Short description
This title is a compelling and dramatic account of Cuban policy in Africa and of its escalating clash with US policy and later its direct military clashes with the South African defence force in Angola.
Long description
This title is an account of Cuban policy in Africa and of its escalating clash with US policy and later its direct military clashes with the South African defence force in Angola. It is the other side of a conflict that South Africans have not been told about until now. The author's narrative gallops from Cuba's first hesitant steps in rendering assistance to Algerian rebels fighting France in 1961, to the war in the Congo (later Zaire and now the democratic republic of Congo) in 1964 - 65, when 100 Cubans led by Che Guevara, acting in support of the Simba rebels, were confronted by white mercenaries from South Africa, Rhodesia, Britain and elsewhere - supported and controlled by America's Central Intelligence Agency. The author writes about the dramatic despatch to Angola of Cuban troops to aid the communist-inclined rebel MPLA movement in 1975. And how, being the rainy season, their destruction of the rapid and victorious advance of the seemingly unstoppable Battle Group Zulu of South Africa's SADF. The blocking of Battle Group Zulu from reaching Luanda led to political decisions by the US secretary of state, Hendry Kissinger, to call off the CIA's IAFEATURE operations in support of UNITA and the FNLA and to South African prime minister John Vorster withdrawing all South African forces from Angola. This left the MPLA and its Cuban and other communist allies in control. This was undoubtedly the most significant domino that would soon lead to the fall of white Rhodesia and ultimately to the handover of Namibia to SWAPO and finally to black rule in the Republic South Africa. The author's analysis is clear, rigorous and balanced; the archival research supporting it is unprecedented.