to be linked
to Angola, and America to Africa. ‘In keeping with the duties rooted in
our principles, our ideology, our convictions and our very own blood, we
shall defend Angola and Africa’,32 remarked the caudillo in 1975. This
argument, of blood as history, and of duty imposed by history, does not
seem to have discomfited Mandela in the slightest. In celebrating this
engagement in 1991, he expressed how moved he was by such a decree
142 A. DELMAS
of the shared history of Africa and America: ‘in particular we are moved
by your affirmation of the historical connection to the continent and
people of Africa’.33 The Cuban regime would proudly bring a new his-
torical narrative and inscribe its action in the genealogy of slave revolts,
back to the eighteenth century or even before. Thus, the first military
operation in Angola was named ‘Carlota’, after the slave who led a revolt
in the province of Matanzas in 1843. At one point, the history of the
slave trade, resistance to slavery, the socialist revolution and the decolo-
nization of Africa became one and the same. As López Blanch notes:
In our hemisphere, the slaves were the first to rise up in one form or
another against colonial domination from times as early as the 16th cen-
tury itself. Large uprisings in Jamaica, Barbados and other countries took
place during the early 18th century, long before the revolt by the North
American colonies at the end of that century. The first republic in Latin
America was created by the slaves of Haiti. In Cuba, years later, heroic and
massive slave rebellions took place. The slaves of African descent showed
the way to freedom on that continent.34
Apartheid is not something that started yesterday. The origins of white rac-
ist domination go back three and a half centuries to the moment when
the first white settlers started a process of disruption and later conquest of
the Khoi, San, and other African peoples – the original inhabitants of our
country.37
an idea and ideal that the Castro revolution borrowed from the work of
the late nineteenth-century poet and father of Cuban independence, José
Martí. The American experience of cultural mixing, which shaped the
national discourse of the states of Latin America and the Caribbean, from
the ‘raza cósmica’ (cosmic race) of Mexico to the ‘racial democracy’ of
Brazil, from José Vasconcelos to Gilberto Freyre,39 is the same experi-
ence that gave shape to Cuban foreign policy and to its military engage-
ment in southern Africa:
There is no hate of races, because there are not any races. The weak think-
ers, the house thinkers, thread and reheat the races of libraries, which
the fair traveller and cordial observer seek in vain in the justice of nature,
where lies, in victorious love and turbulent appetite, the universal identity
of the man.40
Non-racial Atlantic
What does Cuban history tell us about the history of apartheid? The
twentieth century seems to have established diametrically opposed pro-
cesses of national construction between Hispanic America and sub-Sa-
haran Africa—at least as they relate to ‘the racial question’. Haven’t we
become used to reading the two models—mestizaje on the one hand,
apartheid on the other—as incommensurable? This incommensurabil-
ity is first of all linguistic, since no one really tried, as Derrida remarked,
144 A. DELMAS
Notes
1. This paragraph is built on Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana,
Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2003), and Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington,
Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa 1976–1991 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Edward George, The
Cuban Intervention in Angola, 1965–1991: From Che Guevara to Cuito
Cuanavale (London: Routledge, 2005); and Christine Hatzky, Cubans in
Angola, South-South Cooperation and Transfer of Knowledge, 1976–1991
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015).
2. See Piero Gleijeses, Jorge Risquet, and Fernando Remírez, Cuba y Africa:
Historia común de lucha y sangre (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales,
2007), 49–56.
3. It is also worth mentioning Cuba’s military engagement with Ethiopian
forces against Somalia during the Ogaden War (1977–1978), which
brought up to 12,000 Cuban soldiers to the Horn of Africa.
4. “Agreement among the People’s Republic of Angola, the Republic
of Cuba, and the Republic of South Africa (Tripartite Agreement)”,
December 22, 1988. The complete text is available at the United Nations
Peacemaker website, accessed August 15, 2016, http://peacemaker.
un.org/angola-tripartite-agreement88.
5. Testimony of Jorge Risquet, in Jihan El-Tahri’s documentary, Cuba: An
African Odyssey (2007) (II, 48’), which continues: ‘But the Angolans did
not want to take things that far. So we proposed finding a global solu-
tion, with total withdrawal.’
146 A. DELMAS
20. Ibid., 73.
21. Gleijeses, Visions of Freedom, 526.
22. Carlos Moore, Castro, the Blacks and Africa (Los Angeles: University of
California, 1988). Although in many ways a witness for the prosecution,
this book offers valuable testimony and a unique source of information
on the question.
23. Alejandro de la Fuente, Una Nación para todos: Raza, desigualdad
y política en Cuba, 1900–2000 (Havana: Imagen Contemporanea,
2014); Denia García Ronda, cord., Presencia Negra en Cuba (Havana:
Sensemaya, 2006). The existence of a sociological critique of the polit-
ical discourse on racial questions is not unique to Cuba. We can cite,
for example in France, Pap Ndiaye, La Condition noire: Essai sur une
minorité française (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2008), or, in Mexico, Federico
Navarrete, México racista, una denuncia (Mexico: Grijalbo, 2013).
24. The great merit of Moore’s book, unlike that of Fuente, is to show the
extent to which the two questions, of internal and external policy, were
posed in a concomitant manner. But once again, his tone is one of
reproach: ‘Havana’s self-proclaimed duty to ‘save Africa’ from imperial-
ism appears to be a subtle transfer onto the black continent of the eth-
no-political strategy Castro had successfully applied to Cuba’s domestic
Africa.’ Moore, Castro, the Blacks and Africa, 9. On the transformation
of the racial balance following the intervention in Africa, and for a superb
demonstration of this interweaving, see also Henley C. Adams, “Race and
the Cuban Revolution: The Impact of Cuba’s Intervention in Angola”
(PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1999).
25. The best description of this anecdote is to be found in Moore, Castro, the
Blacks and Africa, 78–82.
26. Ibid., 112.
27. Gliejeses, Visions of Freedom, 343–78.
28. Moore, Castro, the Blacks and Africa, 113.
29. The parallel between the dismantling of segregationist policies in Cuba in
1959 and South Africa in 1994 remains to be examined. Such a paral-
lel should not conceal the fact that both countries shared the same basic
question, which endures today: what is a non-racial, or, more precisely,
a post-racial revolution?
30. Castro: ‘The beaches, once the exclusive privilege of a few, have now been
opened up to the Cuban people regardless of colour, without stupid prej-
udices. I ask the people if they are or if they are not in agreement with
the fact that equal opportunities of employment are open to Cuban of
every colours’. Quoted by Moore, Castro, the Blacks and Africa, 58.
31. A relatively late reference to the question of slavery in Cuba.
148 A. DELMAS
48. For a long history and conceptualisation of the South Atlantic, see Luiz
Felipe de Alencastro, O tratado dos vivientes, Formação do Brasil no
Atlântico Sul, séculos XVI e XVII (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras,
2000).
49. Lopez Blanch, Cuba: pequeño gigante, 30.
Bibliography
Documentary
Jihan El-Tahri. Cuba: An African Odyssey, 2007.