Visions of Freedom

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

Piero Gleijeses

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781469628325, 9781469609683
• eBook ISBN: 9781469609690
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

During the final fifteen years of the Cold War, southern Africa underwent a period of upheaval, with dramatic twists and turns in relations between the superpowers. Americans, Cubans, Soviets, and Africans fought over the future of Angola, where tens of thousands of Cuban soldiers were stationed, and over the decolonization of Namibia, Africa’s last colony. Beyond lay the great prize: South Africa. Piero Gleijeses uses archival sources, particularly from the United States, South Africa, and the closed Cuban archives, to provide an unprecedented international history of this important theater of the late Cold War.
These sources all point to one conclusion: by humiliating the United States and defying the Soviet Union, Fidel Castro changed the course of history in southern Africa. It was Cuba’s victory in Angola in 1988 that forced Pretoria to set Namibia free and helped break the back of apartheid South Africa. In the words of Nelson Mandela, the Cubans “destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor . . . [and] inspired the fighting masses of South Africa.”

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 earth”¹¹ 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 monum...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Visions of Freedom
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Maps and Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Prologue
• Chapter 1 The Cuban Drumbeat
• Chapter 2 Neto, Castro, and Carter
• Chapter 3 The Cubans in Angola
• Chapter 4 Strained Relations
• Chapter 5 The Fronts Harden
• Chapter 6 Carter and Southern Africa
• Chapter 7 Enter Reagan
• Chapter 8 The Wonders of Linkage
• Chapter 9 Angolan Travails
• Chapter 10 The Failure of Lusaka
• Chapter 11 The United States, South Africa, and Savimbi
• Chapter 12 The View from Cuba, 1984–1986
• Chapter 13 Havana and Moscow
• Chapter 14 Negotiations in the Offing?
• Chapter 15 Cuito Cuanavale
• Chapter 16 Maniobra XXXI Aniversario
• Chapter 17 Chester Crocker Meets Jorge Risquet
• Chapter 18 The Negotiations
• Chapter 19 The New York Agreements
• Chapter 20 Visions of Freedom
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series