Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976-1991

Visions of Freedom

THE NEW COLD WAR HISTORY

Odd Arne Westad, editor

Visions of Freedom

Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa, 1976–1991

Piero Gleijeses

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

© 2013 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gleijeses, Piero, author.

Visions of freedom : Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the struggle

for southern Africa, 1976–1991/Piero Gleijeses.

pages cm. — (New Cold War history)

ISBN 978-1-4696-0968-3 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4696-2832-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4696-0969-0 (ebook)

1. Africa, Southern—History—1975– 2. Cold War—Political aspects—Africa, Southern. 3. Africa, Southern—Politics and government—1975–1994. 4. Africa, Southern—Foreign relations—1975–1994. 5. Africa, Southern—History—Autonomy and independence movements. I. Title. II. Series: New Cold War history.

DT1165.G54 2013

968.0009048—dc23 2013024964

Portions of this work have appeared earlier, in somewhat different form, as Moscow’s Proxy? Cuba and Africa 1975–1988, Journal of Cold War Studies 8:4 (Fall 2006): 98–146, © 2006 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and A Test of Wills: Jimmy Carter, South Africa, and the Independence of Namibia, Diplomatic History 34:5 (Nov. 2010): 853–91 (John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., publisher), and are reprinted here with permission.

To Setsuko Ono

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations Used in Text

Prologue

1 The Cuban Drumbeat

2 Neto, Castro, and Carter: A New Beginning?

3 The Cubans in Angola

4 Strained Relations: Cuba and Angola

5 The Fronts Harden: The United States and Cuba, 1978–1980

6 Carter and Southern Africa: A Balance Sheet

7 Enter Reagan

8 The Wonders of Linkage

9 Angolan Travails

10 The Failure of Lusaka

11 The United States, South Africa, and Savimbi

12 The View from Cuba, 1984–1986

13 Havana and Moscow: Conflicting Strategies

14 Negotiations in the Offing?

15 Cuito Cuanavale

16 Maniobra XXXI Aniversario

17 Chester Crocker Meets Jorge Risquet: Talks about Talks

18 The Negotiations

19 The New York Agreements

20 Visions of Freedom

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Maps and Illustrations

MAPS

Cuba 2

Africa 3

Angola 4

Namibia, showing the homelands and White Area 5

Southern Angola, showing the Cuban defensive line 6

Angola’s eleven military regions 7

Zaire and its neighbors 40

Angolan territory occupied by South Africa, February 1984 237

Military operations near the Lomba River, late September and early October 1987 395

ILLUSTRATIONS

President of Angola Agostinho Neto with Fidel Castro 265

Agostinho Neto with President of Yugoslavia Josip Broz Tito 265

Agostinho Neto with Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union 266

Lúcio Lara, Neto’s closest aide 266

President of Angola José Eduardo dos Santos 267

Jorge Risquet, Castro’s point man for Africa, with José Eduardo dos Santos and Fidel Castro 267

Chief of Staff of the Angolan Army Ndalu with Jorge Risquet 268

Sam Nujoma, leader of the Namibian rebels, with Fidel Castro 268

Namibian guerrillas 269

Sophia Ndeitungo, Namibian student in Cuba 269

Cuban Special Forces lieutenant with Namibian insurgents 270

Nelson Mandela in Cuba 270

The Wall of Names in Pretoria’s Freedom Park 271

General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev with Raúl Castro 271

Mikhail Gorbachev with Fidel Castro 272

General Konstantin Kurochkin, head of the Soviet Military Mission in Angola 272

General Polo Cintra Frías, head of the Cuban Military Mission in Angola 273

Lourdes Franco Codinach, a Cuban doctor in Angola 274

President Jimmy Carter, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski 274

President Ronald Reagan with Mikhail Gorbachev 275

Ronald Reagan with Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Chester Crocker 276

Angolan rebel leader Jonas Savimbi 276

Ronald Reagan with Jonas Savimbi 277

South African Foreign Minister Pik Botha 278

President of South Africa PW Botha 278

Mr. President: Why Is Chester Crocker Trying to Sell 20 Million Black Africans into Communist Slavery? 283

Savimbi, Savimbi, He’s Our Man, If He Can’t Do It Nobody Can!!! 305

WANTED For Supplying $2 Billion-Plus of Aid and Comfort Annually to America’s Soviet Enemy in Cuban-Occupied Angola. 312

Cuban, Angolan, and Soviet soldiers fleeing 401

South African Defense Minister Malan: 2 + 2 = 10 . . . You ain’t seen nothing yet! 459

Some People Just Don’t Know When to Quitto . . . 483

Acknowledgments

Setsuko Ono has stimulated me along my journey with her probing and frank comments, and she has inspired me with her intelligence, her courage, and her art. Her sculptures adorn Havana, Washington, Baltimore, Tokyo, and Shibukawa. The paintings that she exhibited at the 2009 Bienal of Havana— For Our Beautiful Earth: Resistance to Overwhelming Force and Dreams of Peace—express with exquisite sensitivity her longing for a more just world. They challenge me to be relentless in seeking the truth in my chosen field.

For the past decade, I spent at least two months every year in Havana doing research for this book. Gloria León, one of Cuba’s most gifted intellectuals, has helped me understand her country and saved me from countless gaffes and faux pas. Jorge Risquet, a key protagonist of the events analyzed in this book, made it possible for me to gain access to the closed Cuban archives. He has become a close friend while remaining a harsh and very intelligent critic. I was fortunate to be able to count on Hedelberto López Blanch—Cuba’s foremost investigative journalist—and on the help of Rodrigo Álvarez Cambras, Juan Carrizo Estévez, Gisela Castellanos Castro, Nancy Jiménez Rodríguez, Antonio López López, Fernando Remírez de Estenoz, and Jorge Risquet Valdés Jiménez. Migdalia León is my Cuban doctor and a dear friend.

My research in Pretoria, Windhoek, and Luanda was enriched by the help of six good friends: Claudia Uushona, Paulo Lara, Isabel Martín, Emiliano Manresa, Pedro Ross, and Rosa Fonseca. Thenjiwe Mtintso, Aziz Pahad, and Ronnie Kasrils helped convince the National Archives of South Africa to declassify the documents of the State Security Council that were critical to my research.

At the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where I teach, Associate Dean John Harrington, a lover of history, is a good friend and has helped me in every possible way. I also owe a special debt to Senior Associate Dean Myron Kunka and to Kelley Kornell, the best coordinator that the U.S. foreign policy department has ever had. Kelley holds our department together, and she has assisted me with intelligence, grace, and skill. I also benefited from the assistance of Brian Wingfield, Willy Shield, Thomas Field, David Fowkes, Elizabeth Wente, and Raphaël Guévin-Nicoloff. Three brilliant research librarians—Linda Carlson, Kathy Picart, and Barbara Prophet—tracked down even the most outlandish publications. They performed miracles with good cheer.

I greatly appreciated the intelligent criticism of Professors Lars Schoultz and Odd Arne Westad, who reviewed my manuscript for the University of North Carolina Press. My good friend Isaac Cohen offered, as always, incisive and wise comments, as did Professor Jim Hershberg. I thank Anna-Mart van Wyk for her insights on South Africa. Bringing this manuscript to press was greatly eased by the professionalism of Chuck Grench, Ron Maner, and Sara Cohen at the University of North Carolina Press. For more than three decades Doctor David Berler has safeguarded my eyesight—a challenging task—and Doctor Marwa Adi has now joined the effort. I am deeply grateful to them.

My research took me to archives in the United States, Cuba, Europe, and Africa. I thank all the archivists, but I feel a particular debt to Teresita Muñoz at the military archives in Havana and to Neels Muller at the Foreign Ministry Archives in Pretoria. And, above all, to my dear friend Ivys Silva Jomarrón, at the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party. Her wisdom and efficiency were invaluable.

Maja Murisic searched the Yugoslav archives for me and translated the documents she gathered. Jan Krzewinski did the same in the Polish archives. All other translations are mine.

Four protagonists read the manuscript: Jeff Davidow, the director of the Office of Southern African Affairs of the U.S. State Department in 1984–86; Eeben Barlow, a senior officer in the South African Defence Force in the 1980s; Jorge Risquet, Castro’s point man for Angola in the period covered in this book; and General Paulo Lara, a senior officer in the Angolan army in the 1980s. All were forceful critics of my manuscript. To them, and to all who agreed to be interviewed for this book, I give my sincere thanks. And I also thank the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, and SAIS for their financial assistance.

Nancy Mitchell is much more than the foremost expert on Carter’s foreign policy. Her forthcoming book, Race and the Cold War: Jimmy Carter in Africa, illuminates U.S. foreign policy with unsurpassed intelligence. She generously set it aside time and again to read my manuscript, and I greatly benefited from her literary skill and her penetrating criticism. I depend on the intellectual collaboration we began many years ago.

Abbreviations

The following abbreviations are used in the text. (For source abbreviations used in the notes, see p. 527.)

ANC African National Congress of South Africa ATN Agrupación de Tropas del Norte ATS Agrupación de Tropas del Sur CIA Central Intelligence Agency, United States COMECON Council of Mutual Economic Assistance DCI Director of Central Intelligence, United States DIA Defense Intelligence Agency, United States DTA Democratic Turnhalle Alliance EPG Eminent Persons Group FAPLA People’s Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola FAR Revolutionary Armed Forces (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias), Cuba FLEC Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda FLS Front Line States FNLA National Front for the Liberation of Angola FRELIMO Liberation Front of Mozambique GDR German Democratic Republic INF intermediate-range nuclear forces INR Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Department of State JCS Joint Chiefs of Staff, United States JMC Joint Monitoring Commission MI Military Intelligence, South Africa MINFAR Ministerio de las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias, Cuba MK Umkontho We Sizwe MPLA Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola NSC National Security Council, United States OAU Organization of African Unity PRA People’s Republic of Angola RENAMO Mozambique National Resistance SA South Africa SACP South African Communist Party SADF South African Defence Force SAG South African government SALT II Strategic Arms Limitation Talks SCC Special Coordinating Committee of the U.S. National Security Council SWA South West Africa (Namibia) SWAPO South West Africa People’s Organization SWATF South West Africa Territory Force UNITA National Union for the Total Independence of Angola UNSC United Nations, Security Council UNTAG United Nations Transition Assistance Group USG United States Government ZANU Zimbabwe African National Union ZAPU Zimbabwe African People’s Union

Visions of Freedom

Cuba

Africa

Angola

Namibia, showing the homelands and White Area (adapted from Rand Daily Mail [Johannesburg], July 13, 1978)

Southern Angola, showing the Cuban defensive line

Angola’s eleven military regions

Prologue

Until 1974 southern Africa was a backwater of the Cold War. The guerrillas who fought against Portuguese rule in Angola and Mozambique, against white minority rule in Rhodesia, against Pretoria’s rule in Namibia, and against apartheid in South Africa seemed impotent. The stage was dominated by Washington’s friends—apartheid South Africa and Portugal.

The collapse of the Portuguese dictatorship in April 1974 opened the first fissures in the dam that protected white rule, but Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was confident that the damage could be contained. He zeroed in on Angola, where Pretoria and Washington worked together to crush the left-wing Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and install instead friendly leaders. They almost succeeded.

Between November 1975 and April 1976, 36,000 Cuban soldiers poured into Angola. They were proxies of the Soviet Union, the outraged Ford administration proclaimed. Fidel Castro countered that they were internationalists helping the Angolans repel the South African troops who had invaded the country with Washington’s collusion.

By April 1976 the Cubans had pushed the South Africans out of Angola. The MPLA ruled the country. Southern Africa had been hurled into the vortex of the Cold War. For the next fifteen years—until 1991—tens of thousands of Cuban soldiers remained in Angola. Their number peaked at 55,000 in 1988.

The Cuban role in Angola is without precedent. No other Third World country has projected its military power beyond its immediate neighborhood. Brazil’s mighty generals had gone as far as the Caribbean, sending a small troop to the Dominican Republic in 1965 as the United States’ junior partner; Argentina’s generals briefly helped Anastasio Somoza’s defeated cohorts in 1980–81 as they sought to regain a foothold in Nicaragua. Vietnam’s soldiers never ventured beyond Indochina; China’s military activities outside Asia were limited to the supply of weapons and the dispatch of a few hundred instructors to Africa. During the Cold War, extracontinental military interventions were the preserve of the two superpowers, a few West European countries, and Cuba.

I studied the Angolan events of 1975–76 in an earlier book, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976. Now, in Visions of Freedom, I investigate what happened over the subsequent fifteen years. These were the last years of the Cold War, a convulsed period with dramatic ups and downs in relations between the two superpowers. When the curtain opens, President Gerald Ford has frozen détente with the Soviet Union, largely because of the Cuban intervention in Angola. President Jimmy Carter revives détente, but it never blossoms, in part because of the presence of the Cuban troops in Angola. In 1979, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan plunges the Cold War into one of its most bitter phases. But several years later Ronald Reagan would preside over an epochal change in U.S. relations with the Soviet Union—from the evil empire of the first term to the deepening détente with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987–88.

Many have analyzed how these changes affected the high politics of superpower relations. But how did they affect events in those areas where the Cold War was actually being waged, where it was hot? As historian Nancy Mitchell writes, The Cold War was a contest that consisted of shadow-boxing in areas of marginal significance because real war in places that really counted—Berlin, Washington and Moscow—was unwinnable.¹ After the Cubans’ arrival in Angola, that shadowboxing occurred in southern Africa. Africans, Americans, Cubans, and Soviets jostled in a confusing landscape. They fought over the future of Angola and the decolonization of Namibia, Africa’s last colony. Beyond lay the great prize: South Africa.

In Angola, throughout this period, the MPLA government faced two enemies bent on its destruction: the charismatic rebel leader Jonas Savimbi, and the South African government. Pretoria was well aware of the MPLA’s commitment to help those who fought for the eradication of apartheid; therefore, the MPLA had to be destroyed. The South Africans bolstered Savimbi with economic and military aid. We are working with South Africa to shape a common destiny, Savimbi pledged.² He was brilliant, he was eloquent, and he was without scruple. He was, a British ambassador in Luanda explained, a monster whose lust for power had brought appalling misery to his people.³ The South Africans did more than help Savimbi: they waged war on Angola for longer than a decade, sending their troops at will into the south of the country.

Sandwiched between Angola and South Africa is Namibia, a sprawling, underpopulated country. It had been a German colony before falling under a South African mandate at the close of the First World War. South Africa had ruled it as its fifth province. In 1971 the International Court of Justice and the UN Security Council had decreed Pretoria’s occupation of the country illegal and ordered it to withdraw immediately. South African officials knew that if Namibia were ever truly independent, it would have an extremely negative impact on every front for the apartheid regime. It would encourage black militant groups in South Africa . . . [and] lead to a decline in white morale.⁴ They were willing to give Namibia independence, therefore, in name only. For its future leaders, they handpicked malleable men who scurried across the stage, eager for power and money but unable to garner popular support or legitimacy. Over them loomed the shadow of the South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), the Namibian guerrilla movement that challenged Pretoria’s rule. SWAPO, a U.S. ambassador to South Africa wrote in 1977, has, over the years, in the mind of the [Namibian] population come to symbolize independence, equal rights, and freedom from South Africa.⁵ SWAPO, South African officials lamented, would win any free election; therefore, the UN-supervised elections that the international community demanded were a nonstarter. The war continued.

Namibia and Angola were more than neighbors; their struggles in the last years of the Cold War were intimately related. The SWAPO guerrillas were based in Angola, where the MPLA government gave them what, a South African general wrote, is virtually a prerequisite for a successful insurgent campaign, namely a border that provided safe refuge.⁶ In Angola, the SWAPO guerrillas were trained by Cuban and Soviet instructors.

South Africa, the region’s powerhouse, was prepared to go to any length, break any promises, threaten any alliance in order to protect what she regards as her own legitimate interests, a conservative British newspaper commented.⁷ Among these interests one was paramount: apartheid. Beginning in 1984 the South African government faced the most prolonged and intensive black uprising in the country’s history.⁸ The protests and violence, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) noted, catapulted the African National Congress (ANC) . . . into the forefront of the antiapartheid movement.⁹ Like SWAPO, the ANC had its military camps in Angola where its fighters were trained by Cuban instructors and armed by the Soviet Union.

South African officials agreed on the need to preserve apartheid, but they disagreed about the best way to do it. The doves within the South African government—Foreign Minister Pik Botha and his aides—were skeptical about the generals’ plans to install Savimbi in Luanda and maintain sway over Namibia, but they kept their misgivings to themselves because they were intimidated by the country’s strong-willed prime minister (then president) PW Botha, who shared the generals’ views. Furthermore, they had no alternative to offer: like the generals, they loathed the MPLA government in Luanda and opposed free elections in Namibia. They were simply more aware than the generals of the dangers lurking ahead.

Thus there was a complex and deadly interplay between Angola, Namibia, and South Africa. The MPLA helped SWAPO and the ANC, which fought against South Africa. The South Africans, in turn, wanted to topple the MPLA and hold on to Namibia.

Had these African protagonists been left to themselves, the South Africans would almost certainly have brought down the MPLA government and enthroned Savimbi in Luanda. Savimbi would have ejected SWAPO and the ANC from Angola, and South Africa’s control over Namibia would have been strengthened. This turn of events would have demoralized the black masses in South Africa and, Pretoria believed, strike a blow against the revolutionary onslaught against South Africa.¹⁰

Instead, the Cuban soldiers, armed by the Soviet Union, protected the MPLA government and thereby protected SWAPO and the ANC. Even the CIA acknowledged that the Cuban troops were necessary to preserve Angolan independence.¹¹ Nevertheless, their presence there was intolerable to both the Carter and Reagan administrations. It was, simply, an affront.

Both Carter and Reagan faced two interrelated challenges in southern Africa. The first was a Cold War problem: how to pry the Cubans out of Angola and reduce Soviet influence in the region. The second had domestic implications: how to deal with South Africa. In the United States, racial segregation—America’s own brand of apartheid—was not long past, and racial tensions simmered. Should apartheid South Africa be a partner in the U.S. efforts to force Cuba out of Angola? And how should the United States deal with Pretoria’s ally, Jonas Savimbi, Angola’s rebel chieftain?

Figuring out how to address these two challenges opened schisms in each administration. Nancy Mitchell’s study, Race and the Cold War: Jimmy Carter in Africa, demonstrates that Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski could work harmoniously on some important foreign policy questions. But on Angola, Namibia, and Cuba they were far apart, and their differences reflected contrasting visions of what U.S. foreign policy should be. Carter did not waver between them, unable to reach a decision, as happened in other instances (notably during the agony of the Shah’s regime). He sided with Brzezinski, because he shared his views—and also because, unlike Vance, the national security adviser spiced his recommendations with an eye to electoral politics.

Deep divisions also rent the Reagan administration. They pitted the pragmatists, led by Secretary of State George Shultz, against the true Reaganites, who claimed to represent the president’s instincts. Southern Africa was one of their major battlegrounds. How tightly should the administration embrace South Africa? Should it simply push the Cubans out of Angola, or should it help South Africa bring Savimbi to power? And should the United States defy the international community, including its West European allies, and oppose free elections in Namibia? Reagan, after all, had deemed SWAPO a Marxist terrorist band.¹² In answer to all these questions, Shultz and the pragmatists advocated moderation; the true Reaganites, on the other hand, brooked no compromise.

By Reagan’s second term, the clash reverberated loudly in Congress and in the press. Mr President: Why Is [Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs] Chester Crocker Trying to Sell 20 Million Black Africans into Communist Slavery? the leaders of the country’s most prominent conservative organizations inquired in a December 1984 open letter to Reagan.¹³ Chester Crocker, their bête noire, was the most influential assistant secretary of state for Africa during the Cold War. He enjoyed Shultz’s trust, and he ably led the pragmatists on African issues. I think he sympathizes with the communist government [of Angola], Howard Phillips, chair of the Conservative Caucus, groused—a demented statement that reflected the views of an important segment of the Republican establishment.¹⁴

Angola was, by far, the most important foreign policy initiative of the Cuban revolution. It illuminates the aims and the motivations of Cuban foreign policy. It is also a rich laboratory to study the relationship between Cuba and the Soviet Union. Documents from the Cuban archives, complemented by the memoirs of former Soviet officials and the testimony of senior Angolan military officers, reveal an authoritative inside view of Cuban-Soviet relations during the last fifteen years of the Cold War. The interaction between the two countries took place at two levels: among top government officials in Havana and Moscow, and between the Cuban and the Soviet military missions in Angola. The Cubans knew very well that they were dependent on the Soviet Union. They were keen to avoid quarrels, but when necessary, they stood up to the Kremlin. In Angola, the Cuban generals challenged the recommendations of the Soviets, often vehemently. No one who reads the minutes of the exchanges between General Polo Cintra Frías, head of the Cuban military mission in Angola, and his Soviet counterpart, General Konstantin Kurochkin, can have any doubt about how obstreperous the Cubans could be.

Fidel Castro had defied Leonid Brezhnev by sending troops to Angola in November 1975, and he defied Gorbachev in November 1987 when he decided to send important reinforcements to Angola to push the South Africans out of the country once and for all—at the very moment Gorbachev wanted desperately to foster détente with Washington. You know that our General Secretary will soon go [to Washington] to sign the INF [Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces] treaty, Soviet defense minister Dmitry Yazov complained to the chief of the Cuban General Staff. Havana’s escalation in Angola was undesirable from the political point of view. . . . We don’t want to do anything that the Americans can use against the Soviet Union and Cuba.¹⁵

In his memoirs Gorbachev writes that the Cuban government got us involved in, to put it mildly, difficult situations, such as Angola. In Moscow, opinions about Havana’s African ventures were divided. Our military was interested in establishing a reliable bridgehead in Africa, and so it supported Cuba’s involvement in Angola . . . with enthusiasm. At the same time, Cuba’s excessive engagement, which dragged in the Soviet Union, provoked serious objections in our political circles. In our ‘corridors of power’ many said openly that the Cubans ‘were saddling us with a second Afghanistan.’¹⁶ The doubts increased as Gorbachev engaged in a search for détente with the United States. Nonetheless, Moscow loyally supported the Cuban engagement in Angola, even when it disagreed with Castro’s decisions.

What did the Soviet Union gain from its long involvement in Angola? The CIA summed it up: Moscow got a reliable supporter of Soviet positions in international forums and the use of naval and air facilities in Luanda.¹⁷ It sold vast amounts of weapons to Angola—approximately $6 billion between 1976 and 1988¹⁸—but the Angolans paid in cash only for 10 to 15 percent of the amount; the rest was given on credit, and the debt was not paid during the lifetime of the Soviet Union. Far from being a source of profit, the sale of weapons was, Soviet deputy foreign minister Anatoly Adamishin writes, a black hole.¹⁹

In their memoirs, most former Soviet officials are critical of Moscow’s involvement in Angola because it hurt relations with the United States and diverted resources that should have been used at home. It was a serious mistake, wrote Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev. It did not . . . serve the national interest of the Soviet Union, stressed Deputy Foreign Minister Georgi Kornienko. Why, with all our problems, did we have to get involved? Adamishin asked. Whether it was just or not, we could not afford it, we had too many problems of our own.²⁰

Vladimir Shubin, a former Soviet official and now a prominent scholar, offers a rare contrast to this litany of lamentations. He is proud of what the Soviet Union did in southern Africa. The achievements justified the costs—Moscow helped protect Angola from South Africa and lent crucial assistance to the liberation movements of southern Africa. Armed struggle was a key element in the collapse of white rule in southern Africa, he argues, and it would not have been possible without the weapons provided by the Soviet Union.²¹

Without Moscow, Cuba could not have kept tens of thousands of soldiers in Angola for more than a decade. Without Moscow, the Angolan army would have been virtually without weapons. The two great achievements of the USSR in Angola, a senior Angolan officer remarked, were to give the weapons to our army and to aid Cuba. Angolan president José Eduardo dos Santos told Castro in December 1988, The Soviet Union helped Angola and helped Cuba to help Angola.²²

The engine was Cuba. It was the Cubans who pushed the Soviets to help Angola. It was they who stood guard in Angola for many long years, thousands of miles from home, to prevent the South Africans from overthrowing the MPLA government. It was they who in 1988, with the reinforcements Castro sent against Gorbachev’s wishes, forced the South African army out of Angola. It was they who forced Pretoria to abandon Savimbi and hold free elections in Namibia—which SWAPO won. In the words of Nelson Mandela, the Cuban victory over the South African army in southern Angola in 1988 destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor . . . [and] inspired the fighting masses of South Africa.²³ This was Cuba’s contribution to what Castro has called the most beautiful cause²⁴—the struggle against racial oppression in southern Africa. Humiliating one superpower and repeatedly defying the other, Cuba changed the course of history in southern Africa.

My Sources

Visions of Freedom is the first international history of the conflict in southern Africa based on archival sources. It relies primarily on a triptych of documents: from Cuba, from the United States, and from South Africa.

The Cuban archives for the post-1959 period are closed. I am the only foreign scholar who has been allowed to enter them—after years of effort and failure. Over time, my access has improved, in quantity and in quality. I gathered 3,500 pages of Cuban documents for Conflicting Missions, but 15,000 for Visions of Freedom, including more than 3,500 pages of conversations of Fidel Castro with his closest aides or with foreign leaders, among them Gorbachev. The same rules that governed my research in Cuba for Conflicting Missions applied for this book. I never used a document unless I was given a photocopy of the original. Therefore, I have photocopies of all the Cuban documents I use in Visions of Freedom.

Christian Ostermann, the Director of the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, has created a website on which I have posted a large selection of the Cuban documents I use in this book. This will allow scholars, wherever they are, to have access to them. It is available at digitalarchive.org. I want to thank Christian Ostermann, James Hershberg and Laura Deal for making this possible.

The U.S. archives are, without question, the best-organized and richest that I have used in my professional career. But the pickings get slimmer when the researcher ventures into the Reagan years, because fewer documents have been declassified.

Fortunately for my research, there was a powerful remedy: the South African archives. They are brimming with documents that shed light on U.S. policy in the region. For example, they include the minutes of a great many meetings between U.S. and South African officials that are still under lock and key in the United States.

Other archives add insight and information, especially on the 1970s. Yugoslavia was a close friend of the MPLA; the Yugoslav documents shed light on Angola’s relations with Cuba and the Soviet Union at critical moments in the 1970s. British documents are particularly helpful in understanding U.S. policy toward Namibia in the Carter years. The archives of the Communist Party of the former German Democratic Republic are open through the 1980s and provide important information about Angola, as well as about Cuban and Soviet policy toward southern Africa. The Zambian archives include useful dispatches from Zambian diplomats, and the French archives house the reports of the French chargé in Luanda in the late 1970s; he was an intelligent and knowledgeable observer. The Canadian archives include little relevant to this book. I had hoped to find valuable documents on southern Africa in the archives of the Italian Communist Party, but I had overestimated the party’s interest in the region. I was also disappointed in my hope that the Polish archives would provide an interesting window on developments in Angola—only two documents rewarded the effort. The Angolan archives are closed, but I managed to collect several documents from private collections in Luanda. The Russian government has declassified very little relevant for this book, but the Gorbachev Foundation has released useful documents. Former Soviet protagonists—among them two former ambassadors to Cuba, as well as several generals and senior party officials—have written memoirs with valuable information.

I have also interviewed more than 150 protagonists from South Africa, Namibia, Angola, Cuba, and the United States. Interviews add color and texture; they complement the documents.

Chapter 1

The Cuban Drumbeat

The Last Hurrah: Gorbachev in Havana

Mikhail Gorbachev visited Cuba in April 1989. Some of his closest aides had urged him not to go: Fidel Castro was a political dinosaur, they argued, his policy in the Third World was reckless, and going to Cuba would irritate the United States. Other aides disagreed. In a memo to Gorbachev accompanying a draft of the speech the Soviet leader would deliver to the Cuban National Assembly, Georgi Shakhnazarov noted Cuba’s economic crisis and added: I have attempted to include warm words about the significance of the Cuban revolution . . . to give moral support to the Cuban government in this moment that is so difficult for them.¹

Gorbachev did not consider Castro a relic of the past. He wrote in his memoirs, I had and have a high opinion of this man, of his intellectual and political abilities. He is, without doubt, an outstanding statesman. . . . In my conversations with Castro I never had the feeling that this man had exhausted himself, that he, as they say, ‘was a spent force,’ that his worldview was cast in cement, that he was unable to absorb new ideas. It was possible to have a constructive dialogue with him, to attain mutual understanding, to count on cooperation.²

In Havana, Gorbachev was a tactful and respectful guest. The Cubans appreciated that he did not try to lecture them, give them advice, or criticize them. At the press conference after the talks, when a journalist asked What advice did the charming Gorbachev give the Cubans? Castro quipped, Gorbachev is charming precisely because he does not tell other countries what to do.³

The Soviet leader assured the Cubans of continuing support. Cuba—it is our revolutionary duty, our destiny to help her, Gorbachev wrote after leaving the island.⁴ His promises rang hollow, however, against the backdrop of the rapidly deteriorating situation in the Soviet Union and in the Soviet bloc. Seven months later, the Berlin Wall fell. Throughout Eastern Europe, Communist regimes crumbled.

Castro had told Angola’s President José Eduardo dos Santos in late 1988, as détente between Washington and Moscow blossomed, We don’t know how the United States will interpret peace and détente, whether it will be a peace for all, détente for all, coexistence for all, or whether the North Americans will interpret ‘coexistence’ as peace with the USSR—peace among the powerful—and war against the small. This has yet to be seen. We intend to remain firm, but we are ready to improve relations with the United States if there is an opening.⁵

There was no opening. For the next three years, as the Soviet Union teetered on the brink of collapse, U.S. officials pressured Gorbachev to cut all aid to Cuba.⁶ The collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991 meant that Havana was alone, and in desperate economic straits. Washington tightened the embargo, making it as difficult as possible for third countries to trade with Cuba. U.S. officials hoped that hunger and despair would force the Cuban people to turn against their government.

The Burden of the Past

Why such hatred? The answer lies, in part, in Castro’s betrayal of the special relationship that had existed between the United States and Cuba since the early 1800s, when President Thomas Jefferson had longed to annex the island, then a Spanish colony. Jefferson’s successors embraced the belief that Cuba’s destiny was to belong to the United States. No one understood this better than José Martí, the father of Cuban independence. In 1895, as Cuba’s revolt against Spanish rule began, he wrote, What I have done, and shall continue to do is to . . . block with our [Cuban] blood . . . the annexation of the peoples of America to the turbulent and brutal North that despises them. . . . I lived in the monster [the United States] and know its entrails—and my sling is that of David.⁷ The next day he was killed on the battlefield.

In 1898, as the Cuban revolt entered its fourth year, the United States joined the war against an exhausted Spain, ostensibly to free Cuba. After Spain surrendered, Washington forced the Platt Amendment on the Cubans, which granted the United States the right to send troops to the island whenever it deemed it necessary and to establish bases on Cuban soil. (Today, the Platt Amendment lives on in the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay.) Cuba became, more than any other Latin American country, an American fiefdom.⁸ Until 1959, that is, when Fidel Castro came to power and tweaked the beak of the American eagle.

When Americans look back at that fateful year of 1959—when it all began—they are struck by their good intentions and by Castro’s malevolence. The United States had offered its friendship, only to be rebuffed. Indeed, President Dwight Eisenhower had sought a modus vivendi with Castro—as long as Cuba remained within the U.S. sphere of influence and respected the privileges of the American companies that dominated the island’s economy. Castro, however, was not willing to bow to the United States. He is clearly a strong personality and a born leader of great personal courage and conviction, U.S. officials noted in April 1959, and, a few months later, a National Intelligence Estimate reported, He is inspired by a messianic sense of mission to aid his people.⁹ Even though he did not have a clear blueprint of the Cuba he wanted to create, Castro dreamed of a sweeping revolution that would uproot his country’s oppressive socioeconomic structure. He dreamed of a Cuba free of the United States. Eisenhower was baffled, for he believed, as most Americans still do, that the United States had been the Cubans’ truest friend, fighting Spain in 1898 to give them independence. Here is a country, he marveled, that you would believe, on the basis of our history, would be one of our real friends. As U.S. historian Nancy Mitchell has pointed out, our selective recall not only serves a purpose, it also has repercussions. It creates a chasm between us and the Cubans: we share a past, but we have no shared memories.¹⁰ Ethnocentrism and ignorance are the pillars of the City on the Hill.

The United States responded to Castro’s challenge in the way it always dealt with nuisances in its backyard: with violence. On Eisenhower’s orders, the CIA began planning the overthrow of Castro. In April 1961, three months after John Kennedy’s inauguration, 1,300 CIA-trained insurgents stormed a Cuban beach at the Bay of Pigs—only to surrender en masse three days later.

Flush with this victory, Castro tendered an olive branch. On August 17, 1961, Che Guevara told a close aide of Kennedy that Cuba wanted to explore a modus vivendi with the United States. Kennedy was not interested. A few months later, on the president’s orders, the CIA launched Operation Mongoose, a program of paramilitary operations, economic warfare, and sabotage designed to visit what Kennedy’s aide Arthur Schlesinger has called the terrors of the earth¹¹ on Fidel Castro.

Relations with Moscow

Castro enjoyed widespread support among the Cuban population, as the CIA acknowledged, but he understood that only strong Soviet backing could protect his fledgling revolution from the wrath of the United States. The fate of Guatemala’s President Jacobo Arbenz, overthrown by the CIA in 1954, was a bitter reminder of what befell errant presidents in the U.S. backyard. In January 1959, the Soviets knew very little about Castro. For several months their only contact was through leaders of the Cuban Communist Party visiting Moscow to vouch for the revolutionary credentials of the new government. In October 1959 a KGB official arrived in Havana, establishing the first direct link between the Kremlin and the new Cuban leadership. Soon, the tempo accelerated: in March 1960 Moscow approved a Cuban request for weapons. Diplomatic relations were established the following May. In 1961, the relationship grew close and even ebullient as Soviet bloc arms and economic aid arrived. Castro was charismatic, he seemed steadfast, he worked well with the Cuban communists, and he had humiliated the United States at the Bay of Pigs. The Soviet Union would transform the island into a socialist showcase in Latin America.

It was the Missile Crisis that brought the romance to an abrupt end. Thirty years later, in 1992, Kennedy’s defense secretary, Robert McNamara, finally understood why the Soviets and the Cubans had decided to place missiles in Cuba: I want to state quite frankly with hindsight, if I had been a Cuban leader, I think I might have expected a U.S. invasion. . . . And I should say, as well, if I had been a Soviet leader at the time, I might have come to the same conclusion.¹² Kennedy’s reckless policy meant that Castro had legitimate concerns for his country’s security. Added to this was the Kremlin’s desire to close the missile gap, America’s well-publicized overwhelming superiority in strategic weapons.

Kennedy learned that there were Soviet missiles in Cuba on October 16, 1962. On October 24 the U.S. Navy quarantined the island. Four days later, when Nikita Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles, he did not bother to consult Castro—I don’t see how you can say that we were consulted in the decision you took, Castro wrote Khrushchev.¹³ The honeymoon was over.

In the wake of the Missile Crisis, the United States continued paramilitary raids and sabotage operations against Cuba, trying to cripple its economy and assassinate Castro. U.S. officials were no longer confident that they could topple Castro, but they were determined to teach the Latin Americans that the price of following Cuba’s example would be high. Cuba was the key to all of Latin America, the Director of Central Intelligence told Kennedy. If Cuba succeeds, we can expect most of Latin America to fall.¹⁴

While Kennedy promoted subversion in Cuba, Castro promoted revolution in Latin America. Castro argued that the virus of revolution is not carried in submarines or ships. It is wafted instead on the ethereal waves of ideas. . . . The power of Cuba is the power of its revolutionary ideas, the power of its example. The CIA agreed. The extensive influence of ‘Castroism’ is not a function of Cuba’s power, it noted in mid-1961. Castro’s shadow looms large because social and economic conditions throughout Latin America invite opposition to ruling authority and encourage agitation for radical change.¹⁵

Cuba, however, did not rely just on the power of its example. By 1961–1962, Cuban support [for revolution] began taking many forms, the CIA noted, ranging from inspiration and training to such tangibles as financing and communications support as well as some military assistance. Most significant was military training. The CIA estimated that between 1961 and 1964 at least 1,500 to 2,000 Latin Americans received either guerrilla warfare training or political indoctrination in Cuba.¹⁶

By 1964 the guerrillas in Latin America had suffered a string of setbacks, and Cuban support for them had become a source of discord between Havana and Moscow. The Cubans resented the Soviets’ growing antipathy for armed struggle in Latin America, and the Kremlin was unhappy because Castro’s policies complicated its relations with the United States and Latin American governments.

Castro was unbending. At a meeting of communist parties in Moscow in March 1965, Raúl Castro, Fidel’s brother and minister of defense, stressed that it was imperative to organize a global movement of solidarity with the guerrillas in Venezuela, Colombia, and Guatemala who . . . are fighting heroically for the independence of their countries.¹⁷ By 1968, however, the guerrillas had been crushed in Bolivia, virtually wiped out in Guatemala, and brutally punished in Colombia and Venezuela. These defeats, and Che’s death, taught Havana that a few brave men and women could not by themselves ignite armed struggle in Latin America. By 1970 Cuban assistance to guerrilla groups . . . had been cut back to very low levels, U.S. officials concluded.¹⁸

This removed a major irritant in Cuba’s increasingly strained relationship with the Soviet Union. In the late 1960s, while U.S. policy makers publicly lambasted Castro as a Soviet puppet, U.S. intelligence analysts quietly pointed to his open criticism of the Soviet Union and his refusal to accept Soviet advice. He has no intention of subordinating himself to Soviet discipline and direction, and he has increasingly disagreed with Soviet concepts, strategies and theories, a 1968 study concluded, reflecting the consensus of the U.S. intelligence community.¹⁹ Castro criticized the Soviet Union as dogmatic and opportunistic, niggardly in its aid to Third World governments and liberation movements, and overeager to seek accommodation with the United States. He made no secret of his displeasure with the inadequacy of Moscow’s support of North Vietnam, and in Latin America he actively pursued policies contrary to Moscow’s wishes. If they gave us any advice, we’d say that they were interfering in our internal affairs, Raúl Castro later remarked, but we didn’t hesitate to express our opinions about their internal affairs.²⁰

To explain why the Soviets put up with their recalcitrant Cuban ally, U.S. intelligence reports noted that Moscow was inhibited by Castro’s intractability.²¹ The Soviets still saw advantages in their relationship with Cuba, a 1967 study observed; it proved their ability to support even remote allies, and it had a nuisance value vis-a-vis the US. Above all, Moscow drew back from the political and psychological cost of a break: How could the Soviets pull out of Cuba and look at the world or themselves in the morning? It would be a confession of monumental failure—the first and only Socialist enterprise in the New World abandoned—and it would seriously damage Soviet prestige and be widely interpreted as a victory of sorts for the United States.²²

By the early 1970s, however, reeling from the twin failures of his revolutionary offensive in Latin America and his economic policies at home, Castro softened toward the Kremlin. Cuban criticism of Soviet policies ceased, and Havana acknowledged Moscow’s primacy within the socialist bloc. At the same time, Havana’s new approach to armed struggle in Latin America—more subtle, more discriminating—eased relations with the United States. In 1974 Secretary of State Henry Kissinger concluded that the U.S. embargo of Cuba had become counterproductive. West European and Latin American governments increasingly resented Washington’s heavy-handed pressure to join its crusade against Cuba, and U.S. public opinion, spearheaded by businesses eager to corner the growing Cuban market, now favored peaceful coexistence with the island. Kissinger proposed secret negotiations aimed at normalizing relations, and in a meeting on July 9, 1975, Cuban and U.S. representatives discussed steps that would lead to an improvement in relations and, eventually, full bilateral ties. Four months later, however, Cuban troops landed in Angola.

Africa: The Beginnings

I was among those stunned by the sudden outpouring of thousands of soldiers from a small Caribbean island which, in 1975, seemed more like a tropical Bulgaria, a well-behaved Soviet client, than a fiery revolutionary outpost. You can’t understand our intervention in Angola without understanding our past, a Cuban official later told me. He meant that the Cubans who went to Angola were following in the footsteps of those who, over the previous fifteen years, had gone to Algeria, Zaire, Congo Brazzaville, and Guinea-Bissau.²³ He also meant, very gently, that my mental construction of Cuba as a tropical Bulgaria was, simply, nonsense.

History, geography, culture, and language made Latin America the Cubans’ natural habitat, the place closest to Castro’s and his followers’ hearts, the first place they tried to spread revolution. But Latin America was also where their freedom of movement was most circumscribed. Castro was, the CIA observed, canny enough to keep his risks low in the U.S. backyard.²⁴ Hence, fewer than forty Cubans fought in Latin America in the 1960s, and Cuba exercised extreme caution before sending weapons to Latin American rebels.

In Africa, Cuba incurred fewer risks. Whereas in Latin America Havana challenged legal governments and flouted international law, in Africa it confronted colonial powers and defended established states. Above all, in Africa there was much less risk of a head-on collision with the United States. U.S. officials barely noted the Cubans in Africa—until 36,000 Cuban soldiers landed in Angola.

Moreover, the Cuban leaders were convinced that their country had a special empathy for the Third World beyond the confines of Latin America. The Soviets and their East European allies were white and, by Third World standards, rich; the Chinese exhibited the hubris of a great and rising power and were unable to adapt to African and Latin American culture. By contrast, Cuba was nonwhite, poor, threatened by a powerful enemy, and culturally both Latin American and African. It was, therefore, a unique hybrid: a socialist country with a Third World sensibility. This mattered, in a world that was dominated, as Castro said, by the conflict between privileged and underprivileged, humanity against imperialism,²⁵ and where the major fault line was not between socialist and capitalist states but between developed and underdeveloped countries.

If this were a play—Cuba’s African Journey—the curtain would rise at Casablanca where a Cuban ship, Bahía de Nipe, docked in December 1961. It brought weapons for the Algerian rebels fighting against French colonial rule, and it departed with precious cargo: wounded Algerian fighters and war orphans from refugee camps. This represented the dual thrust of Cuban internationalism: military aid and humanitarian assistance. In May 1963, after Algeria had gained its independence, a fifty-five-person Cuban medical mission arrived in Algiers to provide free health care to the Algerian people. (It was like a beggar offering his help, but we knew that the Algerian people needed it even more than we did, and that they deserved it, explained the minister of public health.)²⁶ In October 1963, when Algeria was threatened by Morocco, the Cubans rushed a force of 686 men with heavy weapons to the Algerians, jeopardizing a contract Rabat had just signed with Havana to buy Cuban sugar worth $184 million, a considerable amount of hard currency at a time when the United States was trying to cripple Cuba’s economy.

Havana’s interest in sub-Saharan Africa quickened in late 1964. This was the moment of the great illusion when the Cubans, and many others, believed that revolution beckoned in Africa. Guerrillas were fighting the Portuguese in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique. In Congo Brazzaville, a new government proclaimed its revolutionary sympathies. Above all, there was Zaire, where armed revolt threatened the corrupt pro-American regime that Eisenhower and Kennedy had laboriously put in place. To save the Zairean government, in the summer of 1964 the Johnson administration raised an army of 1,000 white mercenaries in a major covert operation that provoked a wave of revulsion even among African leaders friendly to the United States. In December, Che Guevara went on a three-month trip to Africa. Thomas Hughes, the director of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), noted that this trip was part of an important new Cuban strategy to spread revolution in Africa: it would win Havana new friends and challenge U.S. influence on the continent. Che explained that he offered the Zairean rebels about thirty instructors and all the weapons we could spare, and they accepted with delight. Che left with the joy of having found people ready to fight to the finish. Our next task, he wrote, was to select a group of black Cubans—all volunteers—to join the struggle in Zaire.²⁷ From April to July 1965, 120 Cubans, led by Che, entered Zaire. In August, 250 Cubans, under Jorge Risquet, arrived in neighboring Congo Brazzaville at the request of that country’s government, which feared an attack by the CIA’s mercenaries; the Cuban column would also, if possible, assist Che in Zaire.

But Central Africa was not ready for revolution. By the time the Cubans arrived in Zaire, the mercenaries had broken the resolve of the rebels, leaving Che no choice by November 1965 but to withdraw. In Congo Brazzaville, Risquet’s column saved the host government from a military coup and trained the rebels of Agostinho Neto’s MPLA before withdrawing in July 1967.

The late 1960s were a time of deepening maturity in Cuba’s relationship with Africa. No longer deluded that revolution was around the corner, the Cubans were learning about the continent. In those years the focus of Havana’s attention in Africa was Guinea-Bissau, where rebels fighting for independence from Portugal asked for Cuba’s assistance. In 1966 Havana sent military instructors and doctors, and they remained until the end of the war in 1974—the longest and most successful Cuban intervention in Africa before the dispatch of troops to Angola in 1975. In the words of Guinea-Bissau’s first president, we were able to fight and triumph because other countries helped us . . . with weapons, medicine, and supplies. . . . But there is one nation that in addition to material, political and diplomatic support, even sent its children to fight by our side, to shed their blood in our land. . . . This great people, this heroic people, we all know that it is the heroic people of Cuba; the Cuba of Fidel Castro.²⁸

Not once did U.S. intelligence reports in the 1960s suggest that Cuba was acting in Latin America or Africa at the behest of the Soviet Union. Instead, they consistently stressed that self-defense and revolutionary fervor were Castro’s main motivations. They were correct. The United States had repeatedly rebuffed Castro’s offers to explore a modus vivendi, and Castro had concluded that the best defense was offense. Attacking the United States directly would be suicidal, but assisting revolutionary forces in the Third World would gain friends for Cuba and weaken U.S. influence. It was almost a reflex, Che’s second-in-command in Zaire remarked. Cuba defends itself by attacking its aggressor. This was our philosophy. The Yankees were attacking us from every side, so we had to challenge them everywhere. We had to divide their forces, so that they wouldn’t be able to descend on us, or any other country, with all their might.²⁹

To explain Cuban activism in the 1960s merely in terms of self-defense, however, would be to distort reality—a mistake U.S. intelligence analysts did not make. There was a second motive force, as CIA and INR freely acknowledged: Castro’s sense of revolutionary mission. Report after report stressed the same point: Castro was a compulsive revolutionary, a man with a fanatical devotion to his cause, who was inspired by a messianic sense of mission. He believed that he was engaged in a great crusade to help free the people of the Third World from the misery and the oppression that tormented them.³⁰

These, then, were the dual motivations of Cuban activism in the 1960s: self-preservation and revolutionary idealism. They ran along parallel tracks, until Angola.

Angola

In 1974 Angola was Portugal’s richest colony. Almost twice the size of Texas, it was the fourth-largest coffee producer in the world, the sixth-largest diamond producer, an important exporter of iron ore, and sub-Saharan Africa’s third-largest oil producer. Its population was approximately 6.4 million, including 320,000 whites. There was only one large city, Luanda, with more than 500,000 residents.

Angola’s mulattoes—estimates range from 60,000 to 100,000—were not a homogeneous social group. They were the great majority of Angola’s nonwhite elite, but they were also found among the most destitute. For most black Angolans, however, the mulattoes were the willing auxiliaries of the Portuguese, ready to serve the white man and betray the African. As John Marcum, one of Angola’s keenest observers, pointed out, a legacy of mistrust between mulatto and African had developed over the centuries.³¹

At the bottom of Angola’s society were the blacks, more than 90 percent of the population. They were the unlucky charges of Europe’s most backward colonial power. Most of Angola’s black population belonged to the country’s three major ethnic groups: the 2 million strong Ovimbundu in the central highlands; the 1.3 million Mbundu in the north-central region; and the 400,000 Bakongo in the northwest. Angola’s ethnic and racial composition helps explain the divisions among its rebel movements—each was based on one of the three major ethnic groups: Agostinho Neto’s MPLA on the Mbundu; Holden Roberto’s National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) on the Bakongo; and Jonas Savimbi’s National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) on the Ovimbundu.

Each of the three movements was led by an authoritarian leader. All three leaders were black. However, unlike their rivals, the leaders of the MPLA, some of whom were mulattoes, thought in terms of class rather than race. Neto’s top military aide, Iko Carreira, was a light-skinned mulatto, as was his closest aide, Lúcio Lara. The MPLA’s largely Mulatto character helps it to transcend tribal divisions and to render its appeal multiracial, the British consul in Luanda remarked in 1965.³² The movement also included whites. Both Neto and Lara were married to white women. Let’s not reject people who can help us just because they’re white, Neto urged. All that matters is that they’re progressive and honest.³³ This attitude caused the rank and file to grumble, and it deepened the rift between the MPLA and its rivals. The leaders of both the FNLA and UNITA were suspicious of mulattoes and hostile to whites, and they accused the MPLA of selling out to the exploiters of Angola’s black population.

Whereas the top echelons of the FNLA had no more than a secondary education, many UNITA leaders had university degrees. None, however, had attained the intellectual prominence of the MPLA leadership. President Neto and several of his colleagues were, the CIA noted, distinguished intellectuals who have studied in Europe. Neto was a well-known doctor and poet. . . . Brilliant student; led his class at the University of Lisbon, INR director Hughes wrote. As a distinguished intellectual, Hughes’s predecessor stated, Neto commands widespread admiration from politically aware Africans and mulattoes in Angola.³⁴ He was an honest man who asked little for himself in the way of material comforts. After his visit to East Berlin in May 1963, East German officials remarked that Dr. Neto was modest and unassuming. He asked for no special treatment of any kind. A journalist wrote that he was a strong character, built stronger by adversity, little given to words, often finding words a waste of time (even when they might not have been) . . . a poet and a scholar who had made himself into a revolutionary. Uninspiring as a public speaker . . . though witty and persuasive in private talk, a man whose mildness of manner concealed a tough, unyielding stubbornness, Neto combined an unbending devotion to his cause with a corresponding moral power.³⁵ This omits the fact that Neto was an authoritarian leader, acting at times, as one of his circle wrote, without even informing his closest aides.³⁶

Neto, Lara, and several other MPLA leaders espoused an eclectic interpretation of Marxism-Leninism that was, a Yugoslav official noted, adapted to the specific conditions and needs of Angola.³⁷ A few intellectuals, none in a senior position, supported orthodox socialism oriented toward the Soviet Union. Most military commanders had no ideological compass, beyond a vague belief that independence should be followed by deep changes in Angolan society. However murky the MPLA’s ideological commitment may have been, it set it apart: the leaders of the FNLA and UNITA espoused no political doctrine. Jonas Savimbi, who led UNITA with an iron hand, was a warlord whose consuming passion was absolute power and who was ready to inflict any sacrifice on his countrymen to attain that goal. The FNLA, the U.S. consul general in Luanda observed, was totally corrupt. The CIA station chief in Luanda agreed: This organization, he wrote, was led by corrupt, unprincipled men who represented the very worst of radical black African nationalism.³⁸

None of the three rebel movements developed an effective fighting force. The MPLA almost succeeded, in the vast, thinly populated areas of eastern