Cuba and The End To Apartheid in South Africa

In the late 1960’s and early 70’s the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa was at a turning point. Decades of peaceful demonstration had resulted in increased political repression and violence from the state of South Africa, culminating in a tragic massacre in the South African township of Sharpeville, where around 70 protestors were killed when police opened fire on the crowd. The resistance movement against apartheid was forced to change its tactics to adopt armed struggle. To do this resistance parties needed to reach out to supportive nations for supplies and training, but with the United States and most western countries either explicitly supporting Pretoria and the apartheid regime or financially benefitting from African colonization, the South African rebels instead turned to support from socialist nations. One nation in particular, Cuba, was different from other Anti-Apartheid Movements. Instead of civil society activism or boycott, divestment, and sanctions, Cuba stood as a state in direct opposition to racial and economic injustice in South Africa, risking 350,000 troops to halt South Africa’s advance on Angola. As Thenjiwe Mtintso, South Africa’s ambassador to Cuba, put it: “No country has given as much to the world as Cuba. No country has received so little materially from the world as Cuba.” (Saney 91)

The central aim of this article is to examine how the Cuban revolution led to a foreign policy that allowed for genuine intervention into international politics towards liberation of oppressed groups while refraining from the historical trend of northern nations in colonization. The Cuban aid to the South African apartheid struggle, both in on the ground training in the Congo and Angola, and the defense of Angola from 1975–1991 were major factors in the end of apartheid in South Africa. These topics require engaging with the questions: What role did Cuito Cuanavale play in the dissolution of South African apartheid? Why would Cuba send 350,000 troops to Angola? How do these actions represent the internationalist ideology of the Marxist-Leninist Cuban government?

Beginning of Socialist International Solidarity in Africa

In July 1960, a delegation of South African Communists with the South African Communist Party (SACP) traveled to Moscow. SACP chairman Yusuf Dadoo would spend the next year traveling around Moscow, and Beijing lobbying party leaders to send financial aid to resistance movements in hopes that an end to colonization in Africa would be a precursor to the collapse of the capitalist system worldwide. The Soviet Union and China agree to send $30,000 before the end of 1960. (Ellis 6)

The Soviet Union was already supplying aid to the recently decolonized Democratic Republic of the Congo in the Marxist-Leninist tradition of internationalism. However the Soviet Union’s “internationalism” in the Eastern Bloc would amount to little more than a variety of the colonization and imperialism that capitalist countries were spreading worldwide. This kind of imperialist internationalism as part of Stalin’s “Socialism in One Country” would only isolate the USSR and estrange resistance movements against capitalism. (Woods) It wasn’t until the Cuban Revolution of 1959, after Stalin’s death, that the Soviet Union began engaging with other socialist nations with supplies and diplomatic ties.

Cuba’s support for black South Africans in apartheid is not surprising as a nation who’s own revolution was based on a non-racial ethos in defiance of an extreme inequality of prosperity and resources of a blooming tourism economy from rich white families from the States that only benefitted light skinned Cubans in the urban center of Havana. The SACP was particularly inspired by the Cuban revolution, as Stephen Ellis writes in his essay The Genesis fo the ANC’s Armed Struggle in South Africa 1948–1981: “SACP leaders were inspired in particular by the recent Cuban revolution, which came about after a small body of guerrillas had been able to set up bases in the countryside from which it raised the population in support.”

In Cuba, Fidel Castro immediately began looking to ‘export’ his revolution to other nations in Africa. Castro remembers in his memoirs: “In 1961 — not quite two years after the triumph of the [Cuban] Revolution, when the people of Algeria were still fighting for their independence — a Cuban ship took weapons to the Algerian patriots. And on its return to Cuba, it brought back about 100 children who had been orphaned and wounded in the war” (Ankomah) Cuba also began sharing the benefits of its new social policies on education and healthcare almost immediately, sending medical care to the more than 15,000 children who were radiation victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine. (Saney 87) Quickly after its revolution Cuba began to challenge the world’s political and economic order that had made exploitation of the South commonplace and instead envisioned a new foreign policy that would focus on a South-South support and exchange.

Cuba began working with rebels who had left South Africa during the early 60’s to seek military training in Angola. There, Cuba and the Soviet Union supported a Marxist independence group called the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), which was facilitating arms exchanges and training for South African rebels along with Che Guevara and African independence militants in the Congo. (Cuba and the Struggle for Democracy in South Africa)

Cuba was also advocating for the dissolution of South African Apartheid in multinational congresses and summits, using its political power backed by the Soviet Union to generate support for the end to apartheid worldwide. At the first Summit of Heads of State and Government of the non-Aligned Summit in Blegrade, Cuban President Osvaldo Dorticos denounced apartheid, and in 1961 Che Guevara spoke at a United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in Geneva, calling for the expulsion of South Africa from the UN, stating that South Africa “violates the Charter of the United Nations by the inhuman and fascist policy of apartheid.” (ibid)

Cuba’s Role In Angola

Angola in many ways functioned as the political bulls eye for southern Africa. Angola’s strategic and economic importance to the region can not be understated. Angola’s border to the South African ‘mandate’ territory Namibia along with over 1,000 miles of coastline as a source of extensive access to support from the West made the MPLA’s pursuit of power very important to Pretoria. If a genuine liberation movement working with the ANC were to seize power it could provide South African rebels with a close neighbor to receive arms, training and refuge. This political aspect was of grave concern to a South African regime that was beginning to lose battles of armed struggle around its nation. If the MPLA were to win power, the South African government believed it would be susceptible to invasion from Cuba and the MPLA’s forces through Namibia in an attempt to liberate the country. (Falk 1080)

The United States’ interest in Angola is less geopolitical, although the Cuban influence in such an important African nation did make this a spot for Cold War puppet conflict. Angola’s land is rich with petroleum, diamonds and coffee. Major railroad connections run east to the Angolan coastline, making its access to trans-Atlantic trade routes prime for exporting the extracted materials beneath it’s crust. (ibid)

By 1975 the MPLA under leadership of José Eduardo dos Santos seized power in Angola, overthrowing a Portuguese colonizing Estado Novo regime. Many global powers, including South Africa and the United States, were extremely opposed to the MPLA taking power and began funding opposition groups like the anti-communist Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) immediately upon the MPLA’s control. UNITA and the Portuguese, Zaire and South African supported National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA) maintained a persistent counterrevolutionary movement attacking MPLA bases throughout Angola.

Cuba’s support for the MPLA in Angola against US and South African aggressions began in 1975. In response to a direct request for military intervention by Augustinho Neto, the president of Angola, Cuba began Operation Carlota, deploying 250 Cuban military advisors along with 1,000 Cuban soldiers and a major increase in Soviet arms from Cuba. Between January and April 1978, Cuban troops arrived at a rate of 6,000 per month. By the end of the struggle in Angola, Cuba had sent over 350,000 soldiers. (Falk 1082)

The struggle to stabilize Angola would be fought in years of small battles as Cuban/Angolan forces attempt to establish strongholds further south. On January 8, 1976, Huamno was won by the MPLA, followed by Lobito, Benguela, Sa de Bandeira, and Mozamedes in the days after. South African forces were on the retreat, and in February 4th South Africa removed 5,000 SADF troops from Angola. (Cuba and the Struggle for Democracy in South Africa)

A critical attack that convinced the Cubans that they had to remain in Angola occurred on May 4, 1978 when the South African Defense Force (SADF) attacked a refugee camp in Cassinga holding more than 3,000 Namibian refugees. Over 300 children were killed in this attack, along with elderly and women. Cuban troops based south of the town advanced north to stop the attack, but were met with land mines and attacks from South Africa’s Air Force. Despite heavy casualties, Cuban forces pushed through and were able to save many refugees from slaughter at the hands of the SADF. (Campbell)

By October of 1987, The MPLA’s forces took heavy casualties when they were met by the SADF in an attempting to advance at the Lomba River. The few remaining MPLA forces retreated to a minor town named Cuito Cuanavale. The SADF could have easily advanced towards Cuito Cuanavale, dealing a final blow to the MPLA’s military forces in the area and opening Angola to SADF invasion at a critical strategic point, but instead the SADF hesitated, allowing Cuban and MPLA forces to reinforce Cuito Cuanavale, establishing a defensive line and keeping the SADF out of northern Angola. As more and more South African soldiers began coming home from the long conflict in Angola in body bags, and no real advances being made past Cuito Cuanavale popularity for the war began to plummet. As former soldier, Mark Patrick stated, “One of the things that was starting to happen was that white people were starting to die up there and with that there became a lot of pressure for South African troops to withdraw.” (Saney 103) This, along with heavy sanctions and continued defeat made it impossible for South Africa to stay involved in the Angolan nation. Pretoria resigned to the negotiating table with the MPLA with only two real options: negotiate a capitulation or surrender. By 1989 the SADF withdrew from Namibia leading the way true Angolan independence and the genuine decolonization of Namibia (Campbell)

The defeat of the SADF in Angola was a turning point for the nation in more than just military might in southern Africa. A white army that was racist in its military tactics (often putting black soldiers in front of white soldiers to block enemy fire) had been decidedly defeated by a non-white army at a time when the pressure for the end to apartheid was blistering. According to Isaac Saney in his essay African Stalingrad: The Cuban Revolution, Internationalism, and the End of Apartheid, “the victory at Cuito Cuanavale became ‘a symbol across the continent that apartheid and its army were no longer invincible’ and was ‘regarded by many diplomats as a turning point’” (104) A South African military analyst at the time wrote: “The reality is that they have won, are winning, and are not White; and that psychological edge, that advantage the White man has enjoyed and exploited over 300 years of colonialism and empire, is slipping away. White elitism has suffered an irreversible blow in Angola, and Whites who have been there know it.” (Pepe)

Ideological Basis of Cuban Aid

On October 8th, 1975, Cuba’s ambassador to the UN Ricardo Alarcón, spoke of the philosophical and political influences in Cuba’s assistance to Angola:

Cuba renews the expression of its full solidarity with the people’s liberation movement in Angola-yesterday heroic in struggle against the European colonizer; today firm in its defense of true independence. In the face of scandalous interference of imperialists, colonists and racist it is the elementary duty [of Cuba] to offer its [the Angolan] people the effective assistance that may be required for that country to ensure its true independence and full sovereignty. (Saney 94)

In 2001 Castro reflected on the decision to support the MPLA, saying “It was our elementary duty, our revolutionary duty, our internationalist duty to give assistance ot MPLA regardless of the price.” (ibid) This ideological framework for internationalist proletarian revolution is key to understanding Cuba’s role in the struggle.

Cuba used extreme political and military strength during a time when they were experiencing crippling sanctions from the United States in order to liberate an oppressed subcontinent almost entirely out of an ideological call to international solidarity. This kind of international solidarity towards liberation struggles is nearly unprecedented in history, especially at a time when major global powers were fighting to hold on to colonial power in the south. In 1975 Fidel Castro outlined Cuba’s internationalist policy:

Some imperialists ask why we are helping the Angolans, what interests we have there. They are used to thinking that when a country is doing something it is because it is seeking oil or copper or diamonds or some other natural resource. No! We are not pursuing any material interest, and it is logical that the imperialists do not understand it, because they are exclusively guided by chauvinistic, nationalistic and egotistical criteria. We are carrying out an elementary internationalist dury when we help the Angolan people. We are not seeking oil, copper, or iron: we seek absolutely nothing. We are simply applying our political principles. (Saney 91)

In fact, Cuban sentiment felt a great deal of debt towards the African peoples. The government saw the consistent military assistance in Angola as not only assisting a Marxist revolutionary party defending its power against foreign invasion, but as a “repayment of a historical debt owed to Africa as a result of slavery and the slave trade” (Saney 95) In this way, Cuba can be seen at the first Western nation that benefitted from the slave trade providing reparations to the nations whose peoples were stolen as a source of slave labor. Saney recounts Castro’s remarks on the reparational aspect of their involvement in Angola:

‘For the first time in history, one of the peoples of our hemisphere, descendants of slaves who were cruelly uprooted from Africa by the voracity of the colonialist rule, sent thousands of its best sons to help peoples that were fighting for liberty and dignity in Africa.’ On another occastion he added, ‘Those who once enslaved man and sent him to America perhaps never imagined that one of those peoples who received slaves would one day send their fighters to struggle for freedom in Africa.’ (95)

Cuba’s extended unconditional support for the nation of Angola in their struggle against imperialist aggressors is an unparalleled example of genuine internationalist solidarity. Cuba was called on by a liberation army to assist a struggle towards people’s liberation and answered not with self-interested demands or malicious aims to take advantage of the MPLA’s fragile state or the country’s extremely fruitful national resources, but with a military intervention that sought to establish a sovereign nation that could decide how to seek prosperity for themselves once secured. This kind of foreign aid can be credited entirely to a socialist ideology and a political leadership that stands for its principles above all else. Cuba’s aid to Angola and around the world is a promising example of a future where national foreign policy is decided not out of realpolitik national self-interests or the establishment of trade routes that exploit undeveloped nations, but from an ideological principled standpoint of a working class revolution that leads to a global post-capitalist world.

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