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Havana's Policy in Africa, 1959-76: New Evidence from Cuban Archives

by Piero Gleijeses1

The dearth of documents and historical context has hampered rigorous analysis of Cuba's intervention in Angola in 1975. Despite the interest scholars have shown in the episode, the lack of Cuban documents and the closed nature of Cuban society have prevented them from being able to accurately describe Cuba's actions. I have gone to Havana six times, for a total of six months, since 1993 to research Cuban policy toward Africa, and I have gained access to the archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba (CC CPC), the Instituto de Historia de Cuba, the Centro de Información de la Defensa de las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias, and the Ministerio para la Inversión Extranjera y la Colaboración Económica. Armed with documents from these closed and never before used archives, supplemented with interviews, a close reading of the press, and U.S. documents, I can shed new light on the Angola affair.

The new documents clarify the evolution of Cuba's involvement in Angola and answer the critical question of whether the Cubans sent troops before or after the South African intervention. They also address the vexing question of Havana's motivation, particularly whether or not it was acting as a Soviet proxy. They document Cuba's longstanding relationship with the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), and they place the Angolan crisis in the broad context of Cuban policy toward Africa. From 1959 to 1974 the Cubans intervened in Algeria, Congo Leopoldville, Congo Brazzaville and Guinea-Bissau. More Cubans fought in Africa during these years than in Latin America, and Cuban policy was far more successful in the former than in the latter. The story of these fifteen years challenges the image of Cuban foreign policy—cyni

cal ploys of a client state—that prevails in the United States. Yet it has attracted virtually no attention. It is a significant lacuna. As a Cuban official told me, "Cuba's intervention in Angola cannot be understood without looking at our past."2

Whereas those who publish in the Bulletin generally use archives that have been opened, the Cuban archives I have used are still closed. This requires, then, an explanation of my modus operandi.

There was no established declassification process in Cuba when I began my research. Mindful of the fact that the documents I cited would not be readily accessible to my readers, I decided that I would never use a document unless I was given a photocopy of the original. I badgered Cuban officials relentlessly, arguing that in the United States their word has no credibility, that their testimonies are only valid if supported by documents, and that while one document would suffice to criticize Cuba, five would be necessary to say anything positive. Jorge Risquet, a member of the Central Committee, understood. I owe a great debt to his intelligence and sensitivity. We have come a long way since the day in 1994 when I asked him for all the reports written by the Chief of the Cuban Military Mission in Angola between August and October 1975 only to be told, "You aren't writing his biography. One will be enough." Two years later, I received all the others. The Cubans established a procedure of which I could only approve: any document they expected to be declassified they allowed me to read in its entirety, whether in Risquet's office or in the archives themselves. Then the waiting would begin. It could take less than a hour or more than a year. As I write, there are several hundred pages of documents that I have been allowed to read but have not yet been given.

About 80 of the more than 3,000 pages of documents that I have received were sanitized after I had read them.

Frequently the edited lines contained the remarks of a foreign leader criticizing his own political allies; thus, to explain why half a page had been sanitized [Doc. 5], Risquet wrote, "the conversation that followed was about internal MPLA matters that [Angolan President Agostinho] Neto discussed with [Cuban official Díaz] Argüelles. It would be unethical to make them public."3 In the case of three intelligence documents, the sanitized paragraphs would have revealed sources. In other cases the lines (or words) sanitized included comments about African or Asian countries that, the censors believed, would unnecessarily complicate Cuba's foreign relations.

I have also interviewed 63 Cuban

protagonists, many of them repeatedly and in relaxed settings. While interviews without documents would be of little use, interviews with documents can be extremely helpful. Furthermore, many of the interviewees gave me letters and journals from their own personal collections, and they alerted me to documents in the government archives, which made it possible to be very specific in my requests to Risquet. The Cuban authorities were well aware of my freewheeling interviews and to the best of my knowledge they did nothing to hinder me. Currently I am complementing my research in Cuba with research in the United States, Europe (particularly Moscow, Berlin, and Lisbon), and, of course, Africa.

Cuba's pre-1975 Africa policy can be divided into three major phases: pre1964, when the focus was Algeria; 1964-66, when Cuba's attention was suddenly riveted by sub-Saharan Africa a heady time characterized by Che Guevara's three-month trip through the continent and the dispatch of Cuban columns to Zaire and Congo Brazzaville; and post-1966, a period of growing maturity, highlighted by the long and successful Cuban involvement in Guinea-Bissau (1966-74). Before

discussing Cuba's role in Angola in 1975-76, I will briefly touch on each of these phases.

Cuban leaders saw similarities between the Algerian revolution against French rule and their own struggle against both Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista and the United States. In December 1961, a Cuban ship unloaded a cargo of weapons at Casablanca for the Algerian rebels. It returned to Havana with 76 wounded Algerian fighters and 20 children from refugee camps." 4

request of that country's government, which lived “in fear" of an attack by the Congo's mercenaries; the column could also, perhaps, assist Che in the Congo. "It constituted . . . a reserve force for Che's column, which it would

Overall, 400 Cuban volunteers were in Central Africa in the summer of 1965.

Guinea as well, but what matters is that a powerful guerrilla movement has taken hold in the Congo."6 (To avoid confusion, Congo Leopoldville will be referred to in this essay as the Congo, and its neighbor as Congo Brazzaville.) To save the Congolese regime, the join if necessary, at the right time.”12 Johnson Administration raised an army of more than 1,000 white mercenaries in a major covert operation that was obvious to all but the U.S. press and provoked a wave of revulsion even among African leaders friendly to the United States. The Cubans saw the conflict as more than an African problem: “Our view was that the situation in the Congo was a problem that concerned all mankind," Che Guevara wrote. 8

The aid continued after Algeria gained its independence. In May 1963, a 55-person Cuban medical mission arrived in Algeria. And, as would be the case for all the missions that followed (until 1978), the aid was free. “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," said the then-Minister of Public Health, José Ramón Machado Ventura.5 And in October 1963, when Algeria was threatened by Morocco, the Cubans rushed a special force of 686 men with heavy weapons to the Algerians' aid, even though Morocco had just signed a contract to buy one million tons of Cuban sugar for $184 million, a considerable amount of hard currency at a time when the United States was trying Gaston Soumialot. 10 to cripple Cuba's economy.

Cuba'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; armed struggle was accelerating in Portuguese Guinea and beginning in Mozambique. In Congo Brazzaville, a new government was loudly proclaiming its revolutionary sympathies. And, above all, there was Congo Leopoldville (later called Zaire), where armed revolt had been spreading with stunning speed since the spring of 1964, threatening the survival of the corrupt pro-American regime that Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy had laboriously put in place. "The struggle has just begun, these are its first flames," wrote the Cuban weekly Verde Olivo. “It will, no doubt, be a long struggle, in Angola and Portuguese

In December 1964, Guevara went to Africa on a three-month trip that signalled Cuba's growing interest in the region. In February 1965 he was in Dares-Salaam, Tanzania, which was then, as the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency pointed out, "a haven for exiles from the rest of Africa... plotting the overthrow of African governments, both black and white." After a general meeting with the liberation movements [see Doc. 2], Che met separately with each, and three times with the Congolese rebel leaders Laurent Kabila and

"[Kabila] impressed me," wrote Che. "I offered him, on behalf of our government, about thirty instructors and all the weapons we could spare, and he accepted with delight; he urged us to hurry, as did Soumialot, in the course of another conversation. Soumialot also asked that the instructors be black."

Cuba had "offered aid on condition that Tanzania approve," Guevara explained. "It did, so we went ahead. The aid was given unconditionally and with no time limit." Che left Dar-es-Salaam with "the joy of having found people ready to fight to the finish. Our next task was to select a group of black Cubans-all volunteers—and send them to help in the struggle in the Congo." 11

In April 1965, a Cuban column of some 120 men under Guevara began entering eastern Congo through Tanzania. A few weeks later a second Cuban column under Jorge Risquet arrived in neighboring Congo Brazzaville at the

But Central Africa was not ready for revolution. By the time the Cubans arrived in the Congo, the rebels' strength had been broken. The story of Che's column is not one of great battles, but of 120 people thrust into an impossible situation, in a totally alien world, who retained their humanity until the end. Their experience is recorded in several documents: the manuscript that Che wrote in the Cuban embassy in Dares-Salaam (and which, he said, would not be published "for a long time"13); the journal of his right-hand-man, Víctor Dreke; and the diaries of several of his men. Guevara could only preside over the agony of the rebellion until the rebels' collapse left him no choice but to withdraw in November 1965.

In Congo Brazzaville, meanwhile, Risquet's column saved the host government from a military coup in June 1966 through bluster and diplomacy, without having to shed blood.14 Then it withdrew, against the wishes of their hosts. Risquet understood, and made Havana understand, that there was no revolution in Congo Brazzaville. "He was able to get us out at the right moment," observes his second-in-com

mand. "He was flexible."15 Although the Cubans withdrew in 1967, they left "something useful in their wake": 16 the doctors attached to the column conducted the first vaccination campaign 17 in the country against polio, and 254 young Congolese had gone to Cuba to study, all expenses paid. 18

The late 1960s were a period of deepening maturity in Cuba's relationship with Africa. No longer deluded that revolution was around the corner, the Cubans were learning about subSaharan Africa. In those years—indeed, through 1974-the main focus of Havana's attention in Africa was Guinea-Bissau, where the rebels of the Partido Africano da Independência da

Guiné e Cabo Verde (PAIGC) were fighting for independence from Portugal. The PAIGC was "the most effective of the liberation organizations in the Portuguese African territories," U.S. 19 reports stressed time and again. At the PAIGC's request, Cuban military instructors arrived in Guinea-Bissau in 1966, and they remained there through the end of the war in 1974. This was the longest Cuban intervention in Africa before the dispatch of troops to Angola in 1975. It was also the most successful. In the words of GuineaBissau's first president,

we were able to fight and triumph because other countries and people helped us... with weapons, with medicine, with 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 together with that of the best children of our country.

This great people, this heroic people, we all know that it is the heroic people of Cuba; the Cuba of Fidel Castro; the Cuba of the Sierra Maestra, the Cuba of Moncada... Cuba sent its best children here so that they could help us in the technical aspects of our war, so that they could help us to wage this great struggle ... against Portuguese colonialism.20

Some 40-50 Cubans fought in Guinea-Bissau each year from 1966 until independence in 1974. They helped in military planning and they were in charge of the artillery. Their contribution was, as President Nino, who had been the senior military commander of the PAIGC, said, “of the utmost importance."21

Just as the only foreigners who fought with the PAIGC in GuineaBissau were Cubans, so too the only foreign doctors were Cubans (with one brief exception), and there were no native doctors until 1968. From 1966 to 1974 there were, on average, seven Cuban doctors in Guinea Bissau. "They really performed a miracle," observes Francisca Pereira, a senior PAIGC official. "I am eternally grateful to them: not only did they save lives, but they also put their own lives at risk. They were truly selfless."22

The men who went to Algeria,

Zaire, Congo Brazzaville, and GuineaBissau were volunteers. They were captivated by the mystique of guerrilla war. "We dreamt of revolution," one muses. "We wanted to be part of it, to feel that we were fighting for it. We were young, and the children of a revolution." Fighting abroad, they would defend the revolution at home. "In all those years we believed that at any moment they [the United States] were going to strike us; and for us it was better to wage the war abroad than in our own country.”"23

The volunteers received no public praise in Cuba. They left "knowing that their story would remain a secret."24 They won neither medals nor material rewards. Once back they could not boast about their deeds, because they were bound to secrecy.

This secrecy notwithstanding, through all these years U.S. officials knew that Cubans were in Africa-in Algeria, then in Zaire, in Congo Brazzaville, and finally in GuineaBissau. And yet they paid little attention to it. As Robinson McIlvaine, the U.S. ambassador in Conakry, Guinea, from October 1966 through August 1969, remarked, "The State Department was not particularly concerned with the Cuban presence. It was not a big worry for us." This complacency, which contrasts starkly with Washington's reaction to even the rumor of Cuban combatants in Latin America, is explained by the fact that U.S. officials were confident that a handful of Cubans could not be effective in distant, alien African countries. In discussing Communist subversion in Africa, the CIA barely 25 mentioned Cuba.4

This helps explain why the United States was stunned by the Cuban intervention in Angola in 1975. “In the 1960s there was no sense of a Cuban danger in Africa; their intervention in Angola was a real surprise," observes former State Department official Paul O'Neil.

During my tenure as Director of Southern Africa Office [of the State Department from July 1973 to June 1975] we were aware that there was some Soviet/ East European support for the MPLA, but I don't recall any discussion of a Cuban role before I left. Aside from the Soviet Union, we would discuss the pos

sible role of East Germany. I don't recall any concern about a Cuban role. Before I left, when people in the Africa Bureau [of the State Department] talked of the Soviet bloc role in Angola, they thought of the Soviets, the East Germans, not of Cuba. I don't recall that we knew of Cuba's ties with the MPLA, but even if we knew it didn't worry us." 26

These ties had begun in 1965, when Che Guevara had met Agostinho Neto, Lucio Lara, and other MPLA leaders in Brazzaville in a "historical encounter,"

as Raúl Castro called it.27 “We spoke, we discussed," related Lara. "We wanted only one thing from the Cubans: instructors. The war was becoming difficult and we were inexperienced ... Guevara promised that he would speak with his Party and his government so that they would send us instructors."28

Risquet's column trained MPLA guerrillas in Congo Brazzaville in 196667 and several of its members joined the IMPLA in the Angolan enclave of Cabinda as advisers, instructors, and combatants.29 There were moments of frustration for the instructors who had learned their trade in the exacting school of Fidel Castro's Rebel Army and who found themselves in a completely alien culture with a very different concept of discipline, and there were also warm moments of humanity in that inhospitable forest. "I looked at them all," wrote the Cuban Rafael Moracén after delivering a particularly severe scolding in which he had given vent to all his frustrations, “and I was moved, I felt love for them.... They had such dignity that I felt it was worth dying with them if I had to." "30 Bonds were forged that would never be forgotten, and which explain why, ten years later, in late 1975, Moracén pestered Raúl Castro to be allowed to return to Angola. "I am an Angolan," he pleaded.31

In 1966, the MPLA withdrew its forces from Cabinda and opened a new front in eastern Angola along the Zambian border. This meant that there was no reason for the Cubans to remain in the Congo, and they were unable to send instructors to eastern Angola, as the MPLA requested, because of Zambian opposition. Over the next few years, until the end of 1974, relations between

2

CONTINUED FROM FRONT COVER

In this issue, the Bulletin presents evidence from communist world archives

pp.) and a major conference organized by
CWIHP and hosted by Hong Kong Univer-
sity in January 1996;

* More Russian Evidence on the Cu

Russian, East German, Cuban-on many of ban Missile Crisis, providing another se

the same issues that so bedeviled U.S.-So-
viet relations in the 1970s: Angola, the Horn
of Africa, Afghanistan, Cuba, et al.

In large measure, the evidence presented
here stems from the labors of the "Carter-

lection of declassified documents from the
Russian Foreign Ministry archives and other
materials to supplement those printed in Bul-
letin 5 (Spring 1995);

* New Evidence on Soviet Decision

Brezhnev Project”: a multi-year, multi-ar Making on the 1956 Polish and Hungar

ian Crises, featuring an authoritive transla-
tion and annotation of the so-called “Malin

chival, international academic effort to ex-
plore the causes, consequences, and lega-
cies of the collapse of superpower detente Notes" of key Kremlin meetings during the
in the 1970s. The project was spearheaded crises, along with an introductory essay, by
by Drs. James G. Blight and janet Lang of Mark Kramer of Harvard University—a re-
the Thomas J. Watson Institute for Interna-markable window into how the Soviet lead-
tional Studies at Brown University (orga- ership responded to a challenge to the com-
munist empire that in many ways foreshad-
owed the terminal crisis of 1989; and finally

nizer of similar conferences on the Cuban
Missile Crisis), with the active participation
of an informal consortium of scholarly part-
ners, including the National Security
Archive, a non-governmental research in-
stitute and declassified documents reposi-
tory located at George Washington Univer-
sity; CWIHP; the Norwegian Nobel Insti-
tute; the Institute for Universal History, the
Foreign Ministry archives, and the Center
for the Storage of Contemporary Documen-
tation in Moscow. (A report on some of the
Project's early findings, on U.S.-Soviet re-
lations at the outset of the Carter Adminis-
tration, appeared in CWIHP Bulletin 5
(Spring 1995), 140-154.)

Many of the documents in this Bulletin
were obtained and translated by the Carter-
Brezhnev Project in preparation for a series
of conferences on the breakdown in U.S.-
Soviet relations in the late 1970s, held in
Georgia in May 1994 (on the SALT II pro-
cess), in Ft. Lauderdale in March 1995 (on
superpower rivalry in the Third World), and
in Lysebu, Norway in September 1995 (on
the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan);
other translations, as well as accompanying
articles and commentaries, were solicited by
the Bulletin. (All documents obtained by
the Carter-Brezhnev Project are available for
research at the National Security Archive.)

Readers interested in these topics will
also wish to obtain the first book to emerge
from the Carter-Brezhnev Project: Odd Arne
Westad, ed., The Fall of Detente: Soviet-

American Relations in the Carter Years (see
box), which contains interpretive essays by
noted scholars as well as recently declassi-
fied U.S. and East-bloc materials; other vol-
umes are planned.

This Bulletin double issue also contains
several other major chunks of important new
evidence from communist archives:

* More New Evidence on the Cold War in Asia, following up on the previous Bulletin (no. 6-7, Winter 1995/1996, 294

* Research Reports on Soviet Nuclear
History: documents on the origins of the
USSR's atomic project and on Nikita
Khrushchev's 1960 troop cut.

This Bulletin marks my final issue as
Editor and as Director of the Cold War In-
ternational History Project; beginning in
January 1997 I took up a position as Assis-
tant Professor of Diplomatic History and In-
ternational Affairs at George Washington
University. I am pleased to report that the
Project is passing into able, enthusiastic,
more linguistically-gifted, and perhaps more
organized hands: David Wolff, formerly of
Princeton University, the author of a major
forthcoming study of Northeast Asian his-
tory, and fluent in Russian, Chinese, Japa-
nese, German, and French, becomes
CWIHP's new Director; and Christian F.
Ostermann, research fellow at the National
Security Archive, a frequent contributor to
the Bulletin of reports on new evidence from
the East German archives, and the author of
a forthcoming study on relations between
the German Democratic Republic and the
United States, becomes Associate Director.
I am also glad to say that I plan to remain
closely associated with CWIHP, collaborat-
ing with my successors on transitional ac-
tivities, contributing to future endeavors,
editing CWIHP's Book Series, and perhaps
even finding time after five years of admin-
istration to do more of my own research and
writing on Cold War history. So this is not
good-bye.

Nevertheless, I would like to express my
gratitude to CWIHP's creators, supporters,
friends, and collaborators for the chance to
participate in the thrilling experience of
peering behind (and trying to rip down en-
tirely) the curtain of the last half-century of
world history, and to work with an extraor-

dinary group of people from around the world. Even more than the historical information it has gathered and disseminated, CWIHP's greatest achievement, I think, has been the creation of an international community of Cold War scholars, especially those who, on a daily and sometimes hourly basis, 24/7, constitute the CWIHP "network": Tom Blanton, Malcolm Byrne, Vlad Zubok, Mark Kramer, Jim Blight/janet

Lang, Odd Arne Westad, Chen Jian, David Wolff, Christian Ostermann, Kathryn Weathersby, Hope Harrison, John Gaddis. Bill Taubman, Warren Cohen, Aleksandr Chubarian, Mikhail Narinsky, and the "group" in Moscow, Bill Burr, Ilya Gaiduk, Leo Gluchowski, Csaba Bekes, Norman Naimark, Priscilla Roberts, Sven Holtsmark, Bob Brigham, Ray Garthoff, Vojtech Mastny, Kostia Pleshakov, Allen Greb, Maxim Korobochkin, Mark Doctoroff, Piero Gleijeses, Daniel Rozas, Peter Kornbluh, and many others who have made the last five-and-a-half years such fun that the exasperation paled by comparison. And above all, thanks to Annie for putting up with everything and coming along for the ride. -Jim Hershberg

THE FALL OF DETENTE: SOVIET-AMERICAN RELATIONS IN THE CARTER YEARS

Readers interested in the materials on the Cold War in the Third World and the Collapse of Detente in the 1970s should also consult a newly

published volume which also emerges from the work of the Carter-Brezhnev Project: Odd Ame Westad, ed., The Fall of Detente: Soviet-American Relations in the Carter Years (Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1997).

The volume includes interpretive essays as well as key U.S., Russian, East German and other documents on SALT and Bilateral Relations, Regional Conflicts, and Afghanistan and After. For ordering information within North America, contact the Scandinavian University Press North America, 875 Mass. Ave., Ste. 84, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA; tel: 617/497-6515; toll-free: 800/498-2877; fax: 617/354-6875; e-mail: 75201.571@compuserve.com; e-mail orders outside North America: books@scup.no

Essays in the book include: Odd Arne Westad, "The Fall of Detente and the Turning Tides of History"; Olav Njolstad, "Keys of Keys? SALT

II and the Breakdown of Detente"; Carol R.
Saivetz, "Superpower Competition in the Middle
East and the Collapse of Detente"; Dan Caldwell,
"The Demise of Detente and US Domestic Poli
tics"; Odd Arne Westad, "The Road to Kabul:
Soviet Policy on Afghanistan, 1978-1979"; John
Lewis Gaddis, "Why Did the Cold War Last as
Long as It Did?"

For additional information, contact Odd Arne
Westad, Director of Research, Norwegian Nobel
Institute, Drammensveien 19, 0255 Oslo, Nor-
way; fax: 47-22 43 01 68.

Havana's Policy in Africa, 1959-76:

New Evidence from Cuban Archives

by Piero Gleijeses'

The dearth of documents and historical context has hampered rigorous analysis of Cuba's intervention in Angola in 1975. Despite the interest scholars have shown in the episode, the lack of Cuban documents and the closed nature of Cuban society have prevented them from being able to accurately describe Cuba's actions. I have gone to Havana six times, for a total of six months, since 1993 to research Cuban policy toward Africa, and I have gained access to the archives of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba (CC CPC), the Instituto de Historia de Cuba, the Centro de Información de la Defensa de las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias, and the Ministerio para la Inversión Extranjera y la Colaboración Económica. Armed with documents from these closed and never before used archives, supplemented with interviews, a close reading of the press, and U.S. documents, I can shed new light on the Angola affair.

The new documents clarify the evolution of Cuba's involvement in Angola and answer the critical question of whether the Cubans sent troops before or after the South African intervention. They also address the vexing question of Havana's motivation, particularly whether or not it was acting as a Soviet proxy. They document Cuba's longstanding relationship with the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), and they place the Angolan crisis in the broad context of Cuban policy toward Africa. From 1959 to 1974 the Cubans intervened in Algeria, Congo Leopoldville, Congo Brazzaville and Guinea-Bissau. More Cubans fought in Africa during these years than in Latin America, and Cuban policy was far more successful in the former than in the latter. The story of these fifteen years challenges the image of Cuban foreign policy—cyni

cal ploys of a client state—that prevails in the United States. Yet it has attracted virtually no attention. It is a significant lacuna. As a Cuban official told me, "Cuba's intervention in Angola cannot be understood without looking at our

past.”2

Whereas those who publish in the Bulletin generally use archives that have been opened, the Cuban archives I have used are still closed. This requires, then, an explanation of my modus operandi.

There was no established declassification process in Cuba when I began my research. Mindful of the fact that the documents I cited would not be readily accessible to my readers, I decided that I would never use a document unless I was given a photocopy of the original. I badgered Cuban officials relentlessly, arguing that in the United States their word has no credibility, that their testimonies are only valid if supported by documents, and that while one document would suffice to criticize Cuba, five would be necessary to say anything positive. Jorge Risquet, a member of the Central Committee, understood. I owe a great debt to his intelligence and sensitivity. We have come a long way since the day in 1994 when I asked him for all the reports. written by the Chief of the Cuban Military Mission in Angola between August and October 1975 only to be told, "You aren't writing his biography. One will be enough." Two years later, I received

all the others. The Cubans established a procedure of which I could only approve: any document they expected to be declassified they allowed me to read in its entirety, whether in Risquet's office or in the archives themselves. Then the waiting would begin. It could take less than a hour or more than a year. As I write, there are several hundred pages of documents that I have been allowed to read but have not yet been given.

About 80 of the more than 3,000 pages of documents that I have received

were sanitized after I had read them.

Frequently the edited lines contained the remarks of a foreign leader criticizing his own political allies; thus, to explain why half a page had been sanitized [Doc. 5], Risquet wrote, "the conversation that followed was about internal MPLA matters that [Angolan President Agostinho] Neto discussed with [Cuban official Díaz] Argüelles. It would be unethical to make them public."3 In the case of three intelligence documents, the sanitized paragraphs would have revealed sources. In other cases the lines (or words) sanitized included comments about African or Asian countries that, the censors believed, would unnecessarily complicate Cuba's foreign relations.

I have also interviewed 63 Cuban protagonists, many of them repeatedly and in relaxed settings. While interviews without documents would be of little use, interviews with documents can be extremely helpful. Furthermore, many of the interviewees gave me letters and journals from their own personal collections, and they alerted me to documents in the government archives, which made it possible to be very specific in my requests to Risquet. The Cuban authorities were well aware of my freewheeling interviews and to the best of my knowledge they did nothing to hinder me. Currently I am complementing my research in Cuba with research in the United States, Europe (particularly Moscow, Berlin, and Lisbon), and, of course, Africa.

Cuba's pre-1975 Africa policy can be divided into three major phases: pre1964, when the focus was Algeria; 1964-66, when Cuba's attention was suddenly riveted by sub-Saharan Africa a heady time characterized by Che Guevara's three-month trip through the continent and the dispatch of Cuban columns to Zaire and Congo Brazzaville; and post-1966, a period of growing maturity, highlighted by the long and successful Cuban involvement in Guinea-Bissau (1966-74). Before

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