Piero Gleijeses (*)
We do not fight for glory or honors,
but for ideas we consider just.
—Fidel Castro Ruz
THIS year marks the 20th anniversary (written in 2007) of the opening of the battle of Cuito Cuanavale, in south-eastern Angola, which pitted the armed forces of apartheid South Africa against the Cuban army and Angolan forces.
General Magnus Malan writes in his memoirs that this campaign marked a great victory for the South African Defense Force (SADF). But Nelson Mandela could not disagree more: Cuito Cuanavale, he asserted, "was the turning point for the liberation of our continent—and of my people—from the scourge of apartheid".
Debate over the significance of Cuito Cuanavale has been intense,
partly because the relevant South African documents remain classified. I have,
however, been able to study files from the closed Cuban archives as well as many
US documents. Despite the ideological divide that separates Havana and
Washington, their records tell a remarkably similar story.
Let me review the facts briefly. In July 1987, the Angolan army
(Fapla) launched a major offensive in south-eastern Angola against Jonas
Savimbi’s forces. When the offensive started to succeed, the SADF, which
controlled the lower reaches of south-western Angola, intervened in the
south-east. By early November, the SADF had cornered elite Angolan units in
Cuito Cuanavale and was poised to destroy them.
The United Nations Security Council demanded that the SADF
unconditionally withdraw from Angola, but the Reagan administration ensured that
this demand had no teeth.
US Assistant Secretary for Africa Chester Crocker reassured
Pretoria’s ambassador: "The resolution did not contain a call for comprehensive
sanctions, and did not provide for any assistance to Angola. That was no
accident, but a consequence of our own efforts to keep the resolution within
bounds." [1] This gave the SADF time to annihilate Fapla’s best units.
By early 1988, South African military sources and Western
diplomats were confident that the fall of Cuito was imminent. This would have
dealt a devastating blow to the Angolan government. But on November 15 1987,
Cuban President Fidel Castro had decided to send more troops and weapons to
Angola—his best planes with his best pilots, his most sophisticated
anti-aircraft weapons and his most modern tanks. Castro’s goal was not merely to
defend Cuito, it was to force the SADF out of Angola once and for all. He later
described this strategy to South African Communist Party leader Joe Slovo: Cuba
would halt the South African onslaught and then attack from another direction,
"like a boxer who with his left hand blocks the blow and with his
right—strikes". [2]
Cuban planes and 1,500 Cuban solders reinforced the Angolans, and
Cuito did not fall.
On March 23 1988, the SADF launched its last major attack on the
town. As Colonel Jan Breytenbach writes, the South African assault "was brought
to a grinding and definite halt" by the combined Cuban and Angolan forces.
Now Havana’s right hand prepared to strike. Powerful Cuban columns
were marching through south-western Angola toward the Namibian border. The
documents telling us what the South African leaders thought about this threat
are still classified. But we know what the SADF did: it gave ground. US
intelligence explained that the South Africans withdrew because they were
impressed by the suddenness and scale of the Cuban advance and because they
believed that a major battle "involved serious risks". [3]
As a child in Italy, I heard my father talk about the hope he and
his friends had felt in December 1941, as they listened to radio reports of
German troops vacating Rostov on the Don—the first time in two years of war that
the German "superman" had been forced to retreat. I remembered his words—and the
profound sense of relief they conveyed—as I read South African and Namibian
press reports from these months in early 1988.
On May 26 1988, the chief of the SADF announced that "heavily
armed Cuban and Swapo [South West Africa People’s Organization] forces,
integrated for the first time, have moved south within 60km of the Namibian
border". The South African administrator general in Namibia acknowledged on June
26 that Cuban MIG-23s were flying over Namibia, a dramatic reversal from earlier
times when the skies had belonged to the SADF. He added that "the presence of
the Cubans had caused a flutter of anxiety" in South Africa.
Such sentiments were however not shared by black South Africans,
who saw the retreat of the South African forces as a beacon of hope.
While Castro’s troops advanced toward Namibia, Cubans, Angolans,
South Africans and Americans were sparring at the negotiating table. Two issues
were paramount: whether South Africa would finally accept implementation of UN
Security Council Resolution 435, which prescribed Namibia’s independence, and
whether the parties could agree on a timetable for the withdrawal of the Cuban
troops from Angola.
The South Africans arrived with high hopes: Foreign Minister Pik
Botha expected that Resolution 435 would be modified; Defense Minister Malan and
President PW Botha asserted that South Africa would withdraw from Angola only
"if Russia and its proxies did the same." They did not mention withdrawing from
Namibia. On March 16 1988, Business Day reported that Pretoria was "offering to
withdraw into Namibia—not from Namibia—in return for the withdrawal of Cuban
forces from Angola. The implication is that South Africa has no real intention
of giving up the territory any time soon."
But the Cubans had reversed the situation on the ground, and when
Pik Botha voiced the South African demands, Jorge Risquet, who headed the Cuban
delegation, fell on him like a ton of bricks: "The time for your military
adventures, for the acts of aggression that you have pursued with impunity, for
your massacres of refugees ... is over." South Africa, he said, was acting as
though it was "a victorious army, rather than what it really is: a defeated
aggressor that is withdrawing ... South Africa must face the fact that it will
not obtain at the negotiating table what it could not achieve on the
battlefield."[4]
As the talks ended, Crocker cabled Secretary of State George
Shultz that they had taken place "against the backdrop of increasing military
tension surrounding the large build-up of heavily armed Cuban troops in
south-west Angola in close proximity to the Namibian border ... The Cuban
build-up in southwest Angola has created an unpredictable military dynamic."[5]
The burning question was: Would the Cubans stop at the border? To
answer this question, Crocker sought out Risquet: "Does Cuba intend to halt its
troops at the border between Namibia and Angola?" Risquet replied, "If I told
you that the troops will not stop, it would be a threat. If I told you that they
will stop, I would be giving you a Meprobamato [a Cuban tranquillizer]. ... and
I want to neither threaten nor reassure you ... What I can say is that the only
way to guarantee [that our troops stop at the border] would be to reach an
agreement [on Namibia’s independence]."[6]
The next day, June 27 1988, Cuban MIGs attacked SADF positions
near the Calueque dam, 11km north of the Namibian border. The CIA reported that
"Cuba’s successful use of air power and the apparent weakness of Pretoria’s air
defenses" highlighted the fact that Havana had achieved air superiority in
southern Angola and northern Namibia. A few hours after the Cubans’ successful
strike, the SADF destroyed a nearby bridge over the Cunene River. They did so,
the CIA surmised, "to deny Cuban and Angolan ground forces easy passage to the
Namibia border and to reduce the number of positions they must defend." [7]
Never had the danger of a Cuban advance into Namibia seemed more real.
The last South African soldiers left Angola on August 30, before
the negotiators had even begun to discuss the timetable of the Cuban withdrawal
from Angola.
Despite Washington’s best efforts to stop it, Cuba changed the
course of Southern African history. Even Crocker acknowledged Cuba’s role when
he cabled Shultz, on August 25 1988: "Reading the Cubans is yet another art
form. They are prepared for both war and peace. We witness considerable tactical
finesse and genuinely creative moves at the table. This occurs against the
backdrop of Castro’s grandiose bluster and his army’s unprecedented projection
of power on the ground."[8]
The Cubans’ battlefield prowess and negotiating skills were
instrumental in forcing South Africa to accept Namibia’s independence. Their
successful defense of Cuito was the prelude for a campaign that forced the SADF
out of Angola. This victory reverberated beyond Namibia.
Many authors—Malan is just the most recent example—have sought to
rewrite this history, but the US and Cuban documents tell another story. It was
expressed eloquently by Thenjiwe Mtintso, South Africa’s ambassador to Cuba, in
December 2005: "Today South Africa has many newly found friends. Yesterday these
friends referred to our leaders and our combatants as terrorists and hounded us
from their countries while supporting apartheid ... These very friends today
want us to denounce and isolate Cuba. Our answer is very simple: it is the blood
of Cuban martyrs—and not of these friends—that runs deep in the African soil and
nurtures the tree of freedom in our country."
1) SecState to American embassy, Pretoria, Dec. 5
1987, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
2) Transcripción sobre la reunión del Comandante en
Jefe con la delegación de políticos de Africa del Sur (Comp. Slovo), "Centro de
Información de las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias (CIFAR)", Havana
3) Abramowitz (Bureau of Intelligence and Research,
US Department of State) to SecState, May 13 1988, FOIA
4) "Actas das Conversaciones Quadripartidas entre a
RPA, Cuba, Estados Unidos de América e a Africa do Sul realizadas no Cairo de
24-26.06.988", Archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba,
Havana
5) Crocker to SecState, June 26, 1988,
FOIA
6) "Entrevista de Risquet con Chester Crocker,
26/6/88", ACC
7) CIA, "South Africa-Angola-Cuba", June 29, 1988,
FOIA; CIA, "South Africa-Angola-Namibia", July 1, 1988, FOIA
8) Crocker to SecState, Aug. 25, 1988, FOIA
(*) Italian political scientist and historian, professor of
U.S. Foreign Policy at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced
International Studies, in Washington, D.C.
March 28, 2013Granma.cu
